"Isn’t Love a High for Everyone?": An Interview with Suzannah Showler
Suzannah Showler’s book onThe Bachelor, Most Dramatic Ever, came out January 23, 2018, from ECW’s Pop Classics series. In it, she discusses certain themes wildly relevant to our times—including American optimism, marriage, sex, trauma narratives, and the high-resolution exposure of “real” feelings—all while carefully and hilariously analyzing this mainstay of reality television. We had the following conversation over email, where Suzannah was generous enough to answer my questions about everything to do with love and humiliation.
Rudrapriya Rathore: I feel like anyone who gets this deep into a show over the course of years feels like they have their own personal narrative about it. So how did you get so invested in The Bachelor? What was your first time watching it like, if you remember? Did your initial reactions to it change over time.
Suzannah Showler: I was a late arrival, actually. I started watching while sick in bed with the flu in the winter of 2013. It’s possible that my fascination with the show started with the fact that I wandered into it in a literal fever dream. My initial reaction was definitely like: what the actual fuck is this? Also, more now please. When I emerged from the illness cocoon, I got my then-boyfriend into Sean Lowe’s season, which was airing at the time. Streaming the show the day after it aired (no cable) while eating dinner on my mattress on the floor (no bed) became a staple of our dating life. Magnums of Woodbridge sauvignon blanc were perpetually on sale at the LCBO that winter, so that was part of it. Later we got married. So did Sean and Catherine.
RR: One of the many, many fascinating things about Most Dramatic Ever and your multi-layered analysis is that you start to realize that the show is way more intelligent than it first lets on. You talk about the unique language it builds, where meaningless phrases like “here for the right reasons” and “open to love” operate as a kind of code for how to be a successful contestant, constantly spinning a tale of emotional vulnerability. Do you think the show deliberately teaches its viewers how to read between the lines of its artificiality?
SS: This a great question, and it’s related to one I’ve never quite been able to answer: how much do we credit any part of this show with being deliberate? By which I think I mean something like: what’s the difference between an intentional act and an intuitive one? To hear the show’s creator Mike Fleiss talk about it, you’d think he was some kind of Svengali who’s strategically insinuated himself and his vision into the fabric of our culture. But really, the way the show came together sounds like a lot of haphazard, organic, lucky nonsense. And, like, to be honest Mike Fleiss is more or less a basic bitch Internet troll? He strikes me as a loosely canny opportunist who is very good at applying his own underdeveloped capacity for shame to lucrative ends. Which is a legitimate talent—it’s just not anything resembling genius. He kind of reminds me of Steve Bannon, actually.All that said, I probably call the show “genius” like 87 times in the book, right? I guess what I’m trying to get at is that to me, “the show” exists between any number of actors and their intentions, and the source of its genius is a mix of accidental-and-intentional collaboration (and/or productive friction) between those parties. I’m not sure how possible it is anymore to reverse-engineer the concoction of performance, labour, and reception across cast, production, and audience, to source exactly which deliberate choices by whom leave us with which impressions. Does that make sense?
My initial reaction was definitely like: what the actual fuck is this? Also, more now please.
Short answer: yes, I think the show has definitely taught viewers to read between the lines of its artificiality. But I also think that viewers have taught the show how to draw lines.
RR: There seem to be so many “accidents” of production that just make their way into the show’s repetitive patterns, and the way audiences and cast members act to reinforce those patterns ends up creating a deeply layering viewing experience.I started to watch a couple of random episodes while reading the book, and it struck me that this show is all about arranged marriage, if you could infuse that concept with a syrupy Americanism. There’s all this collaborative, social vetting of each suitor going on. The parents have to be met before the sex is had. Then there’s the obsession with “family values”: lifelong monogamy and procreation. And finally, there’s that fatalistic spin on the ultimately successful couple—the show conspires to make that feel inevitable to create a sense of satisfaction for the viewer, which is also the end-game of every Bollywood movie. What do you make of the awkwardness of combining that old-world value system with the mechanics of contemporary dating? Is it just more entertaining to watch 20-something frat boys try to convince a woman that they're “ready to settle down”?
SS: Yes! I think you’re totally onto something. I once wrote something along these lines about another matrimony-themed reality show, Married at First Sight. On that show (in which people are set up by a team of “experts” for a “social experiment” in which they meet at their own wedding ceremony), the old-school arranged marriage tradition is applied to a recent invention: the pursuit of individual happiness vis-à-vis romantic love. Traditionally, arranged marriages have what I would describe as communal goals, in the sense that their purpose is to benefit a greater number of people than the two individuals being married, thus preserving culture, religion, capital, class, etc. My argument with regards to Married at First Sight was that the old-world-new-ends combo you’re alluding to is part of a broader shift toward not only appreciating but romanticizing a kind of pragmatism about love and marriage.One thing I didn’t talk about in that essay but have been thinking about since is the way that this has worked its way into our current romance vocab. Like how “my soulmate” has been swapped for “my person.” Or the way that “partner” has gone mainstream—not only for its gender-neutrality, I think, but also for a kind of entrepreneurial spirit of shared goal-oriented labour. It’s become more socially acceptable to talk about how both finding one’s person and being partnered to them takes work. (But not onstage at the Oscars, especially if going to bonk the nanny and get divorced like a minute later.)
Structurally, the show tells us that those tearful limo rides aren’t the Bachelor’s fault, or the viewer’s fault—they’re just what needs to happen.
Mostly, The Bachelor would seem to buck this trend, right? By smothering itself in that high-density concentrate syrup of can’t-miss-it Romance. This soft-focus world where love means wearing a prom dress every other night and making out at high altitudes. But! As you suggest, at the heart of that aesthetic there is also a conflation of old world values and new world dating. It might look very different from the other forms of romanticized pragmatism I’ve alluded to above, but maybe it has a similar point of origin. Like, maybe romance is just like any other cultural object right now and everyone’s decision-making capacities have been depleted by the amazing and terrifying proximity and volume. So many someones. So much everything. Like, maybe we’re not built to be this perpetually free and willing, so we start engineering ways to apply constraints to our experience.
RR: And those constraints become the old-world values we’ve assigned to True Romance, almost like they’re the most authentic, time-tested guidelines available to us, as far as love goes.Something about the shame and humiliation of romantic rejection makes the show especially addicting. And when it’s The Bachelor as opposed to The Bachelorette, it’s the gendered humiliation of women contestants that can be riveting and horrifying. Do you or have you felt any guilt while enjoying those moments? How do you reckon with it?
SS: Oof, yeah. So, probably what I love best about this show is its ability to produce feelings under unreal conditions. Which is a vaguely intellectualized way of saying that I like that I get to spy on people. And yeah, the whole structure of the show conspires to assure us that the True Love and the Horrifying Rejection are bound in a dependent relationship wherein the latter is necessary in order to achieve the former. Structurally, the show tells us that those tearful limo rides aren’t the Bachelor’s fault, or the viewer’s fault—they’re just what needs to happen. A part of the journey.Do I feel guilt? Honestly, if I feel guilty about anything, it’s that I don’t really feel guilty watching those moments. Which isn’t to say I don’t feel badly for these people experiencing romantic pain on camera. I have, like most viewers, had physical reactions to how painful those moments are to watch. But feeling badly—that sympathetic response—is the pleasure, isn’t it? I kind of think it would be disingenuous to stoke guilt over it, if that pleasure is something you get from the show. Maybe? But now I’m starting to confuse myself about what I think guilt is.I hadn’t thought about the gendered aspect of the romantic rejection specifically, though obviously I have thought about the damaged/damaging view of gender this show endorses. I mean, duh. That’s pretty much the whole show. And that I really do have guilty feelings about. Especially right now. I can talk myself into a justification for why it’s totally fine and valid and useful for me to have written a book about this cultural artifact which, in the confluence of its popularity and retrograde gendering, speaks to a truth about where we’re really at, where we’ve always been. Like, I can tell myself a totally plausible story where talking about The Bachelor right now is actually a really honest way of participating in this moment, whatever we might want to call it: a shift, an airing, etc. And then other times I’m like: well, for the rest of my life I will get to look back and remember how in January 2018, when all these women were putting themselves on the line trying force a public reckoning with how rotten, and degraded, and violent the structures of capitalism really are, I was out there publicly analyzing The Bachelor. Good one, me. Way to be on the right side of history.
RR: What! No. Not to sound too therapy-driven, but I think it would be worse for something like this particularly gendered cultural artifact, with its particularly massive fan-base, to go unanalyzed. That would be more like allowing its insinuations about romance and femininity—and the way those things cause us pleasure, as you said—to go unchallenged. I much prefer my problematic reality TV to be deeply scrutinized by intelligent poets.
Don’t we all crave validation and attention from romantic relationships? Isn’t love a high for everyone?
You write a lot about the emotional engineering of the show, how it requires people to leverage their trauma narratives in order to seem like a good candidate for romance. Why do you think explaining how bad one's life has been makes one worthy of this hot person’s love? Is it like an equalizer? A kind of levelling, like, “Because x ruined my life, I deserve this more than the rest?”
SS: I’m not sure it’s a levelling, really. Because trauma narratives on the show aren’t so much presented as “x ruined my life” as “see how x didn’t ruin my life.” More specifically: “see how x is a life-ruining event I shall interpret as positive/formative/self-improving because I am a faithful votary of American optimism.”
RR: There's a part in your book where you say, “Why shouldn't this be the place to find true love? Who's to say these circumstances are really that different from the way matrimony already operates out there in our capitalistic, story-hungry world?” And while I think that's valid, there's a point where I look at a contestant who's gotten really intense in his or her obsession with the star really fast, where all I can ask is: Isn't this just a dopamine addiction for everyone involved? Are they not all just addicted to attention and validation? Is that the defining factor of love?
SS: Oh yeah, for sure, you can spot the ones whose obsession has gone over the edge. And I feel badly for those ones: I’m extremely suggestible, and if I was on this show, I would be the absolute worst. A total mark. I’d have a meltdown in about four seconds. Producers would love me.So yeah, clearly, not all Bachelor-bred love is created equal, and not all the feelings would (or do) hold up equally under real world conditions. But there’s a sweet spot where I really think the dopamine addiction you refer to really isn’t different from falling in love any old time and place. Obviously the fact that it’s happening in an extremely public space changes the tenor of the thing, and probably in ways that merit a deeper sense of skepticism when we evaluate how “real” any given instance of a feeling is. But I really do think it’s useful to turn that skepticism back on ourselves, too. Don’t we all crave validation and attention from romantic relationships? Isn’t love a high for everyone?I heard a RadioLab episode recently where they were talking to this guy who basically believes that the trajectory of neurobiology research is such that we will eventually eliminate all perception of free will because literally everything a person does will be traceable to an inevitability that originates within the brain (and can therefore be corrected/treated there). Obviously, that’s pretty dystopian. I don’t really feel like taking a whole page from that guy’s book, but I would take, you know, maybe a paragraph or so. Just enough to ask: what feels more real and more unreal than a feeling?
