Core Post: The dating game

Anna McCarthy gets it right: to understand reality TV, it is necessary that we attend to its affects. Perhaps no other TV genre arouses stronger emotions, soliciting derision, shock, and incomprehension from those who claim not to watch it. It’s quintessential trash – or, to adopt McCarthy’s language, a foul-smelling, “pungently fertile concoction” (20). McCarthy’s conceptual bridge between governmentality and trauma is provocative and appealing, and goes far in getting a grip on the work that reality TV does – and elegantly linking Ouellette’s and Raphael’s pieces, with its attention on TV as political technique as well as suffering (which Raphael tracks as a labor issue).

I’d like to extend McCarthy’s analysis to one other avatar of reality TV: the dating show. While her essay centers around the ethical/missionary mode of ‘makeover’ shows, many of her insights would appear to carry over to the case of dating shows, where attraction and erotics are dramatized in a variety of novel ways with the aim of – what? Entertainment is obviously one of them; pedagogy is another. Tutoring its viewers in the curation of one’s desires and desirability, dating shows fall easily within a Foucauldian notion of techniques of the self, a technology for the production of subjects. Departing form the modes McCarthy focuses on, however, dating games trade in not the negative affects of shame, guilt, and abjection but a seemingly more positive roster: desire, romance, the enjoyment of intersubjectivity. There is a flip side, of course, with the rejection of unsuccessful contestants and the variable emotions (loneliness, boredom, defeat, etc.) which viewers might bring to the show; but at least on the surface, dating games stage a world where desire can be managed, submitted to rules, and contained – successfully. Unruliness is overcome. Intriguingly, the element of chance that McCarthy identifies seems to be absent from dating shows, which instead emphasize a strange procedurality: contestants are expected to engage with their affects rationally (banishing the chance and mess of actual desire) and to select partners based on their romantic ‘worthiness.’ It is almost metric-driven, almost quantitative (bringing us back to McCarthy and her astute remarks about actuarial culture – especially insightful given the actuarial risk-management function). Why might this be the case? What world is being built within this genre of show, and why has it thrived so well (even jettisoning the trashiness associated with most reality TV)? More thoughts on this in months to come…