The Bachelor Season ?(a million) episode 3 recap

It's unlikely that anyone watches the Bachelor anymore. In fact, its gotten so bad that even contestants on the show admit that they tuned out after a couple of episodes during the previous season. These are women who's hopes and dreams of landing an acting gig after their stint on the show are partially dependent on the degree to which they are obsessed with the show. It doesn't bode well for the future. However, as the show fades like light dying in a limitless western sky, I plan to enjoy it for as long as I can.

Why does anyone watch television? Do you watch it for the entertainment value? Does it, entertain you? And what exactly does "entertain" mean/what does it mean to be entertained? Is it to pass time doing something pleasurable? Is it to just pass time? Would being entertained require laughter, a certain degree of intellectual curiosity or interest? Does it mean that your heart beats fast, that you smile? If you haven't already guessed, I don't exactly know what it means to be entertained. And it means that the initial question, why do I, or anyone else watch television is a vexed one.

Here are a couple of plausible answers. I watch television because it allows me to shut my mind off. The implication here is that the work day, groceries, bills, etc. have become so overwhelming that the brain actually requires a restful state, which is granted by television. I'm willing to grant people with much worse jobs than mine a bit of peace and quiet every now and again, but I'm not sure that turning our mind's off is the best thing. It's a value judgment, I know, but I fear that human beings are all too adept at going on autopilot, and the danger is more that people are constantly roving around with their mind turned off rather than engaged.

I watch television because everyone else does. This whole exercise is moot in some ways. People often watch television or spend time on the internet because they have developed a habit of doing so. It's a bit like asking an alcoholic why they drink. The answer becomes sort of inseparable from the person they've become. Anyhow, if you're watching television because it is a social activity, bravo. It does give you something to talk about around the office or with friends, though I can't remember the last time I had a really meaningful discussion about a television show, so maybe this is only good for chit chat.

Here's where it gets interesting. If you're watching television as a social activity, do you judge the characters based on your own moral rubric, or do you watch and appreciate them as dynamic creations? I tend to watch characters on television shows not as pretend dopplegangers, acting out their life in a way that I can then judge. I tend to watch them as if they were people I really knew, or could know, or would avoid getting to know in certain cases. Anyhow, I watch good television not because it solely entertains me, but because I am fascinated by other human beings, their petty desires, fights, happy picnics, interest me because those are precisely the sort of things that chip away at my days and years. And so I am looking, not for moral guides, but for companions.

The above paragraph is only partly true. I enjoyed the beginning to the latest Casino Royale movie because the chase scene involved two guys doing some amazing parkour. So, yeah, sometimes I just watch to watch.

So why does anyone still watch the Bachelor? Schadenfreude is certainly an apt answer, pleasure taken at the misfortune of others. I wouldn't call it our noblest characteristic, but there is definitely something to be said for establishing yourself as at least not that bad. The weird part about the show for me is that I don't take a great deal of pleasure in the mishaps of the cast off girls. I'm always rooting for them to cry less, respond with dignity etc. (Strangely, this bit of humanity goes out the window when it comes to drinking. I tend to enjoy watching these people drink and say stupid things. Perhaps this is the schadenfreude bit). Anyhow, it's the one show that I watch with the sort of moral rubric that I don't apply to any other television show or movie. I pretty much watch it to see who seems nice and who seems awful.

And doesn't that make a lot of sense? Isn't that the sort of decision that we're forced to make in all of the groups that we're a part of. This is just a type of socialization that happens. We are very comfortable defining ourselves against an other. We actually have a culture of it in our very own large war mongering country. We are constantly at war with new enemies, others to define ourselves against. But I'm getting too far afield. The point is, after you've left a dinner party whether you're talking to your friend, boyfriend, or spouse, the two of you are likely to talk about people who were pleasant, and, I hope, far less likely to talk about people who weren't. The point is, this sort of demarcation is intrinsic to our human nature.

The complicated part is that the Bachelor is a television show, which thrives on unreality. It is not a dinner party, but twenty five women trying to date the same man. And, even if you're a big fan of trying to parse out who is a good person or not, you'd have to admit that beyond finding your fifteen minutes of fame, this show is perhaps the worst idea in the world. It manages to be simultaneously sexist, setting the guy up with only traditionally attractive women, a bit racist, this is the first season that women of color have lasted more than an episode or two, and, on the sexist and just plain unhelpful front, it caters to the idea that a woman is fulfilled when she meets the "the man of her dreams." This seems unlikely.

Of course, we can laugh off at least part of this because by the time the show has rolled into its fiftieth season everyone, sane contestants included, know that the show is silly. They know that they have a small chance at fame if they appear on the show. They know that you have a far better shot of meeting a guy on match.com even if it just says that the two of you share an interest in not smoking than in finding someone on the Bachelor. Its essential charm is just this silliness.

So why is it that in some point in every season I start rooting for one girl or another? Why can't I just remain above the fray? I don't know. I blame socialization. Human beings are social animals. I'd imagine that the other five people out there who watch the show suffer from the same delusion. I can only imagine that those same people watch someone behaving badly and want them to get their comeuppance. The exciting part is that it all appears on camera in a format that leaves us as judge, jury, and executioner. We are able to judge these people in a way that we just wouldn't in all the other social phases of our life, family, job, church, whatever. We are allowed to be the mean people we've always dreamed we could be.

The show's silliness if heightened by the constant refrain of "The most exciting season ever," "the most dramatic rose ceremony ever" that pervades every episode. I can only assume that the producers are having a nice laugh when they write this stuff. Either that or they believe the general viewing public's level of intelligence is somewhere between an ant and a gnat. The silliness continues as people are whisked away on helicopter rides to the top of mountains where they picnic under waterfalls, or repel down to a picnic below, or just picnic at the top of the mountain. And the whole narrative is that these dates are more "romantic" than your traditional coffee type thing and will force these two people to find out very quickly if they love each other or not.

Anyone over the age of about twenty knows that a good date has very little with where you picnic and very much to do with the sort of person that you're with. I'd imagine that the right person could ruin just about anything fun. This is not to say that dates occur in a vacuum, some are better than others, but the idea that being whisked away in a helicopter to jump from the Empire state building is somehow romantic, sort of escapes me. It is romantic in the same way that touching someone's finger accidentally when reaching across a table can be, or holding their eyes for an extra beat, which is to say, only with the right person.

I'm not even going to interrogate the whole idea as much as I probably should because courtship behavior has varied a lot through time and expressed itself in different ways in different culture. The only real piece of evidence seems to be that if women get more education they tend to marry much later, which I attribute, like most intelligent folk, less to the time requirement than to an increase in intelligence and the requisite skepticism that accompanies it. Anyhow, I'm sure that a coffee date would look silly to people who were required chaperones, a lengthy engagement silly to those who married quickly, a courtship arranged around a pursuit of love to the many who married for position, power, convenience etc. This all just means I'm less willing to question the courtship itself than to question the idea that seems implicit, if the voice overs are to be believed, behind it. The real problem is not the yachts and cruise ships etc. The problem is that there are 25 women and 1 guy.

Woops. This all turned out very long and drawn out, and now I haven't the time or energy to recap the episode. However, given that my audience on this one is somewhere between 1 and 2 I don't think too many people will be left disappointed.