14
Popular Culture Review
It is, of course, a fundamental tenet of our postmodern times that texts do
not always mean what they claim they mean. Justin and Krista’s encounter is,
perhaps, not merely a comment on the history of violence toward women, and
neither is it merely a comment on the potential erotic joys of sadomasochism. It
is, as well, a possible access point for us to consider how violence and
surveillance can come to challenge the traditionally held conception of romantic
love.
Consider, for instance, “The Bachelor.” On this show, a single man—
always financially well to do and stereotypically handsome—is surrounded with
beautiful women all competing to become his future wife. Each week, one
woman is eliminated in a “rose ceremony” until the pack gets culled to two or
three. Here, at the end, each season provides us with the same dilemma. The
bachelor talks to the camera about how hard it is to make these final cuts, how
much he loves the remaining two or three women, and how he wishes he didn’t
have to choose. Most seasons end, then, with the bachelor proposing, or
proposing to propose, to the one lucky lady he has picked.12
Now, on the surface this is apparently about the way in which heterosexual
romantic love wins out, about the sense in which one can have a soul-mate and
overcome all obstacles to be together. But of course what various traces in the
text are telling us is something quite the opposite. Rather than a championing of
romantic, pairing relationships, “The Bachelor” is a subtle acknowledgment on
our part that romantic love is an historical creation with no claim to universality.
Although all of the narrative cultural and historical cliches are in place—the
roses, the castles, the beautiful dresses and ball-gowns, the luscious European
settings, and the fact that the women are usually younger and of lesser social and
economic status than the bachelor—each time that the bachelor protests about
how his feelings are so deep and so sincere for each of the women, he is, in
effect, espousing a position that calls into question the reality of monogamous
romance. He is pointing out that this incredibly small sampling of strangers
provided him multiple possible “true loves.” That we feel his pain, praise his
sincerity, and participate in the agony of his choice suggests that we, too, are in
on the secret: the appearance of genuine love for multiple partners—let alone the
other side of the story in which the majority of the women magically fall in love
with this one man they hardly know—is getting at something deep in the
structure of the nature of love itself, specifically its malleability, transitory
nature, and all other things that are mostly in opposition to our public conception
of romance.
Let’s blame Descartes.
I’m not sure that Descartes really had anything to do with this specific
modernist conception of romantic love, but it’s fun to blame Descartes for
things. We know, at least, that mind-body dualism and all of its resulting
silliness can be traced back to Descartes; and if we move forward from Plato to
the 17th century as we look at the ways in which Western thought has vilified