ON SCREEN: ONE MARRIAGE, TWO REVIEWS
She saw
It’s the fifth season but the first we’ve ever subjected ourselves to. I had heard Greta Gerwig on a podcast say she loved it and that was the only endorsement I needed. “It must be high-art reality television if Gerwig watches it,” I thought. It isn’t.
It starts with no kissing. No touching. No looking at all. That’s the gimmick or, as they call it, “the experiment”. Can you be attracted to someone you haven’t seen? At season five, you have to assume they’ve got some pretty conclusive evidence as to whether or not love is actually blind, but they’re not really interested in reporting their findings on that. For there to be future seasons, they need it to remain a hypothesis.
As with all reality shows, the potential of the premise is entirely in the hands of the talent. Every person, in season five, at some stage or another revealed themselves to be unlikeable. It became exceedingly obvious that the producers of the show were plying them with alcohol — maybe having already screened for problem drinkers — in order to make their behaviour more erratic, emotional, extreme. It’s unethical and should be illegal.
It’s unclear watching, how many people “enter the pods” and for how long but light digging reveals it’s 30 people who spend 10 days trying to get to know each other through a wall. On the 10th day, anyone who feels “ready” can propose. It’s hugely gender normative — no same-sex couples and no women proposing to men.
There is no more awkward television than watching two people who have agreed to marry each other sight unseen meet for the first time. Doors open and they take the long excruciating walk towards each other, trying to mask their own reaction while simultaneously trying to see behind the mask of their rashly chosen fiance. Then they kiss. The kisses are awful: clumsy and uncertain.
Each time the doors opened I said to Greg, “What if he has bad breath?” He laughed but I was serious. Even if this show proves love is blind — which it doesn’t, blind people do that — it fails to acknowledge the vital role of our other senses. Attraction isn’t a dichotomy — looks or personality — it involves smell, taste and feel. We can’t underestimate the role breathing someone in plays in a good kiss. Two of the three couples who got engaged didn’t get married. At some point in their time together, both of those failed couples mentioned the smell of the other person — one commenting on breath, the other body odour.
I love a good onscreen romance but there’s a reason casting agents conduct “chemistry tests”. Next time they run this experiment, they should remove some variables and use blindfolds instead of pods. Love might be blind but I don’t think it suffers from anosmia (a word I just learnt, which means loss of smell).
He saw
The first time they saw each other, JP wore a shirt designed to look like an American flag and Taylor called him Sugar Butt. Knowing the conventions of reality TV shows, and especially this one, they understood their first physical meeting must involve a kiss, but knowing one is expected to kiss and being able to do so are two quite different things.
I suppose it’s conceivable that a first kiss between two people who have recently fallen in love and become engaged on the basis of hours of conversation through a wall in a tiny room filled with cameras could convey less passion and more discomfort, but I can’t imagine it. That kiss, that series of kisses, that interminable sequence of lifedenying kisses: his head careening towards hers, their lips hitting and actively rejecting each other, his face jerking back, then returning to hers, for reasons unknown, presumably even to them.
Each and every one of the conversations they’d had prior to their first meeting had been vapid and forgettable, but they were as poetry when compared to the soulsucking emotional vacuum of that first kiss.
It doesn’t matter how hard I scrub, or where, that kiss has embedded itself in my body and shows no sign of leaving. It is there when I kiss my wife and there when I close my eyes at night. It haunts me, popping into my mind when I’m driving or sitting on the bus. It was only a few days ago I first saw it, but I know it will still be burned into my mind years from now, forever part of my understanding of just how bad a kiss can be.
What JP and Taylor’s kiss told us is that, far from being the ultimate expression of human passion, a kiss can also serve as a weapon of mass destruction. Each of their merciless lip-based assaults on each other was an equally violent assault on the belief the rest of us might have had that kissing was one of the few remaining human goods.
No, their lips seem to have been telling us, there is nothing in this world so good or pure that humans can’t destroy it.
Love is Blind is streaming now on Netflix.