Wang Hao and Shi Ce in the variety show "Annual Comedy Contest" have become very popular CP recently, and the two have performed a six-part love from chance encounter, love to marriage on stage, and the chemical reaction between them looks very real, but in fact, they are not lovers in life, and adding love elements to the script is also purely crooked. In contrast, there are ordinary couples who have come out of the real love variety show, although there are also many examples of positive results, but there are also many overturning incidents. When watching the show, the audience also always oscillates back and forth between "I don't believe in love anymore" and "my cp is real".
Although the above two phenomena seem to be diametrically opposed, this half-truth, half-false, looking for sugar in the script, points to the same question - in the past few years when watching others fall in love has become so popular, can we still distinguish between true and false love?
Modern Love in Reasoning and Paradox
In recent years, many love variety shows have taken the route of basic love observation. In fact, as early as 2012, Japan's Netflix launched the "Double-Storey Apartment" series, allowing six ordinary men and women to live under the same roof, freely interacting and falling in love. In addition to love, the show also shows the friendship between ordinary people, and the flaws and pressures they present as a three-dimensional person. In addition, a second scene was set up, inviting celebrity guests to observe and discuss what was happening in the apartment.
In 2017, the popular Korean love roundup "Heart Signal" further upgraded the love observation link, the stars not only have to record the interaction of the vegetarian people, but also through the signal that appears in the interaction to peel off the cocoon, deduce everyone's love line, love has become the most important and only theme, whether the participants are willing or not, they must choose a person to form a couple, this standardized setting is also one of the reasons why the traces of the script are criticized. The following year, the launch of "Heartbeat Signal" in China ushered in the spring of domestic love observation variety shows, and since then, there have been programs such as "Let's Fall in Love" and "Like You, I Am Too", although the homogenization of these programs is becoming more and more serious and showing a weak state, but the "Heartbeat" series still ushered in the fourth season last year.
Looking at these love variety shows, you will find that even if everyone knows that the show has a script, they are still keen to track the moment when the spark of the heartbeat appears. Why are we obsessed with reasoning about love? The answer can be simple: because love is the most elusive. It can also be very complicated, and the German sociologist Nikolas Luhmann proposed in his book "Love as a Passion" that what has become the basis of the reasoning system of love is the paradoxical nature of modern love.
Luhmann pointed out that from the 17th century onwards, the Western love paradigm changed from "ideal love" to "passionate love". At that time, French women gained a more autonomous social status, and male and female lovers could decide how to act according to their own wishes, so that the ancient and polite ethics of love were invalidated, and people began to yearn for more free love. But this leads to a paradox – people still want to pursue the love they once had, but the ideal paradigm has failed; on the one hand, people want to control irresistible passions, and on the other hand, they realize that once they have mastered passions, passions no longer exist.
Author: [de] Nikolas Luhmann Translator: Fan Jin
Edition: East China Normal University Press, Six Points Book 2019-11
The birth of passionate love has led to many paradoxical statements, such as "Passion is a prison, but no one wants to escape", or "Although a woman is afraid of being deceived, the last thing she can tolerate is not to love." The paradox of love becomes more and more complex, until the paradox itself makes love an independent, generalized medium— and in love, the paradox proves the preciousness of love: knowing that it is impossible to live forever, but believing that the other party swears to love me forever, and that the lover should act under the guidance of illusory permanence, regardless of reality.
Does he really love me? How much love? How long will you love? These age-old questions have since become the basis of romantic works, including today's love reasoning reality show.
In the Chinese context, it was not until the reform and opening up, after love returned to the private sphere and became entangled with consumer culture, that our definition and requirements of love gradually converged with the West. In her book Spiritual Revolution: The Genealogy of Love in Modern China, Wang Haiyan pointed out that in the May Fourth period, the truth of love symbolized a kind of super-goodness, and its opposite was more of a patriarchal family, the hypocrisy and formalism of Confucian etiquette.
Today, the concept of "true or false love" that we are familiar with basically comes from modern Western society, that is, whether a person sincerely loves others or has other plans out of personal calculation. In her book Love, Why It Hurts, Eva Ilos mentions that there are two cultural structures at work in the emotions of love: a rational model based on emotional self-regulation and optimal choice, and a powerful fantasy based on emotional fusion. On the one hand, love has been disenchanted, following the logic of economic relations and exchange; on the other hand, people want to believe in the sincere, sacrificial part of love.
The "script" and deception involved in love variety shows are often as Mentioned by Ilos. In 2019, in a podcast program, the guest Amo mentioned that, on the one hand, now the love variety show announces that love is going to get married, and marriage must be romantic; on the other hand, it is very de-romanticized, and the economic status and personality of the guests are listed as personal conditions for each other to screen, and the guests say that they are in love, but they are actually just competing with each other.
In the 2019 variety show "Like You, Me Too", there was an example. In the first episode, the female guest Yang Qianqian launched an offensive against the handsome male guest Dong Haoran, but in the second episode, when everyone announced their career and age, Dong, as a graduate student, appeared to be a bit "discolored" among a group of returnee youth, and Yang's attitude towards Dong also quickly cooled down, and turned to provoke another new male guest, Zhou Haitao. People on the barrage will say that Yang Qianqian is "too realistic and has a heart." However, with the advancement of the show, when the audience gradually saw Yang Qianqian's growth experience, they began to understand her again, feeling that "she is not so annoying, and she is quite frank."
From Ilos's point of view, the audience's criticism of Yang Qianqian can be explained as follows: although love can be driven by personal interests, his love is only convincing if that person proves his selflessness at the same time. The sincerity and falsehood of love are always present at the same time, playing games with each other, and yang Qianqian is probably accused of putting the self-interest side on the table, inadvertently shaking the lice in the robe called love to everyone, thus offending everyone.
True and false are no longer pursued, and love disappears
If Yang Qianqian caused disgust among the audience because of her "insincerity", then in the Korean love variety show "Single is Hell" broadcast in the winter of 2021, Song Zhiya, a female guest who also mastered a set of male dafa, won everyone's unanimous love. She is beautiful and sexy, brand-name plus body, every day with several Chanel suits, in love with the Shura field is also at ease. At the beginning, she said that there is no ideal type here, and in the show, even if she is pursued by three male guests at the same time, she does not seem to have delivered her sincerity. And Song Zhiya is sought after not because she has love, but precisely because she (at least shows) disdain for having love.
In contrast, another female guest, Jiang Suyan, has become a negative model of "no one wants". This involves the setting of the program, the vegetarians are trapped in Hell Island at the beginning, and only if the pairing is successful every night can they go to Paradise Island with luxury hotels. Moreover, after the first successful pairing, the next day when choosing again, you have to pick a new person to successfully walk together. Under such rules, Jiang still listened to the man's promise on the first date and tried to bind each other. Subsequently, Jiang's behavior was complained by netizens as emotional immaturity and low emotional intelligence. This also confirms What Ilos believes that in the modern choice system of love, it is a sign of psychological childishness to commit too eagerly to yourself, and if you want to harvest the so-called "perfect love", you must know when to give and when to give.
Similar to Yang Qianqian's situation, netizens also discussed whether Jiang's behavior was based on a sense of truth or just a calculation to tie a person casually, no matter which one, in short, it was not decent. At this time, what matters is no longer love itself, but whether a person is good-looking and can show his charm in the love game, just like Song Zhiya.
Netizens discuss screenshots
Song's personal charm is largely based on the erotic capital he possesses, that is, a person's ability to cause sexual reactions, including appearance and overall cultural style, and in order to accumulate such capital, it is necessary to go through a series of emotional labors, which includes creating romance in behavior, making the other party move, and also including physical work, such as makeup or fitness.
In the show, there are often shots of guests exercising on the beach, or male guests fighting each other in order to win hearts, which is no different from a concentrated exhibition of erotic capital, or the most primitive kind. Song Zhiya's main emotional work is to show her beauty like a model (her own profession is beauty blogger and model). British scholar Nigel Sreft once pointed out in the article "The Material Practice of Interpreting Charm" that charm is a magical force in contemporary capitalism, it is completely aesthetic, does not need words and narratives, nor does it need intellectual prompts, it can be obtained by feeling alone. By creating charm, real social capital can be created, such as movie stars can increase the box office, or Song Zhiya's advertising fee quotations soar to 600,000 after the end of the show.
In this way, charm and lust carry the shadow of love, but no longer need real love to participate in it, and Song also escapes the doubt about the authenticity of love. In the Little Red Book, almost all of them are her same style of clothing and makeup sharing, or the praise of "sister is so sassy, should be sister to make money", and the group CP has nothing to do with it.
In the eyes of the philosopher Han Bingzhe, such a phenomenon should be worthy of vigilance, he once mentioned in the book "The Death of Love" that talks about the demise of love, "the essence of love lies in sacrificing self-consciousness, placing the self in the midst of others and leading to self-forgetfulness", but now, love has become a tool to achieve narcissism, as well as a proof of work performance and ability. Song Zhiya's story seems to tell us that only beautiful and rich people are entitled to love, but the most fashionable thing to do now is to casually leave this qualification behind, and only the attractive self will last forever.
Author: [De] Han Byung-chol
Translator: Song Lou
Edition: CITIC Publishing Group 2019-03
Interestingly, not long ago, Song Zhiya was suddenly deeply involved in the controversy of wearing fake goods, and the rich woman's setting collapsed, which is not much different from the collapse of the ordinary CP. Whether it is the sincerity of love, or real money and silver, you must always occupy one, otherwise after being favored by capital, you will also be abandoned by capital.
Love that is intertwined with technology, the truth that you want and can't get
In addition to the discussion around love itself, the technical dimension in love variety shows cannot be ignored. From the selection of the original person to the editing and presentation of the final shot, all this has been carefully calculated. But at the same time, the program team will try to narrow the contrast between the guests' usual performance and the program, and eliminate the ordinary people with the nature of performance. This often confuses the audience, how much of my CP is true, how much is the script?
Lee Mackinnon, who studies comparative media and technology at the University of the Arts London, illustrates the intricate interweaving of love and technology by using romance novels as an example. She argues that romance novels promote the idea that love is unpredictable, as if love were independent of technical systems. Ironically, this unpredictability is far from natural or a priori, but happens precisely through the literary techniques that propagate their ideas, for example, when a novel's author always deploys a "chance encounter" as a prelude, and then sets up various plots to climax. In addition, Lee also sees the implicit power structure in the artificial nature of romance novel technology, through the popularity of romance novels, women and love are equated with nature, but nature cannot speak for itself, and love can only be established through the voice of culture through male authors.
In this way, the love complex is the same, the heartbeat it shows, can not be stripped of technical arrangements and exist alone, and this will only become more obvious today, after all, the audience has not received a linear narrative of the novel, but a multi-dimensional fragment, which includes the interaction of ordinary people under camera surveillance, including the reasoning interpretation in the observation room, and also includes the "after-sales service" of cp on social media after the end of the program, such as the daily upload of love records vlog.
In a paper that explores the love variety show from the perspective of visual culture, author Liu Xiaohui also mentioned that when editing the video, the actions and micro-expressions of the ordinary guests will be infinitely amplified, and what we see is already the fact that it is "collage and sticky", and even artificially constructed "ultra-real" simulations, all the high-sweet moments need to be recorded and presented to the audience as the truth.
Screenshot of the "Heartbeat Signal" program
And in a way, precisely because the audience no longer believes that what they see is what they get, different fragments need to corroborate each other and be coherent with each other, as if only in this way can their feelings become truly real. Therefore, for ordinary CP, love is not only for themselves, but also in the public attention and participation to continue. For example, after the end of the "Heartbeat Signal" program, some couples are still together and have successfully become a model in everyone's heart, such as Fang Binhan and Chen Siming; some have experienced dog blood incidents, such as Zhang Tian and Chen Yichen, although the two are very sweet in the program, but in the subsequent interaction, Chen privately recorded a telephone recording with Zhang, which involved many private conversations unfavorable to Zhang, so that many people broke Chen's filter and could never come back.
This can't help but ask, does this mean that the truth of love is no longer worth pursuing? Or, does the truth not exist at all? It doesn't have to be so pessimistic. Naturally, in the so-called "post-truth era", the knowledge we have can only be established in specific situations, including the mystery of love. However, it is precisely because of the mystery of love that it always has some kind of overflow, which cannot be exhausted by individualism or crushed by capital, which anyone who has chased after love and felt the heartbeat of true feelings can understand it.
Resources:
"Today's dating show, is it just a variant of idol drama?" 》
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/4hrIG3oKbIbIZ6ZOx3qL-A
CP After-sales Studies
http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzI5ODA0MjQ5MA==&mid=2652224139&idx=1&sn=6b96617cac3a14c385f3b80c0f62d019&chksm=f74acf9ec03d46883531bf16995f3c348128572d7a0159981d1ed8f42bbf40cda080873108d5&mpshare=1&scene=1&srcid=0121o6l9JAn1spFxiVYNHYJd&sharer_sharetime=1642717522702&sharer_shareid=b29b057dc74662d29418f16c52804bcb#rd
Show | Two-storey apartment without script and contemporary love in the clouds"
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/aV_JJSi-9pdA3uKBd3QZdw
Marriage and Love Variety, the "Place where Soldiers Must Fight" for the 2022 Long Video
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"Analysis of the Popularity of Love Observation Variety Shows from the Perspective of Visual Culture" Zhang Xiaohui Audiovisual Research
The Material Practice of Interpreting Charm by Nigel Sreft by Wang Min'an / Guo Xiaoyan, eds
"The Death of Love" [De] Han Bingzhe by Song Lou Translated by Seeing the City-State | CITIC Publishing Group 2019-3-1
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"Love, Why It Hurts" [Fa] by Eva Ilos translated by Ye Rong East China Normal University Press, 2015-9
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