In the Barrelhouse Television Workshop, writers look at the way we tell stories across media, the way those "writer moves" work, and why they may or may not work in certain situations. Next week, we’ll be discussing “Love is Blind,” the Netflix dating show.
Previously: meet our panel
Part 1: What is it about this show, love in general, MySpace love, Amazing Race love, and aural pheromones
Part 2: JESSICA. (And Kenny and Kelly, and why Gigi may be the world’s top dramatists.)
JESSICA.
Kate Mead-Brewer (KMB): I’m still reeling from the finale with JESSICA. I have so many feelings about her, not all of them negative, and it’s just a big tangle for me. I’m not surprised by her decision at the altar--and I think it was the right one, given what we the audience were shown--but man. She couldn’t have twisted that knife any harder if she’d used both hands and put her back into it. JESSICA, to me, embodies the raw desperate desire to find love, or to have love find her. I believe that’s why she stayed with Mark until the bitter end of the show. She isn’t heartless--selfish, no doubt, but lonely, too. And then angry when things don’t work out, when the love isn’t there for her. I think she really wanted to be in love, but she just couldn’t drink or lie or drag her feet into it. For me, JESSICA and Mark’s relationship shines light on the fact that love doesn’t inevitably appear between two people simply because they’re both attractive, financially stable, generally compatible, etc. It says to me that love is every bit as elusive as all the songs and stories suggest.
Or, you know, she’s got an empty crunched water bottle for a heart.
Michael B. Tager (MBT): Earlier, I referred to JESSICA as a character, which is a problematic thing to say, even if it’s kind of true. It’s easy to forget about JESSICA’s humanity, because the editing has turned her into almost a cartoon villain. But JESSICA gave the editors enough material that this characterization doesn’t feel labored (unlike Kelly’s heel-turn) and so remembering that she’s not a villain is difficult. She isn’t though. She’s just someone who thought she’d come off positively on a reality television show. And I sort of choose to consume the unreality of her Love is Blind homunculus, rather than the totality of her.
JESSICA is the most fascinating person because of what she reveals about us, the viewer. I have been JESSICA. I have dated JESSICA. JESSICA is all of us. And what I find most interesting is that JESSICA seemed to believe everything she said, even when she told Barnett that “I can’t believe you thought I still had feelings for you.” Like, we’re all the heroine in our own story, and JESSICA is a knight on a white charger in JESSICA’s head. I’m not even sure she’s wrong, either.
Full disclosure: I am wildly, wildly attracted to JESSICA and every dumpster fire move she did added fuel. When, after rejecting Mark at the altar, she said, “I guess I’m going to apologize to whoever I have to apologize to, except for myself because I have nothing to apologize for because I’m not sorry,” that bizarre mental calisthenics made me love her more. She’s an actual person and deeply flawed and doing what’s right by her. It doesn’t automatically forgive her selfish tomfoolery or anything, but it snaps into focus that she’s her own entity.
Jackson Bliss (JB): Jessica is easy to hate because she clearly used Mark to try and get something better, which is normal and gross. As a “character,” I find her complexity to be her most redemptive trait & her predictability to be her least: she did exactly what I thought she’d do after getting rejected by Barnett, namely go back to Mark and grovel, pretend she could love him, ask him to demonstrate his love to her even though her mind had already reached its verdict, throw out feelers to Barnett over & over again to see if he’d change his mind, pretend she wasn’t doing that, say she loved Mark when she didn’t, and then dump Mark’s ass on the altar. And the ironic thing is that I don’t think she loved Barnett either, I just think she was thirsty for him like she was for her golden goblet of wine. In the end, I don’t blame her for walking out at all, because it was the one truly honest thing she did, but watching her reminded me of two things: one, that what we don’t know about ourselves (or can’t admit to ourselves), emotionally speaking, will always hurt us and others in the end. Two, the desperate desire to find love can sabotage it like a motherfucker.
Melissa Ragsley (MR): JESSICA, 34 was ultimately, the person I actually think I understood the best and feel like she was showing us everything she had. She went into this open and ready and 34. I’m sorry to simplify this but here is a woman whose father abandoned her and who obviously puts thought and effort into her appearance because she believes she needs to find a man that will love her and never leave her and she is going to make herself as appealing as possible. She falls in love with people that will not love her back. Was she in love with Barnett? No, not until he pulled away. Then, that’s all she wanted, perpetuating the seeking out of love from a man that will withhold it. And taking solace in second place so she doesn’t feel completely worthless. The disassociation radiating from her body when Mark and her picnicked and he kissed her neck was chilling. What she said at the altar to Mark might have been hurtful to him, but if she didn't say it, she would have probably gone through with it to feel the pain of no love because at least it’s a feeling. And I’m sorry, Mark knew all this and was still willing to marry her? That’s on him.
Sian Griffiths (SG): I know I’m alone in this, but I find JESSICA almost too boring for words.
Tyrese Coleman (TLC): I want JESSICA to find herself. Her story arc in the show definitely made her look inconsistent and untrustworthy. But, there is a lot of pain, distrust and hurt there and I wanted to know more about why she was so hung up on believing that Mark’s openness was fake.
JB: Yeah, I agree with this. I thought the great paradox of Jessica is that she clearly wanted to find love but she also clearly didn’t know how to find love. She felt to me like an unreliable narrator of her own love life, telling people things that weren’t true, things she didn’t always believe (but wanted to), or things that were only true momentarily. Whatever happened in her life that scarred her and made her distrust Mark—of all people—LiB never told us. We never saw her family, we didn’t learn very much from her friends, & her pain remained an enigma.
Leonora Desar (LD): There were so many times I wanted to put my hands through the screen and tell JESSICA, please stop. These included:
The times she touched her hair, when flirting with Barnett, post-engagements
The time she let puppy lick the wine glass
Every time she “challenged” Mark (and told us)
On the other hand, I got it. How many of us have been with someone because they love and want us, but can’t stop thinking of someone else? I think a part of her wanted it to work with Mark. I also got how surreal it must have been. We see that in the slurry, hair-touching convo with Barnett. Just two weeks before they were connecting, and almost-betrothed. Now he’s getting hitched to someone else.
I also got her wanting the prenup, with Mark. Here the editors cue in ominous music, but it made sense: she’s older (34, as she keeps telling us) and has more assets. Why shouldn’t she protect herself?
JESSICA pisses us off and makes us cringe because her flaws are our flaws (well, some of them: shoot me if I ever let my dog have wine). It’s hard to imagine Lauren or even Giannina losing dignity the way J did (and if G did, she’d make it splendid).
While, like Sian, I don’t find JESSICA necessarily interesting, I find our reactions to her FASCINATING.
SG: YES--absolutely agree!
KMB: (I loved watching JESSICA play with her hair. I’d take a whole episode of just her flipping her hair around.)
MBT: Yes to the hair-flipping. I found it mesmerizing. .
LD: It made me nervous. That said, I do hope she gets something out of it. Maybe Pantene or another hair conglomerate will be in touch?
Writer Moves
Becky Barnard (BB): First off, nothing but respect to Giannina for including setpieces, props, and blocking in her showdown with Damian. AMAZING writer moves there.
And since this is a classy thinkpiece for a literary journal, is there anything that you gained as a writer from Love is Blind?
BB: Satisfaction deep in my garbage soul, of course. But I also liked that the producers just let superfluous elements of the show fall away without explaining the mechanics, which is a thing I struggle with in my first drafts. To use a very hip and current reference, my first round always looks like Algernon in the curling scene in Help!: “I am moving my left leg. I am moving my right leg.”
Remember the twenty other people on the show? The virgin guy? Extremely Kind Rory? They set the stage in chapter one and then the stage was set and we stopped needing them, and the editors moved us along and we inferred that love was not found. (Although according to one of the many LiB insider articles that I found between episodes, Extremely Kind Rory got engaged as well and the producers said “Congrats and all but we assumed five couples or fewer would actually do the thing and we don’t have rooms or camera crews to celebrate your love.”)
Erin Fitzgerald (EF): Superfluous elements like Mr. and Mrs. Lachey! I like to imagine they got Cask of Amontilladoed in the wine cellar just before the first wedding, and are still calling weakly for help eighteen months later.
Sorry to do this boring take but I think it’s especially true here -- if Shakespeare were alive in 2020, he’d be on the staff of a reality show. (Jane Austen, who also could get invoked here, I think would be the face of a brand -- but that’s wandering away from the topic.) At the end of the day, Love Is Blind is a comedy. It’s worth thinking about how and why that is, beyond the obvious wino dog and its glorious PERSON, or Gigi falling on her ass in an office parking lot.
Also, I am delighted to hear that Horatio, I mean Rory, also found true love. You could tell he was doing a ton of the heavy psychology lifting in the pod-apartment.
MBT: Love is Blind is full of very good ideas and excellent casting and it’s also shockingly poorly executed. Pot-dating is a great high-concept and I could have watched a full season of it, especially with the knowledge that people played games and had dinner and fell asleep and talked to one another for 20-hours at a stretch. But then, it’s barely shown. So I’m faced with this great idea that makes me think, and then the filming of it is botched, which makes me ponder the human and cinematic and production element of it. I’m thinking about the whole of the show, from the ground up and that makes me happy. I love thinking about why, out of all celebrities, the Lacheys were chosen to host this and then, trying to figure out why they’re basically not featured? Why was there such inconsistency in filming and location (e.g. why was Mark/JESSICA’s wedding the only one in a different venue?)?
In a writer sense, all these thoughts have sparked creativity. I’m thinking about thinking. I want to know more and that means I’m going to invent more. I’m happy about that. Give me flawed and weird over competent and boring.
MR: Very simply, this show reminds us that we need to find the quirks and the uniqueness of a character that go beyond what we see as the “type” they are. Would JESSICA be JESSICA without the dog drinking from the wine goblet? Would Gigi be Gigi without her middle name being Milady? Would Amber be Amber without being a tank mechanic with makeup debt? To be reminded of the contradictions within a person is the breeding ground of authentic characters.
Also, doing some rewatching, you pick up on the seeds you might not have noticed before or forgot about because you’re, as a viewer (reader) taking it all in. I had forgotten that Carlton ghosted Amber in the pods. He got up and walked out while she was in the middle of a sentence and walked into the hallway and made a “No” face to whomever was around. I mean, we should have known what he would do to Diamond Jack. Planting seeds is something I think I try to do unconsciously when I write, and I’ll often go back and see if there was enough dusted about that it makes sense. A later draft evaluation check point.
And whoa boy, the well timed dig is such an effective tension builder. I will never forget where I was when Gigi said, from the kitchen, not even looking at Damian as she was making avocado toast, “You know how you tell me it’s the best sex of your life? Have you noticed that I haven't returned the compliment?” You know so much about that relationship in one line of dialogue without him even needing to reply.
JB: I learned in LiB that love, even if it’s the earliest stages of it, is the easy part & that learning how to be with someone when they’re deeply flawed & you’re deeply flawed is really a perfect formula for (what I’m going to call) performative realism. I learned in LiB that despite all evidence to the contrary, we somehow still believe in the mythology of love, even though most of us still don’t understand it, how to find it, or how to nurture it, because we are unreliable narrators in our own lives and emotions, which is fucking fascinating. I also learned through Barnett’s character arc (& to some extent, Jessica’s) that deeply flawed complex characters are so much more compelling than static ones like Damian & Kenny. I also re-remembered in this show that reality TV can be both astonishingly insightful & also frustratingly simplistic, reductive, and formulaic. Why, for example, is love & marriage conflated here? These aren’t even remotely the same thing, but in LiB they’re just accepted as a premise for entertainment value.
KMB: Yes! I was wondering the same thing: Why did they choose to conflate love and marriage here? Simply for the visual spectacle of a bunch of weddings? It certainly allows for a very climactic moment, where the “characters” are forced into a final, dramatic choice. Made to declare before all their answer to “Is love blind?” Was it for this ultimate Marriage Plot moment that the show creators designed things this way, or does the conflation bely some deeper bias about love on their part? It absolutely broke my heart when, after finding out Barnett wasn’t proposing, LC addressed the camera and asked, “Am I just an unlovable person?” LC!!! I was desperate for the show to somehow reassure her or argue against this insecurity, but that reassurance never came. I understand that the show needs certain dramatic plot points, and that weddings provide an easy plot point, but I was burning for them to somehow address these other non-marriage facets of love. After all, thinking about what JESSICA was saying while in the pods, it seems as though she loved Mark, at least for a time. But apparently temporary or fleeting love isn’t “love” in the world of LiB. And what if, in the end, JESSICA better learned to love herself? It’s possible that her final revelation--”I have nothing to apologize for because I’m not sorry”--signals that she’s gained some new insight into herself and what she truly wants/needs. If I were writing this story, I’d want to highlight these different forms and moments of love as (successful?) parts of the LiB “experiment.”
SG: Writer lessons? 1. How wonderful this community of writers is, who can say smart things and reference Poe and the best ever Beatles film and bring meaning and nuance out of human experience. 2. How much of a mistake it is to rush the beginning. I would have been there for easily double the pod time, and that build would have made the rising action of Mexico/Atlanta even more meaningful and the climax of the weddings more spectacular. 3. How much redundancy gets under my skin. Honestly, I hope never again to hear the words “I fell in love with someone I had never seen” and “now is the time to find out if love really is blind” and “say ‘I do’ or never see them again.”
TLC: The thing I learned was actually something that Lauren says in her ET interview. She mentions how, yes, she and Cameron are an interracial couple and yes, they talked about that issue but the show made it seem like that was the only thing they talked about. Same with JESSICA. We don’t really know how much of the age difference was really an issue for her because the editing made it seem like it was the only thing she cared about. For me, I think this taught me that repetition is where we create significance. The more something is repeated, the more the reader or the audience is going to believe that that is the thing that they should focus on. It can be misleading in a show. In a story, it can feel redundant as well as misleading and cliche.
LD: I hate to say it, but I think I learned the most from JESSICA (aka MESSICA). She drove us to tweet and rant. Now, I don’t want to write characters that will make one rant, not necessarily. But I would like to create someone memorable, someone real.
Like it or not—MESSICA struck a chord. We are all a little MESSICA, in some cases, a lot. Many of us (not to mention any names, ahem, LEONORA) got a little teary, if not slurry, when Mark—aka junior high Mark and work Mark and summer camp Mark and Mark who worked at that record store—wanted to woo me, while Barnett said, uh-uh, and went off with Amber.
MESSICA, I feel you.
On the other hand, Kelly? Kenny? Huh??? Were they even on the show? Oh right, they were, but do we remember them? Kenny—as someone else pointed out—was eager to make a good impression, even when Kelly ditched him. Maybe he impressed some of us, but a lot of us were left feeling that it was just one glory moment, or worse, that it came off as insincere. Give me MESSICA-NESS over Kenny-ness any day.
That said, as a writer I do have to keep Kenny (and Mark) in mind. It’s always good to have opposite characters to keep the tension going. For instance: Elena Ferrante’s Lila and Elena, Archie’s Betty and Veronica, America’s Bill and Ted.
MR: Leonora, absolutely agree that Kenny’s speech at the end, intending for him to come off as someone who was going to be the bigger man, the old fashioned guy that wasn’t going to make angry or cruel statements out of hurt in front of his and Kelly’s gathered families. It struck me as inauthentic and insincere. But it felt subtle enough to me that I understand most people saw him as a hero. Writing a character where there is room for both interpretations is the most meaty to me. If in the reunion episodes we learn that Kenny has been sending revenge porn (soft core of course since neither of them could cum for each other) of Kelly to all of Atlanta, I would absolutely believe he was capable of that.
MBT: I think that pissy Kenny yelling at the cameraman was the real Kenny.Stalking around the basement, being a dick to a producer? That’s some real shit. That’s the shitty dude I feel still creeping around my soul, leftover from my teens.
LD: I kind of liked pissy Kenny. I liked the realness, that is. I also liked that the blinds of reality TV world were pulled aside. When Kenny said “Jimmy,” it was like peeking behind the curtain. (Though of course, that was absolutely engineered by the editors to achieve effect.)
KMB: I completely agree--I really liked pissy, vulnerable Kenny. It was in that moment that his “character” felt fullest and truest to me, and it was then that I felt most sorry for him that he’d been left at the altar. Why did they wait so long to reveal this side of him? Was it all to add suspense and surprise to Kelly leaving him, or did they just run out of showtime for more of his and Kelly’s storyline?
THERE WERE More couples that got engaged than they decided to show on Love is Blind. Out of the eight couples that got engaged, why did they choose the six they did, which of course leads to the question, Why Kelly and Kenny?
MBT: My guess is that they looked at Kelly/Kenny as a kind of baseline, a palate cleanser. I kind of view the couples on a spectrum. If you ignore the nuclear disaster of Carlton/Diamond, at one end you have Mark/JESSICA and Gigi/Damian, which the producers knew were going to be chaos. At the other end are Lauren/Cameron and Amber/Barnett, which were dramatic, but more of a “I hope these crazy kids work it out.” Right in the middle are Kelly/Kenny.
It appeared in the beginning like a stable, healthy, sweet, boring relationship and, after the swings of the other four couples, that can be a nice pivot. We do it in food and action movies and everything.
TLC: I feel like all the couples presented a different conflict. I dont know if the show knew until they got to editing table how they were going to frame the show. It felt like they decided to frame it around this concept of “does race matter? Does age matter?” after they realized who the main couples would be. As for Kenny and Kelly, I mean, they turned out to be a surprise, twist ending that was more interesting than the straight up love story from Lauren and Cameron. But each couple met some sort of box that maybe the producers had not figured out all the way beforehand.
SG: Kenny is the show’s sad hero, the good guy whose worth goes unnoticed by the woman he loves. Kenny is the man the show failed to let us know. Kenny is the promise for a better future, even in the midst of a shitty present. (Don’t care about Kelly.)
JB: I think Kenny & Kelly, who I’ll call K+K for now on, were the show’s ballast: eminently forgettable, but structurally stable as a counterweight to the drama of Gigi/Damian & Barnett/Amber. K+K were the background, the stage for other people’s drama. One thing I found interesting, after Lauren & Cameron’s marriage was placed last in the finale, I learned something important about LiB: the experiment might have been a failure but Lauren & Cameron’s marriage was the bright spot in this show and the producers knew it. They were the one relationship that lived completely up to the hype and the premise of the show’s branding, suggesting without saying directly that love can be trans- &/or post-racial. Still, I genuinely loved them as a couple & was rooting for them from the very beginning because they were courageous, honest with themselves & each other about their fears, limits, and affection. They were also gorgeous AF. And they really loved each other, which came through on the show.
LD: Yes, why?
I’m not sure, except for the obvious: balance. An old journalism professor of mine would insist on this. For an article, he’d say, you need different POVs, a “voice chorus.” This typically involved me standing on street corners, in the rain, begging people: “Can I have the spelling of your first and last names?” The answer was invariably: “no.”
In non-journalism terms, there’s only so much chemistry one can take (hello, Amber and Barnett), or perfect soulmatehood (Cameron and Lauren) or rising from the hot ash of volatility, Phoenix-style (I’m looking at you, G).
When it gets to be too exciting, or too interesting, or too Phoenix-y, the camera pans over to K&K, and the viewer can finally breathe easy, happy to take a pee break.
SG: I like the idea of them as a voice chorus, though I would love to spin this in a Greek kind of way--like Amber and Barnett are our strophe and Gigi and Damian are their antistrophe and Kenny and Kelly are our epode.
KMB: I agree with the palate-cleanser theory, although I will say: every time the camera panned to K+K, it felt less like a breather to me and more like a moment of rising suspicion. For me it became a frustrating game of When are they going to reveal there’s trouble in paradise? Oddly enough, the way the show kept tiptoeing around K+K’s relationship felt to me like its cheapest moment. They wanted to have a big surprise, a pull-the-rug-out-from-under-us moment when Kelly left Kenny at the altar--and in order to do this they kept almost the entire development of their story off-screen.
(I’m also a bit bitter about this because I would’ve gladly sacrificed K+K’s storyline for more time in the pods. I want to know what happened to Mr. Virgin!)
MBT: MOAR PODS!
MR: More, more, more. The pods are what makes LiB different from any other show. And the fact that the producers didn't give the podtestants limits on what to ask, or nudges in any way to set up couples, speaks to the idea that they were willing to let the narrative drive them, not the other way around. From everything I’ve read about it, they let the experiment play out without interference, and once people got to know each other, they helped facilitate more time with the one’s that mutually wanted to spend more time together. When they step out of those pods and fly to a resort, that takes them into well-tread territory. I would have loved to linger on the pods for at least one more episode! Let us see more of people not getting along (call back to Carlton just up and leaving his date with Amber while she was talking), let us see more of people smiling without even realizing it. The uniqueness of the show and what we are probably all trying to wrap our heads around in our lives, is the not-in-person relationship, which so many of us have with each other. And more end of the day wine-drinking kitchen sessions where everyone compares notes. How did what Amber would say about Barnett affect what JESSICA would reveal to everyone else about her feelings?
Tomorrow: random bits and pieces, and our Love is Blind astrology wrap-up