The Bachelor
The Bachelor is a popular reality television show on ABC. The show is produced by Next Entertainment in association with Telepictures, and the producer is Mike Fleiss with co-executive producers Lisa Levenson, Scott Jeffress and Jason Carbon. The topic of the show consists of a single man who is looking to find true love from a group of 25 women. Every week the bachelor eliminates at least one woman from the group until the final rose ceremony where one woman is left who has won over his heart.
This season the bachelor is Brad Womack who is 34 and is a successful bar owner. This episode was the final rose ceremony where Brad has to pick between two women for the one he could potentially marry. Brad is portrayed as the ultimate male with the whole package whom all of the women are competing for. He is ripped, hot, nice and has plenty of money to spare. Brad and his family are very wealthy and are of the white, upper middle class.
Dubrofsky explains in her article that The Bachelor is a show that is ‘raced,’ and that the only reason women of color are put on the show is to facilitate the coupling of white people (Dubrofsky 39). It is true that the majority of the women that are on the show are white, and there are usually only a small handful of women of color on the show. There has only been one bachelorette, Mary, who has been of color, and she was Latino. According to Dubrofsky she was portrayed how a stereotypical Latino is thought of – one who dances quite sexually and has a large booty, etc (Dubrofsky 50). However, even if this image was portrayed on Mary she was one of my favorite women on the show who showed a lot of class and was much more mature then all of the other women. She was a crowd favorite, and I don’t think her race negatively affected her in any way.
The majority of women on the show are white, beautiful women. They have “Barbie�-like bodies with long blonde or brown hair. On this episode one of the last women standing is a Phoenix Suns cheerleader, and she has the stereotypical cheerleader personality and figure – very ditzy, a cheesy laugh, skinny, etc. As Yep and Camacho reveal in their article the producer of the show, Mike Fleiss, explains the type of role the women need to fill, “Most importantly, they have to look good in the hot tub (Camacho 339).� This just goes to show that women are the object of desire to be filmed upon as sex objects and that aren’t there for their intelligence and personality.
The opening scene shows Brad on a balcony where he is surrounded in a beautiful landscape with luscious flowers and vegetation, which gives the viewer a sense that he is in somewhat of a fairytale. The camera is on the ground looking up at him to make him seem like he’s this superior, god-like figure. When the camera is on Brad and either of the women, rather then when its Brad with his family, it is much more zoomed in. This gives the viewer the feeling of closeness and really emphasizes the intimacy and emotions between Brad and the women.
Brad is the man the two women are competing for, thus making him the object of desire. He has had all these women throwing themselves at him, which in a sense sort of classifies him a classy pimp. He is the one who has all the power and controls what women can stay or must leave. The Bachelor is supposed to be about a show where one can find true love, but in this season he rejects both of the women. This just reinforces that Brad, the male protagonist is the one with the power who is able to control the women as however he feels so.
After he rejects both of the women he leads them to the limo to be driven off. The setting completely changes form a beautiful scenery with bright flowers and the ocean in the background to this much darker, smaller, cramped back seat within the limo. There are no more lights that are hitting the women’s hair at the right angle to emphasize their beauty, but the setting is depressing with sad, slow music playing the background.
This show really caters to females ranging from young teens to older women. Women usually are more into romance and finding true love compared to men, while men often tend to watch shows that deal with sports, comedy or violence.
There weren’t as many commercials as I remember compared to previous seasons, which may be a result of previously getting a longer air time. The commercials that frequently appeared dealt with the show October Sky and the news. I have never seen October Sky before, but the story seems to be about a love triangle existing between a young woman and two different men. It sounded like the relationships between them are very complicated, and that the woman is just trying to figure out who her true love is. This commercial seemed to really fit with the theme of The Bachelor and the type of audience who would be watching. The news previews also frequently played, and they weren’t optimistic stories that fit with the romance theme of The Bachelor. One preview dealt with a pilot who got caught drunk before trying to fly to Milwaukee, and the other story dealt with a college student’s death in Mankato.
Works Cited
Yup, Gust, and Ariana O. Camacho. "The Normalization of Heterogendered Relations in The
Bachelor." Feminist Media Studes 4 (2004): 338-341.
Dubrofsky, Rachel. "The Bachelor : Whiteness in the Harem." Critical Studies in Media
Communication 23 (2006): 39-56. 19. Academic Search Premier. EBSCOhost. U of M
Lib., MN. 19 Nov. 2007