Doc Edge 2025 Craccum Coverage | The Dating Game
Where love is a product, men become consumers—lonely, desperate, and trapped in a game rigged by capital, class, and performance.
You've probably seen movies like The Dating Game already: the trade of the pick-up artist quickly revealing themselves to be how-to-guides of male chauvinism for unsuspecting straight men experiencing chronic loneliness. You also probably know how to react to such movies; they elicit reactions ranging from contempt, pity, or laughter to the pick-up artist or their unwitting participants. Like fighting fire with fire, our bachelors-in-training begin their journey of indoctrination covering all the classic tactics: classy photo-ops, fresh haircuts and heavily discounted clothes, lying by omission in their dating profiles, and the ol' reliable 'push and pull technique' (a euphemism for 'negging', with a pinch of 'ghosting').
Look at all these girls' photos. You see her figure? That's fake, too. She photoshopped it and the background too. Nothing is authentic. See him playing golf? See him playing guitar? See him drinking tea and playing badminton? See him skiing? It's all performance art… You're better off leaving [date training] camp and being lonely the rest of your life.
The tragic aspect of being single isn't that one lacks a significant other to love or rely upon; one can be perfectly self-sufficient economically and socially without them. The hardwired biological predilection to find a partner that produces the happy chemicals in our brains is competing against every other form of hyper-consumerist commercialisation of pleasure that produces the same, if not greater, amount of happy chemicals. The economic benefits of having a significant other diminish significantly as one goes higher up the tax bracket. This is the false synonymy of love and commerce: that because these things are designed to make you 'happy'—or as the nice adage of Ang Lee's film title Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) implies—they are worth the intergenerational cultural ingratiation and social rules in place for them and all its gastronomic explications.
Love becomes a luxury, a scarce resource, granted to the socially and economically privileged. If one does not meet these prerequisites, they are subsequently condemned to resume an existence with the knowledge that they will never achieve love ever again, a fate that sees countless examples across art and literature and film—from Aeneas and Dido to Romeo and Juliet to Ennis and Jack in Brokeback Mountain (2005)—consider worse than death.
I was raised to be obedient. Any time I did wrong, it felt like the sky was falling. I'm not too proud of my personality, so I'm forcing myself to be different.
That everything in life should function to the abstract end goal, 'happiness', is what foregrounds all manifestations of exploitation. If work doesn't set me free, I will perish. If I don't allow myself to conform to the archaic codes of masculine chivalry, I will perish. In easing this existential pain of struggling to find anything that sticks, we resort to individualistic understandings of behavioural patterns easily digested through psychometric personality tests like MBTI or Enneagram tests, further entrapping oneself into the deterministically narrow trajectory of all these short-sighted and overly pragmatic categories of human expression. The cliché of 'being yourself' is not an affirmative green light for honesty and truthfulness but a systematised' risk calculator' to reduce the work of compatibility for the other party. If your date has nothing to hide, it's easy to let them know you're not interested when you eventually find out they have nothing to offer either—or if you find out they're a sociopathic misogynist.
Love and commerce become inseparable: risk-averse, a safe investment with high returns, the freedom to abort and quickly sell your shares at the slightest possibility of instability or emotional/financial loss. Love becomes a game of competing high-value candidates looking for other high-value candidates that can support their consensual social mobility upwards into the stratosphere of neoliberal prosperity through bootstrapping hard work. Love can't afford to be ugly and catastrophic in an age where fertility rates are dropping in developed countries. But if you did indeed conform and eventually find someone to love by your mid-20s, who cares about the rest of those who struggle to find it themselves? It's their problem, not your problem, their loss for getting their funny up and not their money up.
Love ends where one's subjectivity also ends: "How can I retrofit the entirety of your existence into MY life?" is a selfish conception of an abstract yet immanent feeling.
The relationship I want will allow me to be myself. We can take care of each other, and have heartfelt conversations. Then, I can finally feel… love.
Love and commerce were inseparable in China from 1979 until 2015: parents were only allowed to love one child for the future of the country's economic prosperity. And because a country still needs its breadwinners and labourers, a male child was preferable. Deng's policies set the stage: love capitalist reform or perish in the stagnating countryside communes. China's rapid modernisation in the 90s also meant urban drift, resulting in parents leaving behind their children in the provinces as they continued working in the cities. The Dating Game is cognisant of this class divide, informing virtually every facet of Chinese dating culture. Dating someone from a lower class goes against the principles of love and commerce: How can I live a peaceful life if I don't have a well-paying job or a university-level education?
In fact, there's only one alternative left for these wayward men: joining the military. Love and country over love and commerce.
In the end, our fate is determined by society. Skills alone won't get us a girl. We're not the right people. Girls have to feel you deserve the rest of her life. If I don't build up my status, I bet she'll eventually… She might think that I speak well and that I'm a good person, but she'll realize I'm too ordinary. How can you keep going on?
Yet for all of its millennial Vox/Vice Media YouTube editing and journalistic aspirations, one gets the feeling The Dating Game is only scratching the tip of the iceberg, if not playing up these events to their logical conclusion with no break in the cycle. The film fast-forwards a year later, and we still see our dating coach/pick-up artist offering his services to more lonely men (this time with a less sleazy attitude), whilst the single men he's taught still remain single but keep in touch through WeChat.
So that's it? Love remains the carrot on a stick from which modern society dangles atop the well of lust, avarice and envy we have fallen into? I've only discussed the idea of 'love' throughout this piece from a materialist perspective out of fear of resorting to platitudinal/poetic jargon that makes its rounds in the TikTok 'For You' pages of 30-year-old romantically disillusioned single women. If I'm not careful, I too might also become a romantically disillusioned single woman, but I still need my own flavour of what one would call 'love advice'.
So to conclude this piece, I'll share two quotes encapsulating what 'love' truly means for me and then finish off with a poem.
We must bear in mind that, like many processes for finding the truth, the process of love isn't always peaceful. It can bring violent argument, genuine anguish and separations we may or may not overcome. We should recognize that it is one of the most painful experiences in the subjective life of an individual! That is why some people promote their "comprehensive insurance" propaganda. I have already mentioned that people die because of love. There are murders and suicides prompted by love. In fact, at its own level, love is not necessarily any more peaceful than revolutionary politics. A truth is not something that is constructed in a garden of roses. Never! Love has its own agenda of contradictions and violence. But the difference is that in politics we really have to engage with our enemies, whereas in love it is all about dramas, immanent, internal dramas that don't really define any enemies, though they do sometimes place the drive for identity into conflict with difference. Dramas in love are the sharpest experience of the conflict between identity and difference.
— Alain Badiou and Nicolas Truong, In Praise of Love, 2012
Embracing a love ethic means that we utilize all the dimensions of love—"care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge"—in our everyday lives. We can successfully do this only by cultivating awareness. Being aware enables us to critically examine our actions to see what is needed so that we can give care, be responsible, show respect, and indicate a willingness to learn. Understanding knowledge as an essential element of love is vital because we are daily bombarded with messages that tell us love is about mystery, about that which cannot be known. We see movies in which people are represented as being in love who never talk with one another, who fall into bed without ever discussing their bodies, their sexual needs, their likes and dislikes. Indeed, the message received from the mass media is that knowledge makes love less compelling; that it is ignorance that gives love its erotic and transgressive edge. These messages are often brought to us by profiteering producers who have no clue about the art of loving, who substitute their mystified visions because they do not really know how to genuinely portray loving interaction.
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions, 1999
As from a green zinc coffin, a woman’s
Head with brown hair heavily pomaded
Emerges slowly and stupidly from an old bathtub,
With bald patches rather badly hidden;
Then the fat gray neck, broad shoulder-blades
Sticking out; a short back which curves in and bulges;
Then the roundness of the buttocks seems to take off;
The fat under the skin appears in slabs:
The spine is a bit red; and the whole thing has a smell
Strangely horrible; you notice especially
Odd details you’d have to see with a magnifying glass…
The buttocks bear two engraved words: CLARA VENUS;
—And that whole body moves and extends its broad rump
Hideously beautiful with an ulcer on the anus.
— Arthur Rimbaud, Venus Anadyomène, 1870
The Dating Game Trailer │ Doc Edge Festival 2025
Doc Edge Festival is in Auckland from 25 June through to 13 July. The festival will also be showing in Christchurch and Wellington (16 July - 27 July).
The Dating Game will be premiering in Auckland on the following dates:
29 June 2025 - 7:45pm - Bridgeway Cinema
8 July 2025 - 8:15pm - The Capitol Cinema
John Lau
