Matches on 10's Perfect Match are never perfect like the temperature on the weather report: never 'normal.' The very phrase 'perfect match' is skewed in two directions - the amorous (high in matrimonial potential,' but always deferred) and the sportive (contestants are a 'perfect match' for one another, but one will win, the other lose).
As a television version of a 'happy hour,' Perfect Match, negotiates the transition between work (everyone on Perfect Match has a job) and the Night. Promising a break with repetition, Perfect Match nevertheless institutes it - against the narrative of seduction and possibility in what Roland Barthes (in his analysis of Rochefoucauld's Dominique) calls a 'ludic' structure; 'any motionless structure articulated on the binary oscillation of repetition.' Here, 'passion, once it is established and blocked, oscillates between desire and frustration, happiness and misery, purification and aggression in a literally interminable manner.'
There are all sorts of blockages in Perfect Match. The wall (the metaphor of blindness - as in the 70's Blind Date, television shows - announcing the supremacy of voice in the seduction game) is the obvious one. Opening and closing on the text, it dams up and then releases the erotic, escalating from aural to visual, it concretizes the rhetorical mechanism of the show: question and answer. Yet the anguish, frustration and triumph of this work fort/da game is ultimately that of the audience - those who live in the jealousy of seeing others slip away with the objects of television desire. To the audience is left the repetitive task of nightly viewing an always-delayed match, a 'cruise' without destination, a phantasmagoria of the 'possible' where one body is removed and replaced by another -in short, a game, a real life video game.
Fear of Flying
Perfect Match's sponsors appear to be getaway/flyaway outfits. For the 20s-30s contestants the ability to save is correspondingly highlighted. But something about this sort of leisure/expenditure also comes out -the involvement of sport with holiday, and both of these with seduction. Most are 'into' or 'enjoy' sports, but whether this means that they do it or watch it on television is left
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up in the air. A series is thus created from spectator to participant, from the sporty to the sexy: indoor cricket; tennis; water-sports and 'men' (never 'women') form a typical series of 'interests.' Contestants schooled on squash courts, tennis courts, swimming pools and organized social form of fun are not available -except on television.
You come to Perfect Match without a history - the histories are yet to be written, sexuality yet to come into being. (Each sex, paraphrasing Aragon, is the other's future). At the same time, however, we see them becoming what they already are. To the seducer's questions, thrusting to the 'margins' of sexuality ('In what ways are you offbeat?' 'What do you do when you're tempted to do something you're tempted to do?' 'Life is full of ups and downs - what was your last up?') comes the evasive deflation of the answer ('I haven't had an up myself,' 'I haven't had an up in a long time.') Not only is the pleasure promised by the seductive question cancelled in the suppressive/repressive answer - the effect on the answerers is either suicidal ('What outrageous act would you like to do?' - 'Jump off the Sydney Harbour Bridge,' 'Absail off Centrepoint') or the telescoping of The Question into something Out of The Question ('What's the biggest thing a man could offer you?' - 'Himself and a million dollars,' 'A swimming pool, a mansion and champagne'). Finally the history is that of the machine, in its mechanic rather than productive glory - 'What were your first impressions when the screen was pulled back?' -'She was a lovely piece of work,' 'I wanted to strip his brain and body a bit more,' 'I wanted to find out what makes him tick.'
'Flight' here has at least two renditions - escape-to and escape-from. The flyaway holidays Perfect Match offers are paralleled by consumer/erotic existence, which is what both the advertizers and the show's devizers need to institute in order to transcend ('What is your recurring dream?' 'Falling off a cliff. That's why I'm still here').
The Space of Seduction
Perfect Match, wall and all, is, maybe, a contemporary version of Pyramis and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night's Dream - not only because seductors interrogate prospective seductees through a wall that divides them but also because theirs is a play within a greater play, a play put on by rustics momentarily elevated to ham actors. The averted/walled-off gaze is also that of the confessional (Barthes: 'to listen to the evangelical verb par excellence').
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Through the wall (transformed into a lattice by studio sound) the contestants must decode not only a meaning, they must also detect an underside to the utterance and there hallucinate a physical, seductible body. As in the Dream, marriage follows immediately.
The seduction by voices thus takes place in a quasi-religious space, but not the orgiastic space of confession or conversion -rather an orthodox religious space, in which the 'word' (betrothal) precedes the corporeality of liaisons. The 'I do' (whether occupations, hobbies or commitments) precedes an 'I am.'
The game of seduction conceals identities (no names are mentioned). Abstract (bodiless) participants 'compose' themselves -offer themselves, cast their bets - by decomposing themselves into a series of functions. These can be smiles ('Love those smiles -smiling all the way to Singapore,' 'I'm setting up the Golden Mouth Award'), and this is what makes the show a 'possible space' for all participants, whether live audience, television audience or contestants themselves. Alain Arnoud (Evanescances): 'If the erotic doesn't laugh but only smiles it's because what it's doing is composing subjects - what I mean is, it is starting off stories and persons, as in a play.'
So, as the televisual space becomes alternately divided and whole (the wall again), so does the body, metonymically cut up by the need for representation in default of actual appearance (the condition of the erotic). On 2GB's (Sydney) Midnight Matchmakers, the body introduces itself through answers to questions put by the announcer. The voice of the caller stands as metonym for the whole body and fantasizes it into 'existence,' not only for itself but also for the silent object of seduction (the announcer -but doubled in the listener). Vital statistics are what count here - a numericism of details of limbs, organs, 'spare parts.' Accompanying these are paradigms of likes (garlic?) and dislikes (no tattoos!), in which the voice hallucinates the whole body as it is transferred into the fantasy of the listener. An object of decipherment, it is transacted as a commodity - a used car perhaps ('any spare parts' asks the interviewer). Dimensions of body are the structuring points of the interview, the non-equivalence of bodies replicated by the silence of the possible hearer. Midnight Matchmakers boast of seventy successful marriages as a result of the programme is literally its 'track record.'
This bodily disfigurement which the voice performs on the rest of its owner via the talkback show, becomes in Perfect Match a
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more rationalized division into body and voice that is literally represented by the montage of the studio set. What Barthes had to say about the lover's body in A Lover's Discourse has its material realization in the division set up by the Perfect Match stage:
The other's body was divided: on one side the body proper -skin, eyes - tender, warm; on the other side the voice - abrupt, reserved.
Between the disembodies state where voice hovers over its own hallucinated corporeality comes the moment of recognition (the drawing back of the screen). From here on, eyes take over as metonymic, for they recognize a 'truth' greater than that of which the voice is capable of recognizing. ('Did it go magic for you? I could see it in your eyes when the screen was pulled back'). It is a moment that effects an exchange - the recognition of an T in the other: 'His eyes appealed - big dark pools.' Later: 'She's got a head, she's goes toes, and everything in between.' This momentary re-enactment of the Imaginary falls in between two others. The initial stage (voice), the final that of the symbolic - the world of goods with which the matchees are rewarded: the distribution of desire is 'matched' in its own terms by a distribution of commodities.
To compare Perfect Match and Midnight Matchmakers for a moment. In the end the difference is that between television and radio themselves. The radio directs listeners to the status of meaning (where it comes from, what unseen body produces it) and, given the narrowness of the channel to the vastness and diversity of the audience, proceeds from the voice as basic to a very primary notion of 'message' (imperative). On television, however, the separate spacialization of voice and body is at odds with the spectacularity of the medium, a perversion within it. The voice on Midnight Matchmakers is a purer seduction, less out of phase with its medium - what divides there, on radio, is the air itself, part of its own apparel, a seemingly easy channel to negotiate (telephone is comparable). On Perfect Match, however, there is a space 'of objects, but the space in which objects (people, partners, holidays, histories, 'experiences') become. Lyane Hutton-Williams suggests that the seduction space is far wider: that of prostitution. Perfect Match traffics in bodies as it traffics in goods; it organizes sexual space through a regime of procurers and pimps, selling off the recruitees to contestants who 'bid' for their consorts.
Salome's dance harmonises with John the Baptist's song. It is he who makes the wind of desire since he is, in himself, after coming to prominence, the breath of seduction. And what is
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the voice if not breath endowed with an unlimited power of evocation and provocation; tracing in the air the ungraspable line of a call, murmuring in the direction of the other so that s/he, entering into passivity, will hear. What is the voice if not the entire body metamorphosed into breath, vibration and sonorous transparency that spreads out through space ... (Alain Arnaud, Evanescance).
In Perfect Match there are two sorts of denial of visibility: the 'blind' dates themselves and the audience, always unseen but always addressed. In all cases, the body is reduced to what it 'says' (words/laughter/boos) about itself. Conversely, everything that is said points to the absence of bodies - the apotheosis of the 'readerly' (the emplacement of the subject in discourse 'where the body is lacking' - Barthes).
The voice does finally lead to a whole body - but one only. But before this wholeness is achieved, the body passes through a series of dismemberments (no mistake that Salome's form of seduction takes the form of decapitation, with John the Baptist sliced at the vocal chords). This happens surely in phone sex too (as indeed in Midnight Matchmakers) where the body takes on itself the mask of a scenario, in which it theatricalizes its own disintegration, leaving to the other the business of hallucinating what/who the whole body might be.
There is a story by Poe called 'Berenice,' about a man who gets obsessed (the condition of 'the attentive') by 'the white and ghastly spectrum of (his sister's) teeth? The sister dies during the course of the narrative; at its conclusion, the narrator has dug up the body and extracted the teeth. They had become 'ideas,' says Poe, rather than sentiment.' He sees 'not the living Berenice, but the Berenice of a dream; not as an object of love, but as a theme of the most abstruse although desultory speculation.' So in Perfect Match, just as the commodities are fetishized so are the bodies ('I have a fetish for blue eyes and blond hair,' 'She liked my teeth'). Yet it is always the voice that leads the way to this fetishistic violation, whether the voice of the auctioneer, host, contestant or as voice-over. Freud writes in The Interpretation of Dreams that there is never any 'voice' in dreams. All aural effects must be transformed into visual analogues. A series then: the seductive, dismembering voice, reintegration of the bodies' whole in visual recognition, escape.
Noel Sanders teaches at the New South Wales Institute of Technology
New: 20 October, 1997 | Now: 13 November, 2019