Oh, Sam N.

spoilers for ep 1-4 of S21 of The Bachelorette ahead

I sometimes feel like in a photo I look far too present, as though I am too aware of the camera, too alive and lucid. I look too much like myself. This is obviously absurd; surely I shouldn’t be looking like anyone else.

There’s an Iranian-American guy on The Bachelorette this season.¹ Before the first episode had even aired, three different people had sent me a TikTok from the official Bachelorette account introducing “Sam N” to “Bachelor Nation.” Sam N (Samaun Nejad) from Carlsbad, California is a handsome, unassuming family man, proudly identifying as the son of Iranian immigrants and holding up a sign that said — in Barbie font — “Jenn, Will You Be My First Girlfriend?” My friends were intrigued, though I was less charmed; I can rarely trust SoCal Persians. And some light digging into his Instagram showed me that he was the proprietor of many unfunny Reels about how Iranian dads supposedly treat their daughters vs their sons. (If you were curious, in every video they spoil and overprotect their daughters and DGAF about their sons.)

OK, I was being a bit hard on him because he was Iranian. Is it a crime to be a cringe Instagram grifter? Isn’t every Bachelor franchise contestant? It’s not, and they are. Yet seeing him on the show filled me with thundering dread, and everything he did reminded me that I was right to be nervous. When he steps out of the limo, he faces Jenn and announces he’s “a virgin.” What? Oh, no, he’s “a love virgin.” He’s never been in love! But he’s looking forward to trying it, and he’s looking forward to getting to know Jenn. I’ll see you inside!

Though he looks human, Sam acts like an alien, speaking in words that sputter out of him as if there’s a clog blocking the thought being thought from the words being said. An alien, not a robot, because you can see that there are feelings swirling. He just can’t seem to grasp onto any of them long enough to discern their shape. His eyes are warm, but his gaze is nervous. Like a light bulb, I can’t look at him for too long. Forgive me if I’m projecting, but looking at him is like looking at one of those photos of myself, where I look too aware and too alive.

I think this is, a little bit, because he’s also Iranian. Forgive me again; I feel a little ashamed to do diaspora writing like this — it’s corny. But in the past 4 weeks I have gone from being viscerally disturbed by Sam N to feeling protective of him, much like a Persian Dad protects his Persian Daughter, ha ha ha.

To be safe, it’s perhaps best to avoid shows like The Bachelor when you’re an othered stinky lunch diaspora kid. These are shows, after all, where you have to deviate from the rules just enough that you’re different (Maria from Joey’s season, for instance) but never so much that you’re weird (Victoria from Matt James’s season, people who usually go home after the first episode, etc. Many examples). Nobody shows you where that line is — you have to just keep toeing until you slip. How could you ever walk a line you can barely see?

When I see other people — namely Iranian people, sometimes my family — deviating too far from the norm, I fall into a kind of lateral frustration. Like, come on, get it together. Put on deodorant, wear blue jeans, fit in for God’s sake. I’m obviously not describing anything particularly insightful: It’s the same kind of anger the second-gen kid feels when his mom is bringing ethnic cookies to the bake sale, or whatever. Just anger when other people haven’t yet figured it out, or don’t want to. Or, worst of all, when they clearly want to, but can’t.

That’s what bubbles up inside of me when watching Sam N. What do you even do with that? It’s one of those flat ideas. “Who can really process such thoughts?” writes Jay Caspian Kang in The Loneliest Americans. “They sit like rotted fruit at the foot of a tree — recognizable only by proximity and context, but certainly of no use to anyone.”

Alas, I can’t keep raging at this poor guy. At some point it turns to pity. Something shifts after a group date in the third episode, where the men had to do a sort of Chippendales-esque sexy strip-tease performance for Jenn. (To me this seems like a unique sort of nightmare, for Jenn especially. Yuck!) Sam N — who is more diminutive than most of the other men — is off to a rocky start when he sprains his wrist (?) trying to do a dance move. Then, as Ali Barthwell describes in the Vulture Bachelorette recap, he “worries about being ‘the first Persian to strip’”² and frighteningly “retreats into his mind palace and cooks up a scheme that is unhinged.”

The unhinged scheme: After many of the other men take their turn completing the assigned date task (doing their little Magic Mike dance), Sam goes up, decidedly still donning his robe, and recites a weird poem. He then declares he won’t be baring his abs today, but will instead be baring his soul. He announces: He is already “falling in love” with Jenn!

NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This is an obvious faux pas in the Bachelor/ette world, for anyone who knows anything about the show. It’s far too soon to bring up the L word, let alone in front of all the fellas, let alone when you’ve famously never been in love before. You can basically hear everyone groaning. Jenn looks uncomfortable. I’m tearing out my hair. When two other contestants poke fun at him behind his back, it causes a minor spat among the men. Devin, a clear frontrunner, gets pissed off, because Sam N is like a little brother figure to him. And I feel pissed off for him, too, because he’s just trying to figure it out. He’s just looking straight at the only woman that’s put in front of him and trying so hard to decide what he’s supposed to do, and nobody will tell him. (At least not yet.)

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message from oomf

For several months now, I’ve been almost entirely unable to watch any sort of new scripted TV on my own. I’ve repeated this ad nauseum on here. With the exception of watching Gilmore Girls for the nth time and 30 Rock for the (n+1)th time, the only TV I’ve been watching is reality TV — mostly Real Housewives and The Bachelorette. With anything else my mind wanders, and I can hardly care.³

I think the argument that reality TV is intellectual, actually, is a little bit disingenuous. Reality TV is not smart; it’s so dumb. I am laughing at Mary M Cosby for saying Jen Shah “smells like hospital,” because it’s cruel. I am watching and laughing while these women struggle with alcoholism and drug abuse and infidelity. I laugh when a Bachelor in Paradise contestant is constipated for so long that she has to leave the show. It’s all extractive and exploitative. It can be fucking dark. And even I have limits: I can’t watch Love is Blind or anything where people are too crazy, too vulnerable. I end up feeling so bad, like they shouldn’t be here. Neither of us should be.

I had an argument with my roommate a few weeks ago because she said she didn’t like “scripted reality TV.” Scripted reality TV? There was no such thing, I thought. Feelings are exacerbated, pinched, massaged, and provoked — but they are still real. Nobody’s reading off of a script. Why would you? Why would you choose to look like that on TV?

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Well, Sam N went home this week. It was bound to happen. Luckily, Jenn let him down easy. He was acting like a dickhead on the group date, trying to flirt with Jenn the way a character in a high school movie would. It was all very: “I stole your hat!” He kept saying he had “bad bitch” energy and when another guy calmly explained to him that he was being egotistical and annoying, he couldn’t compute. Bro was buffering, since it didn’t fit with his script. He kept saying they shouldn’t focus on him, they should focus on Jenn, like he was. One of those things Bachelor/ette contestants say all the time, but usually it makes sense. It didn’t really here.

With maybe too much of a sparkle in his eye, he ignores all this and reveals in his confessional that he wants to take the next step with Jenn. He sits next to her, a single strand of hair dangling over his glossy forehead. He’s wearing a horrible leather jacket and riding the high of winning the rugby game on the group date. After some preamble he asks: “Jenn, can I kiss you?” It feels so silly, so jejune; it’s the fourth episode and Jenn has already kissed countless guys without them asking. She has had to forcibly peel herself off of the other Sam, Sam M, because of their “undeniable physical chemistry” — a phrase she brings up at least 3 times an episode.

You can maybe see where this is going. Jenn says no, and Sam N gets dumped.

And when he’s in the car I kind of see that look again. Maybe it’s just recognition? The understanding of where someone’s coming from and why they’re way they are. And I just want to reach into the TV and shake him. But even if I could shake him it wouldn’t do a thing. There’s always that gap, isn’t there?

Reality TV should be like candy, and most of the time it is. Once it a while, though, it gets too alive, too lucid, too real. It becomes your own face in the photo. So then what? What do you do when you see yourself acting too human? Swallow it down, I guess, and move on.

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some things:

• Completely unrelated but I just remembered the time I found my coworker’s wife’s Pinterest account and she had a board called “men” and it was photos of guys who looked exactly like my coworker. Anyway - I am what you would describe as “bored”

• I got covid last week but we are so back this week guys. Once I get my sleep schedule back together it’s so over for you hoes….

• the USWNT is so back btw tell everyone. we’re back up. mal swanson / soph smith / trin rodman front 3 is the platonic ideal. holy trinity. smiling through it all can’t believe this is my life etc etc

• After telling Claire not to get a 40 oz hydroflask tumbler because she didn’t need it and it was just consumption culture telling her to do it, blah blah blah… I got a 40 oz hydroflask tumbler because it was on sale at TJ Maxx. And honestly it has changed my life and was a godsend when I had covid. The only thing is every time i’m on a Zoom meeting and I pull it out to sip from it I feel like a cartoon character and start kind of laughing to myself.

• OK - Some articles I wanted to share from this past month:

  • An essay on taking a vacation via Costco Travel by Simon Wu for The Paris Review

  • “I Changed My Race to White on Hinge” by Jamilah Lemieux. The rare essay in The Cut that didn’t go viral but which made me laugh, especially the phrase “since going white.” H/t

    john d. zhang
    for sharing

  • This article in the NYT about Lee Saedol’s life after the AI AlphaGo beat him in the game Go in 2016. When he lost to AlphaGo, “‘I could no longer enjoy the game,’ he said. ‘So I retired.’”

  • A story about a tree in DC that fell earlier this month. It’s mostly just a regular local story but a local neighbor remarking, “This tree has provided us canopy and enjoyment for many, many years,” brought me to tears.

  • As the summer of soccer comes to a close, another rant in The Guardian about how bad Fox Sports and Alexi Lalas are.

  • This profile of GeoRainbolt, the Geoguessr streamer/TikToker. I found it so incredibly moving.

  • Can’t remember if I already shared this, I don’t think I did. Another profile, of the softspoken singer-songwriter Lizzie McAlpine.

  • “The Unbranding of Abercrombie” by Chantal Fernandez in The Cut. I’d watched the Abercrombie doc a while back and so I found this to be a nice complement. Source of my favorite jeans tbh.

  • Lastly, this interview with Lena Dunham by Rachel Syme for The New Yorker. I am so fascinated by Lena Dunham, maybe for the same reasons I love reality TV and celebrity gossip. I think she’s a genius, I can’t lie.

Okay I’m hitting the email length limit. Glad to be back writing in longform :) Hope everyone’s keeping well. Going to go watch some tennis tomorrow <3 and try to get a 21 year old tennis player to fall in love with me <3

cheers,

PM

1. not the first iranian contestant though. how quickly we forget jojo fletcher is half iranian

2. almost certainly not true

3. although I’m actually kinda getting into Desperate Housewives as of this week. are we so back?