Stars: they’re just like us. Even Oscar-nominated directors get addicted to low-brow reality television shows, although Greta Gerwig may be consuming Love Is Blind slightly differently than the average viewer. In a new profile for Vanity Fair, the Barbie mastermind professes to be obsessed with Netflix’s hit dating show, wherein contestants communicate, fall in love, and commit to getting married before even knowing what the other looks like.
Gerwig’s own films don’t tend to focus on romantic love, and she says even Little Women’s love story between Laurie and Amy made her nervous because of “The performance of it.” Few people have ever probably mentioned Little Women and Love Is Blind in the same breath, but here you go: “I was thinking about this while watching Love Is Blind. Obviously, I know there’s a feeling of being in love, but it’s also the way they act. Are they acting like they think people in love act? I know they feel a way, but are they also performing it? And then I just thought of everyone performing. When you’re in love and you say to someone, ‘I love you.’ Then they say back, ‘I love you too.’ Is everyone like, ‘Now I’m in the scene where we’re saying we love each other’? When I’m with my friends, I’m never like, ‘I’m in that scene where friends are having fun.’”
Trying to parse the surreality of reality television is enough to drive anyone mad, but with Gerwig, who is known to rattle off a laundry list of influences for her work, one gets the sense that this performativity is being sublimated into her own storytelling. Reality TV was present in Barbie, for instance, though it came from one of her stars. Speaking on the Smartless podcast over the summer, Gerwig revealed that Ryan Gosling took inspiration from Bachelor Nation. “[When] we started talking about Ken, he said ‘Oh, the Kens remind me of how the contestants on The Bachelorette are when the woman isn’t around,” she said (via The International News). Gerwig herself hasn’t seen The Bachelor, but her love of Love Is Blind is sincere, she said: “I love Love Is Blind. I love it so much. I love people falling in love on television and in their hearts. It just makes me so happy.”