LOVE ISLAND: BOMBSHELLS IN UTOPIA
LOVE ISLAND: BOMBSHELLS IN UTOPIA
you shouldn't have to justify watching 60 hours of half-naked twenty-somethings lounging poolside with their crushes, but if you do, blame history!
Mysogyny has forced me to defend many of the reality shows I’ve loved over the years - Real Housewives, Vanderpump Rules, Jersey Shore, Jersey Shore Family Vacation, Bachelor in Paradise, Love is Blind, 90 Day Fiancé, 90 Day Fiancé: Before The 90 Days, 90 Day Fiancé: The Other Way, 90 Day Fiancé: Happily Ever After?, 90 Day Fiancé: The Single Life and 90 Day Fiancé: The Last Resort - to name a few. Love Island, which started in the UK and caught on in the US around 2018, has proven particularly difficult to stand behind, mainly because its seasons are roughly sixty episodes long and throughout those sixty episodes, contestants rarely leave the confines of “the villa”.
Love Island follows a bunch of singles competing to couple up and win a small cash prize (and a lifetime career as an influencer) while living in a “luxury” villa decorated like the post-divorce condo of a gen x cokehead dad. The villa has one giant bedroom containing a dozen or so beds where everyone sleeps, a makeup room better stocked than a Sephora, neon signs everywhere that say things like “spill the rizz” and cameras installed in each corner. The singles are placed in couples on entering the villa and must stay coupled to stay on the show.
Love Island films Big Brother style, in “real time” - episodes are filmed and then edited over night and released a day or so later, which means that when new contestants or “bombshells” enter the villa, they’ve already been watching the season at home and deciding whose heads they want to turn when they get there. Outside of that and some intense games of truth or dare, not much happens on the show. Every day, the islanders wake up at the crack of dawn, make each other breakfast and coffee, and then hang by the pool for twelve to twenty hours discussing nothing other than their relationships. When they “get a text”, it usually means they have to walk a handfull of steps over to the fire pit, which is also poolside, and decide whether to stay in their couple or to couple up with someone new.
I’ve had a long career of reality tv consumption, yet Love Island is the first reality show I’ve ever felt clinically hooked on, like physically unable to stop watching. I’ve even downloaded VPN’s to watch the UK episodes early (they’re released across the pond a week before they drop in the US). I’ve agonized over whether or not to skip some seasons of Love Island because I know to press play on episode one means to relinquish my basic human freedoms for at least a month. To press play is to allow the base thumping, sticky self-tanner-coated content to seep into every fiber of my being until my own brain starts talking to me in a thick Liverpool accent, telling me I can’t be arsed to do anything but consume the show.
I’ve described the experience of watching a season of Love Island as akin to eating air. Nothing of substance is coming in, and nothing of substance is going out. I’m not gaining anything from this sixty hour experience and it will in no way mold my perspective going forward. I’m not even actually interested in the end result (which couple gets the most public votes/cash prize), yet I can’t resist it. I crave it. And it’s just. so. damn. watchable. Why?
Well, romanticizing a simpler, more communal lifestyle is in fact a historical human response to the discomfort of modern times. It could be that in this era of ‘dating app burnout’ and AI porn, something in our DNA compels us toward the unencumbered social schema of the Love Island villa, where everyone lives and sleeps together under one roof, without the news, the internet or Netflix, and engages in communal rituals around a fire pit. Where a fishmonger can fall in love with an international dressage rider, and a snake wrangler/model from Alabama can start a love triangle with a personal trainer/model from Miami AND a medical device saleswoman/model from Calabasas… aka where anything is possible.
The set-up of the Love Island villa is not disimilar to some of the greatest communes in human history, many of which began as utopian attempts to resist a rapidly changing society.
The Oneida Community, for example, was founded in 1848 in upstate New York during the lead-up to the Civil War, and fluorished throughout the reconstruction era. As egalitarian progress loomed, fear took hold in communities favored by the status quo. John Humphrey Noyes, the founder of The Oneida Community, was certainly one of the favored. He was born into a prominent political family in Vermont, attended Yale and Dartmouth, studied law and began working in business, only to become radicalized by the religious movements of the Second Great Awakening.
I’m sure we’ve all witnessed the “career shift” of a white woman we went to college with, who started as an associate paralegal and now runs an empathic aura coaching program or founded a doula collective without any medical training. Well, John Humphrey Noyes forged a similar path, from wealthy white businessman to wealthy white Christian preacher at the helm of a powerful commune, launched in part to help him avoid an “adulturous fornucation” indictment. John Humphrey Noyes devised Oneida based on his Christian vision for a new society, akin to heaven on earth, where all could love freely - expecially him. His Oneida Community quickly blossomed to include two hundred and fifty members, living together and sharing all communal duties.
The Oneida Community, much like the Love Island Villa, operated under one roof with all inhabitants sexually available to each other. This is a much simpler way of life, at least visually! Perhaps, therein lies the addictive escape of Love Island - it’s more appealing to watch a bunch of people living and loving without the constraints of the job market, the 24-hour news cycle, or pants than it is to exist in the presence of one’s actual life.
A promininant Oneida Community practice was referred to as “Mutual Criticism”, and involved each community member volunteering to receive direct feedback on their behavior from the rest of the group in an attempt to improve their character. In the villa, Love Island challenges often involve cast mates calling each other out in a similar (but much shadier) way. They might have to play beer pong and, after chugging a cup, respond to a prompt urging them to “snog the Islander they think is just here to play games”.
Alternatively, islanders might have to read tabloid headlines calling out an anonymous cast mate for being a cheater or a liar, and publically guess who the headline is referring to.
I think it’s fair to presume “Mutual Criticism” originated within Oneida as a mechanism for control via self-esteem degradation, as is common within religious cults. And despite its glossy, bronzed and waxed facade, Love Island’s inner workings have been deemed liable in negatively impacting the mental health of show participants. Love Island faced a public reckoning recently, and producers were forced to respond with a commitment to more humane production practices.
Love Island presents itself as valuing love and connection above all else, while being formulated to get viewers addicted to its drama so that the show can turn its cast members into influencers and the influencers can hawk weight loss products which creates more corporate revenue which creates more ad revenue and keeps the capitalistic system alive under the guise of giving lucrative careers to random snake wranglers and medical device sales people around the world. Like all dating shows, Love Island is a money-making vehicle for powerful men, that happens to entertin us. The Oneida Community similarly started as a vehicle for John Humphrey Noyes to evade legal trouble and freely have sex with people he wasn’t married to under the guise of providing solace to scared Christians during a revolutionary era. And ultimately, Oneida also gave up the farce of free love to form a joint-stock company and produce mass market silverware.
Okay, so I admit that Love Island is nowhere near a utopia. It does, however, provide an escape from the burdens and dread of living under the constraints of late-stage capitalism. I can forgive myself for losing track of sixty hours of my life, getting lost in the turbulent love stories of strangers, because my brain is wired to escape when afraid, and this is low impact in comparison to other, more harmful escape mechanisms. Believing that Serena & Kordell will end up together makes my life a little more bearable, so I’m gonna go ahead and press play while I at least still have some of my fredoms, and kiss my consciousness goodbye for a bit.
SOURCES:
Love Island UK on iTV and Hulu / Love Island USA on Peacock
"Oneida: The Free-Love Utopia That Chased Immortality." BBC Reel, narrated by Clemency Burton-Hill, directed by Harriet Constable, BBC, 7 Oct. 2020, www.bbc.com/reel/video/p08sbbn2/oneida-the-free-love-utopia-that-chased-immortality.
Syracuse University Libraries. “John Humphrey Noyes, The Putney Community.” Digital Collections, Syracuse University, https://library.syracuse.edu/digital/collections/j/JohnHumphreyNoyes,ThePutneyCommunity/index.html.
Syracuse University Libraries. “Oneida Community Collection.” Digital Collections, Syracuse University, https://library.syracuse.edu/digital/guides/o/OneidaCommunityCollection/umifilm.htm.
Noyes, John Humphrey. Mutual Criticism. Oneida Community, 1876. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/mutualcriticism00noye/page/n1/mode/2up?view=theater.
Charles Nordhoff, The Communistic Societies of The United States from Personal Visits and Observation Including Detailed Accounts (New York: Schocken Books, 1875, 1966)
Pfeiffer, David. "Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to Silverware Empire." Here & Now, WBUR, 20 May 2016, www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2016/05/20/oneida-silverware.
"Episode 230: The Perfectionists." Criminal, hosted by Phoebe Judge, produced by Lauren Spohrer, 4 Aug. 2023, thisiscriminal.com/episode-230-the-perfectionists-8-4-2023/.
"Bastards of Reality TV: Part Two." Behind the Bastards, hosted by Robert Evans, iHeartRadio, 19 Apr. 2022, www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-two-the-bastards-of-reality-95217862/.
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