Friday, February 14, 2020 // The Statement
6B
“Love Island”: The Walden Pond of reality TV
T
V has always moved too fast for
me. I was too busy running track
and selling books in high school
to participate in my nuclear family’s
“Breaking Bad” bonding routine, I gave
up on “Twin Peaks” after distractedly
missing too many plot points and I figured
that everyone else knew enough about
“The Office” and “Game of Thrones” for
me to ride on their collective coattails.
Last spring, my roommate and I vowed
to get through season 1 of “Killing Eve”,
only to abandon ship in the middle of its
finale, broadly complaining that television
demanded too much from our specific
brand of attention span. We preferred
reading. Crossword puzzles. Knitting
with the cat on the lap. Things that were
… slower.
So I went through a bit of an identity
crisis when, at the end of last semester, I
found myself watching the 2015 British
reality dating show “Love Island” for five
hours straight with my skinny musician
friends, people who usually put on
something between high cinema or the
short film they shot and edited themselves
earlier that day. How or why it started
playing remains a mystery, but we were
inexplicably hooked from the first lens
flare and dramatic muscle shot.
The premise of “Love Island,” especially
to a group unacquainted with reality
television, is inane. In the season opener,
ten sexy-ass Brits are separated by gender
and essentially paraded in front of each
other one by one; a pageant that ends with
the awkward and cheeky heteronormative
“coupling” of birds and lads that express
varying levels of mutual interest upon
first impression. They are (ironically)
isolated from reality for nine weeks on a
luxe compound in Mallorca known fondly
as “The Villa” to test, temper, break and
re-break the bonds they initially formed
— almost none of which last more than a
week.
Couples sleep side-by-side in an open-
room line of king beds, summer camp-
style. They have no phones, computers
or means of connecting with the world
outside the Villa. There is a pool, an
open bar and a few dumbbells thrown
on a makeshift workout lawn. If you’re
single by the time of the next (dreaded)
“recoupling,” you’re out. A relationship
means survival, plain as day. Let the
cameras roll.
Alyssa Schmid, a senior studying
sociology in LSA, doesn’t know why she
likes it either.
“There isn’t even really a plot it feels,
most of the time they’re just sitting in
their bathing suits around the pool,”
Schmid told me last week in the back
corner of Espresso Royale State Street.
She got into “Love Island” through her
roommate, tackled the first three seasons
and successfully converted her sister to
the cause. She follows multiple previous
contestants on Instagram.
“... and this doesn’t make any sense to
me. They put them in a situation where
it’s obviously not reality, and then it’s just
them being themselves ... but you can’t
talk to anyone (from the outside world) so
I guess it kind of makes sense,” she added.
“Like, you have a totally different life
now, you have to make friends and build
relationships because you’re not going to
have anyone else to talk to for however
long you’re there. Literally nothing else to
do.”
Ayat AL-Tamimi, a senior in LSA
studying political science, finds that these
interactions-by-necessity often challenge
what you’d normally expect from “love”-
seeking reality TV like the infamous
“Bachelor.” In fact, it’s what excites her
about the show.
“The goal is to be in a relationship
that goes to be the couple that wins the
money, and so maybe you have to find
people that you can vibe with, just on a
platonic level, to be paired up with for a
little while,” she explained. This is where
“Love Island” makes its major break from
the norm: the premise isn’t to land one
specific relationship with one specific
person. It’s multidimensional in the Villa
— a relationship, a person. You could, in
theory, win by spooning with a friend.
Earlier in our interview AL-Tamimi
used
the
term
“strategic
coupling”
to
describe
this
common
Island-
phenomenon: coupling with a pal to the
mutual interest of evading elimination.
Social symbiosis.
“What I really appreciate is how a lot of
them will come to mutual understanding
of, ‘we don’t like each other that way, I
fully support you going to find someone
that you think you might be romantically
invested in.’ But it’s not killing the
friendship, so in a way it’s much like the
antithesis of other dating shows where
it’s a cold, one-track, have-to-be-in-love
sort of trajectory, which statistically is not
realistic at all,” AL-Tamimi said.
The lines indeed blur. There’s a
moment in season three where contestant
Montana, strategically coupled up with
Marcel, invites Marcel’s new flame Gabby
into their bed to surprise her man with
a good-night kiss. Three people end up
sharing this moment: Marcel, surprised;
Gabby, literally crawling over Montana
to smooch him and Montana herself,
smiling supportively next to her friends.
This seems more organic than the rigid,
elimination-controlled monogamy of “The
Bachelor.” This seems like something that
has happened on the couch in my living
room
“So technically yeah, your worth is
determined by whether you’re coupled or
not, but that plays with it in a lot of ways,”
AL-Tamimi explained. “It’s not like you
have to be romantically coupled to share
a bed with someone. There are a lot of hot
men and hot women sharing a bed and
nothing happening … And I think that’s
kind of subversive.”
I
n the spring of 2017 I, like many
confused
writers
before
and
after me, departed Ann Arbor in
the direction of New Hampshire and
the New England Literature Program
(NELP). NELP is one of the more unusual
experiences available at the University
of Michigan: six weeks, forty strangers,
upwards of twenty literary texts and
something around five overnight hiking
trips in the woods of the White Mountains.
NELPers dwell in a boys’-camp-made-
commune
on
the
picturesque
Lake
Winnipesaukee, cooking and cleaning
for each other in scheduled work shifts.
There are no phones, computers or means
of connecting with the world outside the
camp — all NELPers have are Emerson,
Thoreau and each other.
I’ve never held NELP and reality TV
in the same thought before — NELP
touts itself as a deeply intellectual and
introspective experience, while “Love
Island” comes off as oversaturated,
overstimulating sensationalism. But while
interviewing for this piece it dawned on
me that perhaps I vibe with “Love Island”
because I did something somewhat similar
three years ago in rural New Hampshire.
Despite their aesthetic differences as an
immersive academic program and a reality
dating show, NELP and “Love Island”
share enough of a structural skeleton to
produce mirroring social effects. I mean,
if you drop a group of strangers anywhere
in the world, circumscribe them within
a radius and sever all contact from the
lives they had just left, weird things will
happen. What Schmid said was true: All
you can really do is sit around and talk to
each other, whether that be in a bikini by
the pool or in layers of thermal clothing
on a rock in the woods. In the process,
everyone seems to become a character,
in the best and worst of ways. You have
little to share aside from who you think
you are and what you think is going on,
resulting in what feels like constant
commentary on self and selves. There’s
disproportionate space for unexpectedly
personal and confessional conversation,
equal parts awkward and thrilling.
BY VERITY STURM, STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT
ILLUSTRATION BY CAITLIN MARTENS
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