Love Island or Samuel Beckett
Not only would Samuel Beckett have enjoyed Love Island, it might have inspired him.
I’ve decided, finally, there’s nothing to be gained from trying to figure out why I’ve been watching Love Island this year. It’s my first time, and I came at it about halfway through (although I wonder if there is actually anything like a halfway point for a show that seems to be a mix between a fever dream and a thought experiment). I have bought in to the whole thing. I cheer and rage and weep and cheer. I love the villains and the heroes alike. Chivalry is not dead, and, weirdly, neither is the idea of men and women. Are these real people? It seems there is a good chance they are. And if these are real people, and this is a moment in their real lives, then one thing keeps niggling at me. What do they do all day? Six days a week, we see an edited hour of their twenty four (plus, if you’re really invested, a weekly show of bits left out of the main edit). It’s a bit competition, a bit The Prisoner, a bit Beckett, a bit 24-hour nightclub.
Love Island is a reality game show, in a genre where the word “reality” does a great deal of heavy lifting. Contestants compete to find “love”, and those deemed for a myriad of potential reasons to be unworthy are ejected from the “island” via votes, some from the other contestants, some from the audience at home. A couple must win, so the impetus is on finding a member of the opposite sex with which to “couple up” (yes, the producers have yet to figure out how to include same sex attracted folk, and at some point I’m sure they will executed by firing squad for that, don’t worry). That’s it in a nutshell.
The show itself is mocked and derided for the type of contestant it prefers. I’m not going to get into that here. It is also mocked and derided for the lack of attention to the mental health of its contestants. I’m not going to get into that here. It is also mocked and derided for pretty much everything else it does. I’m not going to get into that here. All I want to ask is: what exactly to they do all day?
It’s really bothered me.
I like lazing by a pool, I like long mornings in bed, I like taking pleasure in the quiet moments, but these guys don’t seem to do anything else. A friend of mine, suspicious of my presence in a Love Island WhatsApp conversation, certain I was there to spoil the whole thing by trying to intellectualise it, eventually summoned up some sympathy for my concern about this.
What do they do all day?
This should concern us all, I said. Yes, what do they do all day, she said. This should concern us all, she said. They just sit around all day, day after day, week after week, nothing to talk about, nothing to be done, I said.
Dammit.
I’d brought Beckett into it. But yes, my friend said, Beckett would have loved Love Island.
And that thought overtook the previous one. How Samuel Beckett would have loved Love Island. And once you think about it, it’s obvious. Beckett’s finest work was often about isolation, the pressures of the mind, the rolling nothingness. Beckett, indeed, wrote about how he discovered in some Parisian epiphany that his darkest thoughts, his depression, his preoccupation with his lowest feelings, should be the focus of his work; since he had found no way to fend off this part of himself, he would mine it. The results changed western literature. His novels Malone Dies and Molloy could have been written on (in?) Love Island. They could have been written about Love Island, too. And his stage works like Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Let Tape and others… well, watching them isn’t totally removed from the experience of watching Love Island. Love Island is not scripted, but if it was, it could have been written by Beckett.
To prove my point (or disprove it), and to mark the finale of Love Island 2021 (I’m team Chloe and Toby, btw, since you asked), here’s a little game. Who said this? Below is a list of quotes. You guess which was uttered from the mouth of one of this year’s Love Island contestants, and which came from the pen of the 1969 Nobel Laureate for Literature, Samuel Beckett.
“People’s heads have turned in the past when they probably shouldn’t have done and if it was to happen to them then I guess all we can really say is, it happens.”
“I think a friendly date would be great because he’s such a great friend and I really like having friends, I can never have enough friends……FRIENDS.”
“If I battle my corner… I can’t battle my corner.”
“You’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that.”
“I need to let that marinate in my brain.”
“What do we do now? Now that we are happy?”
“Any fool can turn a blind eye but who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand.”
“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.”
“Love, that is all I asked, a little love, daily, twice daily, fifty years of twice daily love like a Paris horse-butcher's regular, what normal woman wants affection?”
“What are you on about? I’m a fucking weapon.”
“If there is one question I dread, to which I have never been able to invent a satisfactory reply, it is the question what am I doing.”
“All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer.”
“It is a sacred place. The iron church.”
“Personally of course I regret everything. Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a need, not a grief, not a joy, not a girl, not a boy, not a doubt, not a trust, not a scorn, not a lust, not a hope, not a fear, not a smile, not a tear, not a name, not a face, no time, no place...that I do not regret, exceedingly. An ordure, from beginning to end.”
“I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them.”
“The type of person I'm looking for is someone who can literally rip me a new arsehole... No, not like that!”
Answers in next week’s newsletter.