a hot new bombshell has entered the panopticon
on Love Island, constant surveillance, obsession, and my hatred for Casa Amor
I love putting on my bikini every day to lounge by the pool, carry my water bottle around, and randomly shout out “I got a text” whenever my phone vibrates because, on the surface, Love Island encapsulates summer. I am obviously not in a villa with hot singles, but there’s such a deep fascination with this show that I feel I have to entertain it in my own small way.
If you aren’t familiar with Love Island, I want to get the premise out of the way as quickly as possible so that everything I talk about makes more sense. If you know the show, feel free to skip a little. Love Island takes 5-6 single men and 5-6 single women and lets them loose in a very neon, kind of millennial-coded villa in a beautiful vacation spot (Mallorca for UK, Fiji for USA) where they will be coupling up with each other and attempting to find love over 8 weeks. The islanders have cameras on them near-CONSTANTLY and are fully aware of that, so we get to see them hanging out during the day, having conversations at night, and sharing a bed. producers send in “bombshells” aka other hot singles to “test” existing relationships and couple up with the existing islanders. There are recouplings, breakups, dumpings from the island, challenges to get the players to learn more about each other, and at the end of it all, a $100,000 cash prize to whatever couple the public decides is their favorite. There’s also Casa Amor, the most insane form of psychological torture (more on that later).
It’s so interesting how insane the concept of the show is, like the creators sat down in a room and decided to take elements of different reality TV shows that had a positive reception and create an amalgamation of everything insane about reality TV. Love Island takes what humans like to see (love, friendship, competition, drama, games, and observation) and makes us feel like we are a part of the show. Since we, as viewers, are kind of omnipotent beings to the islanders we can feel like we are making those decisions with the islanders, talk in real-time about the going-ons in the villa, and even vote, we have a sense of power that the islanders are acutely aware of.
I tune in night after night to watch these men make some of the most diabolical decisions I’ve ever seen because even though it’s a TV show, those are real reactions from real people and we are literally watching the human psyche do a complete 360 on television. I really can only consider Love Island to be the most non-violent form of the Hunger Games that exists in the real world. As viewers, we campaign for our favorite islanders, vote on the app, tune in almost every day to watch what insane situation they’ll find themselves in next, and watch as the producers throw in test after test for the islanders. If anything, it’s a study of human behavior, a constant panopticon that we find ourselves at the center of.
As I mentioned earlier, the public is very involved with Love Island. the show employs a panopticon, which puts the viewers at the center, constantly surveilling the islanders. The Panopticon was first introduced in the mid-1700s by Jeremy Bentham as a type of prison reform system that placed inmates in a circular prison with cells lining the outer walls and a 360-degree guard tower in the center to maintain a state of constant surveillance. It was further explored by Michel Foucault, who used the panopticon as a metaphor and developed it into a symbol of social control. In the context of Love Island, the viewers are that central watch tower, we can check in on the islanders night after night, with the cameras on them 24/7 (except for “chill days” and very specific circumstances). They know we can see their every move, including all the awful decisions they’ve made so, their behavior is definitely impacted. They want to maintain positive social standing with the viewers and that infiltrates their subconscious.
In most situations, the islanders have almost no idea how the public perceives them. They are in the villa with no cell phone access (the cell phones you see them use during the show only allow limited access and specific purposes and don’t even tell them what day it is or what time it is) and even when the bombshells come in, they still have been cut off from the public. There was one instance in Season 5 of UK where the islanders became so desperate to try to know what time it was that they attempted to build a makeshift sundial but production stepped in and told them no. There are two distinct situations where the public perception comes into place and the islanders often find themselves on edge. First is the public voting. It is common knowledge to viewers and contestants alike that the public consistently votes for their favorite couple or islander. The producers open up specific time windows where the viewers can vote and then the results are used to determine who is vulnerable to being dumped from the island. There are many instances where an islander or a couple realizes that they are not loved to the extent they thought they were (Gemma and Luca from UK S9 quickly popped into my head) and find themselves not in a position where the public saved them. Usually, that does nothing and the islanders continue business as usual, without any indication of the specifics that turned the public away. It does remind the islanders that at the end of the day, Love Island is a popularity contest, and whatever couple (or person, remember UK S5 Amber?) is most liked will win.
The second, more devious situation is the Twitter challenge. This is a producer-developed situation where the islanders participate in a challenge where they read real tweets about each other with the names blocked off and must fill in the blanks to decide who the public could be tweeting about. This has led to sooooooo many conflicts and actual realizations by the islanders that the public finds some of their actions gross. There have been contestants accused of being there for the money, commentary about islanders’ relationships, commentary about situations that happened days ago, and really just anything that people on Twitter are yapping about. In this instance, the public’s power does not directly affect the villa, but the knowledge that we are reacting, criticizing, and actively discussing the contestants affects the greater dynamic of the islanders and the villa overall. Our power is always present, it’s omnipotent, we pull strings without physically touching them and work in tandem with the production to add to the constant presence the islanders feel.
Currently, season 6 of Love Island USA is airing on Peacock. As someone who has consistently preferred the UK version, I’ve found this season to be one of the best in recent years, mostly due to the lack of what I call “prepared presence.” Love Island has been airing for 11 seasons in the UK and I would say season 5 was a peak season and a point in the show’s history where it became clear just how big of stars the contestants could be.
Molly-Mae Hague, a contestant who came in as a bombshell, was already an influencer before her time on Love Island, and her relationship on the show with Tommy Fury, ultimately launched her into complete stardom. She remains the most successful islander post-Love Island, and ever since her run on the show where she made it to the final two and emerged with a relationship that is still going strong today, countless islanders have tried to recreate her success.
Love Island UK has felt a bit formulaic in that sense, the production has stayed relatively similar for all 11 seasons, but the contests have come in with a “prepared presence,” a demeanor neutral enough to sway the public to their side, make connections (romantic and platonic), and wrack up brand deals once they come out. It’s like they need to make sure their presence at all times is calm enough because they KNOW we are watching, and you could say of course they’ve always known that we’re watching, there are cameras everywhere, but to that, I say the panopticon is just working the way a panopticon is meant to, it’s taking those social behavior patterns and smoothing out the kinks to remain as appealing and neutrally behaved as possible. for all of those years prior, the panopticon was still in full effect, we were watching they knew, but with the outward motivation of wealth and success, like prisoners waiting for their freedom on good behavior, they played the game and remained neutral.
As I mentioned, Love Island USA season 6 has moved away from the planned presence. I think, in part, the US version of the show has been less successful overall than the UK version, so there are fewer expectations to come out of it as an influencer so that social pressure is lifted. The panopticon exists, but as it succeeded for years; they’re aware of our presence and still behave differently than they would out in the “outside world.” The islanders don’t have a secondary motivation besides finding love, so we still see their emotions. This season has combined people who seem to have thrown themselves fully into the experience, with some of the most insane decision-making coming from people who are on camera 24/7 and seem to forget about that, so in a sense, the panopticon is turned on its head.
Just like in the show, I’m going to disrupt what would be a normal point to discuss Casa Amor, or as I like to think of it, a deeply torturous 4 day period that somehow feels like an eternity in hell. Around a month into the islanders’ stay in the villa, the boys and girls are separated into 2 villas, Main Villa and Casa Amor. While separated, the production brings in a set of new islanders to each, girls for the boys’ villa and boys for the girls’ villa, so they essentially have the option to completely start fresh and meet someone new. Most of the time, there are already solid relationships formed between the original islanders at the time of Casa, so they often refer to that 4-day hellscape as “the ultimate relationship test.” And oh my god it is.
Casa Amor forces us, the central figure in this panopticon, to watch the couples we’ve cheered for and voted for completely self-destruct. We no longer feel in control of this system, we can’t control if the boys couple up with a new girl from casa, and we have to sit back and watch all of this. We get used to the power of constant observation and the ability to react and vote off the islanders we dislike, we’ve spent enough time analyzing Aaron’s behavior, so we feel like we know him at this point, but once they get to Casa, all bets are off. We are still watching them 24/7, we can see Cordell getting freaky with one of the Casa girls and he knows it too, but we can’t blow our guard tower whistles and tell the guys to stop, our presence seems to no longer affect them during those 4 days. Somehow the movement from Main Villa into Casa Amor unleashes something completely feral, like they forget their actions are recorded and just free-for-all everything until the consequences of their actions are felt.
If I haven’t made it clear, Casa Amor is incredible television. It also leads to Movie Night, when the islanders finally step inside our central tower and watch clips of each others’ worst behavior throughout their time in the villa. They get to join the viewers in witnessing some of the behavior that (even with cameras all around) some of the islanders hoped would stay secret or at least on the DL. It gives them a moment to step outside the experiment and see from an outside perspective how atrocious some of their fellow islanders have been, and of course, that shifts the dynamic.
It’s such a complicated system, of these people living 2 months under constant surveillance. They also become commodified while living in this villa, with producers using the public’s enjoyment of watching every move the islanders make, to turn them into walking brand advertisements. Almost everything worn in the villa, seen in the villa, and especially those Love Island water bottles can be purchased, it’s right there in the app! The producers profit off of the panopticon, so in a sense, they’re metaphorically panopticonning the viewers, too, since they’ve seen our social reactions to all of the content on the island, they know how we fiend for it and want to be involved, so that’s their way of getting us involved.
As viewers, I feel that we have a responsibility to maintain an awareness of our role in the Love Island panopticon. Yes, it is fun to watch and participate, but there is a limit to when our omnipotence must end: when an episode ends. Reality TV can give us those small tastes of power but we forget that the islanders are not characters we can self-insert ourselves on or take out our frustration on, they’re people, even if they sometimes make the world’s worst decisions. There is a reason why the panopticon system has been consistently declared unethical, it gets in people’s heads and creates this weird imbalance of power, so we must tread carefully. I love the show, but I know that I could not handle the pressure of being watched 24/7, so as I came to realize the panoptic nature, I had to take a step back and re-evaluate my relationship at the center of this twisted system. Islanders are people too!
edit: I recently watched Broey Deschanel’s YouTube video about this topic! She goes into very incredible detail and focuses more on the mental health aspect that has come as a result of Love Island. i would definitely recommend checking it out!!
p.s. my weekly favorites
england’s penalty kick shootout in the Euros. i love you trent alexander-arnold!!!
my interesting night out with my friend alyssa (we slayed too close to the sun)
french toast bagels
standing in the water at the edge of my pool so i can be half-submerged but also read
the pink tank top i found in my drawer while i was putting my laundry away
okay, that’s all for now! love you all to pieces & i’ll see you soon!
sarah 💌
I’ve always been fascinated by love island but never actually watched it so I lovvvvved this analysis and explanation (I always thought casa amor was a designated place couples go off to to have sex lol very wrong)
this was a very fun read and analysis—also the title of your post is PERFECT