The Rules of Seeming: Love Island

Tell someone who is being watched to ‘act natural’ and chances are they will act as though they are not being watched. This is one of the unspoken ‘rules of seeming’ — an expression I came across in John Lanchester’s dark satirisation of the show, Love Island: the short story, ‘Reality’.

The story opens with a contestant named Iona, alone in a villa, aware that she is being watched and unsure how to act. Standing in front of her wardrobe, she performs

complex calculations about how to play this, about what the audience would want and how to give it to them while acting as if she wasn’t thinking about them and their reactions. Act natural — always a tricky one

She knows that she can not deliberate for too long, lest her casual fit seem too contrived. But she cannot under-do it either: the expectation is ‘sexy casual’, ‘but not too casual and the sexy part mustn’t seem calculating’.

It might seem tongue-in-cheek to speak of ‘complex calculations’ in regard to what one will wear, but I interpret it in earnest. To ‘act natural’ is not easy. It involves, what the narrator describes as, a double consciousness, considering not only what we do, but what others might think of what we do. This takes high social intelligence — which Iona has: ‘she was used to it, she knew how it worked. She knew the rules of seeming’. These ‘rules’ are what govern implicit communication, but they are not like regular rules; they are neither clearly defined nor ever really even discussed. They are mutable, intuitive, personal — but also somehow shared. For the uninitiated, these rules can be confusing and contradictory. You could say one thing and mean the complete opposite, or both, all with plausible deniability.

In ‘Reality’, we get to see this doublespeak in action when Iona meets the next contestant, Nousche; a ‘petite’ French or Italian woman with a ‘sexy eurominx style’ (think @ParisianVibe). From the moment they meet, Iona and Nousche engage in a game of one-upmanship. Nousche offers to make them a frittata, to which Iona says, ‘Super!’ — all the while thinking to herself, ‘Damn, [the] Euroskank gets to be the practical caring helpful one, while also avoiding carbs’. Iona, who is at this point set on being ‘the friendly one’, retaliates by offering to see who else is in the villa, which would ‘serve the dual purpose of making her look caring and thoughtful too, while also getting her out of Nousche’s blast area for a bit so she could formulate a plan’. Diabolically, Nousche says, ‘Unless they need a lie-in?’, successfully ‘counter-thoughtfulling’ Iona. For Iona, this is ‘war’, but for an outside observer — particularly those uninitiated in the ‘rules of seeming’ — there is nothing hostile or even noteworthy about this exchange:

It was always easy for an observer to pick up on overt bitchiness, snark, eye-rolling, and you didn’t need to counter it, because the cameras and mikes countered it for you. But this was much more subtle. Nobody would have seen anything yet. They wouldn’t know what was happening

Throughout the story, Iona is attuned to subtle cues and patterns she could sense developing, including covert ‘allegiances and alliances’. Once again, nothing is said explicitly. Instead, there is an entire taxonomy of implicit cues:

you could do a lot with body language and eye talk, with grunts and nods and even silences: silence of assent, silence of letting something hang there, amused silence, disgruntled silence, disbelieving silence, drawing-someone-out silence, silent disagreement and disobedience

On a related note, in Simon Baron-Cohen’s book, The Pattern Seekers, Cohen describes two types of cognition, one that involves the ‘Systemising Mechanism’, and one that involves the ‘Empathy Circuit’. The former, which Cohen associates with autism, biological masculinity, and high STEM achievers, works through if-and-then pattern-seeking. The latter allows one to ‘think about the thoughts and feelings of others and to think about our own thoughts and feelings, rapidly, second by second, […] in a dynamic social context’. According to Cohen, individuals with a high EQ (empathy quotient) are better able to engage in ‘flexible deception’, ‘flexible communication’ and ‘cooperation’, but they struggle with ‘complex patterns’ and ‘tend to avoid subjects like mathematics’. What I find fascinating about Lanchester’s story is that it seems to challenge this notion. It presents high EQ individuals — like Iona — as exceptional systemisers. The language Lanchester uses is systemising language: there are ‘patterns’, ‘calculations’, formulations’, ‘rules’. He uncovers what appears to be a complex system underlying the superficial and cliched speech of the typical Love Island contestant.

This ‘system’ is so abstruse that, at any moment, it can overwhelm its experts. This is especially true in high-pressure situations (like when one is ‘being filmed, surveilled, watched and judged and assessed and ranked for popularity’). With nothing to do all day (in Lanchester’s ‘Love Island’, there are no tasks or evictions), this begins to happen to Iona. The system — the ‘rules of seeming’ — begin to collapse in on itself:

Iona began more and more to notice the sound not of the other contestants’ voices, but their echoes. The voices would often be lifted, bright, happy, joking. The echoes sounded flat and angular and full of silences; full of holes, contradictions, meanings that weren’t supposed to be there. Positive greetings — ‘Hi!’, ‘How are you!’, ‘Love the outfit!’, ‘Looking good!’ — sounded like curses or lies. The echo of a joke sounded like an insult. The echo of a friendly question sounded like a jeer. The echo of a friendly comment dripped with loathing

This is textbook paranoia (which has its own, much less sophisticated, ‘rules of seeming’: with paranoia, everything is interpreted as hostile). Iona goes from deft social maneuvering to immobilizing anxiety. At one point, she feels as though ‘the floor was sliding down from beneath her, actually physically sinking down and down and down, descending into the earth’ — a textbook symptom of anxiety.

Iona’s misstep is that she focuses too much on the audience. Anticipating real time social dynamics is hard enough as it is. (‘Dunbar’s number’ suggests there is a cognitive limit to the amount of social relations we can comfortably deal with; add millions of viewers to this equation and we have far exceeded this limit).

But is this even a misstep? I would say that it is the result of carefully engineered psychological stressors designed to produce heightened states to maximise the viewer’s entertainment. The producers of the show give the contestants nothing to do, no direction — the only place to turn is inwards:

Perhaps the problem was that they were too self-aware, too aware of the set-up; perhaps the problem was precisely that they were talking about it so much? It could be that there was a taboo on asking these questions out loud; it was making them seem too needy, too aware of the audience. In short, maybe they were doing something wrong. It was vital to think about the viewers all the time. It was also vital not to seem to be thinking about them

Even though they are not visible, the viewers are constantly referred to; the same cannot be said of the producers. For all Iona’s self-awareness, we never hear any of her thoughts regarding the producers. They are, as is the case with many of these shows, conspicuously absent (also omniscient and almost omnipotent). It does not help that the story is narrated with free indirect discourse (a way of narrating thoughts that combines third‐person report with first‐person speech), which means that it is not entirely clear what is attributable to Iona and what is produced by the narrator. The less we think about the producers, the more they are able to play with the ‘rules of seeming’. It is a reminder of something I recently read by Byung-Chul Han: ‘The more powerful power is, the more silent is its efficacy. Where it needs to draw special attention to itself, it is already weakened’. The same could be said of the ‘rules of seeming’ — awareness weakens. This does not mean it is any less rigorous than STEM. If anything, this might make it more difficult. Extremes are always easier: try finding the Goldilocks zone.