9 Times the Women of Love Island 2019 Said Absolutely Not

When the history of 2019 is written, I hope it is remembered (to the exclusion of literally everything else) as the year that the women of Love Island finally delivered a righteous chorus of “fuck this.”

Faced with the standard onslaught of callous stupidity from a reel of tightly-trousered, emotionally illiterate men, the show’s 2019 cohort have repeatedly said “no” to bad treatment.

It’s not all been victories, and it’s certainly not the new frontier of feminism, but it has been a wild ride. Here is my unasked-for countdown of the top 9 girl power moments from this season.

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9. Amber tells Tommy and Joe “I’m no one’s second best”

Cast your minds back to week one. Amber is still a widely disliked islander. Floppy-haired and floppy-personalitied Joe admits to her face that he was flirting with her to try to make his partner, Lucie, jealous as she talks to Tommy Fury. As for Tommy, he is soon rejected by Lucie after telling her that he would “crawl to the moon and back” for her. In the tradition of many Love Islanders before him, and without the candour shown by Joe, he tries to backtrack and put the moves on Amber.

Amber shuts both of them down.

“I’m no one’s second best,” she shrugs to the camera in the beach hut later. A small moment in the arc of the series, but in hindsight, the equivalent of dimming the lights and setting the mood music for the season to “I think the fuck not”.

8. Joanna calls Michael a snake

Cut to a few weeks later, and a lot has changed.

This moment might be a controversial pick for this list, partly because a lot of people have a grudge against Joanna for her (admittedly questionable) attitude towards Amber when she was in the villa, and partly because of the fact that pictures have recently surfaced of she and Michael kissing on the outside.

However, I’m in the spirit of leniency. Not all fuck-yous are forever, we’ve all forgiven someone who maybe didn’t deserve it, and at the very least it did make good TV. I am therefore graciously allowing Joanna a low spot on this list that solely I care about.

7. Maura dumps Tom

Credit: Photo by REX/Shutterstock (10322789aq) Tom Walker praying ‘Love Island’ TV Show, Series 5, Episode 22, Majorca, Spain – 27 Jun 2019

Ah, Hurricane Maura hits the list. The great provider of so many of this season’s greatest hits.

Though by the time this moment rolled around, Maura and Tom had already had their peak blowout, this was a lesson in not letting anyone abuse the second chance you give them. Maura’s best moments are yet to come in this countdown, but refusing to be called “embarrassing” is up there for me.

6. Yewande pulls Danny and Arabella for a chat

Winner of my unofficial Islander Who Deserved Better award, Yewande was sick of the relay race of information going on between herself, her partner Danny, and his new love interest Arabella.

Flouting the unspoken Love Island ritual of piecing together information one “chat” at a time by moving from the terrace to the day beds to the fire pit with the mechanical regularity of a cuckoo clock, Yewande did the scientific thing and went straight to the source. Big Dick Energy if ever I’ve seen it.

5. Amy’s exit

Much as I was annoyed by Amy for most of her time in the villa, I do think she deserves some credit. Sometimes standing up for yourself isn’t about standing up to anyone, it’s about looking at the next four weeks of watching the man you love swivel his hips in the direction of another woman while creepily mouthing “Young lady” and making the decision to say “No thank you, actually.”

4. Maura and Anna vs. Curtis and Jordan

The thing that made this moment great was its complete typification of the Maura mentality: no hesitation, no reluctance to upset her panto villain of a partner. Her wine glass instantly went over her shoulder and she sought out her friend, ignoring Curtis’s panicked stage whispers from the bean bags. Anna also gets points for the immediacy and boldness of her reaction, even though the argument really did hurt to watch.

3. “Shut yer mout ya prick”

I know technically this should be lumped in with number four but I could watch this moment on loop for days.

Anything that comes out of Maura’s perfectly-glossed mouth she backs to the hilt—no embarrassment, no fear, no forced guilt. An icon.

2. Tom’s “dickhead comment”

The moment that Maura rejected Tom was one of my favourite ever moments of reality TV and, possibly, my life.

I’ve already spoken about the instantaneousness of the retribution men in the villa faced if they crossed Maura; the blistering speed with which her anger came down on them if they disrespected her or one of her friends.

Speaking to friends about the episode, what was generally agreed upon was the remarkable familiarity of the situation, contrasted with the unfamiliarity of Maura’s refusal to back down from her outrage.

Faced with the same thing, I’m sure I would have doubted myself; swallowed my hurt and anger under the pressure of a roomful of men all assuring the other party that they’d done nothing wrong. Not Maura.

She had her bad moments in the villa, certainly, and at the end of the day it is all warped through the lens of the edit. But Maura set her own benchmark for how to be treated on this season, and it made for glorious viewing—and, I think, had a significant ripple effect for the women around her.

1. Amber recouples with Greg over Michael

Though I will be hearing Maura’s thick Irish accent shouting obscenities at any man who crosses me for the rest of my days, there’s no argument as to who had the biggest moment this season.

Looking back, Amber choosing sexy Irish Greg over Michael in the recoupling seems obvious, and any anxieties over it going the other way merely the result of good editing. But this moment defined the arc of the whole series and revived the premise of Love Island as a show for me.

The truth is that this season, for all its drama, was tough to watch. Nearly every one of the moments on this list was born out of pain inflicted on women for the purposes of reality TV. If you feel any empathy for them at all, there were times when Love Island 2019 felt like a gruelling uphill climb with no signs of a summit.

The moment that Amber chose Greg was an instrumental one in breaking that pattern. It was the fresh start that the series needed to alter its course—a healthy choice, made enthusiastically, by someone who rightly believed that she deserved respect and happiness. It couldn’t save Anna from Jordan’s eleventh-hour head turn, or Queen Maura from the clutches of Curtis, but it made sure that the series parted on a message of resilience. It is what ultimately upset the order of what makes a Love Island winner and it delivered the incredible final result.

Previously, winners have been clear from early in the show’s run, and longevity and basic likeability were all the ingredients for a winning couple. As such, the show lost all momentum the closer it got to the final.

Greg and Amber winning has bucked that trend. A couple of less than 12 days in the villa rising to the top, largely on the strength of one woman’s belief in her own self-worth, has flipped the script on a format that was losing its edge, and it’s renewed my hope that the microcosm of modern dating we see on this show can actually be something other than a bit depressing.

So, long live the women of Love Island 2019. May their crops of Boohoo voucher codes ever flourish, and may someone please get Maura a presenting job so I don’t have to say goodbye to her too soon.

When all is said and done, you’ll believe God is a woman.

Ariana Grande, philosopher

Ode to Rocketman, the Silliest Biopic

In an early scene in Rocketman, a young and so-far unremarkable piano player called Reginald Dwight is told by an American soul singer that “You’ve got to kill the person you were born to be to become the person you want to be.”

It’s been remarked upon by critics that is this is the central argument of Elton John’s biopic: kill the fact to create the fiction; invent yourself and reap the rewards.

The result is that Rocketman is a festival of artifice. Discarding the by-now expected format of the gritty biographical drama, it embraces spectacle by creating a musical of Elton John’s life, set to his own songs. It’s ridiculous and flamboyant and very, very fun.

A lot of critics liked it—the Guardian’s Mark Kermode gave it five stars in his review—but others left disgruntled. Vulture’s David Edelstein called the film’s “Crocodile Rock” sequence (in which John performs at his breakthrough gig at the Troubadour in LA and literally levitates the crowd off their feet) “one of the silliest things I’ve ever seen.” He also pointed out that, as the movie shows, the music was Elton’s but none of the words were—the songs, therefore, should strictly have been put to work in a musical about the life of Bernie Taupin. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody said dispiritedly that Rocketman “sacrifices the depth of Elton’s character to make a feature-length commercial for the real-life back catalogue”—the songs are there, but the man himself is missing.

To cut a long rant short, I think these critics need to lighten up.

Look, anyone is perfectly entitled to expect biography from their biopics—it is, after all, in the name. And they all make a compelling case for the film’s shortcomings, particularly the creation of music biopics as a way to market old songs to a new audience.

The thing that I would question, though, is whether a biopic is obliged to capture the facts of a life—the gritty details, the bloody nose and the coke on the toilet lid—in order to be a success.

Yes, Rocketman plays it fast and loose with historical detail. Events are jumbled, and the facts are often errant if not absent. “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)” takes John from a childhood gig in a pub through to his rowdy late teens. As mentioned above, his breakthrough 1970 performance at the Troubadour is imagined through a rousing rendition of “Crocodile Rock”—which, as Variety’s Owen Gleiberman noted, is “the equivalent of making a biopic about the Beatles in which they launch their Shea Stadium concert in 1965 with a cut off the White Album.”

But insofar as any biopic is a creation myth, Rocketman does an exceedingly good job.

What it lacks in “gritty realism”, the film more than makes up for in its delivery of the technicolour montage I would think plays in John’s head each time he looks back over his career. Instead of trite scenes about the genesis of legendary songs—a phrase is overheard on the street or in a bar and, gasp! the writer reaches for his pen—the film gives us a romp down memory lane, complete with dance numbers, stylised scenes, and outrageous costumes.

It’s an aptly surrealist landscape and one that made the film ring so true for me. The words of these famous songs might not be John’s own, but they’re not ours either, and that’s never stopped anyone who was feeling melodramatic from blasting “I Want Love” at full volume and gazing in melancholy out of the nearest window.

This partiality to John’s side of the story isn’t hidden from the audience. John and his husband David Furnish are both executive producers of the film, and much of the story is narrated from John’s perspective in a rehab therapy group.

The result is a film that presents not so much ‘what really happened,’ but rather, ‘what it really felt like’. John wrote in a Guardian essay that “Some studios wanted us to lose the fantasy element and make a more straightforward biopic, but that was missing the point… when my career took off, it took off in such a way that it almost didn’t seem real to me… it went off like a missile: there’s a moment in Rocketman when I’m playing onstage in the Troubadour club in LA and everything in the room starts levitating, me included, and honestly, that’s what it felt like.”

If you ask me, any biopic of Elton John was going to be silly. It’s Elton John. One day maybe someone will make a biopic of Reginald Dwight and give Rocketman detractors what they crave, but if this was a story about killing the fact to invent the fun, it succeeded for me.

Of course, it wasn’t perfect. Shockingly for a film that leans so far into excess, I found myself thinking as the credits rolled that it had fallen just short of its arc.

The film is preoccupied with John wanting and searching for love, and the ways in which the love he has—from his parents, from his songwriting partner Bernie Taupin, from his lover-turned-manager—variously hinders and helps him through his struggles with addiction and fame. But when John comes out to his mother and she tells him that he will never be truly loved, a ball is tossed into the air that never quite comes satisfactorily to earth; instead, it is hastily caught up in the closing credits’ admittedly touching ‘where are they now’ slideshow.

So, I am by no means saying that the film was a perfect artistic feat. What the film did do well, however, was convey the personality of the man behind the songs. There’s an exuberant Elton-ness to the whole display: a sense of camp and joy and silliness—and, at bottom, a very earnest desire to be understood, to be loved, to have his story told.

Maybe the problem isn’t that the man is missing, but that he’s a bit too present for the traditional tenets of biopic cinema to get a proper look-in.

[Bernie Taupin] was apprehensive about the film. He read the script and he didn’t like the fantasy aspects of it. ‘But that didn’t happen, that’s not true’ – very Bernie. Then he saw it and completely got it. I don’t think he actually burst into tears, but he was incredibly moved by it. He understood the point of it, which was to make something that was like my life: chaotic, funny, mad, horrible, brilliant and dark. It’s obviously not all true, but it’s the truth.

Elton John, The Guardian, 26th May 2019

How Jordan Peele Mastered the Scary Movie

Fair warning: this post definitely contains spoilers

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I first became aware of the work of Jordan Peele a few years ago, probably sometime when I was still in university.

I don’t remember the exact details of that first encounter, but I imagine it was along the lines of a friend showing me one of his sketches with Keegan-Michael Key.

“Have you seen that Key and Peele sketch? About the substitute teacher?” they would have said, sending me the link.

“No,” I would have replied, “I was busy listening to Hotline Bling and discussing #TheDress. And hey, isn’t it crazy that Donald Trump’s running for President? Like that’ll ever take off.”

But life comes at you real fast, as they say, and now, in the arts as in politics, a previously comedic figure has become a purveyor of horror. Both transitions were somewhat unprecedented, but also seem kind of inevitable when you look back at them.

From Mad TV and sketch comedy, Peele has moved to grossing over $200 million in the box office with his debut ‘social horror’, Get Out, in 2017, and is on track to do the same with this year’s even more terrifying Us. In theory, we’re no strangers to old names in comedy taking a sudden, and successful, turn for the serious—take Olivia Colman, who in the last few years has proven herself to be just as transcendent as Queen Anne in The Favourite as she was as Sophie in Peep Show. But it seems like we always find ourselves asking how they do it.

Olivia Colman in The Favourite. Absolute Queen

A frequent conversation I have on this topic is about timing. The thinking goes that no one understands the pressure points of a piece of dialogue better than a comic actor, and this lends itself well to drama. Who can be more finely-tuned to the tension in a room than a comic who’s been working it for laughs for years? Who is better-placed to mine that tension?

The specific transition from comedy writing to horror is interesting though. And, in the great tradition of writers answering questions nobody ever asked (and certainly not to them) I’m going to tell you why—taking as a particular example Peele’s (frankly stellar) 2019 film, Us.

First of all, I think it’s fair to say that if you asked most people, they’d put the genres of horror and comedy on the opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of the kind of entertainment they deliver. The audience for a Nancy Meyers film is not going to be the same as one for Paranormal Activity. Or, not unless a big mistake has been made by these respective films’ marketing teams. But if you look at how horror and comedy deliver their outcomes, they’re not so different after all.

Three main theories of humour have been put forward over the years.

The first is known as Relief Theory—the idea that we laugh when psychological tension breaks. A false expectation or impression is mounted and then, according to philosopher Herbert Spencer, the tension this creates is redistributed economically through laughter. A man walks into a bar—owch.

The second theory is that of superiority: that we laugh at the misfortunes of others. This one goes back to Plato and Aristotle, and is pretty self-explanatory, really. We laugh because watching others’ misfortunes reinforces our own superiority. A man walks into a bar—owch.

And finally, there is Incongruity Theory, perhaps the most complex and pervasive of these three theories of humour: the idea that any joke is comprised of two stories, and that laughter occurs when the one you think you’re in is pulled out from under you, your real surroundings revealed to you for the first time. It’s sometimes called incongruity-resolution theory, as it’s not the dissonance itself that makes us laugh, it’s realising and resolving that disconnect. A man walks into a bar… owch.

You can take almost any one of Key & Peele’s sketches and apply these theories to them, but I would argue that you can also apply them just as effectively to horror.

Like comedy, horror is a painstaking study of tension and release. In comedy, we feel joy and relief when a situation is inverted; in horror, this inversion provokes fear. Comedy makes us laugh at people who we feel we are superior to or know more than; in horror, we fear for them.

But when it comes to horror—and perhaps particularly to Jordan Peele’s Us, a movie obsessed by narrative twists and manic reflections—perhaps it is no surprise that incongruity is the one that most preoccupies me.

In one of Us’s earliest scenes, the protagonist Adelaide wanders away from her parents at a beachside fair in Santa Cruz, California in the 1980s. Entering a hall of mirrors, she encounters not only her own reflection, but a doppelgänger of herself. In the low light of the emergency exit sign, we see Adelaide’s eyes widen in terror; the scene cuts to black.

Later, a present-day Adelaide returns to Santa Cruz with her husband and children. Adelaide’s anxiety about the trip is palpable, and while facing her reflection in a darkened window she explains to her husband Gabe the feeling that the unexplained trauma from her past is closing in on her.

That night, it does, as a group of doppelgängers, each corresponding to a member of Adelaide’s family, attacks the house. They are dressed in red jumpsuits and each armed with a large set of silver scissors. Red, the grown-up version of the Adelaide doppelgänger that we see at the beginning, explains in a choked and husky voice that they have been living underground, ‘tethered’ to the family, experiencing a world of pain while their mirror-images led lives of light and joy on the surface.

This is just the beginning of a viewing experience that keeps dropping the viewer out of one narrative landscape and into another, prompting them to constantly re-evaluate what kind of horror film they are in. Like a panicked child running through a hall of mirrors and hitting glass at every turn, the film leads you from one failed assumption to the next and ramps up the tension each time, whirling from supernatural horror in the funhouse scene, to home invasion nightmare as the doppelgängers arrive, to neo-apocalyptic drama when it is revealed that Adelaide’s family is not the only one to be attacked.

If the incongruity theory of laughter is all about dualities and warped reflections, then Us works on an incongruity theory of horror. Both rely on the mistaking of one situation for another—perhaps its opposite, its evil twin—which is tethered to the truth by only one delicate degree of separation.

This is not unique for the genre—horror films often depict terrible forces disrupting an idealised life. A quaint-seeming cabin becomes a den of horrors, for example, or a trip to meet a girlfriend’s picture-perfect family becomes a body-snatching nightmare.

But Us takes this idea of the doubled life, the horrific reflection, to an obsessive extreme. It takes as not just its form but its narrative centre the things and people that look like us but aren’t—or perhaps were meant to be, could have been, or even, the title suggests, are. As Red explains to Adelaide’s family, “We are Americans”: above and beyond the function of the genre, Us offers a funhouse reflection of everyday reality. It holds up a mirror to the culture that produced and surrounds it, but rather than presenting it for joyful ridicule, as in comedy, it is held up to provoke terror.

This is where Peele’s genius lies. Sketches like “Substitute Teacher” and films like Get Out and Us may be entirely different viewing experiences, but what they both do is reflect American society (and the global culture it has fostered) back to itself. They lay bare the gaps in our reasoning, the whiteness of our cultural consciousness, the arbitrariness of our class system; they make us question, right to the end, the solidity of the ground on which we’re standing. The world flips one more time and, spoiler alert, the Adelaide we have been following all film is actually the demonic doppelgänger of the opening scene.

Peele has mastered how to make us laugh. Now, he’ll make us scream.

It’s so satisfying to me in a horror movie when a question is answered
—but it only remains scary if the answer raises new questions.

— Jordan Peele, The Empire Film Podcast