JULY: Emma Thompson in suits, Marxist agendas, Fleabag, and other things we adore
Dear Kelsey,
It is with great delight that I petition you and our dear readers to replace our regular newsletter in September with Sextember: A History of Sex as a Cultural Tool in Filmmaking. What sex scenes are left in films and which ones are cut, and why? What purpose do sex scenes serve in our movies? It turns out that sex scenes serve a more meaningful purpose than shocking the audience and giving us something to fantasize about. (Someone tell the reviewers at Plugged In.) Sex scenes communicate something important about what aspects of desire we focus on it pop culture.
I was inspired by this thread, which began on Twitter with a tweet about how modern movies are "prudish." A favorite of ours, Nichole (@tnwhiskeywoman) pointed out that many of our recent sex scenes now focus on power and trauma rather than establishing intimacy between partners. She cites the hot tub scene (you know the one) between Peter Kavinsky and Lara Jean in To All the Boys I Loved Before as an example of how starved we are for healthy, consensual desire on television. How has our #MeToo era shifted portrayals of sex on television?
Now that I've sufficiently teased you, time to talk about our content for the month! Let's start with Late Night.
One of the things I was reminded of again in June is that nice men are not necessarily good men—which was one of the hardest parts of Late Night to watch. In Late Night, Molly and Katherine Newbury are surrounded by many times of men—loud men, rude men, nerdy men, bored men—but no type does as much damage as the innocently nice man, Charlie (played by my 7th-grade-crush, Hugh Dancy), who turns out to be....well....not nice. Something about how art imitates life or whatever.
I liked, not loved, this movie. Mindy Kaling will forever have my heart, hallelujah and amen, but something was missing that I haven't put a finger on yet. I guess a tiny part of me resents that they made Katherine Newbury an antihero when I wanted to unconditionally stan. Now I have to stan with anxiety!
The true winners of this movie were the outfits. Katherine Newbury's pantsuits!!!! I couldn't catch my breath! If I were to link all of my favorites, this newsletter would simply be photos of Emma Thompson in pantsuits. Instead, I will show you 3 of my favorite looks and include this link to the Hollywood Reporter interview with the costumer about designing Emma's looks.
This is one of the first looks we see on Emma and I. Am. Obsessed!!! The pinstripes! The hair!
Again: the hair. The jacket. Utter perfection.
Someone please kiss the person who insisted on suits for her. I cannot get enough.
She has this final look which is classic and great but the true pinnacle of the look are these INCREDIBLE black and white chunky-heeled mules that I actually lost my shit over in the theater. I have never fangirled over costuming this much in my life. What is happening to me? KATHERINE NEWBURY'S WARDROBE IS HAPPENING TO ME.
Speaking of great (jump)suits: Fleabag.
Fleabag's time in the limelight has faded over the last month, which feels like the perfect time to talk about it. I'm not going to rehash incredible points already made, like the argument that Fleabag's camera pans are actually dissociative episodes and that the Hot Priest is actually kind of problematic. Instead, I'd like to talk about family dysfunction.
In the premiere of season 2, a year has passed since the last season, and it seems as though everyone is emotionally and financially stabilizing. Fleabag's cafe is finally turning a profit, she's successfully avoiding douchebags, and she's actually taking care of herself.
And this is where everything goes to shit.
When Fleabag returns to the dinner table after a smoke break she runs into Martin, her brother-in-law, who says, "I am so intrigued to see how you manage to make this whole evening about yourself. This is a sentiment that's repeated again in the season finale, when Godmother says to Fleabag, "I was wondering if you had a little show planned. You normally do. And I wondered if there was anything I might need to know about that might happen later." but Fleabag isn't actually selfish or performing. She's the canary in the mine. She's the litmus test for the emotional wellbeing of the family. When the shit is hitting the fan, she's the one who tells the truth about it. What her family members project to be "performance" is actually Fleabag refusing to perform the idea of a perfect family, and instead to tell her truth. (Perhaps Fleabag's glances to her audience provide her with a way to ground herself in the midst of the perpetual gaslighting she experiences.)
Claire, Martin, Dad, and Godmother share a fixation on the outrageousness of Fleabag's emotional expression that helps curtain the outrageousness of their lack of expression. While Fleabag is externally a mess and shows it, Claire is a workaholic with high functioning depression, Martin is an emotionally abusive alcoholic, Dad is an emotionally stunted man-child who can't treat his children with love and affection, and Godmother is....well....A Lot. But by fixating on Fleabag, the family gets to forget about their own flaws and think, "Well, at least I'm better than Fleabag." The rest of the family is most connected when criticizing Fleabag. Fleabag's performances are not merely an inconvenience, they're a requirement for the family to continue in its codependency.
This show has a sharp insightfulness into family dysfunction of either a psychologist or someone who has watched these complexities play out in real time. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is an artist and a queen and her U.K. GQ photoshoot made me Feel Things.
There's no smooth transition here but we'll just have to do it anyway! Superstore!
If you've ever wondered "Can a large cast comedy about minimum wage employees at a Target ripoff have a Marxist agenda?", look no further than Superstore.
When I saw the season finale of season 1, I knew this show was something special. In the episode, it's revealed that Cheyenne (a 20-something ditzy high school graduate with a fiance trying to start a band in his garage) will have no paid leave to give birth and recover afterward, since Cloud 9 doesn't offer maternity leave. The employees recognize this for what it is—an injustice—and rally together to attempt to cover for Cheyenne while she's gone and demand better benefits for Cloud 9 employees. These attempts are unsuccessful, but at the end of the episode Glen (the manager) suspends Cheyenne with pay for 6 weeks—an improvised form of maternity leave. I cried over the ending of season 1! Of a comedy show! (Who am I kidding, I cry over almost every episode of Schitt's Creek.)
Whether it's demonstrating the value of unions for minimum-wage workers and the tactics used by corporations to dismantle them, almost nonexistent health care offered for full-time employees, layoffs of the sick and elderly, or the risks of being an undocumented worker in today's America, Superstore has an agenda for economic and political justice that I am EXTREMELY into. Yes, let's laugh and topple the bourgeoisie while we're at it!!! The only comedy I've ever seen that rivals Superstore in its handling of political issues without being heavyhanded is One Day at a Time (Which! Is! Back!!!!).
In my 15-minute sample teaching lesson for my teaching seminar last spring, I discussed how Marxist memes are a way for the proletariat to let out anger against economic oppression without being propelled to create systemic change. Instead, Superstore uses the tools at its disposal to propel us. Through the eyes of Superstore, we are made to see the ways we have turned a blind eye to injustices leveled against the working class and how the bureaucracy is an inhibitor of reparative justice. Superstore has a vision for justice that invites us to pursue it in ways that can be comforting and discomforting.
This July, may you be a part of something as tight-knit and full of laughter as the employees at the Cloud 9 St. Louis superstore.
Hannah
Dear Hannah,
Happy ~heatwave~ from the northwoods, which have taken a break from their iciness and are giving me delicious, stifling, soupy, WARMTH that I would prefer lasted forever. Speaking of heat, I come to you this week a changed woman with a musical obsession...Kelly Clarkson's 2017 album Meaning of Life.
Like many of us, I fell out of touch with Ms. Clarkson post-Stronger (2011), not for any concrete reason, other than perhaps that jams like Breakaway and My Life Would Suck Without You were so foundational to high school me that I simply thought I didn't need more from her. Plus, the title of her most recent album, Meaning of Life, connoted something saccharine and almost KidzBop-ish to me.
Pals. I was deeply wrong. After hearing Heat on the radio at a gas station and then listening to it about a dozen times, I decided to give the full album a chance and discovered a DEEPLY sexy HIGHLY jammable soul-influenced tracklist that I've been listening to on repeat. I already know the album—which Clarkson has referred to as her "grown-ass woman's record"—well enough that with each song change my immediate response is "omg THIS ONE!!" and it is now the energy I will be bringing to the rest of the summer!
Thanks to you, Kelly. Thanks to YOU.
Moving on (temporarily) from Kelly Clarkson, I'm very excited about all of the Content we chose for this month, and as with last month I'll be burying the topic I feel most vulnerable about at the very end, so if you're mostly here for the Fleabag of it all, have patience! (Or skip to the end, whatever, I'm sure Kelly Clarkson would want you to do what you want.)
So first...Late Night!
This movie....seemed directly designed to appeal to me. Mindy Kaling! Emma motherfucking Thompson in those motherfucking suits!!! Hugh Dancy, a crush of mine as well since Ella Enchanted (thumbs down as an adaptation, thumbs up for casting). Women in comedy! Did I mention Emma Thompson??
And there was a lot to love! (See again: Emma Thompson and her suits.) but on the whole, I found it unbalanced in spots and wholly baffling in others. For instance, I could not for the life of me figure out the storytelling decision for Molly (Kaling) to have had almost no experience in comedy whatsoever. Why couldn't she have been a struggling comic/comedy writer who kept getting passed over for legacy hires and white dudes with "a lot of potential!" As Rachel Chavkin, the Tony-award-winning director of Hadestown, aptly pointed out in her acceptance speech, "this is not a pipeline issue." There are people who are not white men that are and have been working in comedy, and Molly's scant experience ended up feeling to me like a vehicle for [repetitive] conflict.
I think maybe the problem [or a problem] is that the movie really wanted to be about Katherine Newbury [Thompson] but felt like it needed an audience-surrogate character. Everything to do with Katherine was incredibly interesting to me, and I got the sense that Thompson and Kaling [who also wrote the screenplay] had done a lot of thinking about this woman, her backstory, and how that backstory brought her to the story in this movie. A long-running female late night talk show host is someone we don't have any kind of model for (yet!) and Thompson managed to embody both the anxiety and arrogance of someone who'd managed to make it as an "only," which makes her lack of sympathy for Molly's situation so frustrating. This could have been explored in a really interesting way—let's be real, white women SURE DO have a tendency to get through a door and then become extremely reluctant to hold it open for anyone else, or, even better, remove the door altogether! But the movie took so long to let either Katherine or Molly be good at their jobs that we barely had time for that, or for my main desire for this movie, which was simply to watch Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling kill it.
And where the movie absolutely does kill it is in the chemistry between the two of them—I defy a single person to pull their eyes away from the screen any time Emma Thompson is on it, or not to sympathize with Kaling's increasingly complex adoration of her. The scene I have not been able to get out of my head comes about halfway through.
[Spoilers here until the Sense & Sensibility gif]
Early on, the network communicates to Katherine that they intend on replacing her at the end of the season, and she soon discovers that they intend on replacing her with a young misogynist-lite white male comedian [played with panache by Ike Barinholtz]. To handle it "gracefully," they suggest that she have him on the show to formally announce the torch passing. However, an impassioned speech from Molly right before the taping convinces her to fight the change, which she does by manipulating him live, her laser-gaze and precisely executed charisma winning the audience over and forcing Ike (or whatever his name is) to lead the chant for her to keep her spot. It's a hypnotizing scene, and I was holding my breath along with the show's audience. Emma Thompson is just SO GOOD, and (to quote myself) any day in which we do not talk about her adaptation of Sense & Sensibility (FOR WHICH SHE WROTE THE SCREENPLAY) is frankly a waste.
As for Hugh Dancy, I don't know WHAT was going on with him and frankly, I don't care to! My sense was that he was working so hard to keep that flat-affect American accent under control that it simply drained all of the charm out of his frame, but whomst can know? Maybe he was consciously turning the volume down to give his colleague Reid Scott room to shine as the pedantic-asshole/stealthily-hot monologue writer and you know what if that was the plan I ACCEPT.
Moving on to something with a VERY coherent point of view and ethic...Superstore!
(real ones will know that this lady also played Fran in 'Gilmore Girls')
If I had an award for "Show That Most Effectively Sneaked Itself Into My Heart," I would hand it directly over to this show. It takes awhile to get its footing—the first season heavily centers Jonah, the white business-school drop out from an upper-middle-class background and his reactions to life as a big box retail worker. His will-they-won't-they relationship with the (married) floor manager Amy [America Ferrera] is front and center immediately, part of the DNA the show shares with The Office (which creator Justin Spitzer wrote on), and I remember being wary that first season. Surely America Ferrera deserves much better than playing the no-nonsense foil to this dude's cluelessness? Plus it felt uncomfy and a bit tired for the aggressive and odd Assistant Manager Dina [Lauren Ash, who later is given license to be nothing short of brilliant] to keep pursuing Jonah despite his clear disinterest.
(jk jk I am very attracted to him it's fine)
But by the Season 1 finale, just 11 episodes in, the core of this show became steady enough to be what it's really about (and ditch the Jonah/Dina plotline, a la Brooklyn 99's savvy decision to get rid of Charles' creepy crush on Rosa early on). Like you, it was the maternity leave plotline in that finale at which I realized "ohhh this show is DOING something!!" You've already written excellently on the show's subversive Marxist agenda, so I'm going to just gush about some of the other storytelling devices the show uses with devastating skill.
The further the show goes, the deeper their bench of goofy characters that you can't help feel affectionate towards. Not only does America Ferrera get MUCH more to do than grimace at people, the show builds out characters that another show might have replaced with one-note caricatures, often through the gradual development of genuine friendships. For example, the friendship between Mateo and Cheyenne provided some early grounding for both characters as they evolve from petty allies to a sweet friendship.
And Sandra!! Sandra's become a favorite of mine, and I'm delighted that she's getting bumped up from recurring to main cast in the upcoming season. Emily VanDerWerff wrote a fantastic piece on the show (light spoilers) that revealed a bit on how some of the recurring characters were developed over time, one-liner characters getting storylines of their own [the Sandra/Jerry/Carol saga is the best romantic drama on TV do not @ me] and the breadth of the cast provides endless permutations of characters to bounce off of each other. The show's become known in particular for its breakroom meeting scenes that get most of the cast in one room (think Gilmore Girls town meetings) that often become hilariously chaotic while also providing extraordinarily clear-eyed social commentary and character development.
For those caught up, Kathryn VanArendonk's article on the Season 4 finale is fantastic (BIG SPOILERS), going into the ways the long-term storytelling deftly layered in and hinted at the outcome, which definitely informed my recent rewatch of the whole series. Somehow, the show is even funnier on a rewatch, the lines that at first startle you into laughter gaining an extra layer of humor when you see them in the context of the entire show.
IN ADDITION, as someone who usually groans through holiday-themed episodes, I actually like and enjoy the holiday episodes of this show, probably because it recognizes that holidays are often no treat for retail workers, and the show is fully comfortable with reveling in the less savory aspects of human nature that are often revealed on "special days."
relatable, Dina.
And now (deep breath)...Fleabag!
I'll admit, I've been feeling a lot of nerves over this segment of the newsletter. Partly because, as you mentioned, the show has been on everyone's mouths recently, and everyone and their priest has had a Take. And also because this show fosters such an intimacy between show and viewer that it's easy (for me at least) to feel protective of one's own interpretation of and connection to it, which is part of its gut-punching brilliance.
You've already done me the favor of linking to Kathryn VanArendonk's excellent piece about the fourth wall breaking as dissociation (because citing her twice in one of my letters might be an embarrassing amount of fangirling even for ME), which I really like on a TV writing level and feel some resistance to on a personal level. What each viewer takes away and reads into the show, and in particular Fleabag's fourth-wall-breaking, probably says more about us [me] than we'd like to admit. Which is why it feels very "ouch" to me to write about Fleabag and loneliness!
(btw guess who made a huge chunk of these gifs for the world? that's right. Kathryn VanArendonk.)
I remember hearing people talk about the show in 2016, mostly as an end-of-podcast recommendation, but somehow I got it into my head that it was about a pet store? And, I mean, guinea pigs do feature heavily, especially in the first season, but it is...extremely not about a pet store. [Until probably about a week before I started watching it, I thought The Americans was about American spies in Russia.] This spring the rumblings I heard about it from TV Criticism Twitter grabbed my interest. I gulped down the first season in one night and slept better than I had in months. I actually needed to wait a couple of days before taking on the second season, I so wanted to cherish the catharsis of the first. My attempts to train myself away from looking at my phone while watching TV or movies have been mostly unsuccessful so far, but for this show I pressed pause for every second that I was even looking away briefly to adjust a pillow.
When we meet Fleabag in season 1, she's reeling from both the semi-recent loss of her mother and the much more recent loss of her best friend, Boo. As you've talked about, she's frequently in conflict with her family, and her romantic and sexual relationships are mostly, as she says herself, "to deflect from the screaming void inside my empty heart." It's a joke...except it's really REALLY not. As becomes much more clear in season 2, those direct-to-camera moments are also a coping mechanism, though they initially seem more benign, perhaps in part because they're so intoxicating for the viewer.
Spoilers from here until the...end? Skip it if you don't like to see me get emotional! (I sure don't!)
Near the beginning of the second season therapy scene [with Fiona fucking SHAW!] we see Fleabag falter when asked if she has friends [she later winks at us, a reassurance to herself that she's totally fine, we DEFINITELY count, and she feels perfect about it], but her loneliness is in nearly every inch of the show. It's in her choosing to spend the day with her repulsive brother-in-law Martin because she truly doesn't have anyone else to spend time with. It's in the lack of any looking to camera in the show's Boo flashbacks*, and how across the series they become increasingly rare when she's with her sister. It's in the season 1 finale when someone is literally about to declare their love for her (so she thinks) and even the smallest blip in the conversation needs filling in with a quick comment or eyebrow raise at the viewer. Where VanArendonk reads life being "too much" into these moments, I read "not enough," an overwhelm of spaces in which Fleabag feels (and often is) unseen. Which makes that first scene in which Hot Priest notices her cutaways so potent.
(*or any of the flashbacks, but the majority are with Boo)
We're given a hint in that season 2 premiere; despite her family's insistence that she's always snatching the spotlight, no one is paying much attention to her through most of the beginning. As she's telling us, almost smugly, choosing to feel triumphant and right rather than ignored and hurt, that "no one's asked [her] a question in 45 minutes," Hot Priest's voice cuts into her moment with a question. Though she's pleasantly surprised in that moment, her surprise when he truly notices and points out her dissociations is more panicked.
It's a revelatory moment as the viewer, knowing rather than wondering (or not wondering in my case—I truly didn't suspect it!) that these moments could be observable to others. Aside from the simple discomfort on having one's defenses seen through, Fleabag's attempts to dissuade him may also be distress at realizing that those around her have been paying even less attention than she thought. [that's right, betcha didn't think I was going to make Hot Priest's noticing DEPRESSING!!]
If I get into Fleabag, loneliness, and the following ~steamy~ scenes with her and Hot Priest, I will probably go on for FAR too long and also probably give myself an existential crisis, so I'm going to skip to that ENDING, after a heaping of Hot Priest gifs.
GOD PUNCH ME IN THE THROAT WHY DON'T YOU.
After Hot Priest exits scene, pursued by fox, Fleabag sits on the bench, looking at the recurring-bit statue which Godmother has just told her was modeled on her mother. As she stands up to walk away, in the opposite direction of Hot Priest, she smiles once more at the camera and shakes her head, letting us know with almost not fanfare that not only is her relationship with Hot Priest over, so is her relationship with us, her "secret camera friends." I'll admit that my first reaction was panic—how is she supposed to deal with the loneliness now?
And yet. While it's tempting to see Hot Priest (or ourselves) as the "one person" that she's loved and been loved by enough to be seen like this, we know that's not true. The show makes sure we understand the intensity and depth of her love for Boo, and her increasing closeness with her sister leads to this gorgeous moment, possibly the most important declaration of love in the show:
And we know that's not all. She may be leaving this coping mechanism, but we've seen her filling up her life with real connections, feeling things—including shitty things—she hadn't allowed herself to feel. Like the song that plays over that final scene, we know that she will, absolutely, be alright. And so will we.
Happy July and know that I would TOTALLY run through an airport for you.