March: Friendship, Oscars Fury, and Other Potencies
Dear Kelsey,
I am currently writing to you while listening to the Mamma Mia 2! Soundtrack. I know you require no convincing, but this album is truly a work of art. The joy that bubbles up inside of me at the chorus of “Name of the Game” and Cher’s cameo for “Fernando” are nothing short of a masterpiece.
We have to talk about the Oscars. I have not recovered from my fury about Green Book’s win for Best Picture!! I am sick and tired of the Academy using Best Picture nominations as a circle jerk for white liberal Hollywood filmmakers while the accessible movies that most of us enjoy are forced to take a backseat (not to mention far less socially problematic—BLACK PANTHER IS JUST A BETTER MOVIE OKAY). It’s lazy. ARGHHH!
Was Spike Lee talking about the KKK, or predicting the Green Book win? You decide.
Now that my Oscars rage has been addressed, let’s talk Life Partners! When you told me what this movie was about, I needed very little convincing. A movie centered around friendship? Between two women? Sign me up. TBH, at this point I would probably follow you off of the metaphorical movie recommendations cliff with no questions asked.
I was NOT prepared for how many good looking people are in this movie. Leighton Meester? Gillian Jacobs? Even Kate McKinnon trying to be her absolute drippiest is still delightful. Adam Brody’s goatee was a personal lowlight, but even that couldn’t damper the ray of sunshine that is this movie. I was not initially sold on the Meester/Jacobs pairing the movie is centered around, but it grew on me over the course of the movie. Jacobs’ acting can grate a little after a while, but Leighton Meester is a national treasure and still manages to shine in this low-budget, genre-ambiguous coming of age story.
LOOK HOW CUTE SHE IS! My little bisexual heart cannot take it.
Life Partners, at a glance, is a very unimpressive movie about two women (Meester and Jacobs) navigating their late 20s and how to maintain their friendship as their circumstances change (mainly, Jacobs begins a serious relationship with Adam Brody). There are no weird plot twists, just two women trying to figure out how to be good to one another. But the ordinariness of this story is exactly what I love about it so much. It really does feel like *real life*, in all its weird and emotional glory. And the arc for Jacobs is focused on a very real, relatable character flaw she possesses that eventually creates dysfunction in all of her significant relationships—exactly like life. The brilliance of this movie is that it draws our attention to the ways that friendship is still a relationship, and all relationships require the ability to ask for forgiveness and give and receive tenderness when we need it.
Which is the perfect note to transition to Russian Doll on. Russian Doll is also based on a friendship(ish thing) between two unlikely people who meet due to sci-fi related circumstances. Kelsey, this show is a work of art. I don’t like particularly dark TV shows (I had to stop watching Criminal Minds because it gave me nightmares), but RD managed to deal with a very sensitive topic in a very delicate, insightful way while also bringing humor and warmth to the story.
I’m just gonna put a *TRIGGER WARNING* here for discussion of suicide in the next paragraph. If this convo is not your thing (or you know it’s not good for you right now), go ahead and scroll down to the next adorable gif of Natasha Lyonne accepting her metaphorical award for having one of the sexiest voices on the planet and the hair of a witchy lioness.
Confession: As someone who has never been suicidal, I struggle a lot with engaging on this topic and understanding people who deal with chronic depression and suicidal ideation. For me, Russian Doll painted a picture that brought me so much clarity—and with it, compassion. Alan (played by Charlie Barnett) struggles to cope with a world that is so often hard and complicated, simply because his brain makes it hard to do so. Although I’ve never been suicidal, I struggled with anxiety and disordered eating for many years of my life because this is the way my brain is oriented to cope with my difficult realities. The ways that we exist in the world are COMPLICATED, and RD embraces all of that complexity wholeheartedly.
Welcome back, sensitive souls! I haven’t even mentioned how incredible Natasha Lyonne’s performance is, or how much I love that Amy Poehler chose this as her next major project after Parks and Recreation (well, I guess now I have). I’ll conclude my reflections on Russian Doll with this: RD is maybe one of the first TV shows I’ve ever seen that encapsulates Glennon Doyle’s concept of “brutiful” (brutal + beautiful) in our daily lives so fully and accurately, while giving Millennials the nihilistic existentialism we love to laugh about. Our world is better because Russian Doll exists.
I am a big fan of television that has deep and insightful things to say about the human experience, especially when it comes to mental illness. Russian Doll does this so well, but another great example of this is—you guessed it—Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I first heard about CEXG from Twitter (shoutout to my pal Suz!), and I STRUGGLED with Season 1. She is so deeply unlikeable at first that I didn’t know how to handle it (hello, Enneagram 1 here who was always taught that I am only supposed to root for people who are good!). How do I care about a character who is such a toxic person? At that point I had no clue the show would take the drastic turn it did after Season 2 into heavy conversations about what it means to surround yourself with community, how to manage your mental health, and what it looks like to live with a personality disorder.
CEXG is, in my opinion, the best show covering mental illness on television. (It worries me deeply that teens are getting most of their pop culture dialogue about mental illness from 13 Reasons Why.) CEXG isn’t vengeful or fetishizing about suicide, and deals with the issue in a way that gives us context for Rebecca’s mental health and also creates compassion for where she is on her mental health journey. It is also hilarious and touching and the music slaps!
The main emphasis for our discussion is Season 4, which is currently on mid-season hiatus. If you follow CEXG, it’s no secret that Greg—one of Rebecca’s major love interests from the first season—was slated to return for the 4th and final season. I was unsure about the recasting of Greg (originally played by unexpected heartthrob Santino Fontana) with Skylar Astin, and I’m still unsure if I like it??? Astin is dreamy af, but he’s such a classic nice boy that I remain deeply unconvinced by his best attempts at stoicism for this show. I’m happy to have Greg back, but every time Astin is onscreen I find myself disappointed that I’m not seeing Fontana’s face. I MISS YOU SANTINO, COME BACK!
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Season 4 is all about the endings and beginnings in our lives. May your Minnesotan winter be a chapter of your life that ends soon.
Your friend in Texas,
Hannah
Dear Hannah,
Concerning weather, from your voice to the heavens’...ears? Whatever. I come to you having very recently (yesterday) gotten back into Riverdale—in no small part due to the announcement that Chad Michael Murray is going to be playing a cult leader [which??? what???]—so honestly nothing makes sense and that’s okay and great. The very first episode I dropped back in on included a teen militia, so I feel very prepared for every kind of nonsense.
Unfortunately, I did not get nonsense-prepared in time for Oscars. As my friend Jamie mentioned during a viewing party for which I made the following enormous predictions posterboard, “it’s very jarring to be watching a ceremony in which half the awards are going to innovative and exciting women and people of color and then the other half are like ‘hey wasn’t Queen great you guys?’”
"Look at my son! Pride is not the word I'm looking for, there is so much more." - Lin Manuel-Miranda, also me
I don’t know if it’s possible to feel all of the air deflate out of a room THROUGH a screen, but i definitely felt that when Green Book won Best Picture (possibly because it was also happening in the room I was in). Not only that, but its win for Original Screenplay over The [goddamn] Favourite is a grudge I will take to my grave.
In this time of trouble, I am, as always, comforted by Chris Evans. Not only did I swoon when he helped Regina King up to the stage to accept her well-deserved Supporting Actress award for If Beale Street Could Talk (sure we ALL agree that dudes like Chris Evans get applauded for doing the bare minimum but COME ON, he just looks so good doing it!)
but a Twitter exchange between him and Pals fave Jamie Lee Curtis:
brought their upcoming movie Knives Out to my attention. It’s a murder mystery slated for November of this year, also starring Lakeith Stanfield, Toni Collette, and Daniel Craig and I am both extremely psyched and a bit overwhelmed about it, which is the perfect state in which to talk about Russian Doll!
The reference point most are using to describe the premise is Groundhog’s Day, the Bill Murray movie in which no matter what he does, he always wakes up on the same day. However, it’s actually more structurally similar to the Tom Cruise movie Edge of Tomorrow, in which Cruise’s character keeps reliving the same day no matter how many times he’s killed in action, almost like a video game in which you’re trying to get as far from your starting point as you can.
Nadia Vulvokov’s (which! what a name! what a way to tell the viewer right off the bat that this show was created by three women and is NOT here to fuck around!) deaths start on her 36th birthday, and no matter how she goes—hit by a car, falling into a manhole, choking on a chicken bone in her apartment—she always comes back to the same spot. The ensuing narrative is quest-like (or video game-like, or both!) as she tries to figure out what’s going on while also becoming allies and then friends with Alan, the only other person experiencing what she is.
You are spot on when you call this show a work of art. It weaves humor, mystery, and philosophical musings on time, intimacy, and healing all into a tight 8 episodes. It’s gorgeous to look at and moving to listen to and it’s been quite awhile since I’ve been so invested in the stakes of a sci-fi-ish show. I’m now about to dip into both some spoilers and some heavy mental health talk, so if one or both of those things isn’t it for you right now, fast forward to the next gif of Natasha Lyonne being extremely #relatable.
Shows that portray mental health struggles thoughtfully and meaningfully have been increasingly important to me in the last year, especially those that get into the messy questions of how we can really be there for one another. How do we take care of others and how do we let ourselves be taken care of? Nadia, in some ways similar to The Good Place’s Eleanor Shellstrop, is tough and gregarious but emotionally distant from even those she cares the most about. She lives her life on cigarettes and self-reliance, which makes finding out that she and Alan are linked in this situation almost as much of a hindrance as it is a help. As someone who both a) feels deeply uncomfortable expressing her own emotional needs and b) whose current proximity to mental illness is mostly as a support person, Nadia resonated deeply with me. She very clearly has her own trauma to work through, and that arc is done beautifully. Though the show filled with a bunch of slap-sticky type deaths for both her and Alan, the one truly gory moment in the show is part of an important moment of Nadia’s self-discovery and growth. However, we realize in the final episode that the perhaps most significant part of her journey was just realizing how much it was needed.
The final episode [spoilers are getting REAL here, pals!!], in which Nadia and Alan find themselves free of the loop but spat into alternate versions of the timeline, finds them needing to save each other from that first death, but a version of each other that hasn’t yet learned the things about themselves that brought them to this point. As discussed on the Slate’s Spoiler Special podcast (because I am very much myself, and the minute the show ended I immediately needed a dozen podcast episodes to listen to about it), Alan’s task is almost more difficult than Nadia’s. Although Alan at the start of this timeline is suicidal, he’s also hungry for connection and help. Start-of-timeline Nadia requires more convincing that her self-destructive path is actually self-destructive, and that human connection—the one thing she’s been resisting most—is the one thing that can get her off it. Some believe that during parade at the end, when the two screens merge, it means that the timelines have merged and “Original Nadia” and “Original Alan” are reunited, but I don’t quite buy into that. It feels too neat and wrapped up for me, and undercuts rather than rewards what they’ve learned. Like you’ve said, being here is complicated, and I think the show is okay with that (but, you know, okay with it in a MUCH DIFFERENT WAY than Riverdale’s absurd twisty “storytelling”).
OKAY, speaking of complicated...Life Partners!!
This movie about best friends in their late 20s is something I have wanted to make required viewing for every friend at the 3 month mark into their new relationship (or just every friend PERIOD). The beautiful ordinariness of it is one of its biggest draws for me as well; in a world in which indie dramedies like this often seem like they’re in a competition with each other to see whose characters can be the most unlikable, I liked that everyone in this movie felt just warm enough and also just obnoxious enough to be real and to not spend most of the movie wondering how they can even stand each other. Their flaws are apparent—Paige (Jacobs) is a my-way-or-the-highway gal, who in her genuine concern for her loved ones’ well-being tends to strong-arm them into doing what she thinks is best. Meanwhile, Sasha (Meester) deals with feeling stuck in a non-career and sidelined in her relationships by pretending she’s never bothered and avoiding confrontation or forward motion until it’s at its breaking point.
That breaking point turns out to be Paige’s increasingly serious relationship with Tim, played by Adam Brody with an astonishingly acute depiction of a guy that’s charming and likable in like, normal human amounts, kind and gracious but also liable to shout Big Lebowski quotes at an awkwardly loud volume or accidentally reveal to your friend that you’ve been blabbing her business to him. And that’s the beauty of this movie’s storytelling—it doesn’t need the bigness or intensity of “my friend is dating someone TERRIBLE!!!” There’s plenty of drama to be mined in the discomfort and tension of change itself.
[Slight spoilers from here until the next gif]
And too, you can see how this shift in their relationship affects both friends. It’s not just about Sasha feeling left out; the direction and acting is so good at lingering on the actors’ faces long enough to see a full range of complicated emotions play across them. We get to actually WATCH the panic on Paige’s face when a seemingly casual joke from Sasha reveals the widening distance between them, and then later the realization during a confrontation with her controlling mother that the exact same pushiness has been eroding her ability to listen to and compromise for the people she loves.
To get ~personal~, I’ve definitely been in Sasha’s position for...okay like pretty much exclusively in my life. This is something I actually wrote about last year, and while there are a number of ways I’ve changed as a person since then [I’m like, 65% sure for the better], the circumstance of being “the single friend”—I cringe to type it out! I’m so tired of talking about ~singleness~ but I’m not tired of talking about friendship, so here we are—has not changed. I find I relate to Sasha more with every viewing (I’ve watched this movie at least 4 times within the last 2 years), and more and more touched by this small movie that explores how we thoughtfully navigate change and growth in our partnerships of all kinds.
(me about this movie)
From the beginning we knew that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was going to be high on our agenda, and I’m sure that far past the life of the show we’ll be referencing it often and I Think About This A Lot-ing...a lot. As I started compiling thoughts on the topic, I was of course listening to the music of CEXG, which really got me thinking about how incredibly Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna use it and how central it is to the storytelling. Therefore, I decided to structure my section on this in the form of a list of 5 songs that in particular I have THOUGHTS about. They’re not necessarily my 5 ~favorites~ because that would be impossible, but they’re some of the ones that encapsulate and articulate the show best for me, so buckle in!
1. Boy Band Made Up of Four Joshes
This song holds a special place in my heart, because it’s the moment that I knew this show was not just funny or interesting but absolutely BRILLIANT. It happens in the third episode, and though we’d had a few songs already that weren’t lead by Rebecca (it caused me so much pain to leave I’m So Good at Yoga and Face Your Fears off this list) this was the first time that it really sunk in for me that EVERYONE WAS GOING TO BE SINGING and I was one thousand percent here for it. Not only is Vincent Rodriguez III a dreamboat
but this song has it all: in just 2 minutes and 2 seconds, you laugh, you cringe, and you understand one of the central tensions in the Josh and Rebecca relationship, and the show in general. Rebecca has a tendency to see Josh as the answer to all of her problems; actually, considering that the show is premised on her moving to the place “Josh just happens to live!” I think we can call it more than a tendency. I see the show essentially as a love story between Rebecca and her mental health, and this song is showcases early on her preference for subbing in an idealized love story between her and a man to avoid getting personal with herself.
2. You Stupid Bitch
If you’ve never scream-sang this in your car while crying a little bit but also laughing, well...good for you!
Way back in December, when we officially announced the newsletter, you and me and pals Bailey Hundl and Trey Strange chatted a little bit about this song, and how powerfully it captures CEXG’s emphasis on naming. The song is a dramatic ode to self-loathing...that actually feels kind of good, in the way that self-loathing—especially performative self-loathing—often serves as a balm over the scarier feelings like fear and sadness that we may be experiencing. That being said, to quote you, “CXG absolutely abides by the belief that naming things strips them of their power.” Though CEXG’s musical numbers aren’t usually happening in the ‘real world,’ they do seem to be asking us, “hey, wouldn’t it feel great if these feelings and thoughts we stuff deep inside could actually take voice and free us from what’s unhelpful while revealing what is?” However, naming is often a messy, imprecise process, which is how we often arrive at conclusions (for now) that send us back to the drawing board.
3. You Go First
One of my favorite things about this show is its refusal to position its female characters as inherently competition for one another, whether romantically or professionally. Sure, the issue COMES UP, because this is a show that’s very aware of patriarchy and its ill effects, but it’s interested in how women can unlearn and defy their own internalized misogyny; think about how far Valencia has come from her Season 1 song “Women Gotta Stick Together” to becoming someone extremely rooted in her female friendships (HMMM almost as if two female showrunners had something to do with that!!)
But the show ALSO doesn’t take the starry-eyed, condescending position that female friendships are a simple, friction-free elixir, which is best displayed throughout the show through Rebecca and Paula’s friendship. They are incredibly tight and they unreservedly support and cheer one another on. But they’re also complex people who disagree and sometimes fight and then sing power ballads about how happy they’d be to apologize...if only the other would do it first.
4. The Buzzing From the Bathroom
Okay so HEAR ME OUT. This song from a relatively minor character is actually a really excellent snapshot of what CXG does ~en masse~ through the show. LET’S LOOK AT THE FACTS, SHALL WE. (If I can stop giggling uncontrollably at every perfect line in this song and Michael McMillian’s perfect delivery.)
A. It so perfectly captures and emulates a Certain Type Of Song that you immediately know what they’re doing within the first few lines, and the genre’s drama makes the humor even funnier.
B. Even though it’s part of a storyline that happens in context of the show and it’s characters, it can stand without that context. It’s funny (and kind of a bummer) on its own, and applies to a broader phenomenon that you don’t need to have watched the show to recognize and enjoy.
C. It’s funny as hell and executed with 100% sincerity. Where another show would have chosen to wink at the audience or portray the character as a one-dimensional cut-out, Tim here is played with actual pathos. This show takes feelings seriously, even the feelings of some of its more cartoonish supporting characters, and this song is no exception.
5. Antidepressants Are So Not a Big Deal