Fleabag is Not a Femcel

this video is brought to you by mubi a curated streaming service showing exceptional films from around the globe get a whole month free at movie.com broey de Chanel [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] this is a pink piece [Music] I have a new podcast it's called rehash and I'm co-hosting it with my best friend Hannah it's all about recent social media phenomenon and said get us all up in arms only to forget about them within a week so we rehash them as they say our first season is called public Theater which looks at the way we as a public love to create pop culture villains we discuss everything from the try guys to Taylor Swift to bad art friend to diet product and you can find it wherever you get your podcasts we also have a patreon with bonus and weekly mini episodes if you'd like to throw us some extra support hope you enjoy when flyback ended its theatrical run back in 2019 Helen Lewis sat in the audience all struck as she watched the finale of a show that had transcended the realm of theater and grown into something much much bigger for Lewis the play had become more akin to a rock concert the extreme popularity of fleabag both as a play and a hit TV series had spurned an entire culture that reveled in the show's creation of yet another revolutionary Modern Woman its success transformed Phoebe Waller Bridge the creator of fleabag into something of a celebrity but beyond mere star status we bestowed upon Waller Bridge a rare yet contentious title the voice of a generation writing for the Atlantic Lewis explained that his Waller Bridge came back on stage for Curtain Call it seems like the crowd was cheering her home she finishes it was a fitting farewell to fleabag thinkpiece season but it wasn't in the near four years since fleabag ended its theatrical and Commercial run they have sprung a host of lengthy think pieces about his influence on pop culture which according to these writers is a negative one in 1971 art historian Lyndon Auckland asked a provocative question why have there been no great women artists you know the one Maria grazia Cherry slapped on a T-shirt and waltzed down into your runway show back in 2017. today I all of which elements and fears about where feminism is headed today now I'm all for calling attention to the role of media in our contemporary cultural landscape I've even made a career out of it the women who wrote These articles are talented and intelligent and their pieces are very well written so this is not meant to be an attack on them in any sort of way but since there's very little variation in the type of argument being espoused here I find myself growing tired of this discourse which refuses to be a discourse that is to debate itself so I'm going to throw my hat into the ring and deign to disagree with what seems to be a pretty conclusive opinion in the discursive world of feminist pop culture the general argument seems to go like this fleabag and other popular media of the 2010s like Sally Rooney's normal people Andrew Tessa moshvegs my year of rest and relaxation all feature an alarming trend of Whitefish female protagonists checking out of the real world and reveling in their patriarchically induced misery with one writer Emmeline Klein dubbing this trend back in 2019 dissociative feminism a troubled identity that women on Tick Tock and public thinkers like red scares Dash and necrosova have readily adopted and the contrarian urge to Simply give up dissociative feminism is the decision to check out and dissociate that feeling of being detached from your own body into the world around you this climb considers is a reaction to the extreme positivity of lean in you can do it girly feminism but to do so they say is a privilege reserved for these wealthy white women who choose to check out when marginalized women are not able to Simply ignore their oppression why have there been no great women artists when Knockin asked this question back in 1971 she was responding to the feminist knee-jerk inclination to name every notable female artist in history when confronted with this very idea for knocklyn it's not that these artists didn't exist or that they weren't great but that their greatness could never be capital G great because of all the institutional barriers in the world of Art and art history which have barred women from being understood as Geniuses in the same way men have about three waves of feminist reckonings have taken place since nachlan's essay was published and we're now at a point where certain women artists have crossed thresholds into capital G greatness the three women I listed earlier Rooney moshfag and Waller Bridge are women in artistic and literary Fields whose work have received International recognition and because of this it's difficult not to string similarities between them all of these women are indeed writers from middle to upper middle class backgrounds a product of the very institutional barriers novel Auckland was speaking of it is no doubt true for example that the young Picasso passed all the examinations for entrance to the Barcelona and later to the Madrid Academy of Art at the age of 15 in but a single day a feat of such difficulty that most candidates required a month of preparation but one would like to find out more about similar precocious qualifiers for art academies who then went on to achieve nothing but mediocrity or failure in whom of course art historians are uninterested or to study in Greater detail the role played by Picasso's art Professor father in the pictorial precocity of his son what if Picasso had been born a girl would Senor Ruiz have paid as much attention or stimulated as much ambition for achievement in a little pablita at this point we all know about the institutional advantages you get when you have money and connections when you look the part and you're white Waller bridge moshveg and Rooney fit some if not all of these descriptors and some can argue that it was their talent and their privilege that propelled them into Fame these three women blessed at Birth are also blessed with the freedom to explore the complexities of the human mind and to innovate within their field a freedom that's not so easily granted to those born without that same privilege but to place Waller bridge malchback and Rooney within the Loosely defined category of dissociative feminism is in my opinion kind of clickbaity it attempts to prove a point the point being that the creations of Sally Rooney of Tessa malshveg and Phoebe wallerbridge are not only more similar than they really are but that they're actually harmful to the women's rights movement the result in that attempting to prove this point these essays completely flatten and dull the intricacies complexities and purposes of their work in a fascinating dialogue with editor Charlie Mark breiter for her sub stack about the way Millennial media is both derided and memorialized in pop culture writer Aisha a Siddiki says this about the criticism surrounding Sally Rooney there's this weird insistence on elevating a certain type of white woman every so often as a stand-in for the insecurities people have about the quote Millennial identity and is an elevation in the most literal sense putting up on a pedestal to laud and throw Tomatoes at people are bringing in the last of their takes on Millennials through Sally Rooney be es articles are part of the very take cycle she speaks of now a lot of my opinions actually differ from what Siddiki and Mark brighter say in the dialogue one of them is that for me what ties these works together is that through their institutional advantages these artists have been able to Pioneer a more complex version of Womanhood in the public eye a woman who isn't an object or a Mary Sue but a human being in Klein's article she says if Sally Rooney's skinny precocious Irish Beauties are this upset then certainly I have every right to give up on the world on the other hand giving up on progress is perhaps the epitome of white feminism and promotes a nihilism that is somewhere between unproductive and genuinely dangerous a majority of these think pieces seem to place an undue focus on the most exterior traits of these characters in an essay for another gaze Rebecca Liu writes The Curious Case of how these particular women ostensibly furnished with all the social trappings to take over the world white wealthy pretty ever amenable to men in spite of their worst efforts prefer to turn their gaze inward to hate them themselves their bodies their thighs the tone of their speech the other women in their lives their fathers why are the women who in theory holds the most Social Power are so interested in divesting themselves of it I don't know this kind of feels to me like asking why Hamlet goes crazy even though he's a hot Prince like know how to gobbler don't kill yourself you're so sexy there's something odd about discussing dissociation as some sort of conscious choice to compare female characters like Marianne or fleabag to Edge Lords like Dasha necrosova is to insinuate these women are shutting down for the walls which very much overlooks the specific narratives and story arcs they take part in and the messages behind those narratives this media has a psychological interior Focus for a reason sure these female characters have external social trappings that make them politically privileged but it's not like they're inward self-loathing just exists in a vacuum what does tie these texts together is that their characters start off numb and distant as a response to some sort of traumatic event and then embark on a path out none of these essays acknowledge that Marianne from normal people is the way she is extremely depressed because she carries unresolved psychological damage from the abuse she suffered at the hands of her late fall Father which he continues to endure from her brother who has learned and adopted this behavior in high school especially Marianne is outwardly confident and strong-willed but this is a front to hide a more damaged person within one who has spent years being beaten down there's a strong wall that Marianne has built between herself and the world which results in an inability to communicate her emotions but through her relationship to love interest Connell she slowly becomes better at opening up the concept of dissociation is probably most present in my year of rest and relaxation but it exists there to provoke social commentary moshveg's protagonist spiteful checked out and callous as she is is a product of her cold waspish upbringing with a mentally ill and neglectful mother who killed herself a few years earlier I don't think the book is glamorizing mental illness as much as it is satirizing the dehumanizing alienating effects of capitalism and the grotesque sterility of wealth her character is an avatar of the beauty standard to signify that she can check out of the world sleep through life and still get by due to the pure inertia that beauty runs on in this capitalistic world where that is women's greatest and only currency the character being beautiful traumatized and checked out is the entire point of malshveg satire come on this stuff isn't included as decoration it's meant to inform a greater message in the storytelling so why are these essays pretending it isn't there we spend hours and hours watching shows about serial killers and why they are the way they are but we can't fathom that a hot girl might be sad because she had a difficult upbringing or because she lives in an Ever alienating World these characters might hold Social Power in the public sphere but within their interpersonal Dynamics in the private sphere they have none and it's to the private lack of power that they Rebel or fall apart internally Liu is right that is a privilege to turn inwards to object oneself from the inside but there's no need to ask why they do it these texts are telling us this for this video I want to focus on fleabag since it's been used very literally as the poster child of this discussion and since it's a piece of art I personally think is the most undeserving of this criticism I'm concerned that the more we flatten these works and their characters into empty symptoms of some greater cultural sickness the more we engage in a collective Amnesia about what actually happens in these texts and what they're actually all about so fleabag it began as a 65 minute long one-woman show directed by Vicki Jones and written and performed by Phoebe Waller bridge at the 2013 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and then later became a TV series on BBC three in 2016 with its second season coming out three years later in 2019. now Waller Bridge has a very audience-centric approach to storytelling in her words I am obsessed with audiences how to win them why some things alienate them how to draw them in and surprise them what divides them it's a theatrical sport for me and I'm hooked when coming up with the story for fleabag she says I knew I wanted to write about a young sex-obsessed angry dry-witted woman but the main focus of the process was her direct relationship with her audience and how she tries to manipulate and amuse and shock them moment to moment until she eventually Bears her soul Waller Bridge's primary goal and this is something she teaches aspiring playwrights is getting an audience to fall in love with a character in under five minutes and with fleabag you can see she's good at it the play begins with fleabag rushing into an office sweaty and flustered it's established that the office has no women working there due to a sexual harassment case fleabag who is evidently applying for a job which becomes alone in the show attempts to take her sweater off but reveals too late that she isn't wearing anything underneath the interviewer who is in the midst of making a speech about the job requirements tells fleabag that that won't get you very far here anymore this is when things go downhill fleabag calls him a perv he calls her a salute she then asks him to leave despite the fact that they're standing in his office he leaves and this is when she begins her introductory monologue from the get-go fleabag is established as hard-headed desperate a bit bumbling but also very witty and Charming she's flaw God but she has her attention the play in the first season of the show flush out these aspects of her character she's someone who's in a period of serious emotional tumult her business is failing her best friend boo just took her own life after finding out that her boyfriend slept with someone else someone we later find out was fleabag herself her mother passed away a couple years before that her father is distant and his new partner fleabag's godmother is a passive-aggressive Terror please look after yourself you really do look ghastly don't you her emotionally distant sister Claire is perpetually on the brink of mental collapse and her creepy belligerent brother-in-law makes this all worse fleabag is flailing grasping desperately for her disinterested family to just Embrace her because she can't get this from them she hurts other people in her life and she hurts herself but fleabag doesn't want us to know any of these things she wants us to think she has it all together that she is in control of her sexual encounters that she doesn't care that her family doesn't seem to care about her that she doesn't need emotional support this is all delivered through a clever narrative device where she breaks the fourth wall to speak to the audience telling us things that she is telling herself she would like to believe he'll be back Elaine but of course this facade is broken in the final episode of the first season when we discover what she did to boo she turns to run away only to bump into the camera and stare at us and dismay as if we've caught her in the act the second season of the show takes a brighter turn as we catch up with fleabag a year later this is the turn that many of the essayists find welcome she's undergone a long process of textbook Wellness rituals that have brought her to a more stable place but her demons are still lingering as are her feelings towards her increasingly hostile family what she needs is an emotional exorcism and who better to do that than a sexy foul-mouthed priest what the priest can give to fleabag is a spiritual and romantic connection one that's forbidden but also tends to that desperate longing for love and forgiveness that fleabag wants so badly for me and this is something many people I've spoken to about the show actually didn't really feel the second season illuminated something about fleabag that was much harder to see in the first season but for me had always been there that she isn't selfish at all in fact she spends so much time worrying about her family especially her sister Claire that she's unable to properly care for herself I think you know how to love better than any others that's why you find it all so painful something many of these dissociative feminism think pieces also didn't seem to take away from the show in her article Klein does a comparison between fleabag and Hannah Horvath from girls she writes the title character of Phoebe Waller Bridge's series engage in much of the same bad behavior Hannah practiced drinking to excess picking fights with people close to her sleeping with near strangers and her friends lovers diving into a seemingly infinite well of desire and emerging dripping in her own self-interest but fleabag definitely evades the accusations of whining and wallowing that Hannah received because instead of complaining during moments of turmoil she simply dissociates but I just don't know if that's true yes there's a difference in the vitriol waged at Hannah which is very much entangled with misogyny and fat phobia but to compare her to fleabag is to ignore the details of each show Hannah is almost never a victim of the people around her Dunham designed Hannah in such a way that many of her problems in neuroses well relatable to most Millennials struggling in their post-grad lives are kind of minor in fact on most occasions Hannah is the bully in regards to the dissociative feminist character Liu asserts the praise that surround such figures also risks reducing a premature celebration a divestment of power that leaves us happy to pick at scraps and inoculate ourselves against the harder Messier mission of getting to a point where unlikability is no longer a OneNote punch line it is rarely asked to whom these women are cruel what engineered this cruelty and what ends this cruelty serves but who is fleabag cruel to on numerous occasions in the show we watch her get mistreated and neglected by the people whose approval she seeks the most yes she treats some undeserving people quite poorly like her ex-boyfriend but if you were to say that her reactions towards her father stepmother brother-in-law and often her sister are unwarranted I would tell you you're wrong when she makes a scene at her Godmother's art show I cheered her on sure it isn't the healthy rational choice to make but you'd be lying if you said this isn't a natural reaction and Tipping Point to the situation she's placed in okay they're natural there are many lessons that fleabag learns throughout her journey but ultimately at the end of the show I think she learns an overarching lesson that's much more significant than say learning how to connect better with other people or to be a better person in the second season as fleabag sits at the bus stop and watches the priest walk away from her confession of love as she clutches her mother's statue I think her final choice to smile and let us go is a choice of radical acceptance accepting that she and the priest can never be together but that their love for each other will always live inside them is also an acceptance that the people in her life will not always uplift her or make choices that keep her safe she will do the same to them but this acceptance allows her to finally forgive herself for her mistakes and that is what brings her peace for me that is why she doesn't need us anymore fleabag unpacks something about grief that is so poignant and Universal that watching it feels like an exercise in therapy grief is so entangled with the self whether we want it to be or not I've been writing about grief a lot recently and the different forms it takes on it splatters itself onto all the aspects of fleabag's life and manifests and sometimes ugly and sometimes beautiful ways I lost my grandmother recently and while her health was deteriorating severely for about four years and many of us in my family were prepared for it to happen I had a lot of trouble and still have a lot of trouble coming to terms with how acutely she suffered in her final days especially in the final week of her life it was horrible to hold her hand and watch the pain Raw on her face knowing there was nothing we could do to make it go away I also have trouble with the fact that I did not make time to see her enough before she went even though I had ample time to do so this is a guilt that's been following me for these past few weeks but as the days go on I'm trying to see the beauty in this loss the fact that I was so lucky to have a grandmother who cared for me like her own child who loved me so unconditionally even when I sometimes did not express it back that my mother had a mother for so many years of her life a gift that not many of us from my family situation could have the last time I watched fleabag this being my fifth viewing of the show I cried like I have never cried in those final moments it was so healing I don't know many shows that can do this for me fleabag is a work of capital G greatness because as Phoebe Waller Bridge says it's basically trying to disarm an audience as much as you can with comedy and then really punch him in the gut with a drama as uh when they least expect it and I think an audience makes himself so vulnerable and open to you when when they're laughing when they allow you to make them laugh that's um that's when they trust you foolishly so to read the first season as nothing but a woman on a self-indulgent downhill spiral is to ignore the many moments of beauty it gives us within fleabag's path through grief all of these think pieces suggest that fleabags dissociation along with that of Rooney and marshbeck's characters is the result of an overall fatigue with feminism and the subsequent choice to ignore it in fleabag the character engages with the movement directly on many occasions in the first episode fleabag and Claire attend women's speak a feminist lecture which was paid for by their father as compensation for his quote motherless daughters when asked the question of whether they would trade five years of their life for the perfect body both fleabag and Claire throw their hands up in the air without a second thought real bad Klein makes the point that we adopt the daily quotidian dissociation of getting dressed in the morning or prepared to go out at night a process that involves stepping outside your body to see it from the outside and dressing it depending on the occasion we are witches dissociating into fortune tellers predicting whether an outfit will get us asked out or taken seriously or simply left alone yes on New Year's Eve a few weeks ago I had a talk with myself about how I wasn't in fact comfortable in my dress and that I was indeed dressing for the male gaze whether I actually wanted to or not kind of like the compulsory beauty standards interrogated by my year of rest and relaxation and this is something directly interrogated in fleabag I'm not obsessed with sex I just can't stop thinking about it performance of it the awkwardness of it the drama of it the moment you realize someone once your body not so much the feeling of it fleabag never proclaims to be a good feminist but if the show is literally laying out the contradictions between woman and self contradictions that fleeback herself experiences then can it be true that she's somehow promoting it as something to Aspire to the show isn't so much ignoring feminism as it is ruminating on the inherent tensions between a human being who experiences Universal emotions and being a woman who is culturally conditioned by the patriarchy and also by default a member of a collective Rights Movement which seeks to dismantle that patriarchy I wear makeup that I think men will like fight for their attention wish I was younger but I'm also a feminist it's an inner battle I'm sure most women grapple with on a daily basis and to be honest I'm not sure why any of these texts ever have to be explicitly feminist in a piece about dissociative feminism by Sophia piser she observes fleabags repeated laughing at herself during times of Woe perpetuates the idea that pain experienced by a woman is at the fault of the woman herself that she can laugh at herself and remedy the situation this philosophy puts the burden entirely on women to explain and deal with their pain and removes accountability from the societal systems that actually oppress women at the family dinner for example her father and brother-in-law are the cause of many awkward silences yet when fleabag turns to the camera she's taking responsibility I totally agree that sometimes it seems like the show is making it seem like fleabag should have to apologize for situations out of her control which is why I think many people didn't take away that fleabag was actually being selfless all along but frankly I'm not sure the family patriarchy exists in fleabag as obviously as it does and say normal people I'd be remiss to say that fleabag's father or brother-in-law are Patriarchs of any kind they are pretty deeply emasculated men desperately clinging to the women in their lives for some sort of guidance they too need to be told what to do the same goes for fleabag's depressed accountant the power that fleabag lacks in her family life is stemmed from this very crisis of self and faith that her father and sister are going through one that the Godmother has exploited to her advantage so while the show explores ideas about Womanhood I think its aim is universal which has been taken for ignorance I've said this time and time again but I personally find it stronger when art made by women tell specific stories rather than trying to qualify for all women's experiences the moments where fleabag is explicitly political such as though women have pain speech or the hairstyle speech or when I think it's weakest the same goes for Sally Rooney when she has all her characters engage in lengthy debates about Marxism stripping them of their personal traits and backgrounds to make her Point these moments don't resonate with me because overtly sociological storytelling often feels kind of didactic inorganic and disingenuous and I really think that that's why these particular Works have been so well received because for the most part the messages and themes are breathed by the work not told by it the used essay acknowledges that the issue with dissociative feminism is not really in the text themselves but in the way our culture has received these texts in her words a hyperbole drenched marketing cycle fetch shows like this through the language of relatable identification and this sets them up perfectly for the inevitable backlash yes this is similar to what Siddiki was saying earlier and it's something I talked about quite a bit in my Greta Gerwig video but what I want to Point here is that maybe instead of deriding the works of Phoebe Waller Bridge Rooney or moshfag these essays should turn their attention to this current moment and culture where young women on the internet are defining themselves through totalizing identities and labels are you a cool girl chill girl Trad wife warm girl female manipulator Coconut Girl what does this say about our culture beyond the pigeonholing sickening earnestness with which critics prop up white women's media doing it a genuine disservice might I add especially for people like Sally Rooney who are now fighting desperately to be taken seriously outside their now overwhelmingly popular Niche why are so many women resonating with it and why are they taking up its most superficial traits as totalizing identifiers maybe women are having a crisis of self going back to the dialogue Siddiki says something hilariously resonant all these people are obsessed with Sally Rooney because they relate to her but not enough that they don't also feel insecure about her talent and their own writerly aesthetic but lack of writing ability and so they want to say things like you know Marianne and Felix aren't even real Communists and Rooney isn't even making bombs for the IRA and it's like yeah they know Sally knows too that's the whole point they voice that constantly and so do you which is why her books are treated the way they are something's leaking from your toe bag did you notice it seems that women's are 10 to be self-cannibalizing these days we're at a point where whenever a piece of women's media created by women because taken that the worst person in the world which to me could very much fit into this loose category of dissociative feminism but is directed by Joaquin Trier a man is almost completely left out of the conversation whenever this media breaks some sort of threshold and receives Universal recognition it's immediately stripped of all detail context and originality and then placed into a sub-category of feminism to then be picked apart for its failure to be adequately feminist it's like we're so embarrassed by older problematic media and then over correcting in real time to account for whatever aspects of this media could be interpreted as problematic down the line that to me is exhausting to give Credence to these writers I'm having this crisis myself you can see it in my recent work which has taken on a completely different tone than my older work where I'm now focusing more on critiquing problems within the left rather than teaching leftism to the general public mostly because I find the former more challenging but also because I'm fatigued I think I underwent a shift in early adulthood one that many people experience where you become less politically idealistic and angry and a bit more nuanced and maybe even tired I want to be allowed to feel like a [ __ ] up person sometimes and to know that this can be forgiven I just want to be I had a really terrible start to this year and if I spent these last few weeks constantly telling myself that there are others out there doing much worse frankly there would be no way I could cope for many reasons some out of my control I often feel like things are imploding and I've had to learn to tell myself that it's okay to feel like that sometimes to feel like I suck and that I push everyone away because that's a natural feeling I have to go there mentally to then challenge that feeling and climb out of it this is a skill that fleabag gave to me and it's the reason I've watched it five times now fleabag allows you to acknowledge that you are capable of hurting others that you can be heavily flawed and this is something to work on but also to for forgive yourself and anyway that's the very reason why they put rubbers on the end of pencils because people make mistakes I'm all for questioning the role that media plays in shaping our cultural landscape again it's my entire job but I'm not for flattening our media in order to ask those questions in the first place why do capital G greats like fleabag normal people or my year of rest and relaxation all have to have an Icarus moment why do we have to play sun and melt their wings when instead we can Embrace and enjoy their successes learn from their failures and use them as stones to pave our way forward [Music] foreign I want to give a shout out to mubi for sponsoring this video mubi is a curated streaming service dedicated to elevating great Cinema from all around the globe it's for lovers of great Cinema and those who don't know they love great Cinema yet because the beauty of mubi is that it exposes you to Artful thought-provoking and Innovative films you would never think to watch if you're looking for something within the genre of flailing women actual people is a good place to go a directorial debut by kit zahar actual people is a Mumble Court take on post-grad despair for the Gen z age intercutting Slice of Life social media clips into a hyper-realist plot saohar's camera is as unstable and floating as her protagonist to cope with post-grad Dread and a painful breakup Riley throws herself into partying and random hookups along with the malaise of early adulthood it also explores the Asian American biracial experience Paving greater representation and character studies of complex women you can 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Channel: Broey Deschanel

Views: 686,943

Keywords: fleabag, phoebe waller bridge, sally rooney, otessa moshfegh, fleabag hot priest, villain era

Id: fLtwG_i4Ng0

Length: 31min 37sec (1897 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 27 2023