Normal People (2020)
Episode 8
Directed by Hettie MacDonald
Written by Alice Birch
Starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal
As I see more deranged reads than mine, in my head I keep comparing Normal People to Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir. Which might be unfair. Normal People as the book and as the television show—without realizing it the ideal manga to anime production turnaround—already eclipses the movie The New York Film Critics Circle, The British Film Institute, and the circles that wrap around them begged an audience to see and shrug at. But the responses and how they happen is very much in the same sphere. The Souvenir maybe the ideal “deeply felt” romance about always better-off people where their tragedies come off more cosmic in the effort of hiding the economics that these critics in their criticism didn’t notice.
A film exploding out of a bottled kineticism of young people in the 80’s in presence and in conversations naturally appearing rebellious and wanting to unearth the world murmuring around them. Evoking the PAL grain of speckling white walls, how they shine under and across the veils of yellow light bulbs, and how the night sky domes into a flatter tone from the contrast, the work genuinely fogs and fades in like memory. The recreation going further as a lost shard of art from the period. An energy it drifts away from as the Martin Amis impersonator comes to life as he shambles from couch to couch at the party and somehow woos a young artist with the most boring thoughts on Powell and Pressburger one can conjure to impress girls with (?). Not only going into narrative but retreating into conservatism as it closes off into a baroque existence of echoing stale posturing. Trying to be wrought drama and slow cinema in the switch off. The wanderings that goes on with the gaze when holding on to the image but with the fallacy of always thinking “what the fuck is the appeal of this dink?” Where so much of what’s agonizing hides in the impenetrable thinking it’s indescribable. Observing a Graduate Film program that wouldn’t be possible without panic attacks and a sudden trip to Venice is always in the budget. Having to read a New Yorker profile like a Pizza Hut tie-in promotion to maybe get a grasp of what else this man did to deserve being complicated like how you read about why C3P0 has a red arm now. The personable project made to be insular as it guarantees what’s uncovered in the reflection of a past will still signify the artist and the viewer will always be strangers in the endeavour. The engraving of the sad face looking into the camera at the last seconds of the film as the appeal towards an audience that spent five minutes watching these two people do dishes. Where that peering back notes how ornate the thing seen is but also wants to always be pristine even when it understands it as an object unraveling very human failings. I’m on the verge of being more negative but I don’t really understand the need or want to make art when these are the limits and the pain of it has to be felt instead of sealed like air conditioning in a gallery. It wants to be in a museum immediately.
Normal People is a similar object in appearance and given the same privileges. The conversation The New Yorker cages in, the swarm of blurbs it collects, the cover you see once on the subway but start seeing twice but then never see again. The commerce promising the experience of White Elephant Art you can fit in a cool bookstore tote for a day at the beach. Having a nice time even in overcast as you read a line in the shape and metre of “She was his Mongoose as she darted nakedly around their bed” as the waves brush under the wind and a single seagull screams.
I guess that’s what romance is like sometimes.
Also similar objects in that for some reason I gravitated towards them even when my appearance suggests otherwise. It’s the Connell in me but all the Connells I’ve known had motorcycle licenses before they learned how to drive a car when I can’t do either and probably more glaring they were handsome while I look like a Mr. Men Man. Seeing The Souvenir on my 30th Birthday for some reason. Watching Normal People now. Nowhere closer to really getting into Gundam than I was in the year and pennies between them. Berserk an even further possibility** as I wait to get Covid 19 in line for The Souvenir Part 2. But for the grievances I’ve had with the former I’ve noticed that the latter smuggles a critique in these high gravity romances that of course is loosening screws in the same people that would and could call The Souvenir “deeply felt.”
The eighth episode maybe the closest it’s gotten to really establishing the politics or the leanings that are read in the margins (at least as television). A retreat to the Italian countryside that’s a total recreation of the landscape in Call Me By Your Name. That one long road you bike to get to town. That pedestrian roundabout fountain you can sit under. The country villa that’s shot in side scroll or rooms looking more like pockets as they’re shot from the outside as sunlight widens the exterior. It’s intentional—again TV doesn’t really offer new visual ideas the same way as film does—but it’s also aesthetical tourism. Not a takedown but in using that space again it's not lazy but guilty. Connell and Marianne talking under the fountain about how his backpacking trip across Europe wouldn’t be possible without the scholarship he feels a little bit uncomfortable in accepting even though Marianne assures him he deserved it. They talk about what “deserving” it might mean and how so many students don’t get those opportunities despite working just as hard. They bring up Marianne’s scholarship she “earned” but doesn’t exactly need (the country house is her family’s). They talk about how they only really got to know each other because Connell’s mom works for Marianne’s family as a maid and that’s always going to be the fault bringing them together and dividing them. Sitting on the set of another film discussing the tenets of society these stories have to ignore to be romantic but form the tensions of this romance as it happens in blips.
The Post-Modernism of Normal People never promises to be fun. Another Dead-Sun Drama sans this episode that’s only structurally radical in the run time it takes from modern sitcoms already devoid of joke-writing and only radical if pleading ignorance to established short dramas such as Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team and Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War In The Pocket. But like Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite, re-representation doesn’t appear as dissemblance but assembly. Propelled by influences and understanding how convention is rhythmically enticing, the work is offering the conception of fiction as the appealing force to brazenly display practical concerns the viewer ideally enters to avoid. Maybe finding fault in doing the flimsier in-your-face Brechtian maneuverer and how that’s co-opted by ill sources faster than the disarmament of social problems or how these techniques start appearing in centrist art. What this kind of art does instead is smuggle in the shells of already prestigious forms and recognizable genre. What people ideally think good film and good TV is going in and coming out—one can be more boring than the other—in order to present subversive material without subversion and dwell in already co-opted spaces maybe as a way to take them back.
The tense dinner at the villa and the back and forth between Connell, Marianne, and Jaime (Blazes Boylan’s heir to the title of Worst Man in Dublin***) doesn’t have subtext. The viewer already understands the architecture of a scene like this and the markers it crafts (Marianne going to the kitchen, how wine spills on the table) and instead of hiding under language and pleasantries taken the other way and meant to divert what is actually being said, the conversation represents the tension more core than the sexual situation. Connell talking about going on trains to experience culture while Jaime (the shithead) is disgusted by the idea of sharing space with other and poorer people. Jaime congratulating Connell on the scholarship so “he didn’t have to work in his mum’s garage all summer.” Connell talking about going to Venice to see art he now has the privilege of seeing up close and “getting a lot out of it” as he looks back at Jaime. Marianne recommending Connell see Duchamp’s “Sad Young Man in a Train”(not subtle in any direction), and Jaime condemning the very idea of Venice as it seems less pristine and less “Italian” and more “Asian” as he casually dips into xenophobia seeing his girlfriend sit across her ex and smiling. The scene is less about unraveling the dormant attitude and more about expounding what always resides. The accessibility of culture yearned for and the higher classes seeing only the status art conjures rather the deeper meaning they don’t comprehend but keep away to those who try expressed easily because of how intolerable a character like Jaime is as a Baxter.
None of this comes across as particularly magical but the concept of “Venice” talked about and thought of pulled me back. I think about The Souvenir again. Understanding the tragedy that sits at the end of it but never going to comprehend—through experience and what I’ll always earn in a year—the flourishes that come with a relationship like that one. The ellipsis of a jump cut not only covering up the anguish felt but also the mode of transportation for a surprise trip to Venice for these two people one of whom is a grad student. Figuring out there is a disconnect but happening right after the apartment was broken into, knowing this is a grand gesture but the appearance and energy still uniformly dulling as the canals are a darker blue in (again) overcast, never going to see the appeal of this guy who always acts like an uncomfortable chair. In the theatre alone on my 30th birthday realizing a second prank was pulled.
In hindsight I should’ve taken the hints as critics I normally can’t stand brought out poems to epigraph their review that spends too much time paraphrasing a Wikipedia article on a painting. But maybe I’m just a boob. Maybe I just have to realize the commerce a movie like this has in the entertainment news cycle—The Farewell was better but it was another one of these—and how the critic can make their work more essential when asking direct questions in the interview promoting the ambiguous but semi-non-fiction art. Maybe I just have to soften a little bit and try to forget I heard one of these critics say “[Then] Prince Harry has done more good in the world than I ever will” and highlight their Spanish vacation in the show-notes of their podcast but offer no semblance of an interesting story. Maybe I should give them a little slack even though one of them was really excited Jeff Bezos showed up to their Oscar after-party. Sure as I’m thinking of more examples I’m remembering all of these people complaining about having to go to Cannes and Venice (the one in the movie) for their job of seeing films before other people. How they all became their Republican parents in reaction to a killer clown film that wasn’t good but got them nervous as they scuttled around going “I appreciate the art of the filmmaking but I’m worried this clown is under my bed.” But maybe that’s on me for not being cultured enough. Maybe I’m slightly sinking like Venice every day for other reasons I’m not aware.
Normal People—which I’m still talking about—isn’t as evil as I want it to be but in offering simple semblances of relatability it feels a lot more venomous towards the culture that thinks it’s prestigious. The trinket in the conversation that’s more of an annotated mention. The TV recap that covers what’s clearly there but not what’s clearly being touched upon. The maybe/very imperial veneer of British art somehow still incredibly attractive to these Americans who gentrify every step they take as they fetishize slang like “uni” without realizing how in shambles the world is for young people. Either letting the concepts of tuition being inhumane and wanting art to always be accessible—not dumbed down or “consumed” but seen and embraced—wash over them or make them rabid. The latter seeing it as a generational entitlement that’s not worked for but where that critique comes with the fallacy of labour always being cyclical in a way that punishes a promise of something better. Coming from a figure at first idolized that now has the luxury to sully the good will their art gave them to this generation they found power in. The former seeing just hot people looking at each other and maybe taking off their clothes once per-episode, finishing this show in a weekend, and then going over to the next one.
As I try to attempt or try to figure out the steps in which to find deeper solidarity with the world I want to fight for and be apart of even when a lot of times it feels like the sphere that comes up around me isolates and makes me feel lonelier, art like The Souvenir—as academically insular as it is—doesn’t confine me with a hope as I have to do the gymnastics of a story that follows so much of the tack of Common People. As a young person getting older and a person who could express themselves creatively I at least find some of that solidarity I want symbolically through a contemporary piece of art like Normal People. Coming across a television show that I didn’t expect to relate to in less embarrassing other ways as I see the motions of a past self that was miserable but where so much of the politics I hold come from the experience of school as it was taught and in the atmosphere. Seeing that in the art of a stranger from across an ocean. Instead of being sealed off it wants to be shared. Understanding what a museum is actually for.
Next Time: First Cow, Coda, and Hail Mary.
Coming Soon: Normal People Episode 9, Hopefully more space to talk about how shitty Jaime is, and how I discovered BDSM in 1975 while trying to develop a kind of stretchable shoe rubber that was more waterproof.
The End Notes
*On an A24 Podcast, Martin Scorsese says initially that he didn’t like the Joanna Hogg movie he saw randomly on television but he kept thinking about it and from that he found something there and I’m maybe not as forgiving but I’m also noting a movie I saw last year pretty clearly still. It didn’t wipe away.
**The Newsletter would be like the face of God—not the Berserk God— in your junk folder if I was watching Berserk but like a lot of “romance” I don’t know what I want and what makes me happy!!!
***This is maybe the worst reference made here but as someone who read Ulysses I have to confirm he’s worse.
Souvenir Gif by https://blytthe.tumblr.com/post/188154993019/youre-lost-and-youll-always-be-lost-the