Normal People
Episode 9 and 10 watched
An image of Episode 9 talked about vaguely
Directed By Hettie MacDonald
Written by Alice Birch
Based on the novel by Sally Rooney
Starring Paul Mescal, Daisy Edgar-Jones
First off I’m not sure how people—the real “normal” people—were able to binge this show of weird lengths and dejecting structures that mess with tone to degrees where it is incomprehensible as a serial object. Also the one two punch of episodes like these two where they’re spotlight shows but covering different ways these two people hate themselves. The show is very effective but part of the designs as a seemingly streamlined drama without a lot of fat is the gravity has to be put on what you’re feeling during and after it and getting away from the illusion that it is a chronological story but not going to be a satisfied narrative. Supported by a new kind of television watching but watched like these other shows that waste time, people construct as the exact opposite of a 5K run over the weekend, forget about on Wednesday if not Tuesday, are the greatest but shift to “problematic” and “Baby Eating is not Ok” articles by next Friday. There is an actual effort to make this memorable and still orchestrate the octaves of normal television and reach the highs of anime. But you hear about Gwyneth Paltrow binge-watching Evangelion and either go “how?” or wonder if those eggs she puts in actually does make her well-being indestructible. I already know what I’m doing wrong but what else am I doing wrong? Look the only results I get keep breaking the computer.
Second, the switch off from Lenny Abrahamson to Hettie MacDonald elevates the show tremendously. I haven’t seen Room but I feel like so much of what nagged in the first half was the nice looking but still boring visual grammar that’s not that different from other BBC Dramas (and BBC Dramas were the first TV shows to discover they could be pretty and dumb after being smart and ugly). Still deep focus close ups in front of flat but beautiful landscapes that you see in Countryside Murder shows but without the idea your imagination conjures where you think “why don’t they just dump bodies in one of those endless mounds on the horizon?” Pretty but without a style to notice as it is another program adoring the prediction of more overcast. Either surveillance or interrogation in how the camera operates on subjects. Connell’s first semester at Trinity giving an actual edge as it presents goings-on clearly and makes thirty minutes feel longer and a lull but those choices not coming towards a decision. So much of what it is in the beginning is lingering on a kind of authorless gaze even when things like Connell’s apology to Marianne can’t help popping out a vein. So much of the techniques taken from slow cinema feel like covers when a dourer British drama employs them because it wants a colder temperature while still trying to be operas without music. And even with music they still decide on a tamer Carly Rae Jepsen song instead of anything fun*.
The clear Call Me By Your Name riff in episode 8 notwithstanding, Hettie MacDonald and Alice Birch** introduce a scope late in the game that’s beneficial to what’s really happening other than perpetuating the mythology of a young adult romance taken in a vacuum or basking in the sorrows of really hot people being in love (?). Already working as a retrospective—how you always have to think back on the show and how you relate to it having to bend back your own history as if that’s mythology—but now having to be more forward. A narrative of given legacy and context and how those functions fragment as the promise of stability becomes vaguer holistically for a generation. Digging up tradition and watching it break apart in the hand. Connell’s class in place but weirdly void minus the actual anxiety. Marianne having agency and privilege and choosing to be treated worse. As writing, Anti-Joycean in terms of Joyce’s approach—instead of the mass detail of a single day it’s years feeling shorter than hours—but still exploding the Victorian novel’s methods. Conscious of tack but locked in a relative contemporary idea where anything passed the period—in Normal People’s case ours or some years earlier—is odious or always going to be unknowable. Postmodern in the presentation and performance of the reference than re-staging and parody. As television, looking upon places like Dublin and Sweden—both seen one way but the former seen always as it is mapped out in Ulysses (unfilmable sans Back to School) or going off of that—with a haunted vibrancy. Hazel lit streetlights shining with too-bright white lights in a boutique clothing display. Aged modernism clashing with the unliveable sheen of nebulous luxury pitching the new thing. A city of a colossal stirring past receding and a future crisp and unmanageable to sustain or hope for as you’re standing in the shadows of it. Watching Connell and Helen—this short relationship we know is doomed as an unsatisfied mend—walk passed swinging their hands as they’re held.
At first recognizing the romance as limited by a certain developing standard but found if traveling into a coffee shop that’s probably out of business. The kind of sphere I had to commute to in order to see as it divides my natural walkthrough of a day as a lot tamer, more boring, and totally unattractive. Seeing how sex crafts synecdoche normally, time with other people funnel down into a sour or sweet summary for a friend who is listening, the stuff of operas muted in the acoustics of a lunch hour. A grand specific dictating a shared experience in the city and what it means when managing to live there. Always a satellite to it as I take a long way to write and read and get away from a person I shrugged my way into being (or did and now…) at home or around even when I’m a contemporary to the same ilk of a feeling. Can’t help overhearing the pluses and minuses of a Wiccan relationship while catching up on One Punch Man always the better alternative than having to hear about a 90 year old who died from being the example of the new routine you want to try to make your life healthier like running and taking a shower in the morning. As much as I feel divorced from that hipper quadrant of living—and maybe I’m always going to be somewhat removed—there comes a wave of how people want to stabilize even when they live in pulled-apart fractions I understand and also yearn for as I also live in that process.
Normal People is recognizable and that dated kind of universality still finds itself in the specific to work with but so much of what you’re watching is fragmentary. Connell and Marianne and the people they go out with when not together are the only signifiers of a relationship. The images of parents are mostly singular as it offers Connell’s single mom and Marianne’s widowed mother and Helen’s funny dad. The only other couple being the parents of Connell’s date to the Debs that casually encourage Connell’s future he dreads thinking about. A relationship as an idea then comes across more ghostly when thinking of the other person. What that person means in memory or the dream. How their connotation gains something larger in absence. Not built up to annihilate in a gothic way but hesitating at the prospect of fully taking in the known obsession unfettered. Revolutionary here in that both Connell and Marianne are privy and cloy with the notion of knowing but not going further and both spectres in each other’s company.
But if sexual attitudes have relaxed to the point where while I’m at the coffee shop reading chapter 45 of 989 of One Piece the barista starts making out with a woman not even an 30 cm ruler away from me on the bench and brags about being on a podcast soon what exactly is the agony there instead of here? I at least know that coffee place went out of business. The faults have to come from elsewhere in the fiction if looking towards this as contemporary and anxious. Massaging the familiar and classically Victorian modes of romance is either reframing a kind of conservative value or it is taking those Victorian (and we can expand it to Modernism) concerns as relevant in the mire of present-day experience and the stasis it promotes abundantly. How that kind of countenance has come back to re-contextualize how societal appearance refreshes virtually and in that strive for stability given witness to a dangerous conformity in the shape of trying to be moderate or trying to dull yourself into a semblance of the status quo. Rejecting what’s already wanted as a means to make misery serial. Not totally practical but lived with. Not completely alienated in fiction when I know the deal. This could be a Trigun recap series and somehow isn’t.
I don’t know if Normal People is really accomplished in articulating these aspects of what we have but in the constant barrage dealt what else have we been feeling right now? Clear moral problems and the passions that come with fighting them have meant still coming down in the middle as if we still have to contend with ambiguity. As if we still have to be safe and keep up an appearance when the people and objects that structurally demean are part of the paralysis. Having to expect a better world through compromise that negates promise and being at the point generations coming up still have to crave movement in order to survive. How can encouragement be a function when this is the case? What does art mean if values can be wagered down? What’s the point of re-instilling this mythology of young love when offering a handful of dust as a dowry? Never mind wondering how people can watch this over the weekend.
-Sasha Makarewicz August 2020
Next Up: Happy-Go-Lucky, Kes, and The Long Day Closes
The End Notes!
*Make a patch. Put in “Stay Away”, fellas.
** Who you realize is the writer of the scene that made Florence Pugh a star in my eyes at least. The scene in Lady Macbeth where Pugh is trying to talk to the housemaid while someone is being murdered in the other room.