The Women We Love Fest, Day Two : In Which We Talk About Brittany and Kurt
So. One of my favorite things about Glee is the background friendships -- all those little moments when the kids are singing backup for one of Will's deeply awesome unfortunate 90s throwback numbers or just hanging out in the back room getting ready for a performance or maybe chilling in someone's basement doing the "Single Ladies" dance --
(I am going to get so much mileage out of this gif, you guys)
-- and one of the uber-examples of these sorts of quiet friendships is the Kurt/Brittany friendship.
Let's go back to "Single Ladies" for a second. What's interesting about that, to me, is that in the early episodes of Season One, there's a pretty stark division between the Cheerios and the other Glee club members. They're like this little red-and-white island in the sea of New Directions, only interacting with the rest of the group as directed by Sue. And yet, four episodes in, we've suddenly got Brittany hanging out in Kurt's basement with him and Tina like it ain't no thang. Obviously, from a Doylist perspective, this makes total sense -- Heather Morris was one of Beyonce's backup dancers; she taught the dance, so why not have her in the dance? But from the Watsonian perspective, taking it in the context of the show, it's a lot more interesting than that. Here is a Cheerio, hanging out with two total social outcasts for no better reason than -- it's Beyonce, they're dancing, it's fun. And she's doing it on video. Given the extreme social stratification of McKinley, this is social suicide. It makes absolutely no sense for her to do this.
But then, that's Brittany.
It wouldn't have been too surprising if this was one of those moments that was visited absolutely once and then never again. (How many times have we seen Brittany hanging out with Becky since "Wheels"?) But the Kurt/Brittany friendship (as well as the Tina/Brittany friendship, although that's mostly in Season Two, but still) turned out to have surprising legs. And I think it does some interesting things for both characters. They have adorable little moments in "The Rhodes Not Taken"
and during "Ride Wit Me" in "Throwdown"
but one of my favorites comes during "Bust a Move" in "Mash-up"
What I love about this is that up until this point, Kurt's been pretty stiff. To be honest, that's his natural state in a lot of these early group numbers -- he's so self-conscious and worried about his image (to be fair, for Season One Kurt, that's basically all he's got -- he doesn't have the friends to stick up for him or the success of the Glee club or anything else to fall back on; all he's got is his dignity, and he's very protective of it) that he can't jump around and let loose like everyone else. When Tina goes to him, he stays where he's seated; when Will tries to pull him in, he retreats to the corner of the risers. But when Brittany tries to engage with him, he engages back. It's playful. It's sweet. And it establishes that Kurt feels comfortable with Brittany. That he maybe even trusts her a little bit -- at the very least, he knows she won't think he's weird for fake-spanking her with a tambourine. Which is a good place to any friendship to start, I think.
I also think it's cool that Kurt is around for so many of Brittany's casual admissions of bisexuality. He's listening in on the conference call when she says she and Santana have had sex. He's in the choir room when she says she's made out with almost all the guys at McKinley and half the girls as well. For someone like Kurt, who's been pretending to be straight up until very recently, that's kind of huge. Obviously, it's not as big a deal for Brittany as it is for him (because to most teenage straight boys, lesbians are hot and gay men are terrifying), but I don't know. I think it's cool that Kurt has someone else at McKinley who is willing to be that open.
And it's probably a large part of what makes Brittany so nonchalant about Kurt being Capital G Gay, because she doesn't seem to care that much. (Especially since it doesn't wind up interrupting her makeout streak, in the end.)
(Which also makes me wonder about one of Glee's biggest unanswered questions -- how did Brittany wind up taking the breakup? NGL, I always felt a little bad for her about that; I kind of get the impression that most of the guys she made out with just weren't as nice to her as Kurt is. He held her hand in the hallway and everything! Poor Britt.)
But it's in season two where their friendship really shines. Out of everyone's reaction to Burt's heart attack in "Grilled Cheezus," Brittany's were the ones that actually restored my faith in these kids' friendships. She didn't invade the hospital room, she didn't try to coax him into going to church or anything. Admittedly, the book report thing was a little misguided, but at least she was trying to deal with the illness in a practical (for Brittany) way, rather than just giving it up to God (look, I'm an agnostic; I have issues with that episode). And then the card, you guys. The fucking card.
Kurt says it flat-out later in the episode: he believes in his dad, and in his dad's love. I just think that's such a marvelous thing for Brittany to reaffirm that for him, even if she doesn't know what she's doing. Everyone else is telling him that God loves him. Brittany's the one who says that his dad loves him. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing to do, and one of the many times that Brittany is smart in a way that most of her fellow gleeclubbers just aren't.
But it's the "Prom Queen" episode where Brittany shines the most, I think. Apart from the wonderful moment when she tells Santana to "Go back out there and be there for Kurt" (although not to downplay that, either, because oh my god someone needed to say that thank you Brittany thank you), her reactions are consistently spot-on. There's the moment where Kurt gets named as prom queen and she's just hanging her head in the background, the point where she's watching him run away with her hands pressed to her mouth like she's just horrified, and the much-needed moment when Figgins announces that it's time for Kurt to dance with the guy who's bullied him mercilessly for most of the year and Brittany appears to be the only one to realize that this is fucked up:
I feel like her friendship with Kurt (and her friendship/love for Santana, but we'll get into that later) shows how perceptive she's capable of being. She knows when to reach out to him. She knows what he needs to hear when he's upset. And she knows when he's in danger, and she worries about him. For a character who's often portrayed as being childlike to the point of creepitude, it's surprisingly mature behavior. And it makes for a wonderful friendship between the two of them.
One of the things that sort of blows my mind in the evolution of Kurt Hummel is how isolated he was when he started. He was up in the corner of the risers, tucked away and aloof from the others. And now he's right in the thick of things, and he's got all these great friends. And one of those friends is Brittany.
And I'm really, really glad that he's got her. Because I think she's exactly the kind of friend he needs.