Okay so I just watched all 10 episodes. This show is so amazing, I don't know where to start. Love your comment that "the space you are allowed to take in the world can never outweigh the amount of pleasure your existence brings men." I'm gonna read the writeups and then comment more <3.
Okay omg, LOVE that Shapiro is a lesbian! But that's neither here nor there. Okay, random observations: haha, I love watching Rachel justify her life when she's thinking about 1) "helping" Faith come out, and 2) making the terrible decision about inviting the special guest on the family date episode :(. Man, that shit got so real. Which leads me to my main observation, which is about how this show fits into the broader Lifetime oeuvre. I noticed on the writeups that there was some talk about how this show represents Lifetime's step away from its trashy past and into a new future of premium cable peers. But here is the thing, I am a lifelong Lifetime fan, and I see this as fitting in quite nicely. It is a women-authored, women-centered kind of dark storytelling, which spans horror, comedy, and drama. I love that the show includes jokes about miscarriage, super creepy "I love you"s (you know the one I mean, at the end of ep 10), and oh, the "come with me." Moments like that touch what is, as far as I'm concerned, a feminist
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So glad to get your thoughts about this show. Pretty much everyone I've read about it (and there has been so much good writing) has focused on the reality TV satire angle, which while interesting strikes me as probably the least fruitful approach to take with the show - we don't need ten hours of television to figure out that reality TV is exploitative and fake. Your take on the intersection of women's experiences and mental health issues strikes me as much more productive, especially with the end of the season teasing a greater role for Rachel's mother and her need to pathologize her daughter in S2
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I think that to begin with the show definitely wants us to see him as "a safety school boyfriednd," while Rachel sees him as an epitome of goodness that her complicity in the show puts beyond her reach. But I don't think he's either of these things. He isn't good - look at the way he mistreats Lizzy, or that fantastically cruel, entitled display he puts on in the season finale - but he also isn't boring.
Oh, totally, and I think the nastiness of the character was set up pretty well in retrospect. But Rachel has cast him in the role of "nice dependable guy who will take me away from all this."
You didn't mention his abandonment of Rachel, but of course that comes from the same place - he romanticizes her, and when he finds out from Quinn that she might not be his savior, he drops her immediately. Oooh, yes. And specifically, the way Quinn uses mental illness stigma to get between Rachel and Adam works very well: once she's been institutionalized, then she's no fun as his Manic Pixie Dream Girl any more: it's too crazy, too real. And
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I hated Jeremy the most too! Word on your thoughts. The kicker was the "I'm going to make sure that you can't hurt anyone else again!" declaration, as he shamed Rachel in public. Like, he's the police of cheating and if he is, he omitted some details about him and Lizzy in his Big Speech in front of the crew to ensure that *he* can't hurt anyone else again. Jeremy didn't think Rachel was too crazy to stop him from embarking on a relationship. However once he found out that she cheated on him, suddenly, Rachel was so crazy that he had to go running to Rachel's momma/Rachel's controlling shrink in one package because Rachel suddenly became a "danger to society" in just one cliched move of two-timing as opposed to what Jeremy actually sees Rachel do day-in-and-day-out
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Yes, Jeremy's failure to mention Lizzy in his big "I won't let you hurt anyone else" speech was particularly glaring. I go back and forth about whether I want Lizzy to be on the show next season, because on the one hand she does have that perspective on Jeremy and might even ally herself with Rachel because of it, but on the other hand this show doesn't have much faith in female solidarity, and given her behavior in S1 I don't think it's impossible that Lizzy will pin the blame for Jeremy's behavior on Rachel.
how much moral blame should you lay at a person if you also feel they're mentally unwell and need a shrink
I agree that that's an interesting question (and relevant to several shows I'm watching and thinking about). As you say, it's not as if Rachel is mentally ill in the sense that she can be diagnosed as having X, but she's certainly not emotionally healthy and you're right that that's much more a matter of circumstance than of her own personality. As the original post notes, at the heart of UnREAL is the question of how
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THIS. Like, that HUGE AND YAWNING GAP, and direct conflict, between "knowing" and FEELING is so crucial but so easy to forget, and I love that it's an explicitly foregrounded aspect of the narrative on this show.
It's just, like. Mind-blowingly on-point. Everlasting consciously constructs this id-based appeal, to the things the audience feels instead of what it knows. But even though the producers - Rachel and Quinn more than anyone - know this, hold it in conscious contempt, they're still susceptible to it.
It's forbidden for a woman to be openly ~active in the game, at the very least she has to make others buy into her passivity.
I LOVE that the show did this. I mean, it's fucking Biblical, right - she who knows the truth, gets the boot.
(it's interesting that one of mainstream fandom's biggest complaints about BtVS is the Slayer backstory, because fandom itself is always more comfortable with One Girl In All The World, The Chosen One who had her special fate forced on her by the patriarchy, than women genuinely actively
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The power Rachel and Quinn have over their show is a harsh microcosm of how “empowerment” can be glossy and circumscribed. In a lot of ways, Rachel and especially Quinn are themselves Representation™, as ostensibly high-powered female producers. But they’re limited from both above and below. Quinn has to hold the show hostage during the finale in order to have execs treat her with the same respect they unquestioningly show Chett, who only is where he is because he steals Quinn’s ideas and undermines her confidence.Moreover, both Quinn and Rachel have this powerful, series-defining bond where Quinn mentors/mothers Rachel and Rachel "looks up to" Quinn- but in a lot of ways, they both look around for a man to define their place in the world. In the series finale, they exchange "love yous" as they sip champagne and survey the world that they "control". However, Rachel got to that place because both of her boyfriend escape hatches dumped her, foiling her attempts to stick up her middle
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I feel in some ways like it's the no-muggleborn-Slytherin kind of thing? People who have good power player instincts are going to be better at stacking the odds for themselves. You know? A savvy, ambitious kid isn't going to want to have to status-jockey with a bunch of rich, racist roommates, so they're going to ask to be sent elsewhere. Women like Rachel and Quinn, who are especially good at understanding how people operate and seem like they should be more equipped to climb the ladder independently, understand far better than most people how much of an asset male approval is and how much of a liability it is to try and live without it, so they're going to be that much more invested in impressing men like Chett and Adam. If anything, Rachel's academic understanding of The Patriarchy exacerbates this tendency, because she's that much more aware of how fucked she is if she doesn't get their approval.
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Oh, totally, and I think the nastiness of the character was set up pretty well in retrospect. But Rachel has cast him in the role of "nice dependable guy who will take me away from all this."
You didn't mention his abandonment of Rachel, but of course that comes from the same place - he romanticizes her, and when he finds out from Quinn that she might not be his savior, he drops her immediately. Oooh, yes. And specifically, the way Quinn uses mental illness stigma to get between Rachel and Adam works very well: once she's been institutionalized, then she's no fun as his Manic Pixie Dream Girl any more: it's too crazy, too real. And ( ... )
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how much moral blame should you lay at a person if you also feel they're mentally unwell and need a shrink
I agree that that's an interesting question (and relevant to several shows I'm watching and thinking about). As you say, it's not as if Rachel is mentally ill in the sense that she can be diagnosed as having X, but she's certainly not emotionally healthy and you're right that that's much more a matter of circumstance than of her own personality. As the original post notes, at the heart of UnREAL is the question of how ( ... )
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It's just, like. Mind-blowingly on-point. Everlasting consciously constructs this id-based appeal, to the things the audience feels instead of what it knows. But even though the producers - Rachel and Quinn more than anyone - know this, hold it in conscious contempt, they're still susceptible to it.
It's forbidden for a woman to be openly ~active in the game, at the very least she has to make others buy into her passivity.
I LOVE that the show did this. I mean, it's fucking Biblical, right - she who knows the truth, gets the boot.
(it's interesting that one of mainstream fandom's biggest complaints about BtVS is the Slayer backstory, because fandom itself is always more comfortable with One Girl In All The World, The Chosen One who had her special fate forced on her by the patriarchy, than women genuinely actively ( ... )
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The power Rachel and Quinn have over their show is a harsh microcosm of how “empowerment” can be glossy and circumscribed. In a lot of ways, Rachel and especially Quinn are themselves Representation™, as ostensibly high-powered female producers. But they’re limited from both above and below. Quinn has to hold the show hostage during the finale in order to have execs treat her with the same respect they unquestioningly show Chett, who only is where he is because he steals Quinn’s ideas and undermines her confidence.Moreover, both Quinn and Rachel have this powerful, series-defining bond where Quinn mentors/mothers Rachel and Rachel "looks up to" Quinn- but in a lot of ways, they both look around for a man to define their place in the world. In the series finale, they exchange "love yous" as they sip champagne and survey the world that they "control". However, Rachel got to that place because both of her boyfriend escape hatches dumped her, foiling her attempts to stick up her middle ( ... )
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