Sally4ever and Russian Doll are cable series that both feature an alarming and charismatic heroine. The shows are both derivative in many respects, although, certainly, not predictable -- each veer off-track in an interesting way. Both shows rise or fall according to the viewer's perception of the central female character. In each case, the shows are produced by the woman who stars in the series.
Sally4ever (HBO) is a production of Julia Davis. Davis is a British actress known for her previous series, Camping -- that program was adapted by Lena Dunham into an HBO series with some success. The first episode of Sally4ever was compelling but so sadistically mean-spirited and nasty that I didn't take any pleasure in watching Davis torment her characters. The premise of the show is that Sally, a drone in an advertising firm, has endured an unsatisfying relationship with her simpering boyfriend for a number of years. Just as Sally's dissatisfaction with her boyfriend reaches its climax, he proposes to her and, of course, she accepts. The same night, Sally meets Emma in a bar -- Emma is beautiful and seems to be a free-spirit. Sally and Emma have sex and Sally is smitten. She abandons her pathetic fiancée and the two women decide to live together. Emma proposes marriage to Sally and, in fact, plans to have her inseminated so that the couple can have a baby. There is only one problem: Emma is completely insane, violent, and promiscuous. We learn this at the end of the first or second episode when Sally unintentionally does something that annoys her lover, Emma kicks her very hard in the shins. The male characters in the show are uniformly loathsome -- a "horn-dog" inveterate sexual harasser in Sally's workplace ends up getting drunk at an office party with an old man and, after all the women reject them, the two men sit in their befouled hotel room in their vomit-stained underpants morosely masturbating together. This is characteristic for the film's characters -- they are all vicious, backbiting, narcissistic, cruel, and cowardly. One woman uses a wheelchair to seduce her victims -- when a fire burns at the hotel where she is staying, she abandons the wheelchair and her phony disability, fleeing on foot. Sally's boss turns out to be a lesbian rapist and attacks Sally -- fortunately for Sally, she is deterred by diarrhea and projectile vomiting. In the third or fourth episode, the show veers into surrealistic obscenity -- the program contains several scenes that are far filthier than anything that I have seen in mainstream pornography. The effect is more emetic than titillating and, indeed, the last episode, wholly "over the top", is devoted almost entirely to aggressively detailed "poo" humor. Apparently, this sort of thing is popular -- the show was praised by both critics and audiences. I thought it was too wretchedly cruel and unrealistically critical of its characters (none of them seem to have any redeeming value at all;Sally, the heroine, is what the Brits would call a "dumb cow") to be watchable. And, yet, notwithstanding these criticisms, I faithfully watched all episodes of the show, transfixed with a gruesome fascination -- just how putrid and rotten are things going to get. Well, they get very rotten and putrid indeed. At the risk of seeming prudish, I should be clear: Sally4ever is well-made, the characters, although grotesque caricatures, are interesting, and the sexual perversion, pervasive to the show, is explicit -- there's no beating around the bush. I can't recommend the program because it is fundamentally dispiriting and dehumanizing -- it's worse than most porn in which, at least, the participants are pretending to have a good time.
It is tempting to overthink Russian Doll (Netflix). The show involves a 36-year old woman, a denizen of New York's Soho or Tribeca or East Village scene, who is trapped in some kind of time loop. The premise is a macabre variant on the old Bill Murray movie, Groundhog Day. At a party in a spectacular apartment (it's a Gothic-looking space in an old Yeshiva), the heroine, Nadia, leaves, much to the distress of her Gay hostess. (It's Nadia's birthday party.) On the street, searching for her cat Oatmeal, she gets hit by a cab and killed. Suddenly, she's alive again at the party, always in the same peculiar bathroom -- it has a gothic pointed door with a gun as its handle and a strange crystal nebula of light on the door panel. She tries to leave the party again, falls down the steps, and is killed. All told, she dies about six times in the first episode, always reviving in the toilet at her birthday party -- sometimes, she drowns or gets hurled under oncoming subway trains or is crushed by falling objects. (Of course, she keeps encountering the same people -- an ex-boyfriend, her one-night stand from the party, a homeless man in the park. In one touching scene, she tries to help the homeless man, who cuts her lavish, frizzy hair, and, then, freezes to death with him sleeping on the street.) Each death yields resurrection in the toilet at the party where she encounters various guests and tries to make corrections in the scene in an attempt to avoid her demise -- none of the resurrections is exactly the same as the preceding one and, gradually, the heroine discovers that she can exercise some agency, she can make some changes, although, it seems, impossible for her to avoid death and an immediate revival at the birthday party. At the end of the third episode, Nadia encounters another man in an elevator torn free from its tether and falling down the shaft -- the man, a handsome athletic black dude, is strangely unafraid and he tells Nadia that he has also died many times. Together, Nadia and the good-lucking Black man try to solve the mystery of the time loop in which they are trapped -- what have they done to deserve this? The show proposes various hypotheses -- Nadia is a computer programmer and we see first-person shooters in which the characters die and, then, revive to continue their quest. Is she trapped in computer program or is this some sort of punishment, a purgatory, for her sins? Some things change as the cycle of deaths and resurrections continue: fruit rots (or seems to rot -- it's interior remains fresh), flowers decay, characters begin to vanish until the party and the streets are eerily empty, and the principal characters begin to physically disintegrate: they start bleeding and hemorrhaging. None of this is satisfactorily explained and the ending to the first 8 episodes, although cautiously uplifting, is enigmatic. (Spoilers now follow: skip the rest of this paragraph and go to the next if you don't like spoilers.) The last episode is called "Ariadne" and this suggests a labyrinth in which there may be a minotaur. The minotaur actually appears as "Horse", the homeless man -- some explicators say that "Horse" dons a "deer's head" at the end : this is wrong -- it's a bull's head and the bull-man hybrid, of course, is the minotaur in the center of the maze. Nietzsche called Cosima Wagner "Ariadne" in his last insane letters to her and, of course, his "deepest" idea was the concept of "the eternal return of the same". Something like "the eternal return of the same" -- that is, willing one's life to repeat even with all of its pain and tragedy and, in fact, willing it to repeat exactly and in all details was a concept crucial to Nietzsche's metaphysics and ethics. But Russian Doll doesn't really follow this model -- I don't know what the minotaur in the maze of time-loops means: the show ends with a sort of triumphal parade of Gigantes, that is, figures wearing huge paper-mache heads, who seem to represent the various archetypes of the people who appear in the show. But it's not clear at all how we are supposed to interpret the parade led by the minotaur, a character who has morphed from being pathetic to sinister. The real model for the show, I think, is Freud's notion of the Death Instinct, that is, the compulsion to repeat. In fact, the show's solution, to the extent anything is resolved, is disappointingly trivial -- Nadia has suffered a terrible childhood trauma and the repetition seems therapeutic, it's a way for her to control the experience. When she was a child, she was helpless but, now, it seems that by a course of repetitively re-imagining the same situation again and again she is led backward through the maze to the source of her sufferings and alienation, her relationship with her schizophrenic and, ultimately, suicidal mother (played with terrifying intensity by Chloe Sevigny). The show is so clever, ingenious, and with such brilliant dialogue that it's a little disconcerting to find out that the whole thing may be a trope for therapy for PTSD. But in light of the cynicism that pervades TV today, Russian Doll is refreshingly upbeat and, even, didactic -- the show suggests that we redeem ourselves slowly, but surely, by doing good deeds to help others.
Russian Doll succeeds in large part due to Natasha Lyonne's performance as Nadia. Apparently, Lyonne has been around for many years -- she was a child actress back in 1996. She looks radically different in every part -- I don't know what this means, but I must have seen her in lots of shows and movies without noticing her. Here she is indelible and seems completely new and fresh in this role. Like a character in a video game, she always wears the same clothing and looks, in fact, like a figure you might find animated by your Nintendo play-station. She has huge kewpie doll eyes, a broad, pale face -- we have no sense for what her body looks like, because she is always swathed from head to toe in black. Yet, she is fantastically sexy and alluring. There is a leering voyeuristic aspect to the dirty stuff in Sally4ever; by contrast, the perversity in Russian Doll is casual, incidental to the plot, and never in the foreground. In one scene, Natasha wakes up on a couch next to a pile of people passed out on the floor -- some of the people are naked, others wear bondage gear and strap-on dildos although oriented at curious angles. A woman lying on the heap of corpse-like orgy participants wakes up, blinks, looks around her and says: "I don't remember this but it looks like something ...wonderful...happened here last night." Nadia picks up a man at the party for sex only -- she knows the guy is no good but that doesn't bother her: she is casually hedonistic. Everyone uses drugs all the time and chain smokes. Smoking now on film seems more of a perversion than coprophilia. (And there's a touching scene in which an old widower whose wife died of cancer reprimands Nadia for smoking and she points out that the quantum universe contains many worlds in which smoking isn't bad at all.) Nadia and all the characters seem polymorphously perverse -- everyone seeks pleasure unashamedly. But most of all Nadia is highly intelligent -- she plays the part a little bit like an elderly Jew: sometimes, she seems to channel Rhoda Morgenstern from the old Mary Tyler Moore show. And Lyonne has a great voice, a whiskey-rasp, deep and husky and seductive all at the same time. Although Russian Doll is very clever, the best thing in the show is Natasha Lyonne.
Fascinating, will have to check these series out.
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