oooh, i’ve been wanting to write this post for a WHILE now
five years ago, phoebe waller-bridge changed my life with her hit original show, Fleabag. and then in 2019, season 2 came out, and it was all the internet could talk about for MONTHS (that’s DECADES, in Twitter Standard Time)
if you haven’t watched it, Fleabag is a 2-season show about an unnamed 30-something woman with a wicked sense of humour and a heck of a lot of emotional baggage. season 1 is all about her attempts to cope with the trauma of losing her best friend with copious amounts of casual sex (amongst other things). and in season 2, she falls in love with a priest.
that’s about the best TLDR i can give!
having watched both seasons multiple times, i could write an essay just on what this show means to me. but this post isn’t about that
the thing is that season 2 of Fleabag was a Big Deal. like, a HUGE deal. the internet’s reaction to the six 30-minute episodes that made up this season was staggering. when i was in the middle of it i remember having thinking: there’s something here.
over the few months after season 2 came out, i found everyone gravitating towards a specific scene in the show, and rightly so. it’s a seminal scene in the 5th episode of the season, where Fleabag performs a “confession” to the Priest she’s in love with.
this is the scene i wanna talk about in this post.
for some context:
prior to this scene, Fleabag has been in a kind of downward spiral. she’s always found it difficult to relate to other people healthily, but when her best friend dies in a freak accident, she stops trying entirely. this means letting her relationship with her dad and sister fall to pieces, doing everything in her power to rebel against her step-mother, and having a lot of sex, even when she doesn’t particularly want to.
then she meets Priest (who, like Fleabag, remains unnamed). Priest is funny, thoughtful, and notices things about Fleabag that nobody else does. but the biggest thing about Priest that sets him apart from every other man in her life is that Priest can’t have sex with Fleabag.
so she has to befriend him instead.
predictably, the more time they spend together, the more Fleabag’s feelings for Priest grow, and this culminates in the Confession Scene, where Fleabag gets drunk and goes to Priest’s church, where Priest suggests that she perform an informal confession.
Fleabag begins her confession in her signature style of humour and callousness…
…but as Priest listens, Fleabag finds herself thinking about her dead best friend, and about how helpless and frightened that grief has made her feel, which brings us to this bit:
and that’s the bit, really, that hits the nail on the head. it’s the reason that Fleabag finds herself so drawn to Priest: because it’s pretty much his job to tell people what to do.
when season 2 of Fleabag was released, I was in the middle of dealing with a bad breakup.
it was a really difficult time for me. I felt extremely lonely all the time, and like nobody knew what I was going through. i also felt really stupid, like the breakup was my fault, and could have been avoided if i was just a little better at life than i really am. i hated a lot of things about my life then, and like for many others, Fleabag provided a valuable escape
because here was this woman whose life was also a mess. and she, too, was coping with it badly. in fact, season 1 of Fleabag wasn’t so dissimilar from many other shows about people just having a Bad Time Of It. like one of my favourite shows ever, Please Like Me, or some more popular shows like Breaking Bad, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and so on.
so obviously i was expecting nothing more from Season 2 of Fleabag, and the first few episodes were more or less at par with my expectations.
but episode 5 was different.
this scene was different… it said something different. Fleabag said something different.
before this, her general approach had always been: “well, everything is messed up and there’s no escaping it. you just fake it till you make it, take all the bits of life that give you pleasure and throw away everything else, and hope for the best.”
but now, she was saying: “there has to be something better. there is something better. that’s what you [Priest] have found: you found a way to give meaning to all this mess. I want that. I want what you’re having.”
this is what makes this particular scene in Fleabag so revolutionary, I think. because when she says “I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far, I’ve been getting it wrong”, what she’s acknowledging, and this is the most controversial thing you could acknowledge in today’s world, but what she’s acknowledging is that there is a right way to live your life.
i think a lot of the turmoil we face while being alive comes from the fact that we don’t know what to do.
i’ve seen two therapists in my life, both times after facing an unimaginable situation that made me feel absolutely lost and helpless. i went to therapy for answers, but i didn’t get any.
which is not to say that therapy doesn’t help. it did help, in some ways, to talk things through with a professional and identify my habitual ways of thinking that were causing me damage. but when it came to the point where we had to move beyond that, and give me a framework for facing situations like these in the future, all of the therapy answers fell short.
the essence of what my therapists told me was this: you can’t change the world, so about the best way to deal with every unimaginable situation is to believe in yourself.
which sounded like a great idea in theory.
but then i realised that i’m about as unreliable as any human being can get. i change my mind all the time, and things that make me happy today might stop bringing me joy next week.
neither can i find peace with myself, because i never have any idea what i’m doing. my brain is a 24/7 chaotic parade of passing whimsies, periodic obsessions, unrealistic fantasies, and surprise depressive episodes that sneak up on me when i least expect it.
and you can probably relate to most if not all of that because, let’s face it, when it comes to knowing what we’re about, we’re all pretty much the same.
and this isn’t just a personal struggle.
when it comes to thinking about anything, literally any aspect of the world, we run up against an unanswerable question: at the end of the day, what do we know, for certain? what is the truth?
before you roll your eyes, let me give you an example.
last year, i watched ‘The Social Dilemma’, a documentary that became extremely popular due to its coverage of the dangerous impact of social networking.
in this one part of the documentary, they talked about how social networks like YouTube and Twitter thrive off of radicalisation. which means that they want you to be radicalised by a certain ideology, be it the belief that the Earth is flat, or that man never went to the moon, or that Bush did 9/11 and climate change is a hoax. right now the biggest disseminator of conspiracy theories in the world is QAnon, and a bunch of Q followers tried to stage a coup in the USA Capitol on the 6th of January this year.
so this is kind of a big deal
people have been debating the use of social networks to spread false information for years now, but this conversation begins and ends with the Free Speech Debate. which presents the question: who’s to say what we can and cannot talk about? if you think my personal view is wrong, what’s stopping me from thinking your personal view is wrong?
it is for this reason that it is equally controversial when Twitter decides to suspend transphobic accounts, as when actual transgender people are suspended from the website. every side of the debate is loud and unflinching. the question is: who is right?
as ex-Google Design Ethicist, Tristin Harris, puts it:
and this, i think, is also the essence of Fleabag’s monologue.
she runs up against an issue that every nihilist must grapple with at some point. if everything is meaningless and we’re all cosmic ants butting up against each other with no real purpose, then why do anything at all? why make an effort? why live?
it can be a lonely way to think.
because, at the end of the day, we all want to live. we just wish someone, anyone, would tell us how to do life the right way.
when i was working on this post, i told my friend: i’m writing this thing for my newsletter but i can’t figure out what the point of it is. to which she said: if it’s for your newsletter, does it need to have a point?
so if you find this newsletter a bit pointless, that’s probably why :p
if you haven’t watched Fleabag yet, i bet this goes without saying, but i highly recommend it!
i hope everyone’s 2021 is going well!
until next time
krys
love this!