(July 2021) – By Jada Sirkin

Spoiler alert: if you haven't seen the series (both seasons!), I forbid you to read this article.

There is no one right way to do know or pay attention. No single method of watching a film, any more than there is a best way to make one. There are many ways. Every work of art embodies its own unique special ways of knowing. Every work asks us to approach it in its own way, and teaches us how to understand it. Like a person.
Ray Carney

Fleabag is a two-season miniseries ( premiered in 2016 and 2019), written by and starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge, based on a monologue she created for the theater. While it took me more than half of the first season to get into the texture of the series, when I finally did I got immersed and, in season 2, found ecstasy. The climax of my Fleabag #1 experience (the first time I watched it) was the scene of her with the priest: they are sitting on the bench behind the church, she looks at us viewers and he asks her what are you doing? Then a fox appears —or so he thinks. I burst with emotion, but an aesthetic emotion. I couldn't believe the genius, the subtlety, the intelligence, the sensitivity and the love involved in having taken the game/device that structures the series (the protagonist looks and talks to the camera) to that place, where another character from inside the fiction confronts her with what could be thought of as her way of escaping —or controlling the meaning of what she is living.

Once I was inside, I wondered why I had a hard time getting into the texture of the series. I would say this: I struggled with the sharp comedy, I struggled with "intelligence," I struggled with something that sounded, on a first reading, like cynicism. I find that, when comedies declare themselves as such, I rebel; when the scripts are too clever, I distrust; and when opinion becomes cynical, I get bored. I was delighted to fail with my system of prejudice. We have the habit of relating to works of art (especially audiovisual ones) as if they were objects for quick consumption —following the quote at the beginning, let's say that we relate to works as we do to known, familiar people whom we always treat in the same way-because we think we know them. I could make a long list of works of art (and people) that at the beginning I rejected and later I ended up loving.

As Ray Carney suggests in his article on Woody Allen, comedy can be used to judge and run away from the complexity of situations. I agree that many comedic moves are used to simplify experience, to make it readable and tame, to create complicity with the viewer at the cost of trivializing and losing subtlety, to control and not take risks. My hypothesis is that comedy, in Fleabag, perhaps unlike that insistent narrative/explanatory gesture of the protagonist, does not function as an attempt to escape from what we could call complexity —sensitivity or subtlety. Here, complicity with the spectator is a clumsy attempt that, by becoming explicit (the protagonist looks at us and talks to us so that we join her), ends up being part of the fiction. We, the spectators, are forced to enter the fiction; but, at the same time, we remain spectators: we cannot live your life, we should tell the heroine. In this narrative tension (between the attempt to make us participate and the ultimate impossibility for us to participate) rests much of the effect of the series. As our participation is only superficial, the narrative device that structures the fiction is recognized as a symptom of the character. Why is Fleabag continually interrupting situations to look at the camera and give her opinion on what is happening, explain what has happened and even anticipate what will happen next? When the flow of fiction is not interrupted (stopped) by these openings of the character who becomes narrator, she, swiftly, manages to introduce her message in the brief time lapse between one gesture and another —she needs to do it, she cannot avoid the commentary, as if narrating were her way of breathing (perhaps, of being safe).

The point is that, to our lead character, intelligence (that kind of intelligence, shrewd, narrative, witty, controlling) doesn't serve her so well. Now, if that intelligence is what makes her approach cynicism, I would say that she doesn't get there. By failing to build the shelter of cynicism, she remains halfway there, vulnerable, unprotected, tender. Her attempt at cynicism exposes her, fragile, tenderly pathetic. Her vision does not manage to become cynical: perhaps she would like to be so (cynicism protects us!), but she does not succeed. She is too tender to be cynical. She is too sensitive for her intelligence to manage to take her away from the body of her world. If she tries, if she tries to escape on the basis of shrewd and amusing opinions, what we can see in these attempts at escaping is that what she really wants most in the world is to make contact —to be there: to love, if you will; that is, to get dirty with life.

The very gesture of trying to look smart, clever and funny is what reveals her to be vulnerable, needy and broken. Fleabag knows all about what the situations mean, she knows what the others are thinking, she even knows what they are going to say and do, how each character is going to finish their sentence and how they are going to react; but it is precisely that knowledge what reveals her own obsessive needs. The way (the frequency) with which she devotes herself to explaining everything she already knows is obsessive. Hence, the viewer may wonder whether her suffering has to do with what is happening or with her need to narrate it and the consequent impossibility of living (let's say, fully) what is in fact happening. Fleabag gives her opinion. By giving her opinion, as it happens to all of us, she cuts herself off. By cutting herself off (by hiding in her world of ideas), the others resent her. She knows that she is part of a fiction and uses us to be able to give her opinion and thus put herself above the things that happen. In trying to regain the life she loses by storytelling, she screws up. Then, she laughs at herself to put herself back on top of the situations —to not suffer or to suffer a little less. As she confesses to us in episode 1.4, all she wants to do is cry —all the time! She knows that if she judges, it is because she does not cry; or, perhaps, if she does not cry, it is because she judges. Maybe (hypothesis), she doesn't cry because she wastes her time telling us her story.

Expressing her opinion and looking at us serves to keep her from being there, completely there, in her world. By opening herself to the camera and explaining, she closes herself off to part of her experience; thus, she makes the experience confusing, overwhelming and irritating. Why are others so irritated with her? Our protagonist acknowledges the circus she is part of —the point is that she doesn't know what to do with that acknowledgement. In order not to suffer, she jokes. In order not to suffer, she storytells. But storytelling is what makes her suffer. One has to choose, Sartre said in The nausea: to live or to tell. The dichotomy always sounded forced to me, but now it makes sense to me. In that sense, we, the viewers, serve Fleabag not to live —not to feel? That's why we can't entirely become part of his fiction. Our participation in her world is not healthy for her —and we know it. That tension, in the viewer, plays as a curious effect. We are, in a way, like the friend who supports, but at the same time knows that he or she is being the recipient of the repeated complaints of a character who is dramatizing. We want to join in, but we know it's no use. Our presence serves Fleabag (our friend?) to anesthetize herself with her escapist mechanisms. Perhaps the evasion is necessary, perhaps she is so sensitive that she needs to anesthetize herself with the telling (the fabrication) of her own story. For that reason, to help her survive her own sensitivity, we are here, supporting her, laughing with her. Although we know that it may not help, we join her, and we laugh, because we also understand (we know what it is to live), because we admit (life is complex and painful!) and because on some level we thank her for confessing on behalf of all —there is, perhaps in every central character, a certain christic quality: Fleabag suffers for us.

Her opinions highlight how much of a characterthe characters in this fiction are, how much of a character she is as a human being, how much of a character we all are. On some level, she exposes herself for everyone. When she confesses, God's messenger opens up to her body. At the end of episode 1.4, in the scene where she meets the man with whom she fought at the job interview (over a mix-up, over a fumble, over heat), now both in retreat, she, justified by the rule of silence at her retreat, does not speak. Moreover, she does not look at us. In that scene, as in the flashbacks, she does not look at us. Why? Perhaps she does not look at us because she has nothing to say —or because she cannot even speak to us (it is interesting that, while she, stereotypically a rebel, does not respect the silence of the retreat in which she is participating, in the encounter with this man she does choose to be silent). The music of the scene is different, a clearly emotional piano. Despite the obviousness of the relationship between the emotional music and what is spoken in the scene, one appreciates the pause in her more frenetic —more neurotic— mode? The rictus she has on her mouth during the scene is curious, as if by not speaking (by not controlling) she does not know what to do with her face, how to organize it. The only thing she will say in that scene, the only information for which she will break her silence, is: I want to cry all the time. And she doesn't say it to us, she says it to him. After that confession, he can no longer say anything; he copies her gesture (sealed lips), she repeats it one more time and so the scene can end.

Of course, even before she falls in love with the wrong person (a Catholic priest), she has enough reasons (or excuses) to suffer: her mother died recently, her father marries a bitch, her sister is a stone married to a dick and her best friend just died because her boyfriend had sex with.... the secret that is revealed at the end of the first season: with her! (The big screw-up). If all that builds a kind of story (the story of a guilt? The story of a possibility of self-punishment?), if all those characters weave together a causal line that escalates to the revelation at the end of season 1, the plot (I propose) doesn't end up being all that important either. I mean, the moments have such vitality, such spice, so many microtones, so much intelligence/sensitivity (from now on, inseparable) and performances are so excellent (Sian Clifford! Andrew Scott!) that we can say that the story is more of an excuse so that something of an order that transcends the narrative can take place —it's something that has to do with the very ontology of fiction and the way in which narrative determines our ways of living and suffering. It is something that has to do with tenderness, something that has to do with the human being, who is tender because he does not know how to live his life so full of stories. In the tension between control and surrender, the subtle and complex miracle of human behavior takes place.

Fleabag is a hypersensitivity trying to learn to live in a world of harshness and injustice. But these harshness and injustices, as we have been saying, seem more a product of his own interpretation of the facts than of the facts themselves. At times, it seems that this world has no place for his spicy playfulness. At times it seems that his spicy playfulness is a way of escaping his emotional storm. Either way, we have a human being in the flesh, making his life blow up. To survive, like Scheherazade, she narrates. She narrates in order to survive the intensity of what she is living. But perhaps what she needs, based on what we see in season 2, is to stop trying to survive —to stop narrating. Perhaps that intensity has to do not with what she is living but with her (narrative) attempt to not live it quite as much. Thus, intensity is thought of as resistance. The feeling of intensity comes from resisting living —intensity is what we experience when our systems perceive themselves incapable of processing life's information, and, because of that perception, try to over-control.

The hypothesis is: she does not narrate because she suffers, but she suffers because she narrates. Perhaps that is why, in order to rest, at the end she asks us to leave her alone. Linear ending? I like to interpret the ending more as a request for a momentary ceasefire (a rest) than as a farewell forever: if the gesture she makes in the last shot for us not to follow her means goodbye forever, we have to conclude that Fleabag has matured —thus the idea of growth is simplified and linearized; if the gesture means she only wants to rest, we have room to accept that growing processes are complex, more spiral than linear —she, though perhaps less, though perhaps more consciously, will continue to narrate, will continue to ask for our attention and our affection, will continue to resist life.

In season 2, the priest —and everything that happens with him, including Andrew Scott's precious performance— takes the series to another level. Of course, he is the only one who notices that she, at times, is distracted from the situation —these are the moments when, even though he doesn't understand what's going on, she looks at us and narrates. The first moment when, after one of those distractions/narrations, he asks her what happened, comes like a bolt of aesthetic magic. We are as shocked as she is. What might have seemed like a narrative device is, in one unexpected stroke, sucked inside the fiction. In the following episodes it happens a couple more times, he deepens the question: why are you distracted or abstracted? Where are you going? He looks where she looks, at us, tries to understand. She doesn't explain. Walking down the street, she tries to articulate a conversation with him while talking to us, the viewers. The speed (the infatuation) leads her to confuse direction and say to him something that was supposed to be addressed to us. The effect is both comical and sad. The mechanism begins to dismantle. In a therapy session, the doctor asks her if she has friends; Fleabag answers yes and looks at us. Are we her friends? Is it with us, the audience, that she opens up the most? Or does she use us to avoid opening up? Why is it that with the priest, with whom she falls in love, the controlling mechanism of storytelling begins to fail? Fleabag's problem is that she is very much alive! Is that why we humans narrate? Is life too much for us? Do we narrate in order to transform intensity into intention and thus guarantee, by creating sense and meaning, an emotional stability?

Beyond all these ideas, beyond this delicate and subtle narrative mechanism, I would say that the most delicious and beautiful part of the Fleabag experience has to do with the details, the subtleties and microtones in the acting, the tensions and distensions in the bodies of the performers, the funny expressive precision (the thousand ways in which the clown looks at us), the tenderness and the complexity of the relationships. Although there is a construction of quite defined and singular characters, the bodies are not trapped in the stereotype. The ones most in danger might be the harpy godmother (delicious Olivia Colman) and the bloody brother-in-law (Brett Gelman), because they have a clear role as antagonists —this is something I’m tempted to criticize about the series; but the thing is that even they, the stereotypical antagonists, display a precious subtlety! With Olivia Colman (the fake mother-in-law, surprising and shameless harpy) something curious happens: both attraction and rejection at the same time. Not to mention sister Claire (Sian Clifford), with whom one of the most complex relationships of the series unfolds: the emotional and expressive subtlety (complexity) that Claire/Clifford reaches and her relationship with Fleabag is of a higher order: their bond traverses a thousand moods, a thousand colors, and we never know how this sister who, overly sensitive, becomes overly harsh, will react; then there's the priest (Andrew Scott), the amazing and funny father (Bill Paterson), ex-boyfriend Harry (Hugh Skinner) and the delightfully dead friend Boo (Jenny Rainsford), who also brightens everything (with her odd delicacy and tender and spicy playfulness) every time she appears. The characters all seem to verge on stereotype, but intelligence (understood as sensitivity) and sensibility (understood as intelligence) manage to make the recognizable delightful, curious, subtle and complex.

As in the film High hopes (1988, directed by Mike Leigh, a beautiful work to which Fleabag seems to owe not only the detail of the stolen sculpture, there phallic, here feminine, in both cases golden), comedy is not used to simplify. As in Leigh, the energetic (it would be too easy to say: English) comedy makes the characters explode in emotional and bonding movements that do not get stuck in the narrative simplification that Carney recognizes in the simplifying cinema of Woody Allen. Fleabag manages to fill the stereotypes with subtlety. The thick stroke does not eliminate the thin stroke. The fast and precise comedy does not eliminate (but rather makes possible) the complex, absurd and subtle, brilliant grace of being human, animals that sparkle in their attempt to narrate and organize (control) the insane experience of living.