Fleabag: Mean Girl British Style
Phoebe Mary Waller-Bridge has a talent for making rich-girl problems accessible to Amazon Prime viewers. She has the money, intelligence and looks to get anything she wants, then pretends it doesn’t matter.
Waller-Bridge makes us feel superior, by taking the piss out of the sad-sacks we all want to believe we aren’t, but probably are. Strip away Waller-Bridge’s good looks and high-bred lifestyle, and one can see Fleabag as the lowest, meanest form of comedy.
Before I go on; Spoiler alert! Go watch the first two seasons upon which this essay is based. I enjoyed it! This essay is social commentary. The show is well made.
But not the plot. The friend of Fleabag who commits suicide looks unhinged in some flashbacks, yet also self-aware and sympathetic to Fleabag’s sex disorder. So either Fleabag knowingly put her disturbed friend Boo, in harm’s way, by having sex with the boyfriend, or we must believe the friend wasn’t as insightful as portrayed.
Nonetheless, the sorrow of Fleabag having lost her best friend and mother is enough to gain and keep my sympathy.
Which is needed, because remove the crocodile-tears and Fleabag is a selfish, entitled twat. By the end of Season 2 the friend and Mother are completely dropped from the story.
Fleabag has that top 1% mindset. She doesn’t have to work for someone else. The male characters are all unsympathetic. Waller-Bridge makes other people’s hardships the butt-end of multiple jokes and eye-winks.
Anyway, Fleabag goes about her life, looking for meaning, or purpose, while not being able to suffer real-people gladly, or even civilly. The only thing she can depend on is men wanting to have sex with her. She wants a better foundation upon which to build her life, but she can’t find it.
Fleabag completely falls apart when Waller-Bridge writes herself into the corner. When we expect her to confront, with greater honesty, her own failings she fails us. I’ll get to that later.
None of the male characters are sympathetic. The test for me is this — can I imagine a show being spun off around any of them. (the deeper the show, like “Better Call Saul”, the more spin-offs possible.).
In Fleabag, one male character wants anal sex and to call her breasts tiny — over and over again. Another loves dinosaur toys and simple affection. A man with two big front teeth is tortured for the viewer’s pleasure and summarily sent back to central-casting. The father is weakest character of all. Waller-Bridge puts mumbling, incoherent words into his mouth. Or maybe she has him improvise senile soliloquies of an old man talking to himself.
The husband of Fleabag’s sister is all-asshole. That is to say, the brother in-law is a mirror of Fleabag’s character without all the attached feel-sorry-for-the-character plot devices.
Okay, so most of the male characters are joke fodder. What else is new in modern comedy?
The female characters are where Waller-Bridge’s youth and insecurities really get the best of her. They’re good characters, but she sabotages them in every scene. Perhaps it’s a devil’s bargain for Waller-Bridge. Should she weaken Fleabag’s detached irony, at risk of losing the viewer, or does she make sure everyone is subservient to Fleabag’s winky-wink stuff?
So far, after two seasons, everyone is written to make Fleabag the wittiest girl on stage — the fake one played by Waller-Bridge.
Her sister is sadly not portrayed as a strong career women who must make reasonable sacrifices. Instead, she is painted into a horrible, post-apocalypse marriage — with a creepy kid to boot. That is, she’s written as a complete basket-case. Her choices in life, her ambitions, are given neither respect nor love by Waller-Bridge.
The godmother is somehow evil though I’m hard pressed to see why. Like the sister, she has picked out the life she wants to lead, but Waller-Bridge mocks it from start to finish. The best I can understand from mumbling-Dad is he’s respectful and happy with his selfish, controlling, feminist girlfriend. You’d think that would be something to celebrate!
It’s all about Waller-Bridge and her smirking wink.
Then there is the best friend who died. She’s really the same character as the dinosaur loving, friend seeking boyfriend.
The confession scene, in episode 4, season 2, is where Waller-Bridge runs out of party games and must address the show’s central theme. Is Fleabag guilty for her friend’s death? Is she no longer deserving of a happy life? Or is the loss of her Mother too difficult to get over? We expect her to finally address the issues that give the show some humanity. Instead she says she just wants “someone to tell her what to do”.
Cop out. Big time.
The priest has her kneel. He comes around and kisses her. A painting falls. Can I hear a three hail Deus ex machinas from my fellow drama nerds?
Waller-Bridge is an amazing talent. How she could go from Fleabag to Killing Eve, which romanticizes psychopaths and heartless-killing, is a worrisome sign. Just how detached is Waller-Bridge from these psychopaths?
In the future, will she write strong, believable characters, who, when they get to confession don’t take the piss? Will Waller-Bridge learn to honor her characters with grace and understanding? Time will tell.
