#whicxh was RIGHT. NEXT. TO ME.

[laufskadus]

when walgreens keeps delaying your meds for unspecified reasons

[iluvtv]

Thank you, it’s my attitude that keeps me young...

Processing Russian Doll has not been easy. It took a week and a full rewatch for me to even begin to touch this beautiful program’s intricacies through type. The iterations and research I prepared for this post have been almost as vast and extensive as the show itself.  Nearly a month later I decided to save the diatribes for casual conversation. Theories on how the show is a study of the Jewish allegory of Dybbuk or that the loss of characters throughout each life is mirroring the constant death of video game culture can surely be found elsewhere. Instead, I share a version of the draft I started jotting during my rewatch of this beautifully complicated story while sitting on the couch next to my own Mother, both of us quietly reckoning with the histories which brought us to that shared moment. 

Writing, like experience, is a process. For many, this show has brought on personal reflections of their own existential crisis. Presently, a communal and varied reception is floating through our technological ether, acting as intellectual interpretations of such.

And so, in an unusual act of rebellion, I will let my work here act as nothing more than an experiment in my strange and frequently limited relationship with emotions. An armored sort of void that is not without its own challenges.

Like Nadia I sometimes might be written off as the abyss.

And yet neither of us are enthusiastic about or entirely unharmed by such descriptions.

I have no illusions of blowing any minds here with an overtly innovative (though so often it feels that way to me) analysis of Russian Doll, and if you want to avoid spoilers perhaps just stop now (though nothing I say here would ruin your own experience with the show). However, if you want to go exploring through some proverbial baggage with me — I have just too many thoughts, tangents and feels not to write anything at all...

But first:

Holy.

Fucking.

Shit.

I am at once moved, inspired, shaken and totally stunted. The vast creativity in writing and performance and imagery and music within these eight 24-minute episodes could debilitate many an artist. It's so easy here to rationalize giving up. There is no way I could ever create something as powerfully moving and detailed as Russian Doll.

This speaks to the intense fragility (so rarely acknowledged) which Headland, Lyonne and Poehler’s creation has provoked within.

This show, like it’s namesake which holds infinite women inside one another, is an onion. It can be peeled endlessly away— there is no core. The similes housed are so nuanced that solving them all would be a luxurious and laborious service. An intellectual’s ideal wank. Something future generations may hang their Philosophy dissertations on; much like the very pretentious characters which this show so cleverly mocks.

How very unusual, a narrative with notably distinct translations identifiable to everyone from the now aging homeless advocate of New York City in the 90’s to the Jewish millennial living in San Francisco currently participating in gentrification, to the middle-aged dad who never quite got over his suicidal tendencies, to the gamers and engineers entirely distracted with code. It is a glorious conglomeration of our own narcissism and the show’s creative genius which will allow us all to see ourselves here.

Twitter threads and articles debating such translations could distract our own heart for hours. In the end, though it is compassion which will leave room for growth and learning. In time we will not just slice the orange in half and find the ripeness in the fourth dimension but we will also discover another layer, or perhaps metaphors even the creators missed.

In part isn’t this some of the beauty of an increased number of minorities (ahem women) making art reaching the mainstream? The long-whispered narratives of silenced humans have become far more infinite and intricate than the stories we have heard before.

One might argue that the very notion that Nadia’s misfortune is provoked because she is “bad” defies a complex yet deeply scientific female perspective. It seems rational that a writer's room compiled exclusively of women would have enough experience in niceties to understand that no experience or person is entirely one thing. It is empathy whicxh allows us to view the sum of one’s parts. It is humanity which allows us all to persevere, coexist and most importantly notice that others are just doing the same.

And so there are moments in Russian Doll which speak to me so precisely.

The show’s playful exploration into Jewish Mysticism, which I once studied so diligently.

Nadia’s food choices, which I consistently noted before the subtle stitch of their relevance became obvious threads of the tapestry of her stories. The cottage cheese and roast chicken which is so spot on and terribly, neurotically Jewish. The fact that I noted her breakfast of cut watermelon in episode two as though it were a plot point -- which it did eventually become. My takeaways here so painfully reflect my own layered and tumultuous relationship with my body and moreover nourishment.

Nadia’s penchant for drugs and the ability to maintain her relationship to artificial mood enhancements. Through my lens of a similarly uncomplicated love affair with inebriation, I can’t help but find this characteristic terribly charming.

And oddly enough, Nadia’s clear choice of Emily over Anne. This one is tricky as I have zero memory of reading Emily of New Moon and yet I clearly remember loving it while Anne of Green Gables bored me. I know this sounds contrived but my mother concurred: I was a girl who loved Emily; couldn’t be bothered with Anne.

Then there are the less overt parts of Nadia. The painful side effects of what can be more easily spelled out. These are the elements of self I skip over (as did Nadia presumably) the histories of abuse and dysfunction, the draw towards said abyss and the imaginary, the solitude. Here we have a vibrant woman, unabashedly possessing an immodest thirst for life — an extrovert essentially, who somehow manages to remain on the peripheries. Again, this would be a perfectly apt way to describe me. Through silly, fun, terrifying, real and completely magical events however, Nadia is forced to reckon with both her past (and future) and come to terms with relativity.

I mean life is relative, right?

Watching all this forced a reckoning of my own.

People fade, plants and animals die, fruit rots and all the while Nadia battles with the existentialism turning 36 inevitably breeds.

(Speaking of invoked narcissisms I have for years threatened to throw myself an “I still haven’t gotten married or had kids so you never had to go to a bunch of bullshit showers but I’m going to have a huge double chai blowout” of my own. As the time approaches (14 months) this seems increasingly unlikely but the relevance of this age was definitely not lost on me).

Through all this sadness it is the small acts of kindness which somehow makes everything all right again and again. Very subtle pieces of humanity perpetuate life.

Relatively speaking.

Compassionate and honest interaction essentially induces a continued existence.

Alan says, “Our bodies can’t keep lying the way that our minds can”

And when Ruth mentions she heard the author of Emily of New Moon is haunting a house rather than the more familiar trope of Lucy Maud Montogomery’s suicide this makes me think the show is so much more about how you survive and persevere than how you fade.

As I slowly worked through these episodes (the first time) I wished hard that this show would offer hope and eventually it did just that.

But boy did it put me through the wringer through the process.