I didn’t see Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s “Fleabag” before the pandemic struck, though I saw that it won a ton of Emmys, and I took note. Back in the days before pandemic, I didn’t have much time for television. How things have changed!
I saw “Fleabag” over the past weekend, curled up in bed, sometimes laughing hysterically, but more often crying. I cried in awe at Waller-Bridge’s genius, humor, and ability to capture a particularly female version of unrequited lust and sexual frustration. I also cried because the show is incredibly moving, sad, and existentially precise.
There’s something truly literary about “Fleabag.” You get the feeling that you’re watching Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde, and Fran Lebowitz come into their own all at once. Joan Didion writes about “the inability of all of us to speak to one another in any direct way” and I wonder if I’m the only one who feels similarly incapable during the pandemic. What is so moving about Fleabag, a character who makes herself at once hateful and charming at the same time? Perhaps it’s Fleabag’s inability to be direct with anyone in her life other than the camera (she frequently breaks the fourth wall, to confide in us, her viewers), or maybe it was the false sense of intimacy that occurs when the fourth wall is broken. I miss having friends in my living room. After a few episodes, Fleabag felt like a friend.
What I found remarkable was Waller-Bridge’s ability to capture the sense of our essential aloneness, the loneliness of modernity, the isolation of what it means to be alive in 2020 and 2021 (even though the show was filmed in pre-pandemic times), and the aloneness that comes about when one tries to live life authentically, if not always well.
This sense of aloneness has crept upon me from time to time. At times it has slipped through the shadows of the reef at Hanauma Bay when I snorkeled there alone—no, the shadow was not quite a shark, or the bleaching coral of climate change, but something more existential and horrifying—the sense that I could be swept out to sea and no one would know for days or weeks that I was gone because there was no one to know. And sometimes the aloneness was a brute reality that slammed into me like a foul ball. I can remember with distinct clarity the feeling of sitting alone in a basement in Toronto after my husband and I split up, the force of the aloneness pulling me down into despair, as I shuffled through our old photos. I can recall the feeling of aloneness I felt when I found myself lost on a road in Kentucky after my Canadian visa expired. I drove in circles for hours, surrounded by people, but unable to stop and ask for directions.
Am I the only one who has felt alone in this way? “Fleabag” suggests that I am not alone, at least not alone in my feeling of aloneness, and there is comfort in that. For me, the last episode of season one is probably one of the most remarkable pieces of television produced in quite a while, precisely because it captures a kind of existential loneliness that only late capitalism could produce.
At the end of season one Fleabag’s best friend is dead (by suicide, after stepping in front of a bike after learning that her boyfriend had slept with someone else; we learn that the someone else is Fleabag herself, and the unspeakable nature of this guilt is the driving force that separates Fleabag from everyone around her). Fleabag’s pathetic on and off again boyfriend finally leaves her for good. Her sister chooses to believe her own terrible husband’s version of events rather than hers (that sleazy man drunkenly kissed her, dammit, not the other way around as he alleges!). She goes to see her father, the last person in her life, but he tells her she needs to leave (Fleabag has insulted and angered his girlfriend, again). The only person left in her life is her pet gerbil and banker.
Perhaps what I found most horrifying about the end of “Fleabag” was how precisely it captured what it felt like to be truly alone. I saw in Fleabag myself—those times in my life when I somehow managed to burn everything to the ground and cut ties with everyone—lovers, family, friends. That feeling, that precise feeling of aloneness, is what “Fleabag” captures in its pure genius.
Here we are, on the verge of the pandemic ending. Am I the only one who feels incapable of holding a real conversation anymore? Am I the only one who feels like every social connection I still have hangs on by the most tenuous of threads, that might be severed at any moment by wind or disease or misunderstanding or rage or boredom? Am I the only one who sees how fragile this whole enterprise really is? Fleabag says I am not alone, and maybe that’s enough for me.
In “Fleabag,” there’s no escape from the existential dread of being alone. Success at work won’t get you out of it (look at Fleabag’s rich and successful sister who makes millions but hates her life). Throwing yourself into your own doomed project won’t help either (Fleabag sits in her gerbil café, weighed down by the silence). Sex and God won’t save you from the aloneness, either. In season two, Fleabag manages to seduce a priest (the ultimate conquest, really), resulting in what is probably one of the hottest scenes of television ever produced. The prospect of God haunts the show at the perimeter (are we God? Is she talking to the spirit?), and then at the very center, where God literally comes between Fleabag and the only man in the whole show with whom she’s had any real sexual and intimate connection. Sex won’t save Fleabag either. Sex erases the possibility of spiritual connection with God, church, or even friendship with a priest, the only character I see as having the potential to get through to her.
Fleabag envisions a world of zero-sum social games. Of course, the priest must choose between God and love. Of course. Lust satisfied is just that—lust satisfied. It is not connection—any more than Fleabag’s “Chatty Wednesdays” at her café seem to bring anyone closer. And yet, Fleabag keeps trying.
Much has been written about Fleabag’s breaking the fourth wall, and the Priest’s noticing this break. It creates a real sense of the uncanny, and brings almost a sense of spirituality and mysticism to the show. Who, exactly, is Fleabag talking to? Is it us? Is it her dead friend? Is it the creative process itself with which she engages? It is herself? Is it God? The only true intimacy we truly get in the show is this break—it’s the intimacy forged through the creative act of telling one’s own story, however ugly and hard it might be. Fleabag turns her misfortunes into comedy, and they are also deeply moving.
Fleabag envisions a world where every connection requires the complete sacrifice of other connections. Fleabag’s world is one of zero sum social games. The only world where the zero sum game doesn’t exist is in the creation of one’s own life, in the moment where the fourth wall is broken, and we find ourselves face to face with our essential aloneness and also with our essential selves.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.