by Tim Morrise_>“Bad-ass” comes to mind when thinking of words to describe recent popular antiheroes of film and television. Daniel Plainview, Walter White, any Lannister: we are living in a golden age of morally solvent characters, who ain’t afraid to draw blood. _>Consider that of the lot, Cersei Lannister is the only character who gets to be a woman, and even her most striking choices revolve around mass murder. In interviews, Lena Headey has said several times she thinks Cersei is jealous of Jamie and shei wishes she was born a man so she could kill people with swords. It seems orchestrating terrorist acts of mass murder for her constitutes “settling.” _>I bring this up not to say there’s any umbrage to be had with Cersei-as-violent (Cersei in her own right is novel) but in most of these anti-hero cases, we have characters taking matters into their own hands, righteousness be damned, and usually doing so in emulation of traditionally masculine ideals, the pinnacle of which is violence. This even applies to someone like Cersei, who even if she is a vengeful Matriarch, is played like someone who kills in emulation of men. _>What I find fascinating is the way anti-heros and violence become interchangeable, to the point of stagnation in terms of what we call an “anti-hero.” There isn’t much variation in the types of actions anti-heroes tend to take; most primarily engage in physical violence , while emotional violence is sparse. Here is where we get into why I think *the most* interesting and revolutionary television character on TV right now is Rebecca Bunch. _>Rebecca Bunch is a terrible person. Like, really terrible. In a single episode we see her gaslight her obsessive crush only a few minutes after they hook up, hack her ex’s phone in order to stalk him, emotionally blackmail her best friend, and consider interrupting an AA meeting to tell her ex she’s sleeping with his best friend. Rebecca is, as Rachel Bloom (CxG creator) says, a “bubbly antihero,” a novel juxtaposition. _>Crazy Ex-Girlfriend succeeds in a difficult high wire act. It wants to keep its main character morally bankrupt, but also keep her sympathetic. See, Rebecca wants. She wants desperately, and we, while privy to her dreams, want to see her escape that desperation. In the case of characters like Walter White we want to see them get what they want in fits of fury, more than we want to see them confess and start living like healthy members of society. _>What we get with Crazy Ex Girlfriend is what Glee tried to do for 5 seasons without ever finding its footing. CxG gives us morally ambiguous characters while succeeding in properly framing their actions. And here’s the fun part, it accomplishes this successful moral framing almost exclusively through its song parodies. _>The songs of Crazy Ex Girlfriend anchor the show. As we get a genre parody of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire that’s lyrically about self loathing, we are as an audience being given a sign as to how we should be feeling Rebecca and how she sees the world. Her worldview is the butt of the joke, be it her Disney-fairytale fantasies, or the glamorization of Marilyn Monroe-esque coy beauty. (Consider this is also unique for Parody, as it is often lowbrow; it takes shots but risks little in doing so. CxG uses its parody as a map to navigate its resident Plainview which is risky as hell.) _>Rebecca never drinks your milkshake. She never unchains herself in a moment of cathartic badassesism and unleashes her dragons on slavers. She schemes and plots and regularly flails. And we are never guided to feel good about any of the scheming or the flailing. Instead, it’s a jarring, unexpected result: the nearly inconceivable, but actual Upbeat Tragedy. _>This assemblage achieves something new in the constellation of TV antiheroes, a character who stays framed as a total a-hole, but you still root for to escape her total a-holeness while hoping she gets a little slice of that fairy-tale ending. CxG skirts more classical “broadway” musical form to great effect. In a moment early on in the show, Rebbeca tells her therapist she deals with the world by looking at it as a musical. To that end the show keeps its trajectory on the same course, aiming at an ostensible song and dance finish and a happily-ever. _>Season 1 ends with a sendup of Disney prince/princess movies with a number from the fiction Disney movie "Slumbered" (a nice gentle ribbing against an overreliance on past participle titles ala Frozen or Tangled.) Those broadway sensibilities that give depth to the parody are also Disney sensibilities; look to the 90s Disney movies to see a tradition of storytelling that follows that musical formula tightly since the involvement of Howard Ashman. These stories must end one way: be yourself and love will conquer all. Rebbeca Bunch indulges in this, all the while Rachel Bloom behind her winking at the audience. (Sidenote: may the Disney Gods someday let Bloom write a Disney movie, Lord knows she’d have fun with it.) We know these songs are caricatures and that Rebecca is making losing bets out when she puts her faith in them. _>And yet, while Rebecca loses often, she never becomes abandons ideals, like many anti-heroes do. In hurting people, always failing sideward and seeing the stories she loves betray her, there’s still a version of “happy ending” that she feel destined for. And this is compelling, partly because it is upsetting for us that she falls short of her vision. Rebecca, and we as an audience, need to believe in *something,* even as a replacement to a self-destructive fantasies. And at the end of the day CxG and its characters do believe in a lot. They believe in comedy, self-expression, love, but most of all they believe in health. _>Time after time this show gambles its leads’ likability, and it keeps succeeding against the law of averages. Compare to a show like Last Man on Earth, which blew its load to early and lost me halfway through season 1, Rebecca walks that line between keeping me engaged with her plight and still surprised and appalled at her misdeeds. We have never seen this kind of character before, a chaotic force of nature not brandishing a gun or a sword, but a pair of tap shoes. So while Cersei and her ilk may be en vogue, I call for a new queen. Long live The Bubbly Antihero, long may she reign. Timothy Morrise is a half cyborg/half simian working as an editor for Cashiers of Cinema. In his past life he was an Economics Major from Southern Utah University, but now he mostly has too much to say about Star Wars, in between going to church as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (MOrmon) working at The Salt Lake Film Society and practicing as a filmmaker. His number one goal in life is to teach a robot to love. He will settle for an alien or a libertarian.
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25/9/2022 07:07:28 pm
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