Edited by: Mythili Kamath
Excerpt: Isn’t it odd how many weird little rituals we follow every day? From greeting teachers good morning in a sing-songy way (“gOoD mORNinG MAaM”) to occasionally more sensible things like not punching someone in the face because you have not had your morning coffee yet, our lives seem to be dictated by a ritualistic set of activities. Things you shouldn’t say and actions you probably shouldn’t have taken seem to be prescribed. It would be fine if we were just robots programmed to behave in certain ways. Condemned to sentience, we continue to follow these rules with an annoying little voice in our head – sometimes irked, other times just amused. But, what if that voice became anthropomorphized?
Keywords: Performance, femininity, main-character syndrome
“I am a bad feminist”
Written and directed by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the BBC television series, Fleabag follows the life of a woman living in London as she navigates (read: barely scrapes by) her relationships and her identity. Of course, based on this description, Fleabag enters the category of the already wide array of TV shows and movies that seek to portray “strong female characters” who often assume the worst traits of toxic masculinity. More relevantly, however, it seems to push a singular narrative about how women ought to behave in a non-conforming way. Essentially, in its nonconformity to patriarchy, it still dictates what a woman ought to be. The ritualized performance of certain actions gets fused to what “ideal” femininity is.
Even in all the capital F Feminism, performances of femininity are riddles with rules and constraints. One of the best examples in modern cinema is that of a woman who seems to have about twice the number of hours a day to be marvelously successful in her workplace and a perfect wife in the household. This anxiety of modern female performance is highlighted in this series through the messy, unhinged, and unfiltered thoughts and actions of the unnamed character Fleabag who is suffering from the grief of her recently deceased friend. In its essence, Fleabag is a show about a human form of that annoying voice in your head that constantly reminds you how pointless and ridiculous what you are doing is. The literal personification of an existential crisis, if you will.
“I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning. I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like, what to hate, what to rage about, what to listen to, what band to like, what to buy tickets for, what to joke about, what not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in, who to vote for, and who to love, and how to tell them. I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life..”
Unlike most of us who try deliberately attaching meaning to the rituals we perform, Fleabag takes refuge in an acute awareness of her performance.
How does she do this?
By constantly, sometimes irritatingly, breaking the fourth wall. What is so interesting about Fleabag is that she just elicits dialogue that we constantly have with ourselves. The constant addressing of an imaginary audience and narrating our lives in a way that allows us to grasp what the hell is going on is front and center in the show. In its mockery and play with tropes and ideal types that we typically associate with femininity, Fleabag’s character is still plagued by the inescapability of performance, just wanting someone to tell her what to do and how to perform. This is true not only in our inability to meet expectations but also in the loss of identity that comes with these expectations and how we desperately attempt to hold onto our narratives.
Here, main-character syndrome becomes strong. Whether it’s because of the infinite amounts of personalized reels or the endless access to media, the internet has created our own personalized echo chambers, crafting narratives and creating plotlines. This seems so internalized in the way we make sense of the things we do every day, it almost feels like we imagine our very own camera following us around. We constantly play a part in our own self-constructed movie that posits us as the main character. Just as the camera follows the protagonist of a movie, so it follows you. Just as the protagonist addresses the audience –directly or indirectly –so do you. Your life becomes a movie. You constantly play a part for the unseen audience.
Fleabag plays with these ideas, discussing what happens when this “camera” we imagine breaks down. It talks about how our constant inescapability of ritualized activities and our desperate attempts to meet the expectations of certain types of performances creates a sense of self-estrangement. However, it addresses another significant question. What happens when the expectations of performance crumble, and there is no one except you and your true self that struggles to emerge?