In the opening of Elena Ferrante’s novel Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay – the third in her Neapolitan quartet – Lenù remembers the last time she spoke with her best friend, Lina. They were walking on a warm Italian night, a slight unease between them now that, to “regain old intimacy”, they would have to “speak secrets” to one another. “Too many bad things” have passed for them to be able to understand each other the way they once did, and so they exist in a strange middle ground, both known and unknown to each other. Yet, when Lina disappears without a trace, it is only Lenù who understands her reasons.

Ferrante’s novels have been adapted into a series for HBO, too. Seasons one and two focused on the first two books – My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name – which covers the girls’ childhoods and their experience of growing into young women. The third series, currently in production after being delayed due to COVID-19, is set to adapt the third book, which sees the women approach motherhood and middle-age. As I watched the show, having read the books last summer, I was struck by how these two friends grow together because of, and despite, one another. How Lenù is always trying to understand Lina, while Lina resents Lenù for the opportunities she has. Still, they remain loyal, always drawn back to each other, even if their relationship is tricky and complicated.

Friendship, by its very nature, is complicated. It doesn’t have the same structural integrity as other relationships, lacks the societal respect of its relational cousins, and is often expected to be discarded, or, at the very least, subjugated when marriage and children come along. In the recent Friends reunion, co-creator Marta Kaufmann said the show had been about that period in your life “when your friends are your family”, but by the finale, that time was over. As the various characters retreat into their coupledom, the expectation they won’t see each other as much as they used to hangs in the air during the final frames.

The intricacies of a complex friendship make for fascinating TV and movies, even if society doesn’t give it its dues. In Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, which he co-wrote with its star Greta Gerwig, the narrative is driven by Frances’ inability to grasp her best friend Sophie’s life choices. She can’t understand, after years of being a pair, why Sophie is treating her like “a three-hour brunch friend”, considering Frances “held head while cried”, “bought special milk for ”, and knows where she hides her pills. They share a life, frames of reference, and intimacies way beyond that of a casual friendship. Yet Sophie is engaged to be married, is moving to Japan, is leaving their shared life for one with someone else – a guy who wears pre-distressed baseball caps and uses phrases like “I gotta take a leak”. 

At one point in the movie, Frances describes what she wants in life. “It’s that thing”, she says, “when you’re with someone, and you love them, and they know it, and they love you, and you know it, but it’s a party, and you’re both talking to other people, and you’re laughing and shining, and you look across the room and catch each other’s eyes.” In that look, Frances sees a “secret world”, one that others can’t perceive. It’s a space of safety, a space that allows you to feel wanted, a look that confirms you are understood by its very existence. By the end of the movie, she shares a look just like this with Sophie as their eyes meet across a crowded afterparty, and all that exists between them sits in that glance.

Intimacy is essential to friendships; it’s often led me to say that friendships are romances without sex. You fall in love with a friend, learn their quirks, learn how to adapt to them, and learn how they feel about things before they do. In Issa Rae’s HBO show Insecure, its lead characters, Issa and Molly, turn their biggest fight into a codeword, a word that means honesty is required. In the first season, the two aren’t on speaking terms when they head off with friends to a beach house in Malibu. However, when it looks like Issa might be able to reconnect with Lawrence – her ex-boyfriend for whom she still feels something – and needs to head back to the city, Molly is the only one sober enough to drive her. Heading back, Molly and Issa unload their resentment, are open and fully truthful. From here on out, the two use the phrase “Malibu” to indicate they’re being 100% honest with each other, and that there are no pretences between them.

In the fourth season of Insecure, Molly and Issa’s relationship falls apart. By the end of Frances Ha, Frances finally has her own apartment and is, for the first time, genuinely independent; her relationship with Sophie changed but still present. If Ferrante is to be believed, some friendships will last many decades (and four novels), shifting and changing as time goes by. At the start of that third novel, Lenù and Lina haven’t spoken in some time. I, at the time of writing, find myself somewhere in the same position. Now, this friend and I will exist in a more traditional sense, in the passing comments of mutual friends. These mentions come unexpectedly now, from different places, with no control over how or when. They trigger memories; the time we came home drunk as her parents were leaving for the airport at 4am, the nights we watched lousy TV and ate junk food for hours, or the places around our town where we would meet for cigarettes late at night. Old friends haunt our conversations and our cities.

Last weekend, I went camping with some friends and their family when the subject came up. As it turned out, I was not the only one to be removed. We talked at length about whether our feelings were due to an active rejection. After all, we weren’t doing anything to save that relationship – if it could be saved – before we realised what had happened. Yet we went round in circles on what to do next; send a text, leave it alone, invite her over one weekend, forget all about it. It wasn’t until my friend’s mum said that if we had to debate it this long then maybe it wasn’t worth holding on to that we all went silent and watched the smoke from the campfire merge with the air.

If my friend, like Lina, wanted to disappear from certain people, that was her prerogative; if she thought that lazy socialisation was too superficial to maintain, that too was her call. Still, like Lenù, I find myself wondering about the last time we spoke, about the things I do and say that were forged with her during our teenage years and early twenties. Just like the smoke from the campfire, people can linger in our actions and our words, in our clothes and on our skin. Sometimes all we can do is wait for it to settle, to see what can be salvaged. 

Also Read: How Film Changed Me: On Distance

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On Friendship appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

I felt, with online dating, we now had to navigate specific hurdles; when (if ever) do you move from the app to swapping numbers? If you do it too soon, your contacts might look like mine, filled with various men I’ve never actually met saved alongside the app they came from (Dan (Grindr), Alex (Tinder), Max (Hinge) etc.) but, do it too late, and you risk looking uninterested, or unbothered about where things might be going. If you break through that barrier, another appears: when do you graduate from a purely online existence to “IRL”? Talk for too long, and you exhaust all topics of conversation until it ends in a drab fizzle. Do it too soon and you risk being stuck in a pub garden trying to reconcile the fact the thirty-two-year-old man in front of you “loves” rollercoasters. 

Navigating online chat has been a staple of the past decade; the how’s, when’s and why’s of it seeping into the shows we watched. In the first episode of Lena Dunham’s show GIRLS, which premiered in 2012, Marnie, a 23-year-old gallery assistant, discusses what she calls “the totem of chat”. The lowest form of communication with men “would be Facebook, followed by Gchat, then texting, then email, then phone. Face to face is, of course, ideal, but it’s not of this time.” She says this in response to Hannah, a wannabe writer recently cut off financially by her parents, who is complaining that she can’t read the boy she’s seeing. Sometimes he feels so present, and, at other times, he’s so absent she feels as though she “invented him”. 

Just as Dunham did with GIRLS, many shows in recent years have tried to explore the complexities of millennial life which, quite often, includes online dating. There’s Abbi, on Broad City, a Tinder-novice who doesn’t realise there is an option to swipe left, or Molly, on Insecure, desperately waiting to be let into “The League” – an elite invite-only dating app – because, she says, tinder is a “fuck app”. The spectre of online dating seems prevalent on these shows because it highlights that generational divide most precisely; this specific 21^st Century problem that millennials are forced to deal with. 

In fact, due to online dating, millennial comedies often claim romance is dead, at least in any traditional sense. Instead, these shows attempt to move away from a kind of Gen X idealism, for better or worse. What linked shows like Sex and the City, Girlfriends, Will and Grace, and Friends was their role as escapism, but now protagonists meet their love interests online or as sex buddies first instead of with grand meet-cutes or ten years of “will-they-won’t-they” storylines. Elsewhere, we see these characters wear the same clothes again and again, watch them live in rundown housing complexes or tiny apartments, and see them work at jobs they don’t love and/or aren’t fit for. Long gone are the days of large offices at Ralph Lauren, walk-in closets, and spacious “rent-controlled” apartments. Instead, they’ve been replaced with relying on parents for financial support and bad, but realistic, sex with men who won’t text back. 

Of course, this is only one kind of millennial experience and TV shows that aim to capture it often receive substantial criticism. It seemed an episode of GIRLS couldn’t pass without controversy, which was often, though not always, valid. Other shows were critiqued for their whiteness, their privilege, their appropriation of other cultures, their relation to the middle classes, and their representation of a singular millennial voice that doesn’t exist. The millennial experience is vast and diverse, categorised for most by significant gaps in privilege and generational wealth, and those in receipt of those things seem to be the ones who – whether they want to or not – get to define the experience for all. 

In its attempts to tackle what’s real rather than fantasy, millennial comedy has tried to latch onto the things that seem murky or depressing. It has thought it might, to varying degrees of success, turn those experiences into television. But, in 2021, there has been a move away from that, at least in a way that’s so defined. Most recently, Rose Matafeo’s Starstruck added a millennial spin on romantic comedy with a diverse cast of well-drawn and loveable characters. Shrill, which returns for its third and final season next month, critiques #Girlboss feminism, body shaming, and online troll culture. Both shows offer a sense of awareness; they seem to know how annoying shows like theirs can be to general audiences, and make strides to distinguish themselves. 

Does this mean that millennial comedy, after nearly a decade, is maturing into something else? Maybe. Influenced by years of controversy, think-pieces, accusations of navel-gazing and solipsism shows now know that any attempt at proclaiming universality will be met with resistance. You only have to look back to Dunham, whose character proclaimed, whilst high on Shrooms, she thought she might be “the voice of generation”. Whether or not an audience could tell they were satirical (they were!), those words have haunted Dunham for the better part of a decade, as a seeming example of the narcissism most (though not this writer) saw at the heart of GIRLS. Those words have been used as a stick to beat any millennial comedy that attempted to speak for all, and perhaps for good reason. After all, despite a few misses now and then, millennial comedies seem less interested in appealing to everyone. The voice of our generation is nowhere to be seen. 

Also Read: How Film Changed Me: On Teen Shows

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On Millennial Comedies appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.