Mirrors and masquerades in Fleabag and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

In a wrenching scene towards the end of the first episode of Fleabag, the eponymous heroine (played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge) turns up at her dad’s door at two o’clock in the morning. Fleabag is upset. Like a stray cat, she looks like she’s tried every door down the street. Except this is her family home. Or rather – and it’s a big rather – her dad’s house.

“It’s nothing,” she says, when her father (played by Bill Paterson) opens the door, and promptly tells her, “It’s nearly 2 o’clock in the morning” (Waller-Bridge 2016a, 19:44–21:08).

Her dad guards the door, like she’s a salesperson. Fleabag hesitates, then blurts out:

Oh fuck it, I have a horrible feeling that I’m a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist. (Waller-Bridge 2016a, 19:44–21:08)

Beat.

You get all that from your mother. (Waller-Bridge 2016a, 19:44–21:08)

It could have been a funny response, if it wasn’t the middle of the night. If Fleabag wasn’t visibly distressed. If her mother wasn’t dead. In the first episode of the first series, the viewer learns that Fleabag’s mother – and her best friend – have recently passed away.

In a close-up shot we watch Fleabag’s face as it shifts from dejected yet hopeful, to shocked, to broken, before, in typical Fleabag style, she rallies around, laughs in the face of life’s shitshow.

“Good one.” (Waller-Bridge 2016a, 19:44–21:08)

The camera work in this series is as important as the dialogue. Her father’s look over the threshold of his doorstep is a failed look of recognition. Her dad cannot see what the viewer can – Fleabag’s visible pain – the close-up of her distorting, disturbed and disturbing face. And, a moment later, as Fleabag ascends the stairs, she does what the series is perhaps best known for – breaks the fourth wall. Abruptly looking the viewer in the eye, she says of her stepmum, “To be fair, she’s not an evil stepmother. She’s just a cunt” (Waller-Bridge 2016a, 21:46–21:49).

Just as looking is the oversaturated register of Fleabag, so it is in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend – another series in which the show’s creator, Rachel Bloom, plays the female lead – Rebecca Bunch. Like Fleabag, Bunch has a highly troubled relationship with her parents. Her disturbed interior world is similarly explored by breaking the fourth wall. Both series cast the viewer not simply as the looker, but as the interlocuter – the looked upon. Fleabag and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend tell the stories of two women who are desperate to be seen, known for who they really are, in all their internal, intricate messiness. On both thematic and formal levels, issues of visibility and invisibility abound in these series.

This paper will bring Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Fleabag in conversation with the work of the psychoanalysts Joan Riviere and Donald Winnicott, asking: is “femininity” a performance in these shows, and to what end? How and why do these women seek recognition from the viewer/other? By performatively breaking the fourth wall, do these characters reveal their true selves, in Winnicott’s sense?

The paper will start with Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, thinking about the depiction of character and the use of song, before we return to Fleabag.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: Introduction

Let us begin with a short primer of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, as, for British viewers at least, the series is not so well known as Fleabag.

A cult musical comedy, viewed first in the USA on CW and then on Netflix, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend tracks the psychological journey of Rebecca Bunch (played by Rachel Bloom), offering a nuanced exploration of mental illness.

In the first episode, workaholic lawyer Rebecca Bunch is offered a promotion at her prestigious New York Law firm where she is invited to become a partner. It’s a huge opportunity, a great feat. All Rebecca has been dreaming of. Or is it? Instead of her being elated, Rebecca’s mental state spirals. She leaves her office and walks the lurid streets of New York, clutching a bottle of prescription drugs, as she tries to fathom what is going on inside her. It’s a classic case of getting what you thought you wanted, only to think – is that it? (Bloom 2015a, 03:00–05:00).¹

In this state of disarray, slumped on a sidewalk, Rebecca Bunch looks up – and there, coming towards her down a New York street, like an apparition, is Josh Chan – her one-time, short-lived summer camp boyfriend from when she was 16. He tells her he’s leaving the city. With his gelled hair and obviously ripped muscles, he says: “One day I realised, I’m stuck in the rat race … what’s the point, right? Back home it’s so chill, relaxed, back there everyone’s like, I don’t know, it’s like they’re happy” (Bloom 2015a, 06:39).

As Josh walks away, he turns and waves back at Rebecca, and we see him through Rebecca’s eyes, enveloped in a halo of her desire (the production places a spotlight on Josh, as he glows and waves in slow motion). This is a sign, Rebecca decides. She will quit her high-powered job and follow Josh Chan to West Covina. And so begins a story of obsession, delusion and self-awakening. A romantic comedy with an unhinged pitch that stretches over four madcap series, as we follow Rebecca’s long road from manic destructiveness to self-knowledge, with lots of musical vignettes thrown in.

The feminine masquerade

Why is Rebecca crushing every waking hour of her day into a job she doesn’t want anyway? Who is it really for? In a flashback to Rebecca’s summer camp aged sixteen, the lovelorn teenager says farewell to her childhood beau, Josh Chan, at the end of the holiday romance, and gets into her mum’s car: “Rebecca, is that a hicky on your neck,” we hear her mother shriek. “Ok, look, keep in mind anything happens we go right to the abortionist. Nothing is going to ruin your future and your career, do you hear me Rebecca? Are you listening to me,” says a disembodied voice (Bloom 2015a, 00:05–02:44).

If the message isn’t clear enough, the childhood memory cuts to ten years later. An adult Rebecca wakes up to her glassy corporate apartment, to another day in her soulless job, to the sound of her mother’s voice down the phone:

Rebecca, it’s mum; so, did you win the corporate case? You want that promotion, don’t you? It’s very important. It’s what we’ve been working so hard for. I’ve said that many times … right I’ve got to go, today the dermatologist is going to tell me if it’s cancer. Goodbye. (Bloom 2015a, 02:45–03:12)

The answer is obvious. The whole edifice of Rebecca’s life so far has been structured around pleasing her mum, whose presence holds sway over the entire first series; but who, significantly, does not make a physical appearance until episode eight, instead manifesting as disembodied insults and put-downs in Rebecca’s memory or through the phone.

So, when Rebecca tells her bosses to stick their job (she’s going “where dreams live,” she whispers), awash with newfound meaning in her life – Josh Chan – Rebecca exits her office and launches into song: “My life’s about to change, oh my gosh, because I’m hopelessly and desperately in love. West Covina” (Bloom 2015a, 09:14–09:45). Flicking her suit jacket to the curb, in one magical beat Rebecca transforms from corporate lawyer to musical theatre star, skipping down the New York street warbling about her new beginnings. It is the first of over 100 songs in the series, each one in the service of some kind of truth telling.

Early on in the four-part series, the songs of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend are especially frothy and femme, expressions of a certain heightened version of femininity seen through the lens of particular music genres – notably, musical theatre and contemporary pop. In the song “West Covina”, Rebecca Bunch transforms into a kind of hyper-feminine woman-child. Her femininity becomes exaggerated, staged. The blue dress and twinkly stars hint at Alice in Wonderland (09:27–13:00). Swinging aloft on a giant pretzel, ascending to the sky, Rebecca is Judy Garland (Rachel Bloom’s own influence and former idol). The same goes for “The Sexy Getting Ready Song”, where she wrenches her body into the model of a glossy, super-sexual woman. “I’m going to get in touch with my femme side,” she sings (Bloom 2015a, 26:12–28:52). In Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, one might say that Rebecca’s femininity is the masquerade – in both Joan Riviere’s and Judith Butler’s sense. And, as we shall see, this returns us to Rebecca’s relationship with her mother.

Writing in 1929, Riviere’s psychoanalytic thought was radically feminist for her time. Introducing a new type of woman into psychoanalytic understandings of femininity, her essay “Womanliness as a Masquerade” focused on the “intellectual woman” – a type of woman who had so far received little attention in psychoanalysis (Riviere 1929, 303). In what is now largely regarded as an autobiographical text – where the patient she mentions actually refers to Riviere herself – the essay explores, among other things, the anxiety that intellectual women ignite in men – and women.

Riviere describes an intellectual woman, outwardly heterosexual with latent homosexuality, who identifies with her father rather than her mother, as would be the more conventional version of the girl’s Oedipal complex: “Her intellectual work, which took the form of speaking and writing, was based on an evident identification with her father” (Riviere 1929, 305). The female patient delivers lectures, and afterwards flirts outrageously with men from the audience. The patient seeks recognition from the men around her, says Riviere. Unconsciously aware that her intellect provokes fear and anxiety in the men with whom she longs to be seen, she: “puts on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men. It is with a particular type of intellectual woman that I have to deal” (Riviere 1929, 303).

Read in the light of Riviere, entering the male-dominated world of corporate law, the highly intelligent Rebecca Bunch seeks the recognition of men; a recognition which, strikingly, she never received, as – we learn later in the series – her father walked out on her family when she was a child. Rebecca plays out a kind of excessive femininity to appease, not only her colleagues in the “masculine”, phallic world of corporate law, but also, importantly, her mother.

Before we go on, I would like to acknowledge the stereotypes that clearly inhere in the terms “masculine” and “feminine” – an issue I will return to. For the moment, when I use the terms “masculine” and “feminine”, it is important to note that I will be referring to certain cultural constructions of them – which, as we shall see, are often stereotypical.

Elaborating on the developmental roots of the woman of the masquerade – the woman who puts on an ultra-feminine mask – Riviere says that the little girl who identifies with her father fears his retribution. In identifying with her father, in Riviere’s terms she takes his “penis” (Riviere 1929, 311). Lacan would say, she has the phallus – that is, the illusion of self-completion, of power, of lacking nothing. This is threatening for the father, and by extension, other men, who, in common parlance, feel emasculated by her presence.

But the girl is also a threat to her mother – and by extension, to other women. Riviere writes:

She becomes the father, and takes his place; so she can “restore” him to the mother. But this restitution could be made on one condition only; it must procure her a lavish return in the form of gratitude and “recognition”. (Riviere 1929, 310)

What Rebecca does not receive – from her mother at least, as well as from the men she is obsessed with – is the recognition she so needs. Essentially, Rebecca Bunch is in a double bind. In becoming a successful corporate lawyer, she fulfils her mother’s wishes, restoring what her mother lacks: in a sense, she becomes her mother’s substitute husband, the partner who abandoned her. Yet in so doing, she ends up having something her mother does not (in Lacan’s terms, she has the phallus), which only enrages further her mother, who, in Riviere’s terms, is “reduced to pitiful inferiority” (Riviere 1929, 311).

So Rebecca adopts a mask of heightened femininity to avert the other’s aggression – a mask her mother, indeed, encourages her to wear (when her mother arrives in West Covina, she digs at Rebecca for all the ways in which she is not typically feminine). Interestingly, when Rebecca turns up at the West Covina law-firm, Paula says to her – “you think you’re so much better than me, huh. Harvard. Yale,” and then, rather aggressively – “I’m just as smart as you are, Miss Snooty Shoes” (Bloom 2015a, 33:29–33:34). Rebecca acts in a silly, girly way, or adopts a highly sexualized, feminine façade, to prevent herself from appearing as a threat.

Coming back to Riviere now, what is really most radical about her essay – and interestingly contemporary – is her claim that woman has no real essence. She is the masquerade:

The reader may now ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and the “masquerade.” My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference; whether radical or superficial, they are the same thing. (Riviere 1929, 306)

Rebecca’s feminine mask

For Riviere, so-called “femininity” and masquerade are synonymous. There is no genuine womanliness, she is her performance. The same goes for Rebecca Bunch. Rebecca doesn’t so much have a hidden, fixed essence, she is the “feminine” masks she adopts. But isn’t it time we examined these gendered terms a little further? How is Riviere defining masculine and feminine? Although radical for 1929 – especially her interest in intellectual women and her notion of gender as performance not essence – Riviere has, in later years, been criticised for defining the feminine and masculine along stereotypical lines. Why should intellect and success pertain to masculinity, coquettishness and seductiveness to femininity? Aren’t these definitions problematically heteronormative models, reinforcing gender binaries? And where’s the space for gender fluidity? Furthermore, in defining gender identity in anatomical terms (having and not having the penis), Riviere’s account of gender can sound biologically determined – as if gender is innate, not formed.

Judith Butler is a vocal critic here. Yet she draws substantially on Riviere’s essay in her own account of “gender as performative”. For Butler, gender isn’t natural, it’s culturally inscribed. Gender is an act, a doing rather than being – it is a performance: “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (Butler 1990, 25). Women are interpellated by cultural and ideological forces to fulfil a model of proper femininity. “The girling of the girl,” as Butler calls it (Butler 1993, 7–8, 232). Informed by Butler, in this paper when I use the terms “feminine” and “masculine”, I will be referring to certain social constructions of gender, not to gender as at all innate. Indeed, I will be looking at how Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Fleabag question the sexist stereotypes that often underpin these social constructions.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend does a lot to challenge heteronormative ideas of gender: there’s the song, “Gettin bi”, where Darryl embraces his bisexuality (Gardner 2016, 00:00–02:22); Rebecca’s fixation with Chan is almost as much a fixation with his girlfriend Valencia (see the song “Feeling Kinda Naughty”, and the scene where she comes on to Valencia; Bloom 2015b, 00:00–01:50); and later, Valencia falls in love with a woman.

For much of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Rebecca Bunch wears a mask of hyper-femininity, while the show itself critiques the stereotypes that form the mask. The songs in particular form a vehicle for the show to interrogate stereotypical images of “femininity” as expressed through pop videos and musicals – often pink and fluffy, and sexually objectified. In so doing, they show how Rebecca’s mental state is informed and mirrored by these cultural constructions. In Butler’s sense, the songs reveal just how far Rebecca’s feminine identity is interpellated.

In “The Sexy Getting Ready Song”, Rebecca constructs herself according to the invocations of advertisements, music videos and male demands (Bloom 2015a, 26:12–28:52). The injunction to become a certain high-gloss, hyper-feminine/sexual woman. With music video renditions of sexy women cutting abruptly to Rebecca Bunch in her bathroom mirror, it is a stunning commentary on the physical and mental abjection required to reach a certain, sexy, feminine ideal.

And then there’s “Love Kernels”, a hilarious musical feat in which the actor Rachel Bloom, dressed in a sexy cactus costume (she’s thirsty for love), breaks out of Rebecca Bunch to inform the audience, “This video ate up our production budget … we used up literally every cent” (Bloom 2016a, 00:00–03:25). It is a glossy, high-end musical piece and, for those in the know, an homage to and send-up of Beyonce’s Lemonade. That “Love Kernels” and “The Sexy Getting Ready Song” riff on pop videos attests to the hyper-visibility of the genre, while revealing something of Rebecca’s psychological state: that her outlook and identity is shaped by the vividness and heightened gloss of contemporary pop. Psychologically, the songs form coping mechanisms; through song, Rebecca can escape into her fantasy worlds. On the plane in the song “Josh Has No Idea Where I Am,” she admits to Dr “Dream Ghost” Akopian, “when things get tough that’s how I understand the world. I imagine my life as a series of musical numbers” (Bloom 2015c). Rebecca can inhabit magical landscapes, where the gap between wishes and their fulfilment is non-existent.

The songs also have a manic, triumphant edge. In “Womanliness as Masquerade”, Riviere writes:

It appeared, therefore, that this woman had saved herself from the intolerable anxiety … by creating in phantasy a situation in which she became supreme and no harm could be done to her. The essence of the phantasy was her supremacy over the parent-objects … she triumphed over them. (Riviere 1929, 311)

In warding off the threat she poses to her parents – and to other men and women – Riviere’s woman of the masquerade not only puts on a feminine mask but retreats into omnipotence. In Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Rebecca Bunch has an alarmingly omnipotent outlook (crystalized in her first mission – she will move to West Covina and get her man). Rebecca saves herself from aggression – internalized as self-hatred – by escaping into hyper-feminine, all-powerful, fantasy worlds. Musical theatre fits the bill here, since the genre itself evolved as a form of post-World War II escapism. In the songs of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, reality is heightened, exaggerated (it’s worth nothing that this is also the very tone of comedy). Rebecca’s mental landscape appears excessive, over-exposed, more in the register of Lacan’s Imaginary. The whimsical tones of the songs, the fantasy elements, invoke the infant’s magical thinking. We see this in Rebecca’s attachment to street signs, which are overdetermined. Words become things. The songs have a tone of manic defence.

But they also tell truths. The show undercuts Rebecca’s hyper-real mindset, as her fantastical dreams keep lurching back down to earth. In “West Covina” a triumphant Disney aesthetic segues into grotty street scenes, shitty prime meat markets, porn stores. In “The Sexy Getting Ready Song”, we see the abjection that goes into creating a certain feminine ideal. For the viewer, then, and for Rebecca Bunch, the songs in Crazy Ex-girlfriend have a double function. They mask Rebecca’s painful mental state behind a hyper-real landscape, and in so doing, they offer enjoyable escapism; the audience enjoys the magical thinking, the pleasure principle, the elaborate façade – it’s hilarious and fun! But they also unmask, confronting us with painful truths.

Being seen: Fleabag and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Let’s now return to Fleabag, who we’ve left on the doorstep of her dad’s house. Both Fleabag and Rebecca Bunch are searching for recognition. As I suggested at the start, they are desperate to be seen in ways that make them feel like they exist. In Donald Winnicott’s “Mirror-role of Mother and Family in Child Development”, he writes:

Many babies, however, do have a long experience of not getting back what they are giving. They look and they do not see themselves … in some way or other they look around for other ways of getting something of themselves back from the environment. They may succeed by some other method. (Winnicott 1971, 112)

The child looks at the mother, or primary caregiver, and because the caregiver is emotionally absent, perhaps too preoccupied with her own issues, the child does not feel properly seen. In other words, the parent is not emotionally attuned to the infant’s needs. Fleabag’s two major sources of recognition – her mother and her best friend – have been tragically ripped away. And so, throughout the series, Fleabag seeks out substitute forms of recognition. She wants to be seen by men, by her father, and, in the well-known trope of the show, the viewer. Similarly, Rebecca Bunch has only ever been the receptacle of her mother’s vicious projections; she has never really been seen, for who she is. And so she spends four series compensating for this, seeking attention from the various men she fixates on – men who, like her mother, are far too self-absorbed to ever really know her.

In a telling passage from the “Mirror-role of Mother and Family in Child Development”, Winnicott makes a revealing point about visual perception:

the baby gets settled in to the idea that when he or she looks, what is seen is the mother’s face. The mother’s face is not then a mirror. So perception takes the place of apperception, perception takes the place of that which might have been the beginning of a significant exchange with the world, a two-way process in which self-enrichment alternates with the discovery of meaning in the world of seen things. (Winnicott, 1971, 112–113; emphasis added)

If the mother’s face is not a mirror, apperception is exchanged with perception. Perception becomes the pivotal register – seeing. In the series Fleabag, visual perception is hyper-cathected. In Fleabag’s look, her direct gaze at the screen, visual perception – seeing – is over-invested. Indeed, as a visual form, TV itself hyper-cathects seeing; it is the perfect medium with which to explore an over-investment in the look.

Looking and visual perception are also overstated, exaggerated mediums in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Think of the bathroom mirror that looms large in “The Sexy Getting Ready Song”, a mirror in which Rebecca sees herself in ways that comply with other people’s expectations. Winnicott writes: “If the mother’s face is unresponsive, then a mirror is a thing to be looked at but not to be looked into.” He says, “A baby so treated will grow up puzzled about mirrors and what the mirror has to offer” (Winnicott 1971, 113). In “the case of the baby whose mother reflects her own mood or, worse still, the rigidity of her own defences,” Winnicott asks: “In such a case what does the baby see?” (1971, 112). Looking in the mirror, Rebecca is baffled by what she sees. Forever trying to fix her identity, she sees not her “true self” but a mirage of other people’s projections. Her often histrionic, overblown songs also stage this need to be seen.

It is curious that in both shows the leading female protagonists frequently break into exaggerated facial expressions. Fleabag scrunches her nose at the camera, grimaces, twists her face into silly, childish faces. In each of her songs, Bunch puts on a different, highly dramatic face (she is the face of a cactus in “Love Kernels”, a witch in “Villain in my own story”; Bloom 2016a, 2016b). At times, both characters can look a bit cartoonish. In a passage from the “Mirror-role of Mother and Family in Child Development”, Winnicott reflects on the repeated, contorted faces in Francis Bacon’s paintings:

[Bacon] goes on and on painting the human face distorted significantly … [He] is seeing himself in his mother’s face, but with some twist in him or her that maddens both him and us … Bacon’s faces seem to me to be far removed from perception of the actual; in looking at faces he seems to me to be painfully striving towards being seen, which is at the basis of creative looking. (Winnicott 1971, 114)

Winnicott writes: “When I look I am seen, so I exist” (Winnicott 1971, 114). Again, we have this notion of looking as a desire to be seen – a trait of Fleabag and Bunch. But also, in their own odd, contorted faces, do they see themselves in the other’s – or mother’s – face, with some maddening twist?

Let us return once more to Fleabag outside her dad’s house. He has just told her she gets her depraved character from her dead mum and then he says, “I’ll call you a cab, darling … Don’t go upstairs” (Phoebe Waller-Bridge 2016a, 21:00–21:10). For Fleabag, this is a red rag to a bull. Upstairs, Fleabag finds her stepmum – Olivia Coleman, hilariously smug and affected – painting a splodgy grey canvas. It’s “a self-portrait,” she says (2016a, 23:06–23:10). While a major conceit of Fleabag is the protagonist’s self-avoidance – Fleabag spends most of the first series trying to ward off any true introspection – her stepmum has no problem gazing at herself (even if the grey canvas is a great spoof of her pretentiousness).

In contrast to her stepmum, full blooded, at home in a particular version of femininity (flirty, bosomy, a bow in her hair), Fleabag looks gauche, gamine, a little boyish (or at least, a cultural notion of boyish). In an earlier scene, as she takes care of a drunken woman slumped on the street, the woman looks up at her and says, “aww, you’re such a lovely man” (2016a, 18:13-18:25). In her stepmum’s room, Fleabag picks up a gold sculpture from the sideboard. “It’s an exploration of how women are subtle warriors,” says Olivia Coleman: “We just need to use our innate femininity” (2016a, 22:30–22:42). Comfortable in her adult feminine sexuality, her grown-up and accepted womanliness, the stepmum is a reminder of everything Fleabag is not.

After leaving her dad’s house, in the back of the taxi on her way home, Fleabag takes something from her bag. The golden bust. Unbuttoning her shirt, she slots the bust between her breasts, glancing at the taxi-driver in the car-mirror – her need to be seen spilling into exhibitionism. In the figure of a headless, faceless woman, what could be a clearer motif of Fleabag’s invisibility: the daughter who isn’t seen. And therefore, who has to compensate – putting herself on display. But in addition, by stealing a gold bust, is Fleabag stealing fully developed womanhood?

Breaking the fourth wall

The series Fleabag started off as a one-person stage play with Phoebe Waller-Bridge speaking to the audience, and this confessional mode is carried into the TV series, as Fleabag intermittently looks at and talks to the viewer, addressing the camera directly. Just 17 s into the show, and the heroine is addressing us:

you know that feeling when a guy you like sends you a text at 2 o’clock on a Tuesday night … you get in the shower, shave everything, dig out some Agent Provocateur business. And then you open the door to him, like you’d almost forgotten he’s coming over” (2016a, 00:16–00:38).

Moments later, she’s having sex, or rather, he’s having sex with her, as Fleabag talks to the camera, dissociatively. Fleabag breaks the fourth wall 13 times in the first episode, including that scene with her uptight sister when she tells the viewer, “Dad’s way of coping with two motherless daughters was to buy us tickets to feminist lectures, start fucking our godmother, and eventually stop calling” (2016a, 09:24–09:36). On the bus, chatting up a man with protruding teeth who she doesn’t fancy, she looks at the viewer and says, “I hate myself” (2016a, 03:30).

If this conceit is less pronounced in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, it is no less jolting. There is the disarming look to the audience in “Love Kernels”. More often, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend goes meta, pulls the viewer out of the fictional world of West Covina and into the production set (in a handful of scenes, the mic boom intrudes in the screen). There are self-referential nods aplenty. In the song “I’m a good person”, Rebecca drops her mic in Greg’s beer and an annoyed camera crew clean it off. In “Who’s the New Guy”, a song about Rebecca’s smooth new boss, Nathanial, the lyrics chip away at the fourth wall until it is almost demolished: “Is this some desperate move to help our ratings? … I mean, he’s such a character”, “You mean our terrible legal ratings,” etc. (Bloom 2017). In a later revival of the song, Rebecca turns directly to the camera.

Why do these shows break the fourth wall? What does it mean for the character and viewer? There is a lot going on in these looks. On one level, as I have been suggesting, the looks enact the protagonists’ search for recognition. In this respect, the viewer occupies the position of the other – the friend or mother. Left with the glaring absence of her mother and the only friend who wholly accepted her, Fleabag turns to us as replacement confidant. We offer a kind of mirroring. Winnicott writes:

Psychotherapy is not making clever and apt interpretations; by and large it is a long-term giving the patient back what the patient brings. It is a complex derivative of the face that reflects what is there to be seen. (Winnicott 1971, 117)

In breaking out of the drama, breaking into what film critics call extra-diegetic moments, are these characters revealing their true selves? And in doing so, tacitly acknowledging they have been putting on a performance? Look, this is the real me! (The notion that there is something behind the performance, or at least some agency in control of it, is quite contrary to Butler’s idea of performativity – an idea we will return to.) Privy to the character’s inner thoughts, the viewer finds themselves in the role of the analyst and good enough mother, offering recognition, visibility, reflecting back.

In the opening of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Rebecca is performing in her end of summer camp show. Afterwards, she says to Josh: “When I sing my song, I feel like I have a palpable connection with the audience. And I know like, it was a bum my mum didn’t show, but in that moment, it was like, everyone was my mum” (Bloom 2015a, 00:16–00:30). The scene in series two where Fleabag tries out therapy is also especially revealing. Asked by the therapist (Fiona Shaw) if she has any friends, Fleabag makes eye contact with the viewer and insists she does, and what’s more: “They’re always there” (Waller-Bridge 2019a, 18:11). Speaking during The Making of Fleabag, Waller-Bridge comments on Fleabag’s relationship with the camera. “I felt like it was symbolic of something I can’t really explain … I feel like it’s that pressure of being watched and feeling watched and feeling like if you’re not being witnessed, does what you’re doing count for anything, does it matter?” she said; “Fleabag’s constantly grappling with this need for the audience to be there, to validate her, and also to leave her alone so she can experience things on her own” (Waller-Bridge 2020). Fleabag needs a witness to feel alive, to validate her: part of the conceit of the drama is her capacity to grow out of this need to be seen – to learn to see and know herself instead.

Although Fleabag and Rebecca Bunch look searchingly out at the audience, significantly, there is no one out there to return the look. The characters cannot see the viewers. Is the look to the camera, then, an instance of failed recognition? Does the viewer become like André Green’s dead mother – the depressed and emotionally unavailable mother, a vacant other who cannot look back? (Green 1986). In this sense, we can think of Fleabag and Bunch as looking out at an absent, unresponsive void, which only revives their own internal absences and traumas. Here, one might think of Laplanche’s account of the creative artist (in his example, the poet), who writes for an unknown, enigmatic audience specifically to tap into the unknown within himself (Laplanche 2005). In addressing an enigmatic audience, the poet repeats the early experience of being addressed by the parent’s enigmatic message. For Fleabag and Rebecca Bunch, looking out to an unknown, unresponsive other, stirs up the question that has been bothering them throughout the series – what does the other want from me?

But what about the viewer here? So far we have been talking a lot about the psychology of the characters. In some strands of film and literary criticism, it is unfashionable to treat fictional characters as if they are real. The critic must focus on the character’s linguistic, or filmic, constructedness; this is, I believe, vital, but does it neglect the viewer’s imaginary immersion in fiction? Being absorbed in an imaginary world as if it were real, suspending disbelief, is undoubtedly one of the great pleasures of art (although, granted, not the only one). Perhaps it is equally important to ask – why do we enjoy this experience so much? On a psychoanalytic level, what is the appeal of being sucked into the imaginary world of TV?

One answer might be that TV functions like the good enough mother. At the end of a long, hard day, the viewer checks in with mum – with some kind of model of containment. In identifying with characters on the screen, we feel recognized, seen, held even. It’s consoling. It is true that identification is not the only way of watching TV. As critics with a deconstructionist bent have helpfully indicated, there are many ways of watching TV (ways that are more concerned with the formal qualities of TV than with the narrative content). But that is not to neglect the huge role that identification plays. It is clearly part of the big appeal of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Fleabag. Just look at the swathes of followers on the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend fan sites, the Fleabag bloggers (https://cxgfans.libsyn.com; https://cxg.fandom.com/wiki/Crazy_Ex-Girlfriend_Wiki; https://fleabagpodcast.com). In these two series, the imperfect viewer is offered the rare chance to see women who are not obviously sympathetic.

In contemporary culture, today’s young women are enjoined to be models of self-confidence. In the age of confidence culture and girl power feminism, woe betide any woman who might show frailty, insecurity, uncertainty, even self-disgust. As Katherine Angel says, “if you’re not talking loudly about gutsiness today, are you even a feminist?” (Angel 2021, 16). While Fleabag and Bunch both put on tough fronts, they also show the cracks in this model of feminism: the ravines of insecurity and self-doubt which, for many women, run deep, and if left unacknowledged (as any psychoanalyst knows), will only come back to bite. The shows explore common feelings of self-doubt and merciless self-judgement that are rarely seen on the screen.

Yet Fleabag and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend also offer us more than imaginary identifications; indeed, precisely by breaking the fourth wall, these series disrupt the viewer’s capacity to fully identify with the protagonists. The moment Fleabag looks back at the viewer, she disturbs our comfortable sense of recognition. This experience is akin to Winnicott’s impingement – the infant’s sense of a disturbance in the maternal environment (Winnicott 1955, 1960b, 1975). The viewer looks at the TV (as a containing mother) and instead of being mirrored, we see the mother looking back at us, with her own disturbed needs. The effect is slightly traumatic, or at the very least, it taps into something deeply, unconsciously troubling. It’s true, we love it when Fleabag looks out at the screen, there’s something thrilling about these moments, but that’s because they’re a little bit traumatic.

True and false selves

Throughout this discussion, I have been talking a lot about the “true self”, which also inevitably alludes to a “false self”. But how am I using these terms? The concepts come from Winnicott’s essay “Ego Distortion in terms of True and False Self” (Winnicott 1960a), where he aligns the “true self” with a sense of feeling truly real and alive, and the “false self” with compliance to an other person’s expectations (be these explicit or implicit – a pattern that is set up in early childhood in relation to the parents’ demands). Where the true self is spontaneous, the false self imitates. Winnicott writes:

The spontaneous gesture is the True Self in action. Only the True Self can be creative and only the True Self can feel real. Whereas a True Self feels real, the existence of a False Self results in feeling unreal or a sense of futility … In the extreme examples of False Self development, the True Self is so well hidden that spontaneity is not a feature in the infant’s living experiences. Compliance is then the main feature. (Winnicott 1960a, 148)

I have been arguing that both Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Fleabag are about two women who do not feel real or alive because of the grief they are both carrying for different reasons. Unloved and unseen for their true selves, they seek out recognition.

“The organized False Self is associated with a rigidity of defences which prevents growth,” writes Winnicott (1960a, 144). Brittle, spiky, sarcastic, Fleabag is armed with a repertoire of defences, not least her humour, which she wears like a hard, deflective shell. Her defensive attitude is brilliantly captured in the scene where her sister moves in for a hug and Fleabag fends her off with a punch, as if she is being attacked:

“What are you doing?”

“It was a fucking hug.”

“It’s terrifying, never do that again.”

(Waller-Bridge 2016a, 15:10–15:33)

Winnicott writes:

In this second case, where the mother cannot adapt well enough [to the infant’s needs], the infant gets seduced into a compliance, and a compliant False Self reacts to environmental demands and the infant seems to accept them. (Winnicott 1960a, 146)

While part of Fleabag’s attraction is her refusal to comply, she does not care what people think (at least, this is her front), Rebecca Bunch has spent the best part of her twenties complying to her mother’s demand – that Rebecca becomes a lawyer – and she spends the entire four series trying to escape this “false self”.

While Winnicott’s “true self” exhibits spontaneous expression, how far is this the case for Fleabag and Rebecca Bunch? How far are they able to be spontaneous? How far do they imitate and perform? Might their outbreaks of supposed spontaneity in fact be manufactured, and therefore “false”, in Winnicott’s sense? On the one hand, one might describe the moments in which Fleabag and Bunch puncture the fourth wall as expressions of the characters’ true selves. Indeed, this is what I have partly been suggesting. Rebecca’s songs present moments of true spontaneous self-expression. Although Fleabag’s true self is largely unthinkable because of her grief, through her asides, she shows to the viewer something of her internal world.

But in these meta-moments, isn’t the spontaneity highly constructed, rigid? Rebecca has to break into song to express herself; she cannot integrate self-expression into her everyday life. It is like Winnicott’s “safe” spontaneity:

The baby quickly learns to make a forecast: “Just now it is safe to forget the mother’s mood and to be spontaneous, but any minute the mother’s face will become fixed or her mood will dominate, and my own personal needs must then be withdrawn otherwise my central self may suffer insult.” (Winnicott 1971, 113)

Fleabag’s asides to the viewer are similarly rigid. Like Bunch, she cannot incorporate self-expression into everyday life; it has to be cut off, suggestive of a split self. A defended spontaneity. Fleabag uses sex similarly. To read Fleabag’s bold attitude to sex as an expression of self-empowerment is to neglect how little pleasure she seems to get from it, how her apparent sexual confidence slips into dissociation. While she is having sex with teeth guy, he keeps saying to her, “That was amazing,” and all she can muster is a flat “yeah” (Waller-Bridge 2016b, 23:25–23:51). There’s the opening scene where she’s letting the man give her anal sex while she looks at the viewer, clearly disconnected. Until she meets the priest at least, Fleabag’s sex is mechanical, detached, cut off from pleasure and emotion, not so much about enjoyment as about the restitution of something lost.

Conclusion

Is there any movement in these series? Do the protagonists remain desperately, restlessly seeking recognition? In many ways, series two of Fleabag is about the protagonist’s growing self-acknowledgement, her reckoning with grief. Tellingly, the priest is the only one who can see Fleabag turning to the camera. “What is that, that thing that you’re doing?” the priest asks her, before he himself, somewhat startlingly, turns to the camera (Waller-Bridge 2019b, 06:39–06:60). The priest makes Fleabag feel seen. Having fallen for someone who really knows her, Fleabag gradually stops turning to the viewer. She no longer needs us.

In Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Rebecca Bunch learns to be the performer behind the performance. Moving from a state of acrid, manic intensity, to one of real aliveness, her songs – for so long, split off outlets for her inner, tormented mind – do not so much vanish as become integrated in her life. They are less like lurches into split-off, fabricated worlds, and more forays into different styles, other ways of being.

Much of the comic drama of the first three series of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend revolves around Rebecca’s need for certainty, the end of ambivalence. Turning the rom-com cliché of self-discovery on its head, at the end of series four Rebecca does not find her true self, but learns to see herself as messy, multitudinous and sometimes enormously sad. If, for Butler, gender identity is a “set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame” (Butler 1990, 45) where the subject has a limited number of costumes from which to make a choice, then Bunch acquires a richer wardrobe. In the “Eleven O’clock” song in the finale episode, a medley set in Rebecca’s inner Broadway landscape, she is surrounded by the costumes she has worn throughout the course of the show. At last, she comes to see her self as made up of performances. She gains some reflective distance. She owns her masks.

In both series, rather than disavow their pain and grief, both characters learn to honour the mess of their internal feelings. To see themselves.

Notes

1 In what follows, references to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend will be to Series 1, Episode 1, unless otherwise stated.