My Brilliant Friend has returned. Beyond love this show. What women say to each other when only they bare speaking, what they feel about each other throughout their lives, the prints they leave on the skin of other women, there is no more interesting contemplation. A world that is the world behind a door, past a clearing, down a ravine. Lenu’s mother, pointing to her belly while her daughter stares off, smoking a cigarette, “You’re not better than us, you came from here. Where do you think your brains come from? I could have done what you did if I’d had your opportunities. I would have done better.” A few moments later to the daughter, “You can’t stand me.” Lenu, “Yes.” The mother, “Me, neither.”
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My Brilliant Friend. The men. For fuck’s sake. The women can’t move an inch without an interruption or a threat of violence or a way of being ignored or talked about that makes them want to run to the place that doesn’t exist. The men spoil the plot. Men spoiling the plot is the plot, in the way a fish doesn’t know it’s swimming in water. The other plot, the shadow plot, the reason the show exists, the beauty of the show is that from the point of view of the show, the only thing that matters, the only thing of importance and beauty and passion is what the women feel for each other and the way they are pulled away from their central preoccupation, including by their own confusion.
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My Brilliant Friend, season three episode 4. From the time they are born, Lenu and Lila are told that everything that happens to them in life will be more important than their connection to each other. And each day they discover it isn’t true. Nothing will be more real or intimate, nothing–not parents or children or lovers–will show each she has felt and been seen. It’s funny, a secret everyone knows and no one admits–the astounding revelation of this stunning series. Lila to Lenu, “It’s a bad book. Your first book was bad, too. If you don’t do well, what will be the meaning of my life?” The women are Gogo and Didi on the sets of two different plays, Lila in the town where they grew up outside Naples, Lenu in Florence with a man she knows she shouldn’t marry. They quarrel about birth control right before the ceremony. What the women have is You are the one I am supposed to talk to, even when I can’t stand you, even when you are unreliable. You are always I can’t stand you and always unreliable. Always the person I carry around in my head. Never bored.
Laurie Stone’s new book, Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That is Happening, is available for pre-order here.