Dead to Me – Creepiness put to good use

Psychoanalysis of Binge-worthy Fare, Psychology, Women’s Development, Positive feminist models, Netflix Dead to Me

Dead to Me was streaming from Netflix the other night when I walked into the room.  The reluctant wife was in the middle of the first episode of this 10 episode first season and I thought it was not my cup of tea.  It was immediately apparent that it was about a stalker – which feels creepy to me and made the series into a busman’s holiday – and it also seemed to be about women on the edge – again, more like work than recreation.  But I found myself, in spite of myself, getting hooked.  There were some obvious things that started to emerge that seemed pretty necessary to move the creepy part of the plot along and I sort of thought I knew where this was headed, and even then I was hooked.  As much as I didn't want to be manipulated by the story of some creepy, deeply disturbed woman, I couldn't not look.  As the reluctant wife says, I couldn't turn away from watching the accident.  That said, it did not turn into a series about a creepy, deranged woman who was stalking someone because of a creepy need to manage her own internal need states – though it also largely followed this path.  But it diverged enough from the path to become interesting and even to shed new light on things, including augmenting my ways of thinking about the psychology of women…

I feel it necessary to issue the standard spoiler alert, though I will try to dance around the specific plot twists that are cleverly woven into the narrative because I think they are secondary to the underlying themes that I will try to articulate.  That said; no promises.  I think what is more essential than the plot to the satisfaction of watching the series is the ability of the two leads to evoke a wide range of reactions.   ChristinaApplegate (yes – of Married with Children teenage bad acting on purpose fame) plays Jen Harding, the recently widowed woman who is stalked by Judy Hale, played by Linda Cardellini.   In addition to the acting chops of these two women - and their ability to slip in and out of being unlikeable - for the character the of Jen - Christina moves back and forth between being a reasonable, grieving person to being harsh and unlovable and then angry, paranoid, and vindictive - and Judy - who is cute but quickly becomes well, creepy, they remain slippery and intriguing because we have very little back story for either of them.  We don’t know critical elements of how these two people have come to be engaged with each other – but across the course of the season, flashback scenes pull further and further  back so that we get more and more information about this - an interesting and very psychoanalytic way to revisit moments in history.  But even as we learn about their recent past, we learn very little about how they got together with the people who are currently in each of their lives.  Why did they choose to make the decisions they made that put them into place to cross paths in the ways that they have?  Not knowing this keeps at least this psychoanalyst guessing.

Why did Jen choose to work with her (presumably future) harpy from hell mother-in-law in real estate?  Why does Jen recognize just how evil her mother-in-law is – and emulate her simultaneously?  Why did she choose her husband who turned out to be such a deadbeat?  What kind of mother was she before she became a stressed out widow?  One of the transitions in feeling across the course of the season was moving from feeling a real sense of empathy towards Jen, the poor widow who was being stalked by creepy girl to finding myself increasingly irritated and then frankly loathing her almost as much as her one dimensional mother-in-law before moving back towards having a generous appreciation of her spirit (There were also moments of feeling for her mother in law, who turned out not to be quite so one dimensional as she initially appeared).  Jen's movement from likeable to not is quite a swing – and not one that I would have expected from this actress to be able to pull off based on her early work.  Kudos.  But also kudos to the writers who don’t allow us to pigeon hole her.  They keep us guessing – a typical suspense thriller, whodunit, or horror film trope – one of the reasons that I reacted negatively to the initial vibe of the series.  But rather than using these tropes to emptily hype our emotions, I think there is something more important at work here.

Similarly, how is it possible to connect with Judy, the creepy stalker?  Who saw that coming?  Well, Ed Asner did – playing Abe, the centered Jewish patient in the nursing home where Judy works as an art therapist.  He recognizes the essential goodness in her and sits firmly in her corner.  Even while we see her artwork – incredibly creepy paintings of little girls with heart shaped holes in their chests – we start to feel for her.  Where Jen is hard and stable, Judy becomes likably daffy and winningly needy.   Plus we begin to sense that her fiancée, who has warned us that where she goes, chaos soon follows, is not the stable stud she (and we) imagine him to be.  As we learn her immediate back story and that of Jen, we begin to think about the ways that men have treated them badly – regardless of the role the women may have played in evoking that behavior – and we see some of their wackiness – each to her own – as being at least partly the result of their caring for guys who are less than worthy of their care.  Jen’s hard edges and Judy’s creepy, cloying clinginess begin to feel less like liabilities and more like the reactions of decent people to a world that is not particularly supportive of their inner strengths (and, btw, I don’t think it’s just men and mean mother’s-in-law that are the culprits here – Judy and Jen live in the wacky world of Orange County - which is very much on display in the healing pastor and Jen's gay born again Christian sales partner, not to mention her surly teenage son).

As the story unfolds, despite some moments that are hard to believe, there is a psychological reality that undergirds it.  One of the aspects of that reality is the bouncing back and forth between guilt and blame.  I am most familiar with this in the aftermath of suicide – and that may (or may not) be relevant here – I'm not trying to be coy about the spoiler thing – it’s just one of the unclear things that doesn’t quite emerge with any clarity and might be ambiguous and might be my imagination.  And it probably won’t be become clearer.  And this is the second psychologically realistic aspect that the reluctant wife pointed out – when we meet people in the middle of life, we don’t get the back story.  And we discover that they are who they are, perhaps more than we might like them to be – and we don’t quite know how they got to be that way, in the way that we might have learned organically if we were to have hung out at their house in elementary or high school.  We might also have learned that in a first marriage, when they were still connected to their parents in a more need based way.  But when you meet a friend (or a marriage partner) as an adult they can be maddenlingly themselves and it can be difficult to ferret why it is that they are so maddeningly stable in being who it is that they are.  Fortunately, a couple of deaths have destabilized these two women so they get to know each other, and we get to know them, in a more organic and off kilter way.

And what we discover is that it is complicated to be a person.  And perhaps even more complicated to be a woman.  We get going in our lives and stuff starts to happen - and we have to deal with it.  As we peel back thin layer after thin layer, we find that even the things these women  have lied about, have truth to them.  And the things that we thought we knew to be true turn out to be more complicated than we imagined them to be.  In this way, this is a very psychoanalytically rich series.  We are invited to discover, as the sensitive analyst does when he or she is in a good groove with their analysand, things about the person that the person themselves did not know – things that can be uncomfortable to discover, but as a pattern emerges, even the uncomfortable things begin to make sense and to have a certain logic.  And that logic has to do with the essential integrity of the person that is at the core of how everything fits together.  What feels new about that puzzle process from this series is the ways in which that very personal process is impacted by the unnamed but clearly critical events that have buffeted these women during the complicated middle years of their lives.

We don’t yet know either of these women by the end of the first season, and there is a cliffhanger and now a contract that insures a second season.  There is a part of me that would have liked the first season to wrap up and to have this be a one season wonder.  It could have been done.  All the elements were in place and the whodunit could have been neatly solved and we would have been satisfied.  But, OK, here’s the real spoiler - that didn’t happen.  Now we have to trust, with a more implausible ending, that the writers and these two talented actresses will be able to carry what they have brought to life through another season of digging to discover that these women are not whom they seem to be – to the outside world, to each other, or even to themselves.  I am pleased, to this point, with the ability of the writers, but also of the cast to carry this off.  I am mystified how they will move this forward into the future, but ready and willing to go along for the ride.

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