Normal People is little more than a gutless soap opera for millennials
Here we have a young woman, smart and beautiful, but emotionally distant because she is a product of the cold, aristocratic upper classes. But she’s different, you know? We know this because she does things like look out of windows, daydreaming, which regular people would never dare to do.
Then we have this young lad. He’s handsome and charming, sociable and popular. He’s from the working classes, which we know because, well, the show keeps telling us he is. And because his house is not as nice as her house.
These two people from different worlds will come together when his mother is hired to clean her house, and this poor lad will introduce the frigid rich girl to sexual ecstasy. It could be a story from 50% of any of the romantic novels ever published (the other 50% of course being the plain woman picked by the extremely wealthy and mysterious man), but instead it’s the 12episode (!) miniseries Normal People, adapted by Hulu and the BBC from the Sally Rooney novel of the same name. It’s a story as old as time. Which might be why it’s so deathly dull.
Normal People follows these two characters, Marianne and Connell, from high school to college, with a will-theyor-won’t-they story arc, with various forms of authorial interference to separate our lovebirds at various points in order to fill time. I thought I must be missing something. People love Sally Rooney. Her books have replaced those of figures like David Foster Wallace or Joan Didion as the books to be caught out with – “Oh, did this bestselling yet critically acclaimed novel fall out of my bag at the bar right next to the person
I’m sexually attracted to? How clumsy of me!” – and adroitly signal to everyone around you your great taste and your with-it-ness in regards to cultural developments.
But I was bored. I was bored watching actors with crows’ feet play 19year-olds. I was bored watching these very typical representations of college students doing very normal things for freshmen, like throw tasteful dinner parties with all of the food made from scratch or dabble in S&M (represented in the show as a little bit of hair pulling, which, sure). Certain that nothing was ever going to happen, I started jotting down the action of each episode. “Glances exchanged” was the entirety of episode one. Episode two, “vaginal penetration”.
Perhaps what I was missing was the deeper meaning of the show. Maybe there was something there about Marxism. Rooney is a Marxist. Did you hear that hit Irish novelist Sally Rooney has Marxist politics? The author of Normal Peopleand Conversations with Friends, she has Marxist leanings. I know Rooney is a Marxist because she brings it up in every single interview she has ever given.
We get it, Sally. You went to an elite university. Elite universities are where Marxist transmission happens these days, after all. Saying “I’m a Marxist” is a more understated way of saying: “I went to Trinity.”
The relationship between Marianne and Connell is explored mostly through power dynamics. She’s rich, so she wields more economic power; he’s a white male so he has more societal power. Marianne’s wealth gives her a natural introduction to the children of the elite on Trinity’s Dublin campus. “Do you see that?” I asked my cat, pointing at Marianne’s circle of friends on the screen. “That’s social capital.”
The characters say excruciating things, like “As a cis white male … ” and “It’s money, though. The substance that makes the world real.” Ah, there’s the Marxism I had been looking for. Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, iconic tome of socialist feminism, is flashed. Someone says: “Men seem more interested in limiting women’s freedoms than exploring their own.” The TV show analyzes itself for you with these offhand comments by the characters, so you don’t have to do any of the hard work of thinking, and they don’t have to do any of the hard work of delving into the complexity of contemporary heterosexuality.
The desire to tell an old story in a new way only really works if you actually have something new to say. And bringing the power imbalances between the classes or between the genders to the surface of the story only counts as new if you assume that romance novelists throughout time, and their audiences, were completely ignorant about these dynamics. At least when these same stories appear in romance novels, chick lit, and romcoms, there are usually some good jokes, and the S&M is more stimulating than just lying there limp while your hands are bound.
For all its performed awareness about class relations, the show can’t maintain an interest in anyone who isn’t extremely attractive or extremely privileged. The only character who didn’t make the move from high school to university kills himself out of the hopelessness of it all, but of course that happens off screen and is only included as a catalyst for the reunion of our protagonists. And our hero, who struggles to make his way from vague, poorly defined hardship into the upper echelons of career-making education? He completes his hero’s journey into the creative class. He gets into that New York University MFA program.
Jessa Crispin is the host of the Public Intellectual podcast. She is a Guardian US columnist
It’s a story as old as time. Which might be why it’s so deathly dull