AFFAIR AFTERMATH
Season-ending shocker raises frustrating questions for fans of the show,
Spoiler alert: Season four of The Affair ended with a death, and I’m pissed about it. Alison Bailey (Ruth Wilson), a waitress turned social worker, was one of the adulterers for whom the show was named.
We followed her story, and the stories of her lover, novelist Noah Solloway (Dominic West); Noah’s ex-wife Helen (Maura Tierney); and Alison’s ex-husband Cole (Joshua Jackson). Now, in a shocker, Alison is dead.
The series’ showrunner, Sarah Treem, says that Alison was killed off because Wilson wanted to leave the show. On CBS This Morning, Wilson agreed — sort of: “I did want to leave,” she told Gayle King, “but I’m not allowed to talk about why.” That “why” may be financial: Wilson has said that she’s paid less than West.
Showtime, the series’ network, issued the most telling statement: “Everyone agreed the character had run its course. Ultimately, it felt like the most powerful creative decision would be to end Alison’s arc at the moment when she had finally achieved selfempowerment.”
Hmmm. The Affair (available in Canada on Crave and the TMN Go app) has always been about refracted reality. Its structure — we see events from one character’s point of view, and then we see them again via another character — makes manifest the divide between how we see ourselves and how others see us.
It asks, “Do we love another person? Or do we love what we project onto them?”
No one on The Affair was projected upon more than Alison. She was a human drivein movie screen, looming large but blank. She was vulnerable, a walking wound permanently mourning her dead son. No, she was a wildcat, a temptress. She was a sudden squall in a summer sky, unpredictable and destructive. She didn’t see herself that way, but she knew others did, and it made her leery of herself.
These are fascinating ideas. But what was frustrating to me, as a viewer, is that, in order to convey them, Alison always had to be seen in relation to Cole or Noah. Her story was always about what a man wanted from her. (Heck, she meets her father only because he wants one of her kidneys.)
On the last day of Alison’s life, a man says to her, “You are literally the woman of my dreams.”
But to be a dream is literally to be insubstantial. When he asks, “Alison, what do you want?” the only answer the writers gave her was to kiss him.
Even after she dies, the men in her life keep defining her only in relation to themselves. After Cole runs off with her ashes — determined to control her at last — he asks Noah, “Did she make you happy?”
Noah shakes his head no. “She made me happy,” Cole says. Ultimately, she was binary: She made you happy, or she didn’t. But who she was remains a mystery the show never cracked.
Treem gave Alison two big speeches to go out on. In the first, she kicks a man out of her house, saying, “I don’t owe you a thing … I’m allowed to change my mind.”
In the second, she says, “People treat me like some receptacle for their grief and rage and disappointment, but I am sick of it. I want to live a different story.”
The problem is, after she says the first thing, the man kills her. And she says the second thing in voice-over as he dumps her body in the ocean.
That’s why Showtime’s line about ending Alison’s arc “at the moment when she had finally achieved self-empowerment” slays me. (“I’m selfempowered! But whoops, it killed me!”) If they were indeed paying Wilson less than West, the irony is even richer. (“I’m asserting myself! But whoops, I’m unemployed!”)
A self-empowered Alison would be too hard to project onto. Alive, she’s of no use. But dead? Ahh, now we can keep projecting onto her, to the end (the upcoming fifth season will be the last).
Bonus, we don’t have to pay lip service to how Alison feels. Or, for that matter, pay Wilson.