Why can't a woman be proudly single – and still openly want to find love?
Although Love Island officially ended on 23 February, it was pretty much game over 10 days earlier, when Netflix launched the vastly superior car crash of a reality TV show, Love Is Blind. Over three weeks, we watch participants date, profess their love and get engaged, but with one catch – they have never set eyes on each other. The toxic TV spawn of Dating in the Dark, The Circle and Married at First Sight, it is equal parts enchanting and excruciating, oscillating between the two at breakneck speed.
Love Is Blind is fascinating for several reasons, but what particularly captivates is how in love contestants are with the idea of being in love. They are essentially strapped on to a love conveyor belt with the sole intention of coming out of it married. Watching them be so candid makes me think about how rare it is to see women comfortably say that they want a relationship in such plain terms, without
apology – even in less extreme circumstances.
Recently, there has been the rise of a much-needed single positivity movement: last year, Emma Watson announced herself proudly “self-partnered”; Lizzo, meanwhile, declared that she puts the “sing in single” in her hit song Truth Hurts. Onscreen, happily ever after is being rewritten for a generation where romance ranks low on a list of priorities – shows such as Crazy Ex Girlfriend and Fleabag concluded with the female protagonists going it alone. In the upcoming live-action remake of Mulan, Disney has axed the love interest, Li Shang.
This can only be a good thing: women have been defined by their relationships – or lack of – since the dawn of time. But an earnest, unabashed want to find “the one” is increasingly characterised as cringeworthy. A friend of mine recently confided that while she was sick of the idea that marriage was something women should aspire to, she was also sick of being told she shouldn’t waste her time yearning for a partner because she has a great job and Valentine’s Day is only a capitalist scam. Her want of a relationship almost felt embarrassing – she began to feel as if she was failing by not being satisfied with solely “dating herself”. It is increasingly unfashionable to wear your heart on your sleeve.
“Single” is fine, but becomes a dirty word when “and looking” is affixed. Women are rarely permitted to express romantic wants. Smart women are supposed to consider themselves above them – it is deemed at best desperate, at worst unfeminist. As Ru Paul has said many a time: “If you can’t love yourself, how the hell are you going to love somebody else?” But self-love and romantic love aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive – and women who are open about their romantic aspirations shouldn’t need to be coy.
unknown freedom. But it’s a risky strategy for the viewer, and we’ve been burned before by some awfully indulgent shows from film-makers in need of a tighter edit. Devs, thankfully, is not an example of this and while it maybe runs an episode too long, it’s a mostly well-plotted and delicately paced dripfeed of information. Garland relishes the opportunity at hand without forgetting his audience.
Devs focuses on a fictional tech giant called Amaya, run by enigmatic chief executive, Forrest (Nick Offerman). It’s based in the centre of a lush woodland in Silicon Valley, and inspires the confidence and compliance of its many workers, including couple Lily (Sonoya Mizuno) and Sergei (Karl Glusman). When Sergei gets a position within the company’s ultra-mysterious Devs department, he’s excited to finally find out exactly what it is that they do. But after his first day, he never makes it back to Lily, who is forced to explore where he is and what he found at Devs.
It’s loosely familiar territory, recalling everything from Coma to The Firm to Antitrust to, most obviously, The Circle, but Garland deliberately upends expectations throughout – sometimes successfully, sometimes less so. There’s a murkiness between who we see as good and what we think of as evil, and while we might think we know where Garland is taking us, he slowly expands the canvas to reveal something far more audacious than a mere conspiracy thriller. He doesn’t take long to show us what the tech at its centre can do and although it’s an intriguing conceit, the motivations behind its creator aren’t quite as involving, falling foul of a sentimental and overly familiar trope teased by the title of the company.
Because while Garland spends a great deal of time finessing the aesthetic of his show, he’s also keen to embed emotion into what could have easily been a rather chilly thriller. It’s Forrest’s backstory and Lily’s central loss that are supposed to affect our hearts as well as our heads – but Garland has lumbered the show with two sub-par performers who can’t even begin to sell either of their journeys. His visual choices as a director are unusual and immersive, but the negative component of this is that his casting often prioritises surface over substance. Mizuno, who made her feature debut in Ex Machina, has a stark, distinctive look, and her background as a model gives her a confident physical presence. But as an actor, she’s utterly, uncomfortably, vacant. Garland’s script constantly tells us how special, unique, strong, resourceful and determined Lily is, but Mizuno is such an absent performer, trying and struggling to muster up even the basest of human emotions, and so a great deal of energy is sucked out by her scenes, of which there are a great deal.
Offerman is similarly miscast. As an actor known for more comic roles, he fails to add the commanding gravitas a figure like Forrest requires. It’s a one-note performance played to death; I often wondered how two better equipped actors could have transformed the show.
Luckily, they’re surrounded by some well-cast talent, including a selfpossessed and faintly terrifying Alison Pill as Forrest’s second-in-command; a spiky Cailee Spaeny as an enthused young coder; and sterling work from veteran actor Stephen McKinley Henderson as her conflicted older counterpart. It also helps that even when the acting might suffer, Devs remains a gloriously handsome watch. A show about people working with computers might sound like a dry proposition, but Garland constantly expands and expands, intercutting the action with stunning, atmospheric shots of San Francisco, reminding us of the wider world outside of the insular universe the characters are inhabiting.
Where it all ends up, in what’s set to be a divisive finale, isn’t as satisfying, emotionally or narratively, as I’d hoped. But it’s a big bet I admired nonetheless. Devs is a show made on a large, seemingly expensive scale, encompassing high highs and low lows, the good and the bad and, by the end, the everything – and as such, it works and it doesn’t, aiming high and not quite landing, trying to reboot the game but giving it a slight update instead.
Devs starts on FX and Hulu on 5 March with a UK date yet to be announced
get legal recognition,” Darger said. “It’s really just freedom to do what you want as a consenting adult.” He hopes the bill, which applies to all genders, will help change societal attitudes, and separate legitimate criminals from law-abiding polygamists.
“If you want to end the narrative that there are abuses in polygamous communities, you’ve got to take them out of the shadows,” Darger said. “The majority of them are innocent, faithful and civic-minded families. Marginalizing them as committing felonious behavior allows the stereotypes to exist; that polygamy equals abuse. Those kinds of stereotypes exist because no one dares speak up and say anything different,” he said. “The law gives people license for bigotry.”
Opponents of the bill have questioned whether women raised in isolated, religious, groups can really be informed, consenting adults, but Shirlee Draper finds this insulting.
“Nobody would dare infantilize women the way they do women who opt into polygamy,” Draper said. “From my perspective, the most feminist thing we can do is give women the opportunity to choose who they love and with whom they live and that’s literally all this bill is doing. For my money, the more options women have, the better access they have to education, to healthcare, the better choices they’re going to make for themselves,” she said. “But as long as we infantilize them, and tell them what they can do and what they can’t do, we remove choices from them as much as they say the polygamists are doing.”
Anne Wilde is the author of Voices in Harmony, a compilation of women’s experiences in plural marriage. At 84 years old, she’s worked for years to educate people about why she and others choose to live in polygamy.
“I have met so many wonderful polygamist families that have no business being labeled as felons,” Wilde said. “It’s a shadow over the family because they know and they’ve had to teach their children that they’re living that felonious lifestyle,” she said. “This kind of removes that shadow, but it isn’t going to change the opinion of the communities overnight.”
“I still believe that polygamy is oppressive to women,” said Mormon feminist Lindsay Hansen Park, but she supports the bill. “We have 100 years of apathy from our state government and law enforcement to prosecute this. I found that it’s nearly impossible to be able to police how relationships work and what a family looks like. We need to figure out a better way to get justice for victims who have grown up in isolated, fundamentalist groups than attacking family structures,” she said.
Park is host of the podcast Year of Polygamy, and after talking with victims and advocates, she believes this bill removes barriers for people seeking help. “But it’s not an easy fix-all,” she said. “It doesn’t bring justice to a lot of victims who leave these groups, and don’t have any retribution for the things that they went through.”
“I’m convinced that polygamy is a symptom of the problem, but it’s not the problem itself,” Park said. “The problem is patriarchal hierarchy with religious penalties. That takes a lot more to dismantle than a piece of legislation.”