Unbelievable

I’m browsing Netflix and I hover over Unbelievable. I’m about to click it. I’m thinking that if I press this button I enter a category of people. If I don’t I’m in the other category. This moment is sorting me. And I wonder if Netflix knows whether or not I will press it. I don’t even know if I will. Not really. I surprise myself all the time. Realistically: Netflix doesn’t care. Obviously: Netflix is probably not conscious so Netflix can’t care in the usual sense. Yet also, Netflix doesn’t predict what you will watch. Yet other, if Netflix were conscious it would be more of a creepy binoculeer than a hand-holding friendo. Well, more of a reverse binoculeer. A reeluconib. It yearns only to give you the options you are most likely to engage with. It just wants to spend time with you. For you to spend time at it. Pay attention to me. Prove to me that you’d rather be here with me than anywhere else.

But no, I didn’t come here to entertain the supposed perspective of an entertainment distribution entity. That line of thought is just a distancing tool that helps me get a larger view, using nonsensical empathy to dissociate from myself and enter reflection mode. Crosshatch through the mirror if you will.

I liked Unbelievable. But fair warning, this is a story about rape. It’s a short series based on a real story of rape, false rape allegations, false rape allegation allegations, the many, many pitfalls in our society’s support systems, and how women deal with it all. The main focus is on the fictional and easily believable, based on a real person, similar to other real people, representation of a person, foster child, closemouthed outsider outcast named Marie Adler and what happens with her.

There are many worthwhile moments in this show and that’s why I think it’s worth watching. That’s really what I look for in stories these days. My heart measures a story in moments and if there are enough of them then my heart tells me “I got my moments-worth” and then my brain makes a note of that and using a very mighty and slimy rubber stamp bureaucratizes it as [WORTH]. It can also have bad moments, or even more bad than good. It can even be mostly bad moments—for serious. I think this is a good criteria, more so than measuring a thing’s worth by how many flaws it has and then doing a kind of Platonic subtraction, distance from perfect. That subtraction method creates a weird grouping of art. It scoops up the best but it also includes a whole yammering of milquetoast people-pleasing “go wide” art. The example I like is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show with more flaws than merits, and yet the flaws inform the overall texture and shape the experience and give the heart a reason for being, the journey worth taking, the show worth stamping, the hand worth wiping against the internal pants, the mind worth wondering why this [WORTH] stamp would be ever slimy, then slime starts smiling, the sentence crying, reader shaking head, looking down, sighing–

We are thrust into the shoes of a very unfortunate person. Marie Adler. I don’t want to be specific at all about what happens with her, but more generally she is the strongest entry point into this story and the most sympathetic character by far. Watching her is an exercise in frustration. In many scenes she is on the verge of speaking or acting, or not speaking, or not acting, and it never satisfies. Which is brilliant. A wise woman once told me that the most engaging moments of a story are when the audience most wants the story to go differently but understands that it can’t. That’s why I’ve never been a good writer. I don’t have that willpower to drive the story in a direction I don’t want it to go. I like it when things line up. Marie Adler’s story is misaligned every which way, which means sliding off in a direction you don’t want it to go, in both large ways and tiny moment-to-moment ways. She is misaligned with life. That is a very powerful central character. No matter how normal or lucky you may be, you’ll find yourself either shouting at her or the world or both because she’s you and the world is you and nothing is right with that combination.

I very much wanted to the show to take more risks than it did. With content of this type I always wish stories to make more controversial decisions, and challenge the audience a little more. Yet that’s unrealistic because I know I’m more on the outside than most, a content junkie. For many people more challenging would be unacceptable and for content such as this it would be a bridge too far. This is a story about a struggle against reality. The hard work of the story is in getting us to not run away. For most of us there is an acceptable balance to the world and when that balance is disrupted we are thrown into a decision mangling process. To actually be in that situation is unthinkable and completely disorienting. To wrap a brain around that situation is to deny denial. In that sense as a show it can’t be too real because that would drive away most of the audience. So although it didn’t cater to me specifically, I have to recognize the wisdom, the decency, in the level of nuance and shock and ambiguity that Unbelievable settled on.

Because I think about the people who were like me and clicked on it. And the larger group of those who didn’t. Like most stories centered around rape Unbelievable has a very defined mission. There is entertainment that exists purely to satisfy. Most of comedy and most of action falls in that category. Easy listening. Then there is entertainment that expects something of you. This definitely falls into the latter, especially when viewed as one piece of a larger body of literature seeking to educate us about rape and sexual violence in general. That larger body operates best when there is an appropriate access point for each individual to enter. Perhaps I clicked on this show and it affected me because I was in that appropriate spot. I may not have clicked on a slightly different show or access point. And for other people this one might be too far or not far enough. I do think it is a worthy addition to that existing body of work.

Most of the moments I dislike about the show are the usual ones, when things are too pat or too pert and work out too easily or flow too softly or walk away too quickly. You know the type. Things line up just right and I say wait, wait, wait. Is this a story or is this professionally marketed, overproduced, microwaveable wishful thinking? As I mentioned before, it has to be somewhat stylized in order to cushion the impact. Also, the logician in me knows that when a story has a mission all arguments are constructed via inequalities.

I’ll use the movie Parasite as an example. If you haven’t seen it, go see it. I really mean that. Don’t read the rest of this paragraph. Anyway: In the first act this poor family hits on a series of ridiculous windfalls. These are played for comedic effect but basically everything is going as well as it can, even better as it can. It’s a can that’s too perfect to exist. Everything is gliding for them. However, all it takes is one particularly bad night for this the can to be completely crushed. Now, how you rate the events of that night on a scale from likely to impossible will affect whether you are convinced of one of the story’s claims: that the vast difference in wealth is insurmountable (or unjust). Even a family working together as a single unit, though they may be talented and ingenious and ruthless, though they may ride on luck as if it were a personal pony, in the end neither merit nor good fortune could insulate them from the much larger circumstances at play. And perhaps luck of the moment is nothing compared to firmly established wealth (perhaps itself an accumulation of luck?) And this is an argument via experience. You can follow it with your brain but it is experienced through your heart, and its effectiveness depends primarily on how much you accept and internalize the reality of the fiction. Even if characters are as wild and extreme as cartoons, the comparisons can remain completely valid and applicable to each of our more quiet lives.

Unbelievable does stray to certain extremes. However, it’s easy to recognize that these extremes are simply the bounded edges of its inequality arguments. The crime may be pushed to an unsettling degree, but that only means a milder crime would be swept under the rug all the more quickly. The investigation might be coming together too easily, but even then the horrors are not neatly undone. The pursuant detectives are women, but if there weren’t it may never have gotten this far (and so on and so on). In this way we see these “unrealistic” points remain just as convincing if they were tuned down. And there’s no need to break out your magnifying glass and protractor. I’m just saying that if you did, it would still hold up. And we can’t deny that if we believe in the message heartily enough then we mustn’t allow any bone-headed ones in the audience to escape a good clubbing.

I would say the first episode is the most ambitious and the most essential. The remaining are less ambitious but very competently carry out the first episode’s promises. If the first one really roughs you up, the remaining do help to take the edge off. You might be thinking that this isn’t the show you need to see. You could definitely be right. Let me just say that it’s an experience that has the potential to not just be cathartic and therapeutic but critically preventative. The people who really need to see it might be in the group that doesn’t click on it. But maybe if everyone watches it…