Let's play a game where we drink as much as Naomi Watts
“You’re gonna get me into trouble, Diane”
Actually, in this situation, we’re all in trouble. There isn’t a single person in the Netflix drama, “Gypsy,” that isn’t blurring the lines between morality and trauma-bonding. Are we normalizing it? Are we making it easier for couples to annihilate each other? Calm yourself, I’m going to break this down.
Let’s break down Freud’s Death Drive to something ridiculously simple: you buy into the lifestyle that you want to die with but that doesn’t really mean you want to stick around for all the “living” part that happens in between.
Let’s pivot: Gypsy is not about one person. It is about a rampant sense of wandering that afflicts people throughout life. If you’re trying to look for the rabbit under the hat, you’ve already gone wrong--nobody is really at fault here--they have all just completely gone astray in one temporal sequence, like dominoes, because well, that’s how a TV show works.
“I could fucking kill her” -- This is the predominant sentiment throughout the show that is only really expressed by Sam, in a fit of narcissistic rage, after his dog is dognapped. This dognapping is never discussed again. It’s not important--it’s symbolic. And by the way, if you feel like being a “gypsy” at any point of your life--let me save you the trouble, just go talk to your Mom or Blythe Danner. And if you don’t have parents, like Michael, just get some coffee for your wife. This will lead to a super awkward conversation about a barista who has an Indie band and we might just all figure out what the fuck is going on without inflicting too much damage on each other.
But if you’re too busy managing our people’s lives, this is hardly important. There’s a power in telling people what to do--it’s called transference and it can be assigned to a variable, even (x = 0).
The full body; the blank slate; it’s always there in the background, but it informs everything.
“It would totally set him off--my sexuality and all of that shit.” Here’s a big clue that we’re dealing with grandiosity. Who’s the borderline and who’s the narcissist? It actually took me quite a bit to figure this out because there are so many dynamics happening during the show. But, it’s easily broken down into dyads in the preliminary in order to reach a point of clarity:
Jean + Michael
Diane + Sidney
JEAN + SIDNEY
Sam + Jean
Rebecca + Jean
Allison + Jean
Michael + Alexis
Yadayadayada
The point is not to villainize Naomi Watts. We’ve multiplied everything for her benefit. She might be a smokeshow and trying to "explore herself" with some chick she met via her patient, but she’s not exactly a villain. She’s experiencing a pull towards something else that she thinks she wants--she’s detaching from her old life and transforming. She’s growing but in a morally abject way. What? I'm not mad at it.
You shouldn’t be either. Because unless you think that people never change and we all live together like a TV family, maybe what’s happening is for the best. “The best for whom?” This is an excellent question.
Return again: “Who is the gypsy?” Yeah, we can all trash Stevie Nix if we want, but a vagabond is a nomad is a wanderer is an OBJECT = X. If you take a moral stand in understanding this, you will miss out on what we all like to call “human psychology.” I actually just did air quotes. It’s all about maintaining an image. And I’m gonna blow your fucking mind right now,but an image is always double-sided. The gypsy goes across the boundary into both sides. Like I said, it’s nomadic, asymmetrical, and it produces parallax. I didn’t say that? Scroll up and work through your notes.
Ep 10 - “A moment of trespass” - here’s what actually interesting about this show: at the exact moment when the husband confronts the wife for cheating when he hasn’t exactly been standing on the moral high ground in a lot of ways, her psychotic patient intervenes with drama that causes the husband to gaslight her. And in doing so, the equilibrium of the whole situation is fixed. How do you fix a situation with a reckless therapist who is keeping secret apartments and basically pissing off everyone? Well, you could tell her to just talk to her Mom or you could realize something very simple: that all therapy leads down to the very bottom, even to a turtle who is dreaming all of us. The content of the explanation isn’t as important as your desire to be satisfied with the explanation. Until then, you’ll live in a black barn and pretend your little girl doesn’t really want to be a boy. And if that doesn’t work, you can give a completely unhinged speech at the PTA meeting about “bullying.”
Like any narcissist, she’s just talking about herself and not using air quotes.
But who the fuck is Diane Hart?
Unknown.