Disregarding the pain of others

Russian Dolls Season 1 (Netflix)

Hear me out. This is regarding the somewhat amusing Netflix comedy Russian Dolls. Spoilers, obviously. At the root of the show is the female protagonist’s trauma living with a mentally unstable mother. She can’t quite move on, dying and reliving her catastrophic 34th birthday. Because she’s now at an age where she surpasses the age of deceased mother’s. Fine. Then, we are introduced to another character who’s experiencing the same thing as she does except his storyline is tied to a disastrous relationship. It’s “good” that the show tries to be multicultural (note the demographic during the party) because hey it’s set in NYC, but it seems the casting is also color-blind-ed. The other guy is black, and his race is never quite a factor to his endless day. I guess what I’m saying is, where is his trauma? For a young black man, he must have experienced things living in the United States, but the show sanitizes him as a geeky control freak with no significant trace of racialization. (Ditto the Asian BFF except for the odd Uncle Chung joke, the only reference to her ethnicity.) Now for my wild conjecture: do white writers and filmmakers imagine themselves as oppressed, like the way black people are oppressed and or how POCs are oppressed, because of their traumatic experiences? It’s like, hey, I’ve been through a lot too, just like you guys, POCs and other minorities, who’ve gone through a lot. It doesn’t occur to these writers that THEY GET TO NARRATIVIZE THEIR TRAUMAS CONSTANTLY while those who aren’t white don’t have such an easy access to get their concerns televised, published, etc. A conjecture on my part, after watching film after film recently (The Rider, You Were Never Really There, Leave No Trace, mainstream media articles about Trump voters, etc) that privileges white pain without addressing the pain of non-white others. Going back to the show, it ends with a carnivalesque parade that resembles the entr’acte from Holy Motors. They stole it from that movie like the way they’ve stolen the limelight of the pain of others for their own.

#2019 #February