On Being With Normal People

by Catherine Fowler

At a time when, for many, lockdown meant isolation from others, the absence of actual intimacy made depictions of it onscreen achingly poignant and even painful. That is one way to explain the streaming surge that accompanied the ten-part BBC/Hulu series Normal People in April 2020, when it was reportedly downloaded 16.2 million times on the BBC iplayer Journalist Hanna Reich could be said to encapsulate reactions to the series when she confessed: ‘Last week a friend texted our WhatsApp group: “who’s watching Normal People? It’s very hot.”’[1] The series depicts the first serious sexual relationship between two Irish teenagers, Marianne Sheridan (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Connell Waldron (Paul Mescal). The series’ reflection upon the nature of intimacy and of relations between the public and the private, the self and others, appears to have tapped into an abiding ‘structure of feeling’ that combined loneliness with lust, melancholy with hope – or, as protagonist Connell puts it in the novel, ‘pleasurable sorrow’.[2]

In this video essay I use repetition of the crucial first scene in which Marianne and Connell get together to explore how it feels to be with and to be without in a multitude of ways. On a macro scale, whole nations were going through the experience of lockdown together creating, à la Benedict Anderson, ‘imagined “COVID” communities’.[3] Thus even as we were separated physically from those closest to us we were joined imaginatively with complete strangers. While repeating the dialogue from Marianne and Connell’s first tryst I isolate image and sound to mimic the frustrating incompleteness of Lockdown, in which we had to make do with mediated presence amidst actual absence.

On a micro scale, in the chosen scene Marianne’s interrogation of Connell regarding his feelings ‘now’ are answered without words, by him rising to initiate a tentative kiss. The moment beautifully illustrates Sara Ahmed’s notion of the ‘with’.[4] The ‘with’ describes a sense of proximity to other bodies and objects created by a shared intensification of feeling, in this case Connel’s sigh and Marianne’s gulp. Paradoxically the ‘with’ brings about an awareness of ‘the distinction between inside and outside’, between self and other. Following Ahmed then, the intensification of feeling expressed sonically, dynamically, and performatively through the flow of Marianne and Connell’s bodies towards each other will also cause the forming of a surface or recognition of one’s separation from the other.

Author

Catherine Fowler is Professor in Film and Media at Otago University, New Zealand. She researches women filmmakers, artists’ film and video, and European cinemas. She has published essays on teaching and researching video essays in Cinema Journal and The Journal of Media Practice and Education. In 2023 she curated and edited a special issue of [in]Transition on Videographic Feminist Diptychs, including her own video The Responsive Eye, or, The Morning Show May Destroy You.

References

Ahmed, S. ‘Communities that feel: intensity, difference and attachment’ in Conference proceedings for affective encounters: Rethinking embodiment in feminist media studies, edited by A. Koivunen and S. Paasonen. Turku: University of Turku, 2001: 10-25.

Anderson, B. Imagined communities. Verso Books, 2016.

Reich, H. ‘Normal People series based on Sally Rooney novel delivers on the sex and heartbreak’, The Screen Show, ABC Arts, 11 May 2020: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-12/bbc-normal-people-sally-rooney-hulu-stan/12234758 (accessed on 6 March 2023).

Rooney, S. Normal people. London: Faber & Faber, 2018: 25.

[1] Reich 2020.
[2] Rooney 2018.
[3] Anderson 2016.
[4] Ahmed 2001.