Mae Martin made a knotty romcom about the impossibility of the romcom
I loved it, when Bart Simpson met a fit little squirrel
In the first giddy throes of infatuation, Mae Martin, a Canadian comedian playing a thinly-veiled version of themselves in Feel Good, calls George, her new love, a “dangerous Mary Poppins,” “England’s rose,” and my favorite, “a fit little squirrel.” (Mae, meanwhile, alternately calls herself Bart Simpson or “a kernel of corn somebody glued onto a stick”). In the middle of their first argument—a shitstorm about Mae concealing her past as a cocaine addict—Mae dramatically sets alight a box of her old possessions. Accused of being too intense and with her remarkably Bart Simpson-like face framed by flames and smeared with soot, she deadpans, “I. am. not. INTENSE.”
The jokes on Feel Good kill me not just because of their accuracy or even because of Martin’s pitch-perfect wryness. Most of us have either been in or observed a relationship that everyone knows, with horror movie intuition, is going to spectacularly implode, but you’ve got to hang around to see how it happens.
Mae Martin really was an addict in their teens and moved to the UK newly sober to pursue a career in stand-up. In the dramatized version of their life, they quickly fall for and move in with George, played by Charlotte Ritchie. George has never been with a woman before and perhaps even more crucially, is hopelessly muddled about what she wants out of a monogamous relationship anyways. The intoxicating first phase of their romance unspools in a sexy montage—you see the magnetic chemistry, the shared sense of humor, the shape of them in bed, just enough to root for a couple that’s clearly fucked. That is, before the inevitable comedown, as they both begin to realize the near impossibility of mashing two lives together, with their clashing needs, hang-ups and baggage.
Women of a certain age (mine!) are obsessed with attachment styles. We believe it to be a Rosetta Stone for who we’re attracted to and why (see also: Myers-Briggs, astrology, the love languages, etc.). Any of the legions of us would be able to tell you that Mae is anxious, in constant need of reassurance, and has grafted all of her hopes and dreams onto a soulmate who can rescue her from thrashing against her own life. “I had a problem and now I have you,” she says, both precisely self-aware and completely obtuse. George is avoidant and although she can sometimes mime the motions of a supportive partner, her self-absorption wreaks emotional havoc on Mae, especially as Mae goes through the process of re-evaluating her own gender (in the second season, Mae says she’s still figuring it out but identifies as “an Adam Driver or a Ryan Gosling”). Lisa Kudrow also pops up as Mae’s lacerating mother and is, true to form, perfect.
The entire first season is an excavation of whether love is just a replacement addiction, as dangerous and self-destructive as the one Mae used to have to drugs. Her return to Narcotics Anonymous meetings, with its zany cast of addicts (David who now compulsively makes deviled eggs; Maggie who puts her excess energy into tailing her estranged daughter) provides the backdrop to return to that question again and again.
As faithful followers of Bad Taste will know (hello 10 friends, I love you), my brain was addled by a steady stream of late 1990s and 2000s rom coms that gave me a lot of sideways ideas about love and relationships. Namely, the moment you fly into Tom Hanks’ or Hugh Grant’s or Matthew McConaughey’s arms, you want for nothing else, never mind all the emotional manipulation along the way. You no longer need fulfilling relationships with friends or family or hobbies or even dreams (Kathleen Kelly had to lose her book store! Andie Anderson doesn’t go to D.C. for that job interview!). Durable happiness or real compatibility is sort of beside the point.
Television, with its space to track a relationship over several seasons, has been a good place to pick apart those tropes. The Mindy Project’s central rom-com goes off the rails when Mindy’s true love, Danny, is revealed to be kind of a retro misogynist who insists she be a stay-at-home mom. Rebecca Bunch in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend gets to indulge her worst obsessive tendencies under the guise of culturally-sanctioned grand romantic gestures. Feel Good follows in the same vein. In one of its most devastating scenes, George asks Mae if she makes her happy. Mae responds, brutally, “I’m in love with you.”
The second season layers onto Mae and George’s love story another jagged one about the long tail of trauma and abuse. Mae confronts why she often feels “full of birds” or like there’s “empty Tupperware clanging around in my brain cupboard.” The reason involves an older “friend” who took Mae in when she was kicked out of her parent’s house as a teen. Concurrently, she also has to decide what to do about a famous comedian who has, on the one hand, championed her career and on the other, is prone to making lewd advances all the while capitalizing on an “enlightened male” brand. Feel Good is so deft and efficient at handling the slipperiness of these relationships: how you can feel genuine affection and loyalty to those who deeply harmed you, and how none of our conflicting impulses—toward forgiveness, revenge and nihilism—are very satisfying.
It’s easy to come to cynical conclusions when you’re dealing with such weighty topics: does love ever actually work? Can we ever move past our baggage? What I like best about Feel Good is that it still manages to approach those questions with so much optimism and earnestness. Watch it and talk about it with me!
(Note: Mae Martin, the writer and performer, uses both they/them and she/her pronouns while Mae Martin, the character, hasn’t decided yet, so I’ve done a bit of both!)
Other recs:
I am only the 436,000,000th person but I absolutely will not, cannot stop listening to Butter this summer.
This was a fantastic read, Naureen!