Letter #18: Tune in for Love / Thirty-Nine / Twenty-Five, Twenty-One
Good
afternoon, Erin.
Netflix
once again lured me away from the true and righteous path, this weekend, by
asking me if I was interested in watching a movie with the actress who played
Eun-tak in Goblin—and, given that she’s one of my top three K-drama
actress crushes, I was obligated to acquiesce to the siren song of The
Algorithm. And so I watched Tune in for Love.
But,
in a way, that's not what I’m here to talk to you about, today. I will,
of course, as you will see, though not in the way you've grown accustomed to
(which, perhaps, is of great relief to you (or perhaps not, which...well,
you'll see))—not the least because I will not be speaking about it in
isolation: as it happens, I watched this movie in between the wrap-ups of
both Thirty-Nine and Twenty-Five Twenty-One, and
there’s a (broad) unified theme that runs through my notes on all three that I
think is worth discussing, specifically in light of all three.
First
though, as much a convenience as that has turned out to be, it isn’t the main
reason I’ve decided to change my tack, here. Rather, it’s because of an
observation Eun-tak makes about herself, in the middle of Tune in for Love, which hit so close to home that
I had to stop the movie, curl up into a ball on the couch, and sleep for three
hours. I’m too embarrassed to share exactly what she said, but it did—in a
roundabout way—make me...I dunno, take stock, I guess, of something, as I sat
there writing my notes later on: I don’t know much about what you think of
these shows. I know that you like some, don’t like others, and I can assume all
the basic stuff that applies to why anyone likes or dislikes anything, but…I
don’t know exactly what speaks to you about the stuff you like, what turns you
away from the stuff you don’t, if those things are simple or complex, or if you’re
even particularly interested in why you like or dislike those things.
Which,
I want to stress, is not a criticism of you, especially if this is more or less
a deliberate withholding on your part, but rather it is a recognition of
however much of this is owed to my inability to express specific interest in or
provide space for your thoughts and opinions. Ideally, we’d sit down and have a
nice long talk about every K-drama you guide me to complete. (Of course,
ideally, I wouldn’t feel quite so nervous/boring/navel-gazing every time I talk
about something that interests me…but, hey, if wishes were horses, and all
that.) But, barring the sudden convenience of a very small romcom symposium
springing up every time I finish one of your recommendations, I am left with
just this acknowledgement that I know I…well, let’s diplomatically say talk too much.
“...which
is all very...um, interesting, Daryl, but what does this have to do with
this movie or those shows?” I hear you say, an impatient sigh hovering around
the edges of your words.
Well,
dear Erin, it has everything to do with them—because, today, we’re talking
about lack of focus and self-awareness. (See? When have I ever said in one
sentence what I could just as easily say in 100?)
Let’s
begin:
I. RADIO
BLAH-BLAH
With
Tune in for Love, we’ve got a solid concept executed poorly because the
filmmakers seem not to know what’s necessary to tell a story properly. Or, more
specifically, they seem to have studied poignant or "artsy" movies
and detailed the kinds of structures those movies have—but without understanding
why those movies have those structures. As such, the movie comes across
as more of a pastiche of an emotional movie than actually being one.
That
is, I think the movie was so interested in sticking to its premise ("two
people love each other but circumstances repeatedly prevent them from being
together") that it lost sight of what connects an audience to a story.
So
much time was given to things getting in the way of our couple being together
that the movie forgot to give them space to draw us into their coming together.
In fact, we hardly see them interact, in the first half of the film, so we're
basing our interest on the success of their romantic attraction on the supposition
that, by virtue of being a movie, they want to be together, rather than on the
movie making us connect with the characters and wanting them to
come together because of it. Of course, the assumption of connection is, in and
of itself, enough to situate an audience, to get them on board for the starting
point of the story, but it isn't enough to root the audience in the story—even
if the audience were to be, just as an example, already in love with the main
actress and, therefore, already of a romantic mind when the movie starts.
Essentially,
they lost sight of the characters while telling the story—which means there
wasn’t a story, really, just plot.
Beyond
that, none of the story details mattered enough to get into any of them. (Oh!
Except that the boy in this is Eun-tak's baseball-playing flirtation whom Mr.
Goblin dooms to playing the piano out of jealousy! How funny is that?)
Overall,
it wasn't a good movie...but it let me moon at Eun-tak for a couple of hours,
so I can't be too upset, can I. For whatever that bottom line might be worth to
you.
II. MID-LIFE
CRY, SIS
On
the other hand, I have SO MANY things to say about both Thirty-Nine (which...did
you drop it?) and Twenty-Five Twenty-One. But, again, rather than go
through a dozen pages of minutia and (in the case of the latter show) rehashes
of items we've already touched on, while chatting, I'm going to focus on how
neither of these shows seemed to know quite what they were about—because, while
both shows had a solid premise, and both shows had all the elements necessary
to make that premise work, both shows seemed incapable of giving the story what
it needed for all of that to work.
With Thirty-Nine,
the premise is that three friends on the cusp of 40 are forced to face the
meaninglessness of their life choices when one of them is diagnosed with an
imminently terminal cancer. Essentially, the three women realize they've all
but wasted their lives on frivolity, even if that frivolity is couched in their
love for each other: Is that kind of life
enough? Was it enough now that they know there isn't going to be more time for
one of them? And, further, is it fair to use this impetus to change for the
better, even as one of them is dying?
It's
heavy stuff, to be sure. But it's also really, really specific—which means the
show just needs to focus on those few questions for those few characters, always
keeping things tethered to the internal conflict of the healthy girls feeling
guilty that they have good things happening when their friend is dying, and the
internal conflict of the dying girl's guilt that her friends are sacrificing
their happiness out of guilt about her dying.
What
it doesn't do, of course, is any of that. Rather, we get episodes and episodes
of secondary and tertiary character drama that keeps us away from addressing
those main concerns directly—or even indirectly. And it all feels like filler.
Filler that is built upon an ever-growing series of ridiculous coincidences and
conveniences. And which often forgets where it has been as it moves on to the
next happenstance dramatic contrivance on the docket.
What's
worse, I think, is that the show doesn't even start in a good position, since
it doesn't even serve its protagonist trio well—in that one of the three
shouldn't even be in the show to begin with: Third Girl (as in, not Dr. Girl or
Actor Girl) is, in-universe, constantly aware that she is left out of the
dealings of the other two, but the show does nothing to deal with this issue or
how it affects the friendship in this time of turmoil. But the show keeps her
out of the main tangle of Actor Girl's steady descent into her cancer, instead
focusing almost exclusively on the deep affection between Actor Girl and Dr.
Girl. Which would be fine if this was, in some sense, a "love" story
between these two friends, as the severing of their platonic soul-matehood
loomed closer and closer. But it's not. And, in fact, it never really does
anything with that pairing, either, since Dr. Girl has a thousand other issues
of no particular relevance to attend to (her somewhat insecure boyfriend and
his needless family drama; her biological mother’s shady shenanigans;
constantly walking around with a forlorn look on her face), and Actor Girl
needs to have the same conversation with her kinda-boyfriend two or three times
an episode. I don’t know how you explore the effects on the friend group when
the friend group isn’t given the primary attention of the story.
Further,
consider that the big factor before they discover Actor Girl is dying is that
Dr. Girl is going overseas for a year-long sabbatical—because she suffers from
panic attacks and insomnia. These are two conditions intimately tied to stress,
and both are sever enough that Dr. Girl needs to leave her life for a year in an attempt to deal with them. And both
of which bear absolutely no influence over the story, despite the fact that the
arguably most stressful thing she's ever had to deal with has arrived on her
doorstep.
We
don’t focus on the friend group. We don’t focus on the connection of the main
duo of the group. We don’t focus on the core elements of the central
protagonist. We just watch a bunch of things that happen around the cancer diagnosis and dying of Actor Girl, not on the
very specific emotional character stories that spring from the cancer diagnosis and dying of Actor Girl.
(And
can I take a moment to vent about my biggest story issue with this show? Dr.
Girl's awesome older sister is introduced into the story at the police station,
in Episode 1, when she comes to pick up the girls after they were attacked by
that roving band of housewives—and the first thing she does is threaten to beat
the housewives to a pulp for touching her little sister. Flash forward to
Episode 10, where a creepy dude wanders into the clinic to threaten Dr. Girl—after
which the older sister strong-arms Actor Girl and Third Girl into giving her
the information she needs to figure out he was a loan shark who Dr. Girl’s
biological mother is indented to and, as such, sent him to shake down her rich
biological daughter for the money she owes. And the older sister...does nothing
about it. In fact, the next time we see her, she's just in her office and
placidly tells Dr. Girl that it must have been rough to deal with all that
stress. I...does this show know what it’s already established?! Why didn't the
older sister rip the biological mother a new one? Or take a led pipe to the
knees of that loan shark? How do you set this up so perfectly and do nothing
with it? Did you not know you set
this up? I just...I can’t, Erin, I can’t.)
With
one or two minor (well, sub-major) exceptions, the show is a cacophony of
spinning plates which, because of their sheer number, manage to diminish the
emotional weight of dealing with the rapidly approach death of one of the three
best friends—and to diminish even
those other spinning plates, since nothing is given the weight it needs to be
truly meaningful.
In
fact, the most poignant moment in the whole show is probably a line by—of all
people—Third Girl, as she and Dr. Girl are talking about what might come next:
"I never imagined us as a group of two." The impact of which comes
not from acknowledging that none of them thought death was something to worry
about (for them) but from the implication that she knows she's not an equal
member of the trio, and the death of their friend might be the death of her
friendship with Dr. Girl—leaving her with nothing. Of course, I don't think the
show understood that. Because it's much harder to stay within the confines of a
single, meaty lane of emotional drama when you can, instead, have a tertiary
character work at a skeevy hostess bar or a quaternary character whine about
wanting to be a better mother.
…that
said, did you see the headshot of Actor Girl with her dark hair? Wowza.
I've added Hospital Playlist to my queue.
...and
taken Crash-Landing on You out of it.
(And,
yes, I saw the actress who played Dr. Girl got married, the other day.
Coincidence? I...assume so. Goodness, imagine if it wasn't. Me, with the power
to find only the actresses I don't like their happily ever afters,
inadvertently dooming all my favorite girls to bachelorettedom forever. Yikes.)
III. ON
THE FENCE
Which
brings us, at last, to Twenty-Five Twenty-One, the undisputed "best
girl" of this trio, and, as such, the one whose missteps hurt the most.
Because it had everything going for it—story, characters, structure, theme,
Class President—until about halfway through, and then began not just the
dreaded filler nonsense but the total departure from its core ideas.
In
other words: I don't think this show knew what it was about.
I've
mentioned before that anything in the show that wasn't, in some way, about
advancing Hee-do and Nam Do-san's relationship wasn't really worth getting
into (yes—even my beloved Class President's subplot) because the thrust of
the show was always about the two of them, not the players around them. And I
still maintain that...just not as strictly as that, in hindsight.
The
thing that really reset my thinking on why I was falling off the show was
revisiting the first episode—specifically, revisiting the first part of the
first episode, when we're following the daughter in 2021. Because it's actually
the most important piece of context for the story: this is all being done in
service of a frame. That is, the story she will read within Hee-do's diary must—narratively—serve
to help the daughter's conflict. And it doesn't.
Or,
rather, it certainly does—but not with the focus and precision so much of the
first half of the series seemed to have.
See,
there are three things the diary must help the daughter with: her frustration
at her stagnating talent level; overcoming the gap she has with Hee-do; and
sating her curiosity about her mom's old flame. Which means everything we see
play out should be in service of one or more of these things—because the story
is not about a group of five friends and what happens to them over the course
of a 10-year period from 1999 to 2009; it’s about the things that happened over
that 10-year period that help satisfy the daughter.
So,
every moment we spend on Yu-rim's financial strains, Other Boy's inability to
drive calmly, or Class President trying to strike out against the tyranny of
the system is a moment wasted on information that doesn't satisfy the needs of
the story. (In fact, I'd go as far as saying that, unless Class President was
going to create a love triangle with Hee-do or dating Other Boy was going to
ruin Yu-rim's ability to fence, I think we could have nixed those characters
altogether. Get rid of them, and the whole story flows through Hee-do—as it
should, given that this is her diary—and pointedly hits all three of the
daughter’s issues: her relationship with Nam Do-san (romance), with Yu-rim
(talent stagnation), and with her mother (closing the gap…though, of course,
the whole diary does that, regardless of the parallel between both sets of
mothers and daughters.)
The
show tries to play off the ending as the daughter returning to ballet because
she wants to live it up, like Hee-do did back in the day, but that's never the
issue at hand in the diary: Hee-do's good times were only cosmetically related
to her passionate pursuit of fencing. That is, she could have just as easily
been part of a book club or just gone to class and had a similar good time. Yes,
her fencing brought her the exact situation she lived through, but it isn't the
source of the good time the daughter says she wants for herself. And, further,
returning to ballet does not open her up to this supposed good time—it’s just
what she could be doing when that good time appears. (Could we say that her
“I’m bored” comment takes care of this? Sure. We could also say that her not
reading the final diary somehow sates her curiosity about the failed grand
romance her mother had before she married her father. We shouldn’t. But we
could.)
But
even if we do strip the whole thing down to the romance (or connection) plot
with Hee-do and Nam Do-san, the lazy catchall of 9/11 being the thing that
tears them apart—or, I suppose, expedites the inevitable failure of their
relationship by taking a hammer to the pre-existing cracks—undermines the
significance of the ultimate (and heartbreaking (and beautiful)) truth: their
love for each is unique…and, as such, cannot survive the framework of mundane
definition. Again, their relationship is a rainbow: something gorgeous,
miraculous, and ephemeral. It’s meant to appear and disappear. Expecting it to
persist is only going to lead to disappointment. (I also want to take some kind
of meaning from the Gospel quote in the front yard of Hee-do’s house and the
idea that the rainbow is the sign of the covenant with God after the flood,
but…I mean, the carving is covered by a bookshelf, in 2021, so maybe I’m just
reading into things.)
…my
point being that, by boiling it down to a montage of depression and separation
because of something as extraordinary as 9/11, it take away from the uniqueness
of their connection and undermines the entire point of their love story. (Even
if I do acknowledge the consistency of the motif of “the times” taking things
away from people: the IMF crisis, 9/11, the pandemic. Good job, there, but it
shouldn’t be at the expense of the backbone of the story.)
But,
y’know, Class President, so 10/10.
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