If random people find these recaps they might get frustrated with how I do things. They clearly missed the 10,000-word Supernatural re-caps. I like to write about things that inspire OTHER things, like aesthetics, film acting, dramaturgy. I was inspired to write about Off Campus mainly because of the dramaturgy of it all, but I was also inspired by this mostly unknown cast, and how fun it was to see them work with no preconceived notions. This is rare for me as a writer!

Louisa Levy said she wanted the series to be victim-focused. Hannah’s point of view is prioritized in the “disclosure” scene opening episode 4, reflected in the choices made with edits and shots. Hannah tells Garrett her story and the camera mostly stays on her, not “checking in” with Garrett to see his response. You don’t realize the cliche until they take it away. Keeping the camera on Hannah is just a technical thing, but you can FEEL the difference.

 

Episode 4 “The Breakup”

Directed by Samantha Bailey

 

At the bottom of the post I put a huge thing I wrote about episode 4’s subject matter – huge is an understatement. I started writing it actually back in September, because the episode brought back that whole time, and then just sat on it because … obvious reasons. The piece is very long, and I don’t write much personal stuff anymore, but I decided to just not second-guess any of this. Read/don’t read – I wanted to write it, even though I know this whole thing is obnoxiously long. I just … don’t care!

The Off Campus team brought on trauma counselors for episode 4. The cast and crew had discussions about the subject matter. There are a lot of writers credited for each episode, a team effort. How to include humor in this subject? How to do so without being insensitive? (A similar thing happens in episode 7, heavy subject and more light-hearted subject – but it is not as well handled. The balance is way off.) You can read an oral history at the Hollywood Reporter about everything they did in preparation for the “big scene” in episode 4.

Cheech Manohar, executive story editor, talked about how much he worked on the Dean-Garrett weight room scene, a relatively short scene which could move mountains if people stopped to listen. I think he did a brilliant job balancing the humor before swerving into an honest discussion, keeping the integrity of the characters – they still feel very real – while also opening up new ground in this type of “bro advice” scene. I always forget how short the scene is. It’s brilliant how much the scene gets done with not a lot of words.

When discussing Hannah’s “disclosure” scene opening the episode, Belmont Cameli said he didn’t think Garrett would have much to say in response. Incidentally, having Garrett “just” listen – mainly because his mind is flooded with new information and he was fast asleep a minute ago – also makes the moment Hannah-focused. Garrett isn’t just listening but struggling to listen. Watch him TRY to listen to her, to try to quiet down inside so he can process, hear her, and understand what she is saying. There’s a moment where Hannah says, “What do you think??”, and he literally just sits there, blank as a piece of paper. This was Belmont’s contribution and it’s the correct one.

In so many shows and films, telling someone your trauma is a huge high-emotion event. You divulge it through tears, you break down over what you’ve experienced, you basically re-live it, you get a hug. The presumption is that once you TELL someone what happened to you, … you’re over the hump. See: Good Will Hunting. A lifetime of trauma, months of therapy, and all it takes to heal is a therapist saying “It’s not your fault” six times. In life we ALL KNOW things are more complicated.

Off Campus uses Hannah’s “disclosure” as a starting point, not a culmination, and even THERE the disclosure doesn’t proceed as per usual. Hannah doesn’t tearfully share her backstory, as though SHE is confessing to a shameful secret. She is on her feet, wearing his jersey, being very commanding, barreling through the bullet points, assuring him she’s fine, and even getting impatient when he has feelings about what he’s hearing. Hannah, give him a SECOND! You’ve had five years of therapy to process, he’s had 20 seconds! (You can’t control how someone responds. He is allowed to have feelings. I get the complexity, but he WILL have to process this thing.) The disclosure is a “means to an end” because what is REALLY important to her is her request he give her an orgasm. Garrett’s head explodes three times in a row. She asks him to give her an orgasm. Explosion. She tells him she was raped. Explosion. She tells him she thinks having an orgasm with him will “prepare” her for Justin. Explosion.

In episode 5, the Thanksgiving dinner debacle will provide the full reveal of Garrett’s horrific childhood. Unlike Hannah, Garrett does cry, but his crying is a little un-expressed, and ultimately un-cathartic. He can barely submit to crying, he’s pushing himself out of it almost immediately. This feels very real, to me. People don’t easily submit to big feelings. Only actors do that. It’s cool, to have two “disclosure” scenes play out with very different feelings and results.

A good cry doesn’t “handle” trauma. Saying “this happened to me” is not a magic wand. In episode 7, when Garrett’s dad shows up at the game, Garrett gets fully triggered. As does Hannah, across campus, knowing her rapist is on the ice facing off with her boyfriend. You think you’re past something and there it is again. Navigating is difficult and you will have to make some tough decisions, like cutting off contact with your father, for example. Hannah revealing her trauma in episode 4 doesn’t spare her from episode 7. Telling Hannah his deepest secret doesn’t mean Garrett is now magically fine. You can see Garrett calling on every bit of strength he has to even meet his father’s eyes in episode 7.

Hannah and Garrett get together at the end of this episode! We have four more episodes to go. We can guess the complications for the next four episodes:

Logan makes a play for Hannah.
Kendall decides to stir up shit.
Logan talks shit about Garrett TO Hannah.
Jules posts a picture of Garrett with his arms around a puck bunny at an away game – because of course Jules WOULD do that – and Hannah thinks Garrett is cheating.
Justin comes back into the picture somehow.

Wrong on all counts.

Episode 4’s structure is extremely unconventional, and I did not perceive this on a first watch. The episode feels endless. You feel like it has to be two hours long. The time span for the characters is just two days. There are three ground-breaking two-person scenes: the opening scene with Garrett and Hannah (long), Dean and Garrett’s weight room scene (short), and the second scene with Garrett and Hannah (huge). The episode ends with a massive event, laid out in intricate detail, a fictional “ritual” called Drunk Shakespeare.

Drunk Shakespeare is an invention for the series, and – unlike Jules, unlike the Joanna-Maxwell-Hunter-Davenport-terrible-advice plot-point in episode 7 – the invention works on a thematic and entertaining level. I already can’t imagine a time before I knew about Drunk Shakespeare.

Even with all the ground covered, Episode 4 still manages to give the actors room to breathe, to listen and talk. There are spaces around the words they say. The silences are eloquent. Organic character development happens in those silences.

I must mention the fantastic “fruit gag”, one of my favorite parts of episode 4. Off Campus even re-frames hazing, so necessary in the current landscape where boys die every year being hazed. The fruit gag is included as a meaningless way to lighten the mood, and it also – beautifully – centers Tucker, which I’d been hoping for.

“Gags” are out of style to the degree that they are practically a lost art! Gags have a long history. I bet some of the comedic actors in ancient Greece did comedic gags. Commedia dell’arte was full of gags (lazzis) and were also a staple in vaudeville comedy. We can see the vaudeville inheritance in 1930s films, where most of those character actors – and many of the biggest stars – like James Cagney and Cary Grant – came from vaudeville. These people had gags running through their veins. The Marx Brothers. W.C. Fields. The sheriff in Bringing Up Baby. The dog with the top hat in The Awful Truth. Actors like Marie Dressler. Screwball comedies depend on well-placed gags. The interchangeable plaid bags in What’s Up, Doc? are a feature-length gag. Let’s not forget the pane of glass gag.

Presenting a gag requires skill, and the actors just have to go with the silliness. Gags are meaningless outside their comedic function.

Acting is like poetry or music, but a good gag is like calculus. Timing is everything. A gag doesn’t need to “make sense” logically. It just needs to WORK. Tucker holding a larger piece of fruit every time you see him is such a fun gag.

My thoughts during the wildly romantic rom-com-coded final scene was: “This is happening WAY too early!! It’s only episode 4! What could happen NEXT??”

And finally: I think director Samantha Bailey should win an Emmy for this episode. For the fruit gag alone …

Episode 4 observations, the “how” of it all

 

The episode picks up right where we left off, with Garrett, stunned – I don’t blame him – repeating her question without saying the word “orgasm”. It’s hysterical.
More importantly: Belmont’s hair in this episode is the best version of his mercurial hair. If you watch clips of him dancing – anywhere – everywhere – there’s a lot of them – he looks like Einstein on amphetamines. I understand the desire to calm the hair down a bit, but I like it tousled and unabashedly curly.

 

 

Hannah got herself together while making coffee. She knows what he’s going to say and has tried to prepare for all possibilities. She needs to get through this conversation as quickly as possible before she chickens out. But, Hannah has had five years living with this problem. Garrett was asleep a minute ago. Please don’t yell at him!

 

 

I love when she stands up, like she’s about to give a lecture. Garrett has no idea what’s coming, but he puts down his coffee and assumes an open listening position. What, is it 7 o’clock in the morning? He has no idea what’s about to happen.

 

 

To say Garrett is “dwelling” when he’s had a millisecond to process, is, I’m sorry, funny. Allowing for humor in this scene is a kind of miracle! Getting the balance right had to be like handling nitroglycerine.
“I need you to breeze past this part. Focus up, Graham.”
“I’m breezing, I’m breezing.”
No, Garrett. You are not “breezing” in the slightest. But it’s okay. You’re doing your best.

 

 

In the book, we get dueling first-person POVs, and so we are inside Garrett’s head after this early morning discussion. He cringes away from the word “rape” in his head. “Assault” might be easier to “take”. He keeps saying to himself, “Hannah was raped”, just to get used to having those words in his head. There’s a moment in this opening scene when Hannah tells Garrett her counselor “helped me understand the rape doesn’t define me” and there’s a quick cut to Garrett, where you can see the slightest recoil, and he glances away from her for just a second. He doesn’t want her to see whatever reaction he is having since she just demanded he not “dwell”. The concept of rape “defining” someone … he’s probably never thought about any of this, and he certainly never been chosen as a confidante. Hannah has talked to her parents and her therapist. She is five years ahead of Garrett in terms of processing. (This comes up in episode 7’s breakup scene, when Garrett falls apart because Delaney called Hannah a “lying slut”. Hannah tells Garrett she “heard it every day in high school”. Yes, but the first time you heard it, your soul was probably crushed. You got used to it, unfortunately. You learned to ignore it. Garrett is in love with you and here is this rapist calling you a lying slut. Garrett needed time – and maybe a little bit more information – to process this horror. His brain explodes. I am not blaming either of them. I am acknowledging the good-intentions on both sides. It’s why the breakup scene is so devastating, because the two of them were truly doing their BEST, while they were both in full-on separate meltdowns.) In a later discussion in the book, Hannah walks him through the trial. I wish we had more of that in the series. At one point in the book, Hannah – seeing Garrett’s helpless infuriated face – warns him, “It gets worse.” You have to hear all of it.

 

“Things are going really well with Justin.”
Are they, though?
I maintain my belief that Justin has nothing to do with this, not really.

 

 

In the book, Justin isn’t as big a factor as he is in the series. In the book, Hannah tells Garrett that maybe if he gives her an orgasm, her body will “re-program”, it’ll be a “re-set” after the trauma, almost like clearing out the blockage. I almost wish the series went this way instead of Hannah saying she wanted to be “ready” for the impending hookup with Justin. I understand the choice, though, just story-wise. Hannah’s reasoning “ups the stakes” for the “lower stakes” Garrett. Making the stakes higher is always better story-telling. Garrett has barely been able to process the news of Hannah’s rape and then the orgasm request before she hits him that this is all about Justin. By this point, Garrett is not confused about his feelings for Hannah. I love how Ella Bright plays this scene. She rattles it all out in an unbroken monologue, not letting Garrett get a word in edgewise. (This is a new way to present a disclosure like this! But … and I’m sure this is true for others, I did a similar thing in my version of this story. I watched her rattle things off and winced, “oh my God, that was my 25-year-old self barreling through my ‘truth’ and not letting him say anything.”)

 

 

John Wayne always said, “I’m not an actor. I’m a RE-actor.” John Ford knew he could place a camera on John Wayne even when he had no lines, and Wayne’s reaction fills in the whole scene.

 

 

Belmont Cameli is relatively new at this, but he understands already what John Wayne was talking about. Hannah does most of the talking, and Garrett has maybe five short lines. There are only a couple of cut-aways to him. Garrett’s adrenaline is going but he is very aware of his face. She’s being very firm with him about what she needs from him and he doesn’t want his facial expressions to be incorrect. He’s being asked to suppress his honest responses and he is doing his best. What this leaves for Cameli to play is conflicting emotions, a little fear, a desire to be there for her conflicting with his own “what the FUCK” response. She’s demanding he “focus”, and … he is truly trying. Cameli UNDER-plays all of this. I truly love under-playing. Takes a lot of sensitivity and also control.

 

A perfect example of this Cameli’s line reading for “Wow”. I think why he’s effective as an actor is he’s willing to show his character in process. He doesn’t have to land on one thing or one emotion. Garrett sometimes doesn’t know what he thinks or how he should be responding publicly. Garrett is thoughtful, but that means he thinks things through. Cameli ALLOWS for things to happen. “Wow” is perfect because Garrett can’t believe what she just said. He gets how huge this moment is. Garrett just spent the previous night proving to her – and to himself – that he can be trusted. Last night, he protected her successfully (in the way he couldn’t protect his mother? subconsciously?), but I don’t think he expected immediate confirmation of his trustworthiness five hours later when she tells him her secret. He doesn’t want to make the moment about him, but he can’t help it, he has a moment where it’s about him. “Wow.” His anxiety about being trustworthy will come up again in the weight room scene.

 

 

“Okay. I’ll do it.” I can’t explain it better than this: what Cameli does there looks like nothing. It IS nothing. You can’t fake doing nothing. You have to ACTUALLY do nothing. Cameli doesn’t add anything. He doesn’t try to “show” what he’s feeling. In the last two seconds, Garrett made his decision. Whatever HE might feel – and he feels a LOT, she’s asked him for something, he’s attached and wants to give it to her. Last night, he had to put her to bed after peeling her off of him. She’s sober this morning. The decision is up to him. I think Hannah expects him to say no, and has probably convinced herself, “It’ll be totally fine if he says no.” I believe her. When he says yes, she can’t believe it, and he says yes in this NOTHING way, as though he’s agreeing to give her a ride to school. His “nothing” manner gives her space – and, incidentally, gives him space too. Stay cool, let’s all remain calm.

 

I wrote a thing about “commitment” in the episode 3 re-cap. These two, without knowing each other, made a commitment to “the deal”. Garrett understands commitment. His whole life has been “commitment” to hockey. He doesn’t question his commitment to Hannah, a surprising element in Off Campus. His expression is so kind when they make the appointment for later. Garrett is repressing a LOT for Hannah’s sake, but the kindness is genuine. She has not allowed him to “dwell” but he got himself together and made it through this conversation without fucking up. All he had to do was sit very very still and … control all the muscles in his face.

 

“Did you mean now?”
lol

 

 

Meanwhile, downstairs …

 

 

The hazing-Tucker thing is isolated to episode 4. The Greek scene is prominent in the book, since football-player Justin is in a frat, and Hannah and Garrett go to frat parties, etc. Here, the only party in town is hockey house parties. In the series, Justin is in Beau and Dean’s frat (no way is he in a frat). Presenting hazing as a funny fruit gag is a genius stroke. Just technically, keeping a gag going for this long is not easy.

 

 

Off Campus takes place during a Massachusetts fall and early winter. They filmed the series in Vancouver in summer, and they did almost nothing to make the background autumnal. In episode 8, we get a couple of haphazard patches of snow lying on bright green grass. I need autumn colors! Bare trees. Different outerwear. I feel this REALLY strongly in the breakup scene in episode 7, a great scene, but they made some choices stylistically with environment and lighting which I don’t understand. Everything’s too golden-lit and green. It’s now December in New England and the December of their relationship. Things should not be magic-hour-y.

 

Daveed observes how Hannah’s “whole body relaxed” when she thought of her favorite song. The same wording, almost exactly, shows up in Dean’s weight room advice to Garrett. A subtle – or maybe not subtle – echo.

 

“And I knew it was a dream because my childhood dog Rosie was there …” Allie breaking up with Sean in the middle of him recounting a dream about his beloved childhood dog is so funny to me. Maybe I’m pushing it but having Sean talk about his dream connects to their shower scene when he says she thought she’d outgrow her dreams, and also connects to the sequence at the end of the episode, involving a certain play that has a little something to do with dreams.

 

 

In episode 4, Hannah “breaks up” with Justin. Garrett and Hannah jointly “break up” with their own deal. But the first breakup, and the longest overdue, is Allie and Sean. This is an extremely annoying breakup because Sean doesn’t believe her when she says she’s done. Sean isn’t wrong to disbelieve her, however, if this is something that always happens. And he’s right: it’s not fair to him. You know what’s ALSO not fair, though? Telling someone you thought they’d “outgrow” their dreams.

 

“See you in 36 hours” is aggressively passive-aggressive.

 

Allie is a good communicator here, all things considered. I’ll get to one of the things I really love about Allie in the scene later with Hannah in the dorm room. One of my favorite Allie-verbal-quirks.

 

 

The weight room scene, when Garrett asks for Dean’s advice on “making a girl come” – even though he’s obviously done it before but not under these circumstances – is a revelation. I’d love to see all the different drafts of the scene, because they worked it like a math problem. They (the writing staff, I mean) knew their assignment and the “event” of the scene, and also the expectations audiences will have going into it. In this situation, at least in media, guys tend to give each other certain kinds of advice. They refuse to take it seriously. Or … the advice is terrible. But Garrett is nervous, there’s the shoulder-twitch-touch thing he does when he’s uncomfortable, and nothing gets by Dean. What then follows is a scene I’ve never seen before.

 

 

I love how Kalyn plays this: all of these actors fill in the blanks for themselves. I mentioned in episode 3 that all actors need to come up with a Moment Before every scene. Nobody comes from nowhere. Every moment comes from something else, even if you’re just walking into the kitchen on a normal morning. What are you doing before?

 

Let’s take a moment to revisit the timeline. Last night they all went and did karaoke and Hannah got drunk. She tried to get Garrett to sleep with her and woke up the next morning asking him to give her an orgasm. It’s been an eventful 12 hours. But let’s think about what DEAN was doing last night. He brought two girls home, found Allie on the couch, and then the two of them sat outside talking. There was banter, of course, but they both stir the depths. This is not surface talk, it’s about where Allie is at in her life, her struggles and what she wants. “What do you want?” I wrote about the centrality of this question to the series in the piece I wrote on episode 3. Dean calls himself “Six Flags” and says “that’s fine by me.” Allie looks at him dead on and asks, “Is it?” The expression on his face in response is one of my favorite moments in the whole series. He is SHOOK. So. That’s what’s on DEAN’S mind as he tries to help out his friend with the girl-who-is-not-Hannah. That’s Dean’s Moment Before.

 

In Kalyn’s behavior you can see that Dean has probably sensed the whole morning that something was “up” with Garrett. Dean picks up on everything. I love how Cameli isn’t openly weird, “indicating” that something is wrong so the audience can see it. Cameli gravitates towards the least obvious most dialed-down choice. Garrett is TRYING to seem normal, but he’s struggling with a weight he shouldn’t struggle with, and his response to Dean’s help with the weight isn’t overtly anything, he’s just slightly distant. The choice is so cool because it says something about Dean’s perceptiveness that he would receive Garrett’s vaguely recessive mood and realize “…. something’s going on with Garrett.” The script is good! Lots of room for us to infer, to read into things, to pick up on whatever subliminal signals exist between these two friends.

 

 

Dean hesitates before going over to Garrett, and this feels very real to me. Gearing up. Should I go have a personal talk with my friend? This is going to be weird because we never do that, but … maybe I should go over there. Let me take a second to get my shit together.
The revelation of this scene is how it up-ends what is expected. Media representation shows guys toxically refusing to get involved with each other emotionally. We aren’t accustomed to seeing a heart-to-heart like this between two men, especially JACKED men in a weight room. And, to be fair, Dean and Garrett don’t go around having deep conversations, in general. They haven’t done this before. Nobody really knows what they’re doing. There’s also the “reveal” that we probably have been underestimating Dean and we need to stop it. (This carries out into the larger world: maybe we need to stop labeling people and deciding we know who they are based on a snap judgment.)

 

When Dean asks “What’s going on?”, Garrett doesn’t reply “No worries, I’m fine.” Instead, he launches right in. I love what this says about their friendship. Garrett isn’t consciously putting out radio signal waves of “Dean, please ask me what’s going on, I have got to talk to someone …” but it’s THERE, and you can actually see it when you’re looking for it. Dean HEARS this as though it was spoken out loud. Acting is RE-acting. Acting is behavior.

 

 

Dean’s initial response is a joke. He can’t help it. He just needs to get the joke out of the way. Garrett would have kept walking if Dean didn’t stop him, I believe! This speaks to Garrett’s nervousness. Garrett doesn’t WANT to have this conversation, but … it’s gotta be done and Dean needs to settle down. Dean, to his credit, immediately adjusts his entire emotional attitude, and even his body language reflects his openness. Dean immediately guesses this is about Hannah, and a flash of surprise floats across Garrett’s face. At this point, Dean and Hannah have not interacted AT ALL (at least in terms of what we are shown). So I love the series “filling in those blanks” for us, and the look on Dean’s face when he lets go of the joke. He knows what’s going on. Garrett can’t reveal what Hannah shared, but … did you think your friends hadn’t noticed, Garrett? You have no idea how much has already changed. There is no “someone else” and everyone knows it.

 

 

In the book, Garrett asks Birdie for advice and decides to frame it as “How To Sleep With a Virgin”. He thinks maybe the “etiquette” – his word – is the same. He spends some time on Google researching women’s orgasms, which is adorable, he probably got some pretty interesting results. “Nothing is more vulnerable than sex” is a line from the book, but then Garrett admits to Hannah, “… or at least that’s what Google says.” I don’t think “sex is vulnerable” is “lived” experience for Garrett. We’ve seen him having sex. It’s pleasurable and fun, but is it vulnerable?

 

 

It’s so fun how Dean doesn’t even try to hide that he knows Garrett is talking about Hannah, even after Garrett says no, this is “about someone else”. Garrett lets Dean keep mentioning Hannah, without saying, “Dude, I told you this is not about Hannah.” There’s all of this plausible deniability going on. Dean, listening carefully, taking in Garrett’s very uncharacteristic nervousness, wonders if Hannah is a virgin – and this is so funny because Garrett literally just said “This is not about Hannah.” 2 seconds later, “Is Hannah a virgin?” Even though Garrett says Hannah is not a virgin, he lets Dean squint at him like “uh-huh, okay”, and lets it be a conversation about virginity. Garrett is just trying to get through this damn thing, and Dean is trying to figure out, “What the hell is Garrett actually asking me about?”
“G, is Hannah a virgin?”
“What? No.”
“Dude. Don’t make this weird.”
It’s funny because it’s true. Garrett IS making this weird!

 

Dean: “If it’s her first time, she might not come.”
Garrett: “Not an option. She has to come.”
Dean: “Respect.”

 

“I just don’t think I’m the kind of guy she should be trusting this with.” There it is again. Garrett’s most vulnerable moment in the scene. He can barely look at Dean. This is a deep fear for him.

 

“She asked you, she thinks you are” is my favorite piece of Dean advice. It gives respect to Hannah as a woman who’s made a choice and knows why she’s made it. The line also hypes up his friend: “You’re good, don’t worry about it …” In episode 8, Beau gives similar advice to Dean, who really needs it. “Allie knows you’re awesome or she wouldn’t be hooking up with you.” Giving respect to the woman in this scenario.
The bar is in hell for men: giving respect to women for knowing why they’ve chosen you, is the barest of minimums, and it’s sad these moments feel revelatory but here we are.

 

When Dean tells Garrett not to “skimp” on the foreplay, Garrett’s reaction is like, “Come on, dude, who do you think you’re talking to, I’m not a COMPLETE idiot.”

 

 

Everything about Hannah with Justin is “too much”. Garrett was “making it weird” in the weight room and Hannah “makes it weird” with Justin. With proliferating summer green in the background, even though it’s November.

 

“Bye, I guess.” I guess? Hannah, you are making things so weird Justin doesn’t even know if he’s saying “goodbye” or not.

 

 

I find it so touching that Hannah shows up for her “appointment” with Garrett not just dressed to the nines but in a skintight un-Hannah-like dress, boobs spilling out, high heels. In episode 2, Allie says Hannah’s costume has to be “boy-hot, not girl-hot”. Hannah thinks she needs to be “boy-hot” for what she and Garrett are about to do. I’ve seen a lot of YouTube reactors – mostly men – not understand this moment. They judge Garrett for being in sweats, for not dressing up, as though Garrett is showing up like a slob. No, no, no. The discrepancy is because Hannah thinks she needs to look sexy for him in order to do this thing. This is what our culture does to women! Hannah told Garrett “not all women want to dress up for the male gaze” but here she is doing it. Understandable impulse. I am not judging her. Having sexual feelings has nothing to do with BEING sexy, or being PERCEIVED as sexy by men in between the ages of 22 and 35. What Hannah looks like or how she is dressed has nothing to do with the request she’s made and the experience they’re about to have. They’re not going clubbing. Her outfit choice is so vulnerable, and I love the detail. I also love that Garrett takes one look at the dress and realizes what is going on.

 

The music choices are masterful in this lengthy scene, and I know the “team” worked really hard to get all the segues/fades perfect. The scene is so long, you have to provide some kind of structural soundtrack. The choice to have the music totally stop when Garrett pulls back from kissing her … Nothing sentimental under their intimate conversation. The moment is saying, “Shhhh. Just listen.” The moment “Baby Now That I Found You” is engulfed by the score … they tried it so many different ways because what they were trying to accomplish is so delicate. One wrong move and the whole thing falls apart.

 

Just as I like to imagine Hannah making coffee for Garrett, rehearsing what she wants to say to him, Garrett has been doing … what, exactly … in his room before she comes over? The house is quiet. Where is everybody? I’m sure he showered and shaved. Maybe did laundry. But what else? Being quiet, remembering the purpose of what they’re doing, which (obviously) he’s never had to think about before in regards to sex. We’ve seen him having sex, so we know he “cares about” his partner’s pleasure at the very least … so he’s got that going for him, but he’s thought of a couple of things he wants to do to establish the mood, and also … Dean’s words help. Maybe Garrett’s in the shower murmuring “trust trust trust safe safe safe” …

 

 

Garrett has the player in his pocket. He probably put together a little “order of how the sex part should go”, and maybe he won’t stick to it, but he wants the outline just in case. (Or flashcards.) He is NOT “comfortable”. You usually aren’t when you do something brand new. (Related: I did a show once where there was a lot of nudity. A serious nasty play, eventually made into a film. The play opened with my character walking across the stage naked, looking for my cigarettes. The first time we ran the scene through with me naked was stressful and I dreaded it. My boyfriend was also in the show, and he was there that day, so I felt at least a LITTLE safe. The director stopped me to talk about an acting moment, and I was standing there naked, going, “… really? Now? Can’t our first time through JUST be about me being naked to get used to it?? Can I put on a T-shirt now at least?” Midway through the run, the other actress in the show, who also had a nude scene, said to me, “I have to remember I’m supposed to be scared and tentative when I take my clothes off. I’m so comfortable doing it now, and I shouldn’t be ‘whatever’ about being nude in front of the guy who’s going to rape me.” I started laughing because I knew exactly what she meant!)
This “orgasm scene” was rehearsed and choreographed within an inch of its life. They worked the material over and over. Intimacy coordinators choreographed it. They spent two days shooting it. The actors were comfortable with each other. But still: you have to put all that aside and remember the characters are NOT comfortable!

 

 

“So … are we going to do it now?”
Seduction hasn’t existed for Hannah. No one has ever taken the time with her or cared. There’s a shot of Garrett, and he suddenly looks helplessly vulnerable. He does not know what he is doing! This is such risky territory. When he tells her to pick out a song to “set the mood”, not only does Hannah make fun of him, she says, “Ew!” Garrett laughs, but he’s insecure. No one has tried to “set the mood” for Hannah and his words sound cheesy to her, corny. But she’s also uncomfortable with him in this role, I’d say the dominant role. Letting a man be “dominant” in this scenario is treacherous waters, and this is why when Garrett takes charge by proposing his “idea”, and she’s open to it and lets him take the lead … it’s so emotional and powerful. Letting him “take charge”, and saying “yes” to that, when she’s never been allowed to really say “yes” before … is terrifying but … he’s Garrett. His behavior is WHY she asked him to do this with her. Trust is such a big deal in Off Campus.

 

 

The lighting, the production design, of Garrett’s room, is so perfect. The Venetian blinds give options for ambience, different times of day and night. The scene is quite dark: there are times you can barely see them through the blue-blackness. Having Garrett’s sheets and blankets be dark is aesthetically pleasing (imagine the shot with white sheets and a white comforter), so we have dark sheets with a spill of moonlight across it, and the fragile night lamp.

 

I love to know The Foundations song was written into the script. It’s an unusual choice. Garrett’s mother was probably Gen X or older millennial. Gen X kids were raised by Boomers who passed on their music taste. And I suppose this goes on regardless of generations. My nephew, a Gen Z-er, loves current music but also loves the Beatles, Johnny Cash, etc. Parents pass things down. My parents indoctrinated me into The Beatles. Dylan. Joni Mitchell. The Clancy Brothers. Folk music. Breaking away from parents’ record collection as a teenager, getting into Prince, Sinead O’Connor, Nirvana, Sleater-Kinney, and etc., was a rite of passage, but you don’t throw out the old when you embrace the new. Some of the records Garrett owns are probably his mother’s.

 

 

When Hannah leans her back against him, she’s moving the “event” away from the playful dancing into the prologue of intimacy, and there’s a moment where Garrett opens his eyes, looking straight forward, not lost in the moment, he’s thinking, getting himself together. He probably wants to attack her (in a sexy way), but this isn’t Kendall or Zoe. Hannah has put him “in charge”, essentially, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing either. He knows the mechanics of how to make a girl come (bare minimum) but this will require something more from him. It’s obvious Garrett’s feelings for her are WAY too involved for this activity, and he’s basically already in love with her … and it’s touching to see how seriously he takes all of it. You WILL get hurt, Garrett, but … as Ethan Hawke said to Amelia Dimoldenberg on the red carpet: “The one who loves always wins.”

 

 

The addition of the heartbeat when they lie down in bed, the music changing ever so slightly … the overall effect is nerveracking. You feel something is not quite right. Ella Bright brilliantly shows the disconnect, the sudden freeze-up, the kneejerk response to his hand on her leg … and Garrett, who’s already checked in with her once to make sure she’s okay, feels the change..

 

 

This scene is so excellent on consent, so let me break it down a bit.
In this little section – where he thinks they should stop and she wants to continue – we can see how intelligently everyone involved has thought about consent. Garrett consented to do this with Hannah. Hannah’s asked him to do this, so she’s consented too. Now they’re in bed. They’re fully clothed but her legs are spreaad, which made me nervous for her as potentially triggering vulnerability … but she wants to push through her response because she’s sick of having this problem, and she has Garrett here now, and the problem is coming up again.
Garrett says he thinks they should stop, a big risk for him to take. He’s slept with a lot of people so he has probably stopped things before, I imagine. How many times has he turned down a girl because she’s drunk and pawing at him? I’m thinking many times, considering the parties in that house. Stopping with Hannah, though, is fraught with the unknown.
Hannah ignores his “no”, literally pulling him down onto her, gripping on his neck, even as he’s pulling back from her. He really has to resist her to get her to stop. This is incredibly intimate work from these two actors! Finally his resistance is strong enough that she is forced to stop, and, of course, she is devastated.
The moment is so beautiful and complicated.
Hannah is not just saying “yes” – she is saying specifically, “I want to do this” – potentially sexy words in another scenario – and a clear “yes” if ever there was one, at least verbally. Her words give not just consent, but “enthusiastic consent”, although her body recoils from it.
However, if she kept pulling Garrett down onto her telling him she wanted it, if he finally stopped resisting her because she’s SAYING she wants it, after all, if he is confused about what’s going on and decides not to say anything … well, then, HIS consent has now been compromised. He said “no” to her and she overrode his “no”.
I LOVE this section so much. Rarely do we see this addressed. Everyone needs to consent. Garrett is upset and doesn’t want to keep going. Whatever sexual moment they’d have wouldn’t be good for him if he just kept pushing through this, merely because she wanted him to. You are allowed to take BACK your consent if something doesn’t feel right. You have to be in charge of yourself, you can’t expect anyone to be a mind reader.
It’s nuanced. We hear the word “consent” and we think of the horror stories like Hannah’s. But consent is also delicate, and needs to be negotiated on a moment to moment basis. Consent doesn’t have to be un-sexy. However:
Hannah SAYS “yes” even though her body says “NO”. Garrett feels the “NO” in her body, so he ignores her verbal “YES”, at the same time Hannah ignores his unambiguous “NO”.
Amazing writing and performances.

 

The way Hannah pulls her shirt down over her private area is just heart-rending and Garret sits up in alarm, backing up from her, giving her space. He has no idea what she is going through. They both must be so scared.

 

 

“Wow, that was surprisingly deep.” I don’t like this line. It’s not as bad as episode 7’s “Broadway’s hard, dude”. Nothing’s as bad as that. But “surprisingly deep” shows Hannah is not being honest with herself about what is going on here. What about Garrett at this point is “shallow”? How can you say his depth is “surprising” after everything, after the bedroom scene at the party, after karaoke, after him agreeing to be here with you in this room right now? This attitude comes up in the kitchen when she talks about his “cool hockey guy image”, and again in the scene with Allie. Hannah’s not ready yet to admit … this guy right here right now is actually THE guy. She’ll be ready after Justin’s comment about Haley Joel Osmont.

 

We all can see how incredible this scene is. Garrett does not make a wrong move from this moment forward. He notices the dissociation when it happens and is able to pull her out of it, because he was listening to her describe it earlier. He has no idea what “dissociation” is but she told him she leaves her body. So he’s looking for it. AS he is masturbating. (I can’t believe this scene exists.) He is not a doctor or a sex therapist but he knows enough to know she is not broken, she’s just not ready, everything is fine. Since my life includes something along these lines, with some variations, which I wrote about below to spare anyone not interested, I have no distance from any of this except to say, I am so happy we have this scene now. My life has not proceeded in a conventional way, hitting the conventional benchmarks, and … you know, that’s what happened, and no one who knows me is surprised, but it’s weird to never see your experience represented. I’ve seen little comments like “the men in Off Campus are clearly men written by women” and I get it, but this annoys me a little. First of all, the book was written by a woman and the way these guy characters talk in their private POVs is often extremely gross and sexist. Garrett referencing Hannah’s “stripper tits”, etc. All of the hockey guys leering at Hannah’s body, Dean groping her at karaoke. There are men on the series’ writing staff. Off Campus is clearly woman-led, and they’ve made changes to the boys which serve the story well, providing a fresh new take on positive masculinity in a stereotypically male-jock environment. There are green flag men in the world, and some of them aren’t sensitive boys with goatees who work in a coffee shop in Portland. Some green-flag-men are jock fuckboys. (Since guys with goatees who work in coffee shops were never interested in me, and the jock fuckboys often were … I feel I can speak with some authority on this subject). The vibe between men and women right now is the worst I have personally ever seen. No matter the appeal of Off Campus, I would not suggest you fall asleep drunk on the couch in a house full of men you do not know. But I, for one, am gratified this scene exists now. Everyone wants to “see themselves” in media. My thought: FINALLY.

 

Garrett is moving by instinct. He comes up with his idea on the spot, because he’s listened to what she’s saying, and picking up on context clues. He didn’t know what might happen when he touched her, and he sensed immediately it wasn’t okay to touch her. He’s scared, but he’s clear-headed enough to 1. not take her reaction personally and 2. propose something else he thinks might work. The suggestion is thoughtful and intelligent: let’s do something that will be vulnerable and intimate but won’t involve me touching you. Basically: “How about you be vulnerable over there and I’ll be vulnerable over here.”

 

I could live without the double toe-curl.

 

We need to accept the unreality of Garrett not cleaning himself up. That’s okay, show. I get it.

 

 

The fist bump is perfect.

 

 

The post-orgasm kitchen scene is the most boyfriend-ish Garrett has ever been in his life and I don’t think he even realizes how naturally he has taken to the role. He’s not weird about what they just did, he’s not awkward at all, they’re still friends and nothing has changed. (Well, everything has changed, but in terms of his post-intimacy behavior … he nails it. He’s still “taking care” of her. He’s a natural.) They both just had orgasms and now they’re hungry. His hair is a mop of curls, and I approve.

 

The scene starts in medias res: “Drunk Shakespeare?” This suggests he’s just asked her what she’s doing in the next couple of days. “What’s up with you tomorrow night?” [inside: “… wanna get together again tomorrow? Please?”] You get me? Moments Before are so important!

 

 

Garrett had no idea he’d be good at being intimate. He assumed he’d suck at it. Kendall says she wants to be his girlfriend and he says, in honest confusion, “Why?” He’s avoided intimacy with women. He’s afraid he’ll grow up to be like his dad. He couldn’t protect his mother. Turns out, though, being intimate is easy for him.

 

“I’m a little surprised it’s your most-played song. It doesn’t go with your ‘I’m a cool hockey man who listens to classic rock’ image.” Hannah, it’s not an “image”. Garrett is not walking around pretending to be cool or pretending to like classic rock, and he’s not done that with you, not since maybe the first scene in his bedroom when you came over to tutor him. But even there, he did the reading, he wants to talk about philosophy. Garrett’s response (“I’m a cool hockey man that contains multitudes”) is an awful line. Cameli survives it the best way he knows how (and honestly it’s the only choice): he makes fun of the line AS he says it. The man is already a pro. Hannah laughs at his joke, they share a laugh, and the bad line is turned into an asset. We love to see it.

 

 

Garrett sharing something about his mother, and including his father in the story, is huge. Garrett wants her to know him. He wants to BE known by her. At the block party, he also mentioned his father and mother. He so wants to talk to her, let her in.

 

 

The shot of Ella Bright, quietly listening to Garrett talk about music, is one of the most beautiful shots of her face in the series. She feels peaceful and safe, and she’s thinking about music. She wants to hear from Garrett about his emotions. This is intimate! Steven Spielberg said something along the lines of “a movie camera was made to show faces, and there is nothing more interesting than watching someone think.”

 

When Garrett talks about feeling “bold”, I thought, confusedly, on my first watch “What episode is this? This is happening way too early!” Hannah picked the song to “set the mood” because he clearly loves it, and it’s a perfect choice because what was about to happen in that bedroom would require boldness on Garrett’s part. When he elaborates – “Like saying, ‘I like you. Deal with it.'” I thought, “Wait … we’re doing this now?” They just sit there staring at each other. Guys, what are we even DOING. Justin? Who’s Justin? Bye, I guess?

 

“Thank you for your service. Much appreciated.” I’ve seen male YouTube reactors wince at her vocabulary. I think it’s charming. She’s not storming out of there because Garrett got a snapchat message. They aren’t a couple and thanks are in order. Garrett took all this on, he did a great job, she felt (and still feels) safe. You should thank someone who does that for you. She takes the edge off the awkwardness by making a joke (notice she is totally unable to do this with Justin). Cameli’s response is so sweet and open, a gentle smile, the acknowledgement of what they just did together, there’s a real friendliness in Garrett I didn’t expect.

 

 

Hannah: “See you soon?”
Garrett: “Yeah … okay … uhm, I’ll text you?”
The question mark at the end is one of Garrett’s most vulnerable moments in the scene, if not the episode. He doesn’t want her to leave. To quote Birdie: “He didn’t want the night to end.” Their deal is almost done too. What then? Can he text her still? Are they friends? What is he going to do if his life just goes back to what it was before without her in it? He can’t imagine. What now? Cameli doesn’t add unnecessary stuff to the very simple line. Garrett is two steps behind the moment, he’s trying to figure things out, his impulse is to jump up and say, “Oh God, please don’t leave” and of course he can’t do that so instead his voice goes up at the end of what should be a declaratory sentence. (Also, remember the joke in their first conversation, about how he’s asking a question but his voice doesn’t go up. If your voice doesn’t go up in the forest, was a question even asked? Now he’s asking a question when he should be making a statement. This is how much has changed in the last couple of weeks.) Garrett seems so unsure all of a sudden. If you’re in the moment, you don’t have to act ANYthing. People go to acting classes to learn how to do this shit.

 

 

Okay, so here’s the Allie-quirk. She lies. She lies badly and constantly and somehow Mika Abdalla makes it this charming funny personality quirk as opposed to something … sociopathic, perhaps? I love the detail and there are too many examples to count. In the final moment of the series – Dean asks, “Allie, was it HIM?” Allie, automatically: “No.” Then: “Yes.” Each character has their own language and phraseology in Off Campus, something a lot of shows – particularly comedic shows – don’t manage. Everyone starts to sound the same, with the same joke tone, rhythm … the characters sound interchangeable. Dean’s language is not Hannah’s language. You would never mistake the two characters. Allie has her own cadences and humor … Abdalla has so much fun with it. It’s hard to picture another actress in the role. Allie is sitting here with her best friend in the world, wearing Sean’s Vermont sweatshirt (“This isn’t his sweatshirt.” ALLIE.) and lying through her teeth.

 

Last night, Allie sat in the hockey house backyard with Dean, smoking weed, and talking about how she wants to break up with Sean. It’s now the following day and what did she do today? She broke up with Sean while he was rambling about his childhood dog. Dean’s number is already in Allie’s phone. Allie wants to call it. What she does instead … is lie. I love how she insists, with this huge frozen smile, “I don’t even really miss Sean.” Mika Abdalla has a screwball soul. This is some Carole Lombard shit. Carole Lombard was so hilarious when she lied, hoping the person would just BUY the lie, already. LET ME LIE. TO MYSELF AND TO YOU.

 

 

 

Hannah clocks the lie immediately, and notices the dreaded sweatshirt. Look at Hannah’s face. I wonder if Allie lies so much because of Sean. Their relationship required her to lie a little bit all the time. Maybe the impulse to lie ruins deeper. Allie is very conscious of how things look. What would it sound like and look like if she just came out and said, “I like you. Deal with it.”

 

Hannah is lying too! “It’s just an arrangement between friends.” To quote my idol Harriet the Spy: “Sometimes you have to lie.”

 

 

Look at the expression on Allie’s face as she listens to Hannah talking about her time with Garrett, and working out the “orgasm problem”, and having a perfect night. Allie knows everything. Hannah told her about how she can’t come, but Allie guessed the “why” of it. Allie’s heart is broken for Hannah, thinking of her friend carrying this around by herself, but Allie would never push. All she can do is be there, as hard as she can, for her friend. Allie knows how huge the night with Garrett was for Hannah. Pouring out of her face in this moment is “I know, my dear friend, what happened to you, and I am so sorry, but also so proud of you taking charge of your healing.” This is all Mika Abdalla.

 

“Garrett made me feel really safe and a lot of really really good other things, but it doesn’t magically turn him into someone else.”
Hannah, what are you even talking about.

 

Hannah: “There will be absolutely no weirdness.”
Garrett: “It was so weird.”

 

 

The hockey bench scene is a miracle of concept, execution, editing and timing. Technically, the scene is a marvel. Oh, and let’s not forget blocking! People clambering over the wall, clambering back over the wall, moving down the bench … the whole thing had to be a BEAR to get right.

 

Garrett has clearly been talking about Hannah all practice. What I’m picturing is Dean coming up to him for an update. “Soo … how’d it go with Hannah?” Garrett gives a vague answer suggesting maybe mixed feelings, and how it ended “weird”. Maybe Tucker overhears, or one of the other players overhear, and before you know it the whole team knows. By this point, Garrett has said “fuck it” to the pretense it’s some other girl. Everyone’s talking about Hannah now and Logan is in hell. It’s wild to me that Garrett seems perfectly FINE with sharing his private business, in the same way he felt fine sharing about the “breakup” with Kendall. Men talking about women or relationships is usually represented in a certain way, like we haven’t graduated culturally from American Pie or Animal House. (I love Animal House, but diversity of representation is good.) Male friends are expected to be suspicious or reticent, almost automatically, at the sight of their friend getting serious about one woman. Men are expected to push back, tell him not to “limit his options”, whatever. None of these guys do that.

 

 

This sequence only works because of every tiny choice made by Bailey and editor Lisa Robison. Precision cutting. Slivers off here and there. The whole thing could so easily have been an incomprehensible mess. The way the camera moves, from Garrett to Logan. The humor is in the script but the humor is also in the cuts, and where they chose to put the camera. Like, how Birdie (Josh Chambers) suddenly speaks and everyone looks at him, how the camera surprises us with him, he comes from out of nowhere.

 

Birdie is practical but almost frustrated, like “oh my GOD you guys ENOUGH”. Garrett looks legitimately confused. WHAT’S “obvious”? Garrett truly doesn’t know. Garrett has been obsessing all day, holding himself back from texting her every five minutes to see how she’s doing, and now he’s letting the entire team gossip about his love life because nothing is obvious. This is why you need friends.

 

 

Enter: Bernardo the Banana. With everything else going on, you have to keep track of Bernardo, and I love it so much. THIS is how to do a good old-fashioned gag! We need the lead-up of this scene in preparation for the fruit gag culmination during Drunk Shakespeare, where the gag reaches its most perfect and absurd form. Some people will find it stupid. It IS stupid.

 

Luckily for Garrett, he asked Hannah what she was doing tomorrow night. He knows where she will be! He doesn’t know what Drunk Shakespeare is. I love how Dean – who knows everything – clambers back on the bench, and he’s heard the words “Drunk Shakespeare” and immediately includes himself. “Why are we going to Drunk Shakespeare?” We. Garrett informs Dean: “Birdie thinks I should tell Hannah how I feel about her.” Mopey Logan asks, “How DO you feel about her?” Dean eats Bernardo, casually supporting Garrett’s whole situation, every bit of it, clearing the way for his friend. “Telling her’s the right move, G. We all fuck with Wellsy. I think she’s good for you.” Dean’s the best.

 

I love how the freshmen – Joe Rogers (Dylan Kingwell) and Steuber (Austin A.J. Abell) – are not involved in the team discussion about Garrett’s love life. When Steuber is called out onto the ice, he says, “FINALLY”, like, “I am trapped on the bench with these guys I idolize and they’re talking about … girls?” OR, maybe he’s thinking to himself, “Garrett. Dude. Just tell her you like her, what is the big deal.” Either way, he’s eager to get out of there.

 

You can’t just leave a gag hanging. You need to stick the landing. Tucker: “NO! BERNARDO! HOWWWW.” For me, Tucker’s agonized “how” sticks the landing. I laugh every time.

 

 

Logan’s “crush” is finally acknowledged out loud. but unfortunately, Jules is the one to do it. I think the writers thought they were giving Jules some “oomph” as a character, Jules and Logan are siblings so they can “talk straight” to each other, and Jules’ proximity to Logan – a lead in the show – would make us interested in them, automatically. Not true. Having Logan yearn by himself with no dialogue about it for three and a half episodes is NOT narratively satisfying. While it is a relief to actually have the crush mentioned, the way Jules handles it shows why Logan does not feel comfortable confiding in his sibling. This is why Jules is a problem. All you can do when someone speaks to you the way Jules speaks to Logan is to try to defend yourself. Logan needs to talk to someone else, otherwise we are stuck in an irritated sibling loop of “You have a crush on Hannah” “No I don’t”. The story doesn’t go anywhere.

 

 

Drunk Shakespeare is everything this drama club kid could ever have hoped for. Of all the events closing out the first four episodes, Drunk Shakespeare is the most original, the most fully fleshed out. Drunk Shakespeare – and the bonding between Beau and Allie in the car in episode 6 – reveals there has got to be some serious theatre nerds on the writing staff. (The Beau-Allie bond also points to what I wrote about in maybe the first re-cap: the crossover territory of jocks and actors. This is a fact all actors know, but many “civilians” don’t, expressing surprise at “jocks” being into theatre. How many actors ARE jocks? Or WERE star jocks in high school before converting to acting? Nobody should be surprised.)

 

 

The entire cast descends on Drunk Shakespeare. Hockey and theatre worlds merge. The merging began at karaoke, when two theatre/music girls joined the hockey boys at the bar, and now the hockey boys enter THEIR turf, having no idea what to expect. Everyone attends in order to “support” Garrett’s quest to find love (this is hysterical). After Drunk Shakespeare, if a hockey boy sees Dexter walking across the quad, he’ll say “HEYYY PUCK how’s it going?” And they’ll stop and chat. Dexter comes to friendsgiving. It’s official. You don’t just emerge from your time in the magical forest of Midsummer Night’s Dream unchanged. There is no “going back to the way things were”.

 

 

Dexter moves into the spotlight in his role as Puck, reverse-engineering an onstage confrontation with the Love Square percolating in the audience.

 

No way would a college host a bacchanal like Drunk Shakespeare!

 

Makes perfect sense that the hockey boys would love a show where the emcee is named PUCK.

 

 

 

The production team outdid themselves, in the same way the costume designer (Charlene Akuamoah) outdid herself in episode 2, and outdoes herself again with the Shakespeare costumes. All the translucent colored wings, Allie’s dress, Dexter’s Puck costume, the wreaths of flowers. I’m going to get to Midsummer Night’s Dream in a second.

 

 

Similar to karaoke and the costume party, there is so much going on in the background, my eyes keep moving away from the leads in the foreground, trying to see what else was happening. When we’re up onstage with Dexter, we can see the audience, we can see the hockey boys, we can see the people around them. So much behavior is going on I don’t even know where to look. Even the extras are interesting, a key element for a big crowd scene like this. When everything is working, the audience feels like we are actually attending a real event. A real event isn’t “what happens”. A real event is the VIBE. Drunk Shakespeare has the best vibe for a fictional event I’ve seen in a long long time.

 

 

The scene starts in an overtly theatrical way: an actor – wearing colored wings – walks through a curtain onto a stage. Let the show begin. We follow the fairy: he crosses the stage, moves through the space where people are mingling, interacting with people – we see the hockey boys as the fairy passes by them, on his way to the other side of the space. He’s our tour guide through this fascinating environment.

 

 

The fairy walks by Jules and another fairy doing shots at the bar (with Jules filming. Of course). I love the shot, the throughline of this one figure – a glorified extra wearing magical wings – sweeping us behind him through the space. I’ve said it before: Off Campus has a real visual identity: episode 4 stays in Garrett’s bedroom, all told, for maybe 30 minutes. Even his bedroom, though, changes, depending on what’s happening. Drunk Shakespeare was a vast task, taking four days to shoot, and it’s only one location but feels like it’s 7 or 8 separate places.

 

Logan doesn’t attend Drunk Shakespeare but Jules does. (Why are you doing this to me, Off Campus.)

 

 

Dean’s been at Drunk Shakespeare for five minutes and he already has a fairy hanging all over him. Who needs the puck bunnies? Dean fits in anywhere. This reminds me of Glen Powell’s charm-onslaught performance in Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!, the Ur-text of Jocks-Meet-Theatre-Kids. Glen Powell plays a college baseball player who fits in wherever he goes, mainly because girls are everywhere, whether they’re sporting a cowboy hat or a Mohawk.
 

 

There’s a REASON girls want to hang out with him. He’s horny but he’s also NICE. So Dean is at Drunk Shakespeare totally open, chats up a fairy instantly, and before you know it she’s glued to his side, talking with Tucker, Dean and Beau. Dean does not enter a place to judge it or remain aloof from it because he’s not on his own turf. He walks in open, like “WOWWW, what’s going on HERE.”

 

We don’t know it yet, but Beau’s sister is an actress – we’ll get to HER in episode 7 – and Dean is well-versed in theatre by proximity, having grown up with the Maxwells. Beau knows his way around the theatre world, and Dean tags along. Going to see Beau’s sister in a play on opening night is one thing. Sitting on wooden platforms at Drunk Shakespeare, surrounded by fairies, is another thing altogether.

 

Also, lest we forget: last night, Dean and Allie sat in the back yard at the fire pit smoking weed. He knows he will see her at Drunk Shakespeare. “I’m there,” he tells Garrett on the hockey bench.

 

 

Dean sees literally everything that’s going on.

 

The only two people at Drunk Shakespeare who fully perceive the 360-degree complexities of what is happening with literally everyone in that space are Dean and Dexter.

 

 

Drunk Shakespeare gives Dexter (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) his chance to shine. We also get some funny stuff from a character named “Jeremy”, but I just think of him as Bottom (Riley Orr) – to Allie’s nervous-breakdown Queen of the Fairies. Both Jeremy and Dexter will show up at friendsgiving. I can’t say enough good things about Gutierrez-Riley’s performance. What a gift for a young character actor, playing a smaller part. Dexter runs Drunk Shakespeare, with flowers wrapped around his arms and legs, wearing a T-shirt that says PUCK ME, BABY. He lays out the rules beforehand – and the hockey boys get all excited because they love rules. Dexter not only plays Puck but he stage-manages the event from onstage, ushering people around, letting audience participants know what they’re supposed to do, reveling in the power he wields from the spotlight. I mean, you know he wants to see either Garrett or Justin dance. Both, preferably. Dexter is in this for himself as well, objectifying literally everyone onstage, squeezing Justin’s bicep, etc. Even though the fictional event, as portrayed, is – of course – run by the director and cinematographer and all the behind-the-scenes people – the ILLUSION is that Dexter is in charge.
Additionally: the Drunk Shakespeare scenes shows that not ONLY the hockey boys are “cool”. The theatre kids are cool. Off Campus lets different kinds of people be fucking cool.

 

 

The Midsummer Night’s Dream of it all

Let’s discuss the possibilities created by choosing Midsummer Night’s Dream to be the play performed, as opposed to some other play by Shakespeare. (Coincidentally, I re-read Midsummer early this year when I was doing my Shakespeare Re-Read project. I had to stop the project because – honestly – Hamlet did me in. I had to take a break.

To start:

In the play, a group of “rude mechanicals” (a theatre troupe) are putting on a play to celebrate the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. The play is about the tragic love story of Pyramus and Thisbe (maybe not the most appropriate material for a wedding ceremony?). The troupe rehearse the play, argue over practicalities, and problem-solve.

My favorite line in maybe the whole play, and certainly the most important, comes when Quince wonders how they are going to create the illusion of night when they will be performing the play outside during the day:

But there is two hard things: that is, to bring the moonlight into a chamber, for you know, Pyramus and Thisbe meet by moonlight.

The line is said casually as a practical theatrical problem. But bringing “moonlight into a chamber” is the essence of the artistic process. I wrote about this in my piece on Before Sunrise. Whatever you are doing as an artist – painting, acting, writing a pop song – you must create something an audience will feel and believe. The art is both real and NOT real, art makes people feel real things even if the wings are colored paper and the moon is made of tinfoil. The problem for the artist is always the same: the “hard thing” is figuring out a way to bring “moonlight into a chamber”.

This is one of my favorite metaphors for art. The line is not included in Drunk Shakespeare, but – in my opinion – the concept of it hovers over the whole scene.

In case I haven’t made my point, I’ll say it bluntly: Louisa Levy, Samantha Bailey, the cast, and the whole crew “bring the moonlight into a chamber” with Drunk Shakespeare.

To go a tiny bit further with this (too far?): Pyramus and Thisbe are doomed-suicide lovers. (Romeo and Juliet takes a lot of inspiration from the myth). The play-within-the-play, as presented in Midsummer, is a catastrophe, nothing goes right, the audience talks back, everything goes wrong, these are humble bumbling people playing mythical lovers with a fake wall between them. The lovers “meet by moonlight”. I don’t know if there’s a moon on the night of Drunk Shakespeare, but this is theatre – a spotlight will do if you believe it’s a moon. There’s a love potion backstage, and things are happening … people have acute awareness of one another, shedding old skins, masks being carelessly erected and then dropped, making believe and then getting sucked back into reality, wanting the “dream” but being scared to say so … maybe all of this going on simultaneously could only occur within the embrace of Shakespeare’s most original play. Finally: the characters needed to get out of Hockey Land and enter the world of theatrical magic for these openings in reality to be possible.
 

 

The structure of the sequence is perfect: the “chamber” was created by the students, revealed by the fairy strolling through the space. We have a moment to get oriented. We are not in the main theatre, but presumably downstairs in the costume shop, construction shop. The students draped colored fabric over the walls, and created a makeshift backstage area. The space is cavernous. There are wooden platforms for seats, and little clusters of chairs on the floor. There’s a bar in the back. Over behind the stairs is a red-lit area, where Justin and Hannah discuss Haley Joel Osment later, and there’s a graffitied corrugated tin wall, which I imagine can be pulled up to load large set pieces in and out. Whimsical lights circle on the walls like shimmering soap bubbles.
 

 

We have entered the forest of Midsummer Night’s Dream where it’s always night, where the fairies are human-sized but can’t be seen by humans. The only human who can see the fairies is the buffoonish Bottom, an important thing to keep in mind. Bottom is open to the transcendent. The four young lovers, on the run from strict society, flee to the forest, as you do. Puck, on orders from Oberon, King of the Fairies, rubs a love potion on the lovers’ eyelids as they sleep. When they wake up, they will fall in love with the first person they see. Puck mixes up the eyelids. Hijinx ensue.

 

 

In Off Campus, there are three young lovers – well, five, if you count Allie and Dean, six, if you count the absent Sean, who makes an appearance in a ghost-of-Hamlet’s-dad kind of way. All of them are torn between the real world, where things are known and settled, and the possibility of transformating their reality. Eyelids have been smeared with the potion but the spell is not working yet.

 

 

Well, that’s not entirely true. Garrett’s eyelids were smeared with love potion in episode 1, for God’s sake, and ever since he’s been sitting by himself in a dark chamber waiting for someone to bring the moonlight in. Any day now, Jeez.

 

 

Hannah’s eyelids were smeared with love potion for Justin, but having an orgasm with Garrett and then Drunk Shakespeare smears her eyes with the “second love potion” – which Garrett thinks is for Justin, but Hannah knows is actually for Garrett. Hijinx ensue, just as they do in Midsummer.

 

 

Dean’s love potion was smeared on his eyelids at the fire pit the night before when Allie asks him, “Is it?” He was hooked already, he’s intrigued, he’s turned on, but her question unnerves him. No one has ever asked him that before. No one has even thought to ask such a thing. Just like Garrett, Dean falls first.

 

 

The only love potion on Allie’s eyelids is the now-crusty residue of the Sean love potion, smudged there three years ago, its magic completely dissipated. However … Allie’s fingers itch to call Dean. The Sean residue is flaking off at a rapid pace. Allie resists the new love potion for the rest of the season.

 

 

Kendall THOUGHT the love potion on her eyes was for Garrett, but turns out … it wasn’t a love potion at all. At Drunk Shakespeare, Kendall drinks the real love potion backstage. She’s being bitter towards Garrett (oh my God, Kendall, it’s been two months. Stop hooking up with people if you can’t handle it) but the potion works on her: she accepts Garrett’s apology, acknowledges she’s been having way too much fun being a bitch, and in the next moment she gives up her bullshit, and decides to have a good time without all her boy-crazy nonsense. Kendall then gets to wear a flower crown and is picked by Puck to sit in a throne and be the center of attention, like she so wants to be in her love life. It hasn’t happened for Kendall yet, but in the throne she seems like a different person – girlish and playful and free. She HAS been transformed. Maybe the love potion on Kendall’s eyes is for … herself. Maybe Kendall needs to switch friendgroups. Maybe the theatre kids would be better for her. There are only a few “token straight boys”. She might plow right through them but I bet the gay theatre boys would love Kendall and she’d feel better about life and herself.

 

 

Allie’s monologue-slash-nervous-breakdown echoes Titania’s confusion when she gets the love potion smeared on her eyelids! We can also explore Titania’s story to find fun analogies for Allie’s situation:
— Titania is “married” to Oberon, who is King of the Fairies. The two are estranged and Oberon wants to punish Titania for what he considers to be an affront to his authority. Oberon tells Puck to put together a love potion. Whoever she sees when she first wakes up she will love. Oberon wants to SHAME Titania into realizing the error of her ways and “take him back.”
— Oberon rubs the love potion on her eyes as she sleeps. Puck rubs the love potion on the eyelids of the four young lovers. Bottom, meanwhile, is now a donkey-man lumbering through the forest in a panic. Titania wakes up and the first thing she sees is Bottom. One of the funniest lines in the whole play is Titania’s, when she gazes upon the donkey-man and sighs rapturously, “What angel wakes me from my flow’ry bed?”
— An obvious connection with Allie’s situation could be: Allie is a QUEEN who has fallen in love with a DONKEY (Sean) and needs to be in love with a KING (Dean). But there is a much better (and closer) analogy:
— Sean isn’t Bottom. He can’t be Bottom because in the play Bottom sees the magic. Sean doesn’t see the magic at all. Bottom is the only human who sees and interacts with the fairies. Bottom is also the only human transformed into an animal. You have to be OPEN to transform. Prose-ridden silly Bottom is the only one who sees Titania (from here on out, when I say “see” I mean it literally and figuratively). Sean is Oberon, a King irritated at the independence of his Queen, and Dean – whom everyone underestimates as an “ass” – is Bottom. In their first meeting on the dance floor, Dean KNELT before QUEEN Allie. He immediately recognized her majesty and magic. He was not intimidated. He worshiped. Titania and Bottom are both “enchanted”. Bottom is ridiculous and funny but he sees everything. And didn’t I say earlier in this post, 5,000 words ago … Dean sees everything?
— In the play, Bottom recounts a weird dream he had, and his description turns the play itself into a fractal, or a wormhole to the opposite side of the cosmos. A hall of mirrors opens up with Bottom’s dream. Is the play we are watching in the 21st century actually Bottom’s dream? Who is the dreamer? Bottom? Us? What dream are we even in?
— I’ll tell you what dream we are NOT in. A dream about a childhood dog.

 

 

I’ll lean into this a bit more. Allie and Hannah enter the space, and Allie is high-strung and irritable, having DTs from Sean-withdrawal. Hannah supports her, and as she and Hannah talk, I want to say, “Allie, you need to turn around and look for the guy behind you, being hugged by a fairy. He’s right there. Hate to break it to you, but that’s your Bottom. You know why, Titania? Because he can SEE you. He SEES you in a way KING SEAN never did.”

 

I mean, I could go on. I love Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the play is a perfect choice for this scene. If they put on Romeo and Juliet or even Much Ado About Nothing, you wouldn’t have the same thematic echoes and doubling.

 

 

Did Hannah know that Garrett – and the entire hockey team – would show up? She mentioned it to Garrett but she didn’t say “Please bring your entire team with you.” Instead, she texts Justin. If I were Hannah and I saw all those guys walk in, I would nearly faint because I would know Garrett had been paying attention, he wants to see me, he brought all his friends, and I … think I like him. I have been similarly dense, I get it. One other note, and forgive me for the detail but this is how I watch things: a couple of different times during the sequence Garrett stands in this very spot, in front of the Angels in America poster. His exact positioning gives the illusion that he has wings. Maybe it’s just a coincidence but I will read magic into it. JUSTIN doesn’t stand in front of that poster – TWICE – and get wings.

 

 

Justin enters wearing a sweater that makes him look like the St. Pauli Girl. He and Hannah hug rapturously. Where did THAT come from? The text messages between Hannah and Justin show a bit more engagement than their in-person meetups. Garrett sees the hug, and his heart must sink, but what does he do? He walks over to join them, a total power move. Garrett approaches the “couple” from behind, just as he did in episode 1 at the block party, when he called out “WELLSY” for the first time. Garrett is all “hey, man” but his looks down at Hannah have last night in them. He calls Justin “Jordan”. He says, “You a big Shakespeare guy?” I love petty Garrett. Until the end of the night, you watch Garrett struggle to hide his sadness. It’s more like his heart is heavy with disappointment and impending loss. I don’t think he realized how much he cared, or what this was going to do to him. The memory of last night doesn’t help. Garrett has lots of experience with sex, but no experience with this. He says as much to Kendall backstage. His feelings for Hannah are intense and he now knows that getting over her is going to suuuuuuuck. To make things worse, it’s happening in front of his whole team, who just spent an entire practice discussing his relationship with Hannah. So exposing! They’re all witnessing Hannah sitting on a couch with Justin’s arm around her. There’s always this little battle going on on Cameli’s face. For the last 48 hours, Garrett has had to control the muscles in his face in order not to reveal what he’s feeling. Will someone please allow Garrett to have any facial expression he wants?

 

 

 

 

 

The fruit gag gallops back onstage in order to reach its most perfect form. Pure chaos. A calculus problem. You establish what the game is with the grape/strawberry/kiwi. Then Garrett and Hannah have a 20-minute long scene where they masturbate together and, Jesus, of course you forget all about it. Then Bernardo enters the chat. Now here we are, we can go as fast as we need to now with the gag: Every time the camera lands on Tucker, he is holding a different and bigger piece of fruit. Is some Sig Tau brother hiding behind one of the colored drapes, waiting with a wheelbarrow of fruit? The fruit gag is funny and also stupid. One of my favorite combinations.

 

Tucker is last seen “carrying a watermelon”. I’m just saying.

 

 

 

 

 

Dexter asks for volunteers from the audience and then chooses Justin and Hannah, who did not volunteer. Dean “volunteers” Garrett. Kendall is the only one who volunteers, but she didn’t “wait to be picked”. She stormed the stage. Why is this so funny to me. Puck’s magic is tricky, things go haywire, and Dexter knows exactly what he’s doing.

 

“Bitch, I love this for you.”

 

Dexter to Garrett: “Come here, pookie.”
Garrett: “No, no, that’s all right.”
Dexter: “You’re ours now.”

 

 

Look at Dexter.

 

 

The four-way energy ricocheting around between Garrett, Kendall, Hannah, and Justin (although, to be fair, Justin seems a bit oblivious) is totally chaotic and very Shakespearean. Garrett is uncomfortable, of course, but on some level he’s finding this entertaining. I mean, what else are you going to do. You are in an emotional STATE and you are now on a STAGE, standing with two girls everyone knows you’ve messed around with. And also there’s the St. Pauli Girl is up there with you, and he is also hot, and a “star” like YOU are a star, and the St. Pauli Girl is on a DATE with YOUR girl, whom you masturbated with less than 24 hours ago, and you totally don’t care about the OTHER girl and yet the other girl is really mad at you for no reason and being mean to YOUR girl. All of this is playing out in front of all of your friends. At a certain point, you have to just give up.

 

 

It’s Dexter’s responsibility to keep the event moving along, while including the audience every step of the way. He’s got his four “victims” onstage now, sets up the scenario, squeezes Justin’s bicep lasciviously, and presents the choice: Lysander or Demetrius? The hockey boys are fully involved, booing “Demetrius” – i.e. their vaguely annoyed self-conscious friend up there.

 

 

Hannah/Hermia: “But Daddy, I love him!” [Lysander/Justin]
Cast: “BUT DADDDDEEE SHE LOOOOVES HIM.”
I like the small heartbeat sound placed in around here. The last time we heard the heartbeat was in Garrett’s bedroom when he started touching her leg. Her heartbeat was way too fast. Now it’s just … there. Don’t forget the interior world, the moonlit chamber of it all, the magic is already in there.

 

 

Fairies dance along the edge of the stage, making their prop white doves fly. Confetti or flower petals flutter in the air, down onto Hannah and Justin. Dean and Beau taking it all in is a five-act play in and of itself. I wonder if they got stoned beforehand.

 

 

The show is organized in a way that makes sense to me, if I think like a director. As the drunkenness intensifies, more actors will call for line. There has to be a “waitstaff” to pass out drinks, but they must be part of the show too, so let’s get the fairies to do it. The fairies get more stage time than the leads, wheeling through the space passing out little plastic shots of love-potion. Puck, meanwhile, gets to leave the stage periodically, especially during the “rude mechanicals” scene, so he can set up Demetrius and Helena (Garrett and Kendall) in the impossibly romantic colorful-yet-dark backstage area. There’s a table with punch on it, labeled like a Valentine: LOVE POTION.

 

 

Look at Dexter.

 

 

If you think back to episode 1, and Garrett’s behavior at the first hockey party, and then compare to what’s going on here backstage with Kendall, the transformation is pretty amazing, but nothing’s been hammered home or underlined. If you weren’t looking closely – as Logan isn’t – then you might not perceive the change. Dean does. And I think Tucker does too. Kendall is being a bitch but it’s because she’s hurt. (I still think she’s being a little ridiculous, and still think it’s ridiculous for the hockey boys to equate a month – maybe? – of hooking up to be “dating”. But moving on.) Garrett is HURTING right now and this makes him kinder to Kendall. He’s trying to avoid the reality that literally everyone – including Kendall – sees how he feels about Hannah. Kendall’s drank the love potion, though, and when she says, “You want her to be your girlfriend. I looked at you the same way for months” … it’s a little heartbreaking. The last time Garrett’s heart broke was when he was 12. Kendall really liked him! Having just watched the damn show, who can blame her?

 

 

And here it is, the funniest line! “What angel wakes me from my flow’ry bed?” Allie, downstage center, talking to Jeremy/Bottom, who does his best to keep up with her bizarre ramblings, before finally crumbling, leading us into the MANIC portion of our evening, when everyone is wasted, no one can remember their lines, and the audience goes ballistic. Allie is our gateway into the madness. The placement is perfect: she stands on the stage, and right there, right below her, are Dean, Beau, and Tucker. Oh yeah, and Jules. Tucker clutches his coconut. Everyone is riveted.

 

 

Jeremy thinks he knows what’s happening until he suddenly realizes … he is in a no-man’s-land with a scene partner who’s gone off road.

 

 

Allie breaks from reality, talking hysterically about the sweatshirt and pancakes and carbs and the missionary position. She looks ravishing, with the blue dress, the flower crown, the glitter on her skin. As she has what is obvioiusly a nervous breakdown, Dean, in the audience, leans forward. Dean is the real Bottom. Ahem. Dean heard every word of her drunken soliloquy in the ladies’ room and they discussed it last night at the fire pit. Dean knows EXACTLY what’s happening up there. However: because we are in a forest where transformation is possible … her magic as an ACTRESS is working on him. He’s in awe of her beauty and power. His response isn’t about HIM, in other words. This is key. He’s in awe. She’s incredible! But of course he knew that from the moment he knelt before her on the dance floor.

 

 

Dean is interesting because he is so outward-focused. He’s comfortable out there mainly because he says what he means and means what he says. He’s not trying to juggle lies and obfuscations and personae. “You gotta take him at face value,” Allie says about Garrett. Both Garrett and Dean would be a little challenging to “take at face value”. Hannah is taking Garrett “at face value” when she says he is “surprisingly deep” and calls him a “cool hockey man” after he just mutually-pinnacled with her upstairs 10 minutes ago. But I understand Allie’s point: don’t read too much into things. Like a wise friend of mine once said to me years ago: “I don’t believe what a man says. I only believe what a man does.” I have found this to be good advice. Focus on what people DO, you can actually SEE them there (both meanings of “see”). Taking Dean at face value is a mistake, but Dean doesn’t seem too troubled by this. Dean is not a still-waters-run-deep guy. He’s also not a phony. I believe him when he says he “likes being the casual sex guy”. But … maybe it’s getting a little bit old. Not because he’s “avoiding intimacy” blah blah some people just like to fuck around, you know – but because he’s a hedonist and there will be plenty of time to get serious later. But maybe he’s a little bored by all of it. Whatever is going on, and Dean isn’t talking, we saw the depths stirred out by the fire pit (Allie: “Is it?”). I don’t think Dean’s secrets are deep and dark, like Garrett’s are. (And I know, I’ve read the book, but we have to just evaluate what we see onscreen, let it tell its own story.) What’s going on with Dean is more of a soul-type thing. Essentially existential. We can fall into patterns of behavior and identity, and this can start from a very young age. Other people assign roles for us, putting us in a box. We also put ourSELVES into boxes. When you realize you don’t really want to be in that particular box anymore, it’s hard sometimes. Sometimes other people won’t accept you’ve changed. Dean is ready to let a lot of things go and he never even THOUGHT about any of this before yesterday. I must underline (and this is the highest praise for Stephen Kalyn): Kalyn shows all of this with no dialogue.

 

 

Dean, in awe: “Holy shit, she’s incredible.”
Beau, in awe: “Yeah, she really is.”

 

 

When Jeremy calls for “line” all hell breaks loose. The scene is now a frenzied montage of alcohol consumption and increasingly drunk – and annoyed – actors calling for “line”. The crowd screams, the fairies deliver drinks. Allie calls for “line” and I love the exasperated Bottom shouting, “It’s not even your line!” The hockey boys are athletes, and athletes at this level love The Rules of the Game. They get so excited, shouting at each other, “THERE IT IS.” “HE SAID IT, HE SAID IT.” The series team did such a great job – and I think much of the success is due to the careful editing, but I have to give credit to the cast too, for getting so into the spirit of this thing – even shooting it for four days straight – and giving such a visceral feel of the event’s VIBE. The shots feel “caught”, not planned.

 

 

 

“Are these drama kids better at drinking than us?”
Yes, Beau. Yes, they are.

 

After a time of confusion, where Dean has no idea what is happening onstage – small wonder since the actors are deteriorating rapidly – he sums it all up expansively: “Pyramus and Thisbe are us all.” Beau drunkenly nods in agreement, slurring, “Well done.”

 

We should hope Pyramus and Thisbe are NOT us all!

 

Just because I love it so much:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dexter has to wrangle the troops backstage and control everyone in the audience to keep pushing ahead with the show, even as there’s an entire hockey team screaming “LIIIIIINE” right below him. Puck brings back Garrett and Kendall, to join up with Hannah and the St. Pauli Girl. There are these little translucent pices of fabric and wire wrapped around a stripper pole for the upcoming dance-off for Helena’s hand. Hermia (Hannah) is left out of the loop of this one.
 

 

Belmont Cameli is a very good dancer. He can be smooth and hip with it, but doesn’t seem to take himself seriously – like, at all – and he also goes insane. There are clips of him where he’s dancing so hard you think he might snap his neck. He had to tone himself down a LOT to dance “as Garrett”, who – one imagines – would not dance like Belmont does, could not be that free, probably ever. It had to be a little difficult. I wish, though, he had launched himself up onto the pole. Don’t have a stripper pole onstage and then NOT have one of the two men – or both – use it! How dare you!

 

 

I can barely watch him dance at first. He’s shy. He’s repressed. Very cute, though. When he takes off his shirt, to give everyone the real show, all is well and Kendall gets the contact high, while the St. Pauli Girl tells Hannah, earnestly, he’d like to ask her out, and Hannah stares at Garrett’s half-naked writhing torso, thinking, “…. uhm … I think I might be in trouble here.”

 

There’s that scene in Notting Hill, near the end, when Hugh Grant fills in his friends about turning down Julia Roberts’ offer of love, and how she brought him a painting and then said “I’m just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her.” There’s this long long pause as all of his friends think about this. Some of them look very moved and one is in tears. Hugh Grant, too, is deep in thought before he realizes, “Oh no. I’ve made the wrong choice, haven’t I.” Hannah, watching Garrett dance, is kind of like that.

 

 

Before Hannah arrives backstage, Garrett languishes by himself on the couch, like Oscar Wilde.

 

 

 

Hannah and Garrett’s scene backstage is so sad! Both of them want the other to speak, to say “I like you. Deal with it.” You think about their last 24 hours, you think about Birdie’s comments at practice. You can’t help but notice … or, I can’t help but notice, at any rate – that Garrett has wings again.

 

 

Garrett came here really ready to declare himself. But he didn’t expect Justin, or the rapturous hug he witnessed. He subdued his impulses. Justin is who Hannah wants. He knows that from “The deal”. Pushing himself into the situation, making a demand, messing up her shit in other words, doesn’t feel right, not just because he doesn’t want to hurt Hannah but also … his old life, his unattached life is still right there in his rear-view mirror. He can just step back into it. But he suddenly realizes his heart is broken. He can’t go back but what is he supposed to do now?

 

Hannah wants him to say something so bad.

 

 

Christine Lavin has a song called “The Moment Slipped Away“, which I thought of in this final moment, when Hannah pauses to look back at Garrett, who is already walking away. I also thought of another Christine Lavin song, “The Kind of Love You Never Recover From” which I will never listen to again. It’s been 20 years, but the song probably still isn’t safe. But that’s what’s going on here.

 

 

Allie’s up on the balcony like Juliet, staring down at the party below. (When Justin says to Hannah, “This party is dead” … I mean, I’d break up with him for that alone. The party looks awesome.) The “red herring” of DO NOT CALL is successful. I was tricked! I guessed in episode 5, when she got into that expensive-looking vehicle … but I did not guess here. I fully believed she was calling Sean! I was so frustrated with Allie as she clacked down the stairs in her glass (Cinderella?) shoes.

 

 

“And that’s when I learned the difference between Billie Joe Armstrong and Haley Joel Osment.”
Whoever came up with Justin’s opening line is an evil genius.

 

 

Hannah’s smile is a frozen phony mask. Hannah. Go get your man.

 

 

It hurts to see Garrett’s demeanor in the scene with Logan at the rink. All of the softness and openness in the kitchen with Hannah is gone. He’s weighted down. But because he’s talking to Logan, he can’t really be honest about where he’s at. Even when Logan says, “Sorry about Hannah, I know you were really into her …” Garrett can’t collapse a bit to express his real feelings, like he might have (maybe?) been able to do with Dean.

 

 

It occurs to me that the conversation between Logan and Garrett is like the conversation between Phil and Garrett on Thanksgiving when watching hockey on television. They are only on sure ground, they are only “close” when they are talking about hockey. Which means, of course, they aren’t close at all.

 

“Of course, you can’t get everything you want. You’re Garrett Graham. Things are going to work out for you. They always do.” This is an incredibly bitchy comment to make to your friend who is CLEARLY bummed out. It’s not just bitchy. It’s mean. Garrett, though, responds with a very nice comment about how things will work out for Logan, too, reminding him of their shared dream. Logan is not a good friend.

 

 

Garrett waits until Logan leaves to be private with his real feelings. And this, too, makes me sad, but … Logan is too resentful, too self-absorbed, to be a good friend. Better to just suffer alone, honestly. Logan is like this in “his” book, too – but it’s handled and acknowledged and they end up talking about it. I so wish we had this in season 1. We might get it in Season 2, but, for me, it’s a little late.

 

 

Hannah makes the grand romantic gesture. Hannah is the one who has to be “bold”, even though Garrett was the one who made the first stab at “I like you” boldness. Hannah being “bold” and singing Garrett’s favorite song, the one they danced to and spoke about is so layered! Garrett helps her feel comfortable. Hannah already IS bold. Usually, the guy is the one who has to make the grand gesture: he has to run through airports, show up below someone’s window with a string quartet, or burst into a press conference like Hugh Grant does in Notting Hill. Usually, the man has fucked it up, chose someone else, decided to take the job in Bangkok … and she has moved on. Her heart is broken but she’s moved on. Here, though: Hannah is the one. It must be her.

 

If you think about it, without saying a word, Garrett had to break himself up with Hannah. The reasons are deeper than the usual. He needs to let her go. She told him what she wants and he can’t get in the way of it. Remember his commitment: she’ll get him the grade, he’ll get her the guy. In the conventional story, the one I was expecting, she actually would “move on”, and the next two or three episodes would involve her relationship with Justin. Garrett would witness the relationship, and secretly be crushed, but try to be happy for her because he loves her, and blah blah This is the typical way.

 

It wouldn’t have been right if Garrett declared himself at Drunk Shakespeare. Garrett was too hurt, first of all. Garrett saw how happy she was when she hugged Justin. And suddenly the cliche re-appears, but with the expected roles reversed: Hannah has “chosen” Justin. She’s Hugh Grant in Notting Hill, in other words. And like Hugh Grant in Notting Hill, she realizes almost immediately that she made the wrong choice and must race to right the wrong.

 

 

Finally, FINALLY, good GOD, the love potion is on the right eyelids and moonlight pours into the chamber.

 

Props, Costumes, and Technology

Garrett has Pigeonhed’s first album cover framed on his wall. I would love to have sat in on meetings with the production team. I so get off on details like this. Pigeonhed, a blast from the Sub Pop past! To quote Shania Twain, “I’m a ’90s bitch.” I know my Pigeonhed!

 

 

Photos on the hockey boys’ fridge. Probably by Jules.

 

 

Easter Island sticker and/or magnet on the fridge and also on the cabinet. I don’t know what or why but I am intrigued.

 

 

Zoe, I do not blame you for snapping Garrett. We saw what he was doing to you when Hannah barged in. But your timing is shit.

 

 

Justin and Hannah text exchange! A music discussion. Justin is suggesting going for a “Wallows” sound – a band I am not familiar with – clarifying their “old stuff”, and Hannah knows just what he is talking about and is enthusiastic. I know I keep mentioning the handling of technology in Off Campus, but it’s worth pointing out again how you gain a lot if you freeze and look closely at these text exchanges. They aren’t information only. They’re character-building and also are PART of the plot moving forward. We communicate about a lot of things via text. We aren’t just like “meet you at 7.” We’re chatting and sharing. This is what we see here. Hannah and Justin are vibing. They can bond on music, they have the same frame of refernce. These texts are part of the script! So cool. Hannah “hearts” his message about how he’ll get to work on what they’ve discussed. Justin’s final text is “what are you up to tomorrow?” Little does he know that tonight – at Drunk Shakespeare – she’s going to dump his ass. There will be no “tomorrow.” But still: since Justin isn’t really developed as a character, and Hannah is so awkward with him in person, it’s nice to see a little glimpse of their exchanges. Justin isn’t a villain, another nice element. I find him a little boring, but he’s not a cartoon.

 

 

I love all of the posters for the theatre department productions. Good repertoire! Hamlet and The Crucible. How fun it would be to design these fictional posters for fictional productions.

 

 

The all-important love potion table backstage.

 

 

Of course Kendall has a “Kendall” necklace. I find it strangely vulnerable and perfect for the character.

 

 

Allie’s phone background needs to be changed. Stat. Don’t let Oberon punish you anymore.

 

 

The moment before Allie calls the “angel waking her from her flow’ry bed’.

 

 

Hairspray and Angels in America. I wonder what roles Dexter, Allie, and Jeremy played in these productions. Maybe Joanna Maxwell (ugh) starred in some of them.

 

 

Allie told Sean in the shower that an agent saw her in Our Town and signs her. There’s the Our Town poster. I’m guessing she played Emily! Dexter would make an interesting choice for the Stage Manager.

 

 

Digging the surreal non-literal design for The Crucible!

 

 

Off Campus episode recaps

Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3

The Bumpy (Cranky) Road to Healing

Honestly, this is all I wanted to write about episode 4

INTRODUCTION:

I started out wanting to just write a bit about episode 4’s subject matter and it ballooned into something else: the anatomy of my experience but also the anatomy of this relationship. If you’re here just for Off Campus, this is wayyyy beyond what you signed up for, and that’s fine. Please don’t read if you’re going to be shocked at TMI. This is how I do things here. For me (as I know is true for many people), there are a lot of intersections with the material which aren’t theoretical or academic because I had to actually – with no training or help or guidance – or even an awareness of what the hell was going on – take the reins of my own healing, which was a feat because I was very fucked up at the time, and strolling around with a mental illness which wouldn’t be diagnosed for another 20 years. I suffered because of this, of course, and a lot of it showed up (I now believe) in the stories I shared below. Believe it or not, this is the tip of the iceberg of what happened. The subject is serious, but I am so far past it now, and I look back on the whole thing with gratitude and also, sometimes, laughter. I had fun writing this, calling up crazy memories I haven’t thought of in a long time until I watched episode 4.

In my re-cap for episode 3, I referenced F. Scott Fitzgerald’s comment that problems arose in his writing when he started viewing tragic things tragically. He lost the necessary distance, he was unable to treat tragedy with lightness or satire. I’ve always tried to avoid writing tragically about tragedy whenever I write personally. I haven’t always succeeded. I kept Fitzgerald’s words in mind as I wrote this piece. I don’t think of this time with pain (in fact, the opposite), even though calling this time – my early-mid-20s – “painful” is an understatement. Much of it was harrowing – my mental state being what it was – but someone was there to basically work on it with me, or listen to me, even if all he said in response, as he lit a cigarette, was: “What you just said is completely insane and none of it is true.”

It’s good to take a moment to remember how far I’ve come, and how I – when I was a VERY young woman – pulled myself out of a year of suicidal ideation, spent fixated on an inner nightmare I don’t even want to mention. As Carrie Fisher wrote, even after treatment, she hesitated to talk about her bipolar because she feared “summoning” it. I am proud of my younger self: even in the face of not wanting to LOOK, not wanting to say out loud things I never told anyone, I decided to take charge of my body, my trauma and, honestly, my future, because if I hadn’t … I don’t know if I would have made it.

This gets pretty graphic. Lots of trigger warnings are in order probably. The story is hopeful though and the graphic stuff isn’t violent or traumatic. I’m just being frank. If frank sex talk is not your thing, or you don’t want to know those things about other people, I totally understand, so just skip. It’s a character-study of a relationship, as we addressed this pretty heavy subject together – which I still can’t even believe we did. If you see any part of yourself or your journey in this … that is wonderful and I am glad I shared. If you DON’T, or if you think I should include other things, then remember I am not trying to be universal. I am not trying to cover everyone’s bases, I am only trying to cover my own. I would never presume to speak for someone else – the subject is too personal. I put this here because episode 4 inspired it.

I want to talk about what’s going on with Hannah by talking about myself, since her situation is similar to what I went through at the same-ish age. Similar? More like one-to-one, except I was a little bit sicker. In the head, I mean. As the episode unfolded I could not believe what I was watching. From my perspective, Off Campus handled this beautifully. The episode is a masterclass in consent, communication, trust-building, taking risks, taking charge of your own healing, etc. I’m not alone in finding so much to connect to my own life. I worked SO HARD to “get over” this thing and I had to consciously choose to work on it, as Hannah does in episodes 3 and 4. Looking back on my 24-year-old self, I think “where did I get the freakin’ balls …”

Trauma responses are not just mental issues, but the mental part of it is massive. This “problem” dominated my early-to-mid-20s and it was terrible, the worst, really. Finally, I was able to address the “issue” or whatever you want to call it – directly – with M. I’ve written quite a bit about him over the years. There are so many things about that relationship I still find entertaining and profound – and it lasted in various forms for 11 years – but a certain “season” of it all came back watching episode 4.

Despite growing up in the same culture everyone else did, being an actor when I was a kid and teen protected me from status-quo-anxieties, or even wanting to “fit in”. If you spend high school running down the hallway with your friends doing jazz hands, and watching every Marlon Brando movie you can get your hands on, “fitting in” isn’t an option OR a need. Seeing All That Jazz when you are 12 and deciding you want to LIVE in that movie obliterates picket-fence dreams for good. Being straight was not the default in my crowd, never was, and this started early. Growing up with an aunt who was an actress, an uncle who was a director, cousins who were also artists and actors, meant I had valid “alternative” examples of how to live your life all around. Still: I had to wrest myself free from cultural conditioning, same way as everyone else. Recognizing the conditioning has to happen, and breaking free is the difficult first step. Part of the “conditioning” was the general message everywhere I looked as I hit my early-mid-20s: the problems you’re experiencing are better handled within a loving monogamous relationship. Also, don’t talk about it. I was lucky I had a huge group of rowdy friends across the spectrum of sexual experience and identity (still my core friendgroup), and I talked about it with them.

But there’s only so much you can do through talking with your friends …

Oh, and therapy was absolutely useless.

In my last re-cap, I riffed on liberation. Liberation will look different for different people. Without any therapeutic help, without a diagnosis, I decided – somehow? how did I find the GRIT? – to liberate myself. At the time, I was so traumatized I was practically frozen in space, tormented by delusions about myself which had hardened into fixations. I don’t want to talk about those. Things got so bad I blew up my life after living in a van for months with my first boyfriend (whose bright idea was that?), and moved alone to Chicago as though I were escaping a fiery wreck. I threw myself into the theatre world, got cast in things right away, found a cheap apartment, all good, but also … I looked at this issue head-on so I could do what I needed to do to work on it.

First step: break up with boyfriend. Done. (I say that like it was easy. It was NOT easy.)

Second step: Make decisions about what you want to do when you are single. I’d be single as an adult for the first time, how did I want to handle it? My life situation was different than Hannah’s, but the issue was the same. Once I moved to Chicago I was determined: I don’t know what life has in store for me but whatever comes, I am going to WORK on this problem. With actual people. Plural. I got upset once when some girl called me a “slut”, and my friend Mitchell said, “Sheila, you’re getting liberated. It’s going to bother people.” That was always how I looked at it. I needed to take control of my healing by acknowledging, at the very least, that there might be something I could DO about this problem.

This is what Hannah is doing when she makes the request of Garrett. The request has nothing to do with Justin. He’s the pretext. She is STUCK and she has a fixation that she is “broken”, the fixation is REAL to her, and she wants to ADDRESS this problem, choosing Garrett to be her partner in it.

An issue almost no one talks about – at least not in any mainstream way – is the impact sexual assault has on responsiveness (i.e. orgasm). Being anorgasmic is not seen as a health issue, or valid to discuss with your doctor. This is true of any vaginal health issue, not just trauma-related. Sexual health includes libido issues. Our culture is so weird about this with women. Matter-of-fact discussion about orgasms with a doctor should not be some weird thing. I remember saying wildly to the mood disorder doctor who first diagnosed me back in 2013, “Don’t put me on anything that’ll fuck up my ability to come. Orgasms are the only thing right now I even HALFway enjoy!” (It shows you how sick I was that this was 100% true.) I was yelling these words in a mood disorder clinic on 52nd Street during the intake. This was early days when I was yelling at everyone. Yelling about Elvis. Yelling about orgasms. The doctor – still my doctor – said calmly, “The medication is better now than it used to be in that regard, so if you have any problems, we can adjust.”

I don’t know why women’s sexual pleasure is so taboo. Well, of course I know. Freud thought clitoral orgasms were “immature”. Vaginal orgasms from penetration are more “mature”, and therefore preferable. Why? We need men for those, and only penetration leads to procreation. Imagine being this self-centered. We don’t actually need men for penetration, but I guess it’s more comforting (to men) to know that we need them for procreation, and so we ladies need to stay away from the “immature” clitoris which we can diddle whenever we want and never get pregnant. Men pathologized a body part on bodies that are not like theirs. Why were all these male doctors pooh-poohing the innocent clit? Again, we know why. They were (are?) envious we have something serving no purpose but pleasure. Plus we can come multiple times in a single “session”. Why have one when you can have ten? Sky’s the limit, really. This must not stand, right? Well, the scheme worked. We’re all fucked up! Our culture is SICK. 2016, people.

I am not paranoid. There really was a conspiracy. The etymological root for “pudenda” is “shame” or “thing to be ashamed of”. They name our body part and tell us how we are supposed to feel about it. The etymological roots for “penis” are either descriptive – “tail” – or function-based “Offspring”, “progeny.” The Latin root for “vagina” is “sheathe” and/or “scabbard” – not initially a medical term, so these are not metaphors. But a metaphor for “sheathe” is better than the diabolical SHAME. I am not a scholar but I did look into these things because it seemed important – not as an intellectual exercise, but because I was clearly impacted by all of it, absorbing “shame” via osmosis as a horrible inheritance. Generations of women (and men) absorbed the etymological roots of the body part, even if they don’t know the etymological root. It’s in the air.

When I talk about liberation, I mean liberating yourself from all THAT. Liberating yourself from centuries of bad harmful information. This goes for men too, it should go without saying! We all need to liberate ourselves.

There’s a great scene in thirtysomething when Nancy (Patricia Wettig), recovering from cancer, finds herself unable to get into sex, unable to orgasm, or get wet, or any of the things that are “supposed” to happen. She goes to talk to her doctor about it, and he really just can’t even care about it, and gives banal advice. She wants to know what might be going on medically – her body went through a trauma – and the trauma was PHYSICAL, not mental, so let’s talk about it. The doctor has no clue and doesn’t seem to take it seriously. Nancy says, “If someone told you you’d never experience sexual pleasure again, what would you call it. You’d call it the end of your life.”

Who should you go to with such a problem? Psychiatrists? The problem isn’t just mental. Also, psychiatry’s history with this subject matter is… not great. A pelvic floor therapist (or so I’ve heard) can help. Obviously not for everyone, but a sex worker might be useful. They know a lot about this stuff, and so you could discuss what’s going on with you with no shame. You can be explicit and they won’t secretly get anxious like “I’m not a good lover” or “I’m doing something wrong”, in the way a boyfriend might. A lot of the time, women are having issues with sex while simultaneously trying to make their male partners not feel bad about themselves. It’s a shitshow. Women sometimes have bad experiences with sex, with or without assault. Sometimes it hurts. And if it hurts once, you tense up the next time. Why do we all collectively agree that this is … okay?

Dissociation during sex is common. You detach from your body and look on at yourself from afar, you can’t get back IN to your body (Maggie Rogers’ beautiful “Back In My Body” is a crucial needledrop in episode 4). The body knows it has been hurt, and the body is protecting itself. Trauma does not understand time. How do you train the body to know: “we’re safe now”? An important distinction with trauma from sexual assault: you have to train your body to feel safe while you are in the exact same situation. War veterans suffering from PTSD have to remember they are no longer in Vietnam while they are sitting by their backyard pool. But for assault victims it’s like: “I was assaulted by a man and now I am in a room with a naked man again.” Dissociating is sometimes hard to “clock”. Garrett does a great job of seeing when she’s doing it, but it’s only because she gave him a heads up that it happens sometimes. This is not to excuse men for not paying attention to what is going on with their partners, even during a hookup. But it is an acknowledgement that learning about dissociation might be a good idea. Knowledge is power.

You can develop vaginismus and vulvodynia and other issues involving penetration. There are many reasons for vaginismus, and trauma is one of them. (There’s a character in A.S. Byatt’s Possession who – clearly – without having a name for it – has vaginismus, making sex impossible. Possession takes place in the Victorian age, and it makes you think: women have probably experienced this since the beginning of human history and have suffered in silence. Having painful sex. Still, to this day, these things are not understood or taken seriously, a side effect of having men be in charge of medicine.) Religious trauma, growing up in a fundamentalist environment, rife with purity culture, also can lead to issues in this area. Sex education helps, which unfortunately so many people in this country don’t want us to have. Barbarians. A couple years ago, I interviewed Bonnie Gross, screenwriter for Lady Parts, a really good movie based on her own experiences with vulvodynia and vaginismus.

The pleasure gap is real. Everyone should be appalled. Like, what are we even DOING here. Some men get tripped up on it, they make it an ego thing, they get frustrated … not because they are bad people (necessarily) but being with a woman who has problems like this triggers a LOT of shame and guilt and fear in (some) men. I have sympathy for men in this position. Think about the opposite scenario, men having sexual problems, their shame about it, fear of how women will react or being rejected. This stuff is so personal it feels like it IS your identity. At least that is how it was for me, so I can only assume this is true for others.

When my first boyfriend and I broke up, and I moved to Chicago with literally just a suitcase of clothes, no wonder why I was like …

about getting into any kind of romantic relationship.

Garrett is not a sex worker, obviously, but because they aren’t in a relationship and because they trust each other already … Hannah can actually be where she’s at with him, once he knows the details. She can tell him what’s going on. She can describe what she’s experiencing. He can listen and he doesn’t take it personally. It’s not about YOU. This might be the #1 reason why these things are easier to address with someone who’s not your established boyfriend. You have to be able to talk about these things without fear of being broken up with, or fear of someone taking it personally. I suppose one COULD do this with a long-time partner and that’s the cultural myth passed on: all of this is better when you’re married, etc. When you are in love, all of this will work itself out.

One size does not fit all in this conversation! There are no rules, and what feels good for you is paramount. I do not want to sound prescriptive, because I’ve been damaged by prescriptive advice. My context is hetero and I’ll be speaking from that standpoint, because … well, because it’s my life.

Conventional hetero sex – henceforth referred to as the “conventional model” – tends to proceed in a particular order – and I don’t mean “conventional” in a derogatory way. Your basic meat-and-potatoes good-sex behavior in general encompasses the conventional model. I may be stealing this from Norman Rush’s Mating but I don’t have the book on hand: the conventional model runs on the “You first” “oh no, you first” “after you, mi’lady” model. There is nothing wrong with this. In fact, it’s lovely and polite, it’s an attempt to close the pleasure gap, and it’s 100% preferable to the model where the man (metaphorically) doesn’t open the door for the woman, ever. Or he goes through the door first and closes it in her face. And then asks her if she came. In the conventional model, everyone gets a turn. You do me, I do you, we do each other, good night.

I never will tell anyone how they like it is wrong. It is against my personal religion. Since I had to fight so hard to find out what was right for me, I would never EVER tell someone else they have it wrong. I am only speaking about my subjective experience. Guys who want you to “go first” have the right idea, and good for them, they are not selfish. But the conventional model sent me into a panic spiral, since – in general, women “go first”, I’d get worried it was taking too long and I would get in my head and just want to stop my turn and move on to his. I’m hopelessly hetero – to quote What’s Up Doc “listen, kiddo, you can’t fight a tidal wave” – but the conventional model did not work for me. I was 23, 24 years old, though, and thought the problem was me. Why don’t I like this thing everyone loves so much? Something is DEEPLY wrong with me. This headspace sunk me. For years.

After moving to Chicago, I got re-traumatized a couple times, which was bad, reinforcing the feeling that something was REALLY wrong with me, but a part of me was like “well, this is part of it, just give it a shot and then … slink out at dawn.” I said yes to anyone who asked me out, they had a tendency to fall for me (but it wasn’t really “me”), so when they’d start to have feelings I’d cut them loose. I remember one guy saying to me in March, “Hey … there’s a theatre festival in Milwaukee this summer, maybe we could go?” In my head, I thought, “This SUMMER??? You think we’ll still be hanging out THIS SUMMER??” I wreaked havoc and hurt some people. I was learning in the process, learning to be clear, learning how to “vet” people for what I wanted to be doing. No more of this “THIS SUMMER” business!!

In the book, Hannah dated someone for eight months the year before and she was in love with him but their sex was “You first” “Oh no you first”, which led to their shared belief that she “couldn’t come”. Without being an evil person, he made it all about him. He tried hard, it wouldn’t happen, and he gave up. Also, they were like 19 years old. This is a lot to handle for anyone of any age. Listen, it’s a tricky subject and I give men a lot of grace – especially if the woman can’t articulate what’s going on. You can’t expect people to be mind readers. You have to be able to communicate. Take responsibility for yourself, as Hannah does here, with the clarity of her articulation to Garrett. My first boyfriend did nothing wrong. It’s just that I needed a radical focused healing process, not a boyfriend, but had no idea this was the case and so I sank into a suicidal depression about how I was made wrong. I could never have said, “Can we throw out the conventional model so I can figure out what’s going on, with no pressure to figure it out by next week?” I never would have said those things, I didn’t even know one could.

Hannah’s prior relationship is not in the series, so I will forget it existed in my commentary. In the series, Hannah hasn’t had a relationship. She’s hooked up a few times, felt the problem in front of her face, and panics about getting involved with anyone. This is why she doesn’t have crushes, because she knows she’ll get in bed with them and she won’t “be able to”, it’ll be the same thing all over again. This issue shows up in her episode 3 sexual fantasies, literally screaming at her: “DEAL WITH ME.” Hannah is not going to “work through this” with some hookup. Or with Justin. Garrett is safe because he is not her boyfriend. Garrett is also safe because he proved to her he WAS safe, by guarding her drinks and NOT sleeping with her when she was drunk.

Sometimes I think of that funny line from As You Like It, said to the weird little shepherdess: “Sell when you can; you are not for all markets.” I first read As You Like It in college, and being struck by the line, having a moment of clarity “…’you are not for all markets’ … I think that’s me.” I was right. I did not “sell when I can” – “selling when I can” would have meant accepting my first boyfriend’s marriage proposal, which I did not. THANK GOD. Experience would underline how much I was “not for all markets”. I’ve wasted time wanting to be “for all markets” and wishing I wasn’t a weird little shepherdess. Not too many men prefer weird little shepherdesses, but I’ve attracted ones who do. I’ve been wildly in love only once, because once was enough. He is still somewhat radioactive to me. I missed that guy for years.

It took me so long to realize that the best most healthy (insane, considering) relationship I ever had – where I was unabashedly my weird shepherdess self – was with M, who was also “not for all markets”. We weren’t in love, and we never called it a relationship. I never would have been with him if he wanted to be my boyfriend. See above comments on relationships. If we ever formally dated, it would have been a total disaster. It’s great to be in love (I guess?) but it’s also great to be endlessly entertained, as I was by M. If you are endlessly entertained by the man you are also in love with, I am happy for you. It didn’t work out that way for me. I appreciate “endlessly entertaining” like it’s oxygen. We never cheated on partners with each other. We stopped getting together for about 8 months because both of us got involved with other people. Those other situations fell apart almost simultaneously, due to everyone being 20something, and he and I called each other within a couple of days. “Heard your thing was over?” “Yeah. You too?” “Yeah.” Even if I called him a MINUTE after I broke up with the other guy, that would be FINE (I am looking at you, Sean and Allie!).

The timeline is blurry – because the “problem” showed up in different small ways from the beginning, but we really didn’t know each other – and then maybe a year in, we kept coming up against this thing I could no longer ignore, even though I wanted to just be OVER IT, and there were moments like Hannah’s “no, no, I can do this”. etc. And M. said, “Oh, fuck this. No. We’re stopping.” I felt like a failure, it was mortifying, blah blah, but he didn’t want to keep going, it wasn’t right. After making sure he wasn’t hurting me physically, he just wanted to know what was going on. I made some point-blank blanket machine-gun-delivery statements about myself in a firm and no-nonsense “this is how it is” way, something along the lines of, “Listen, there’s something wrong with my body, it just doesn’t really work right, and if you’re not okay with that, I totally get it, and we don’t have to mess around anymore, even though I still really want to. Just know I don’t feel things the way other women do. That’s just the way it is. So. Hope that’s okay.” He just sat there, deadpan, receiving the onslaught with no reaction. He told me later his first thought was “…. Challenge accepted.” lol

Once I stopped insisting “this is just the way things are”, we actually started talking about it. He told me that every single point-blank statement I made was not true. At that point, I could barely hear him, but, at the very least, I was able to tolerate staying in the room. It’s not nice to be contradicted when you are telling someone your deepest darkest fears but … I actually DID want to know what he thought and observed about me, I thought it might be helpful intel, even if it was tough to hear. And so it began.

Everyone always commends Garrett’s behavior in that bedroom scene and yes, he does a great job. But I feel like … Hannah is the really brave one. She’s the one actually willing to address this scary traumatic issue head-on, and trust a man to be there as she goes through whatever she goes through. Again, I look back at my traumatized 24-25-year-old self with awe and pride … wow, how the hell were you so brave? M. easily could have dropped me because who wants to hookup with someone so messed up? He could have vanished. But he didn’t. He kept calling.

Side note but I think it’s so funny and does have relevance. M. had a term for female masturbation, and it requires familiarity with a rotary phone, which means you’d have to be an older millennial, or Gen-X and earlier to have the muscle memory for it. He called it “dialing zero”. I don’t know if he stole that from anyone but I love it to this day. It has to be “zero”, not any of the other numbers.

If we weren’t going home together because one of us had to get up early, he used to say, “Go home and dial zero.” (I am laughing as I type this.) And he’d say it in front of his friends, who had no idea it was code, and might have wondered, “Why is M. telling his girl to go home and call the operator?” Or, we wouldn’t see each other for a couple weeks, and he’d say, in a German accent, “Have you been dialing zero like we discussed?” He was so stupid.

M.’s lack of fear about what was going on took away the scariness for me. Because I was SCARED. He wasn’t scared when I would burst into tears and start ranting and raving about how something was wrong with me. Had I been M., I would have been scared. Sometimes, I would sob inconsolably for half an hour … epic crying jags. I mean, I’d burst into sobs in the middle of him going down on me … for example. “Embarrassing” doesn’t even begin to cover it. When I’d cry like that – deep crying, I didn’t even cry like that when I was alone – he didn’t meet my energy. He didn’t say, “Oh God, what’s wrong??” or hold me while I cried, for example, making soothing noises. He would never. He listened to me, but he wouldn’t validate what I said, because more often than not what I was saying was self-loathing and/or delusional. Instead, he’d bluntly contradict me. “No, that’s actually not true.” Blunt, not mean. Or, lighting a cigarette, same blunt tone, “Your body works fine. Stop it.” It sounds like maybe he should have been gentler, but the way he did it interrupted the thought patterns, which had taken on phantasmagorical shapes in my (sick) head. He didn’t give my bad thoughts any space to move. He cut them off at the pass: “Nope. Not true.” In these moments, he FELT like reality to me, and since he FELT so real the things in my head, which HAD felt real five minutes ago, suddenly … became less solid. He said things that re-arranged me. For good. The way he talked to me somehow shrank my fixations in size, if that makes sense, because his whole vibe was, “What you are saying is not real.” And it WASN’T real. Some things I will never share. Only he knows.

His poor roommate must have been like “…. what the hell is going on in there. She has been crying for–” (checks watch) “… 30 minutes? Should I … call the police? Or dial zero?”

M. wasn’t a warm person, but he was perceptive and sharp: nothing got past him. His default mode was mildly-cranky straight-shooting iconoclast. He was athletic – a former high school basketball player, recruited by colleges all over the country – but when I met him he lived pretty dangerously. A wild reckless boy. I worried sometimes, preparing myself for the news he died in a car wreck. (He made it. He is still top-side!) Something life-changingly bad happened to him in high school, and he told me about it once and then never mentioned it again, but not before warning me I was not allowed to feel sorry for him. He knew a little something about feeling broken. He cried once in front of me, and I referenced it months later, saying “That was the night you cried.” Sheila. How did you think that wording would go over. He bristled. “I didn’t cry.” “M., come on.” “I wasn’t crying.” “I can’t believe this. I was there. Okay, forget it.” He was pretty tough and taciturn, he rolled a pack of cigarettes up in his T-shirt sleeve unironically, he was big and strong, the whole thing, honestly, I was overwhelmed by the Masculine Spectacle of it all, but he didn’t have any scary male qualities. He did not have a bad temper, for example. He wasn’t a wall-puncher, he wasn’t manipulative. He never pouted. You’d have to pay him to be passive-aggressive. He didn’t have even an ECHO of the double standard. He was goofy and funny, would purposefully make himself look silly if it would make me laugh. He was not homophobic, a deal-breaker for me. He was a bit of a fuckboy, but … honestly, so was I at that time. And we just got along famously. I guess I felt safe with a dangerous-living perpetually-cranky sometimes-goofball who wouldn’t admit he cried. He never took what was going on with me personally. I didn’t know this was even a possibility. Him not taking my problems personally was the secret password to all that followed. (Kudos to the 28-year-old M. who had no idea what was happening and made it up as he went. “It’s no big deal. I just want you to be happy,” he said once. Oh, okay. Yeah, dude, wanting me to be happy is NO BIG DEAL.)

But above all of these personality details, crucially: M. was liberated. He was a mess in so many ways, and chaos and disaster were always threatening to overtake his life, but he was liberated.

His total lack of interest in the conventional model was perfect for this scenario, although I couldn’t have put it into words at the time. He could DO conventional but “You first” “After you, mi’lady” held no interest for him. There was no “now it’s your turn.” (A perk of the mostly horrible situation of feeling like you’re taking too long during your “turn” is you can become extremely proficient at … everything else. That’s what Marilyn Monroe did. She had similar issues, so she made sure she knew how to give the man a good time, hoping they wouldn’t notice she was … not there? I will call this a perk, even though it is also tragic. Life isn’t black and white. I was not shy, shyness was not the issue, and I didn’t lack confidence. It feels good to please somebody, I loved it, so I’ll take it as a perk while recognizing the tragedy. Men dug a not-shy confident person who know their way around, of course, as did M., but he was the only one who clocked the discrepancy. “No, no, no, not so fast, I’m not done with YOU yet.” And this … is when the problems began.) I won’t say that PIV held no interest for M. – let’s not be ridiculous, and I wouldn’t have been on board with that either – but he wasn’t super focused on PIV as the end goal. We weren’t moving towards anything. Things weren’t supposed to go a certain way in a certain order. An entire night could be taken up with his “turn” or mine. I never felt in a rush or like I was taking too long. I literally never worried about that again. I gave as good as I got. From the moment I laid eyes on him I wanted my hands on him, and now I actually got to touch him! I was psyched!

The road was sometimes rocky but it had a rhythm. We’d try something, I’d dissociate, or sob inconsolably, we’d watch MASH re-runs, maybe get some food, and then play Truth or Dare, and do ridiculous hilarious shit. I remember giving him my black derby once and daring him to do a Fosse routine. Watching big tall M. doing what he imagined to be Fosse moves – wearing my derby – was so funny I was rolling around weeping with laughter. I mean … speaking of All That Jazz …

Or … we’d mess around and it went great or maybe it didn’t, and then we’d order food and watch Columbo re-runs. If a crying jag thing happened, we’d stop and just do something else. No need to re-hash, we both were just like, “Oh. This is happening again. Let’s watch Creature from the Black Lagoon.” We’d have little post-mortem talks about how everything went. Not “how was that for you?” but detailed. He’d tell me what he observed – not compliments, just what he was noticing as we did whatever. This sounds like it must have been AWFUL but his observations were invaluable and did so much to heal some of the shit I had going on. Humor was (as usual) involved. One time I said something about what I wanted, and his response was, “Picky picky”, and when I think of it, so many years later, I still laugh. You can say anything if you know the other person isn’t going to take it personally. We were on the same side. Like, this was a regular fucking thing for about a year. And we were both extremely busy people, with day jobs and night jobs, shows and rehearsals, his teaching schedule. Entire weekends were taken up with this behavior.

And somehow I didn’t think it was an intimate relationship. I was then and I remain a total idiot.

As we started wading our way through this “problem”, he clearly gave it some thought. He said once, and he was cranky (of course), and almost ‘over it’, “If you’re not on top every time, then I don’t even know what the fuck we’re doing anymore.” (like: “we’ve discussed this already.” lol) Why is this still so funny to me. But it was something I was so scared of, you have no idea. M. was not forcing me to do something I didn’t want to do. He intuited I was scared of it, and he would say, “There is nothing to be scared of. Get on up there.” I just couldn’t. It all seems a little silly now but I was a frozen girl, and I felt safe enough with him to actually consider “hmm, my resistance is so strong there probably is something on the other side of it.” And there was. The whole thing feels symbolic – everything comes with its own baggage. This is what M. sensed, just from familiarity with me. He wanted me to let it be all about me for a change. He said, “Be selfish, Sheila. Come on.” I was so afraid I thought I would shatter into pieces. I’m sad for 20something Sheila for doing this to herself. BUT. Eventually, fed up with the whole subject, with him, with me, I was like, “FINE, OKAY, I’ll try it, just STOP” and … I didn’t shatter into pieces at all and … the light dawned. The first thing he said afterwards: “I told you so.” So obnoxious. “Yeah, I know, you told me.” I was on the other side of it, thinking, wait, what was I so scared of again? Also… can we do that again? I trusted him so much. (He took out my journal once, and wrote on one of the pages: “Trust is more important than true love. I don’t trust anyone but I trust you.” We were very alike.)

I should add too that, yes, he was always a little cranky, like he was a 70-year-old man with bad knees, and he had no problem saying, “You’re wrong and you need to stop thinking like that”, but he was also wildly complimentary when I did anything he liked, he loved my body in a way I couldn’t even believe, no one had ever loved my body like that before – I never realized how amazing it was being objectified!! – and, finally, he was encouraging while we were doing stuff. In a sexy way. Sexy as fuck. I’d always felt alone in bed. So there was a full spectrum of stuff going on.

We were already pretty connected when all this started up. This was not our starting point. We were intertwined already through fun, shouted conversations over loud music, late-night meetups in sketchy pool halls, re-enacting the shooting of John Dillinger one night in the alley beside the Biograph Theatre, where it actually happened (M. staggered beautifully), and general Chicago actor chaos. Not everything was grim! Even the crying jags weren’t grim. They were PROGRESS.

My superpower may very well have been NOT falling madly in love with him and thereby ruining it. We clearly weren’t just FWBs – can you be FWBs for 11 years? – but if we spent more than two consecutive days together, we’d start driving each other crazy. We did well in short concentrated bursts separated by a couple of weeks, sometimes a couple months. A very little went a long way. Besides, neither of us were “date”-able then, like, at all. Maybe we sensed this? He said to me once, “I don’t have another you, you know.” In retrospect, this is an insanely romantic thing to say but I didn’t really take it that way at the time. It felt good to hear though. I just had the sense that if we tried to domesticate “us”, something would be lost. We never discussed it, although he did say to me once, at 4 in the morning, “There isn’t a word evolved enough for what we are.” Yeah, what he said.

One morning, maybe a year or so into our thing, M. and I sat in the living room of his apartment, having coffee. We were joined by M.’s very nice roommate (now an Emmy winner, I can’t help it). M. and I were basically wrecked from lack of sleep and whatever workshop-intensive we put ourselves through over the last 7 hours, and we probably looked ravaged to the roommate. We were all chatting about normal stuff, and suddenly the roommate said, “Soooo…” gesturing at the two of us. “What exactly IS this.” I figured he was owed an explanation since I was always over there and he obviously heard a lot of what was going on. I didn’t know what to say, though, so I looked at M. M., squinting in the sunlight like a vampire, said, “Sheila and I …” his voice trailing off. The roommate waited. I waited, too: I had no idea what “this” was either. I couldn’t wait to find out! M. finished: “… are on a mission.” I burst out laughing, and so did M. The roommate said, still confused, “Well, okay then!”

Years later I watched the Emmy Awards and saw the roommate walk up on stage and thought “…life is so strange.”

You never put something totally in the past, but you can at least work WITH it, creating some space around the thing so you can actually SEE it. (An additional factor was I was walking through life with the emergency brake on – my mood doctor’s terminology – and nothing could really happen until I got diagnosed, and it would be years.) I still had my moments, but the self-destructive self-talk vanished, and other things which had seemed uncrossable mountains vanished into thin air. I literally never thought my body was made wrong ever again. He showed me it was as “responsive” as anyone else’s. It was like walking through a magical portal, I am not even kidding. And I have that knowledge with me now, forever. He slayed that phantom-dragon. Once it was dead, it was dead. The capacity was always there, I just needed TIME and TRUST. Sometimes I felt so relieved to be RID of all that, I’d start crying – what a shock – and M. would say, on top of me, grumpy but alert, “…Happy tears?” He wasn’t an angel but he was a kind of a saint. Or, let’s calm down, what he was was a genius, at least about me. He had a Master’s Degree in The Weird Little Shepherdess sitting cross-legged on his bed, insisting through sobs that her body didn’t work properly. It speaks volumes that during this whole time – except for the initial point-blank-statement monologue – I never once said, “This is way too much for you, I’m sorry, I know I’m a lot, we don’t have to do this anymore, it’s not fun for you, I’m sorry …” I have no memory of even feeling that way once we were up and running with our “mission”. M. didn’t seem to be having a bad or stressful time with the whole thing. He was actually kind of into it. “Happy tears?” “Yeah, no worries.” “Okay.”

I think of that funny line in Thelma and Louise, “Oh, honey, you’ve finally been laid properly!” Or Beth’s happy sigh after sleeping with Benny in The Queen’s Gambit: “That’s what it’s supposed to feel like.” Sex without going “in order”, without the “after you, mi’lady” vibe, was a total revelation to me. I realized, “Oh. Nothing’s wrong with me, after all. I just like it a different way. Duh.” I mean, it really was that simple. And life-changing. And then … somehow … we were on the other side of it, and we were doing all the shenanigans the way we liked to do them, and there were no more crying jags. Maybe a minor dissociative episode every now and then, but he’d clock it in seconds, snapping his fingers in front of my face. Not warm but sharp and observant.

This whole THING is just a small part of our story. We cavorted around for over a decade. We were in our mid-late 30s when we ceased operations (in the most beautiful tender mutual way, but that one’s just for me). We did things like go to the club where he bartended, after hours when it was closed, and he’d play the piano for me (he was an amazing pianist too) and I’d lie in the middle of the dance floor staring at the ceiling. Or I’d go watch him play pool, his cigarette dangling. I never saw him lose. He always parked illegally and his car was always getting towed, and he’d call me at 11 at night to see if I had any cash. This happened so often I finally put my foot down: “STOP PARKING IN FRONT OF FIRE HYDRANTS AND DON’T CALL ME AGAIN FOR THIS REASON.”

We didn’t cuddle, but we would fall asleep in a messy akimbo-pigpile of limbs, like we were trying to fuse together, but the result was a dented broken dodecahedron or a Picasso painting where you can’t tell what belongs to who. He was so big he’d basically crush my body if he threw his arm and leg over me. His elbow in my side, my hand squished in his armpit, his face smushed into the back of my neck. We would sleep that way! Threatened by imminent suffocation. We had chaotic fights, about what I don’t remember, and I’d stomp home since we lived four blocks apart. Muttering to myself in a rage. One time I tried to grab his car keys, he never let me drive, and he held the keys above his head out of my reach, laughing in my face as I jumped up trying to grab them, and we slipped on the ice and fell into a snow drift, wrestling for his keys. He was laughing hysterically, I was furious, and I stomped home in 5-degree frigid weather and didn’t talk to him for two weeks. Then … we’d hit each other up again. Listen, kiddo, you can’t fight a tidal wave.

He took care of me once when I was burning up with fever, like we were in a Jane Austen novel. He had a lot of physical problems, his body was often a mess, and he’d ask me to walk on his back. Sometimes he’d call me in the middle of the day – remember, this is from the Time of Landlines and Dialing Zero – and say, “I have to teach in an hour. My back is killing me. Could you come over?” If I was free, I’d walk the four blocks to his place, climb the back stairs of his building, let myself in through the porch door, walk on his back for half an hour, and then head home.

He would break into my house in the middle of the night. He did this repeatedly. And when we woke up the next morning, his car wouldn’t be outside because he had parked in front of a fire hydrant. He’d break the news to me sheepishly, knowing the wrath coming his way. I’d deliver: “HOW many times have I told you NEVER AGAIN.” And then of course I’d lend him the cash. He always paid me back.

One really hot day during the time I’ve been describing – maybe a year and a half in – we sat on the cool tile in my apartment, having ice cold beer, a fan blowing on us, and he took a bunch of pictures of me. I changed into a variety of outfits for our impromptu photo shoot. Clearly I am not a fashion plate. Ripped jeans shorts and overalls. There are a couple where I am wearing a top hat. M. was sitting on the floor in the bathroom with the lights off. Just in his boxers probably, after a freezing cold shower. We were soooo hot, the temp was in the 90s. I have just one or two photos of the two of us together, so there’s barely any physical evidence of us, so I’m happy to have the heat wave photos, taken while our “mission” was up and running. So: He breaks into your house at 2 a.m., and by 3 a.m. you’re having a crying jag and then you eat some food, you mess around some more, then you do a corny photo shoot because it’s a heat wave and you don’t have A/C because you’re 26 and broke. Photo evidence that the whole “season” wasn’t grim. We were horsing around the whole time.

Writing all this down, and reading over all of it, my main thought is … “wait … why did I think we weren’t boyfriend-girlfriend again?”

It’s almost better we didn’t label it. Trust is more important than true love.

Off Campus episode 4 brought back those times. I was like, “Holy shit, that bedroom scene, we went through almost exactly this, except ours was interrupted by a crying jag, a smoke break, ordering take-out, and watching Planet of the Apes.” The fight-or-flight response I had to him asking me “what do you want” – just like Garrett does in Hannah’s fantasies during episode 3 … also came up for me. “What do you want?” “No one has ever asked me that before, please STOP I FEEL FEAR.” I’ve said it before: if I had seen this episode at age 22, it could have been a game-changer, because I would have known then I was not alone, and what was happening with my body was an actual “thing” that happens and I wasn’t “made wrong”. I have wanted to see such a scene for so long and now here it is.

When I think of M. I think of all the ways I found him entertaining. The freedom and fun, the chaos, the random, the familiarity. Wrestling with my nightmare in his bedroom or mine is not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of him. To this day, though, I am grateful it happened because it might not have. Not everyone finds a person like him (he was fairly sui generis, I will grant. Not a lot of him’s running around. “Not for all markets”). I would have progressed because I was aware of what I wanted to overcome … but could I have planned what ended up happening? The two of us together did a better job healing some of this stuff than I ever could have accomplished on my own. I was too in my head. I am fully aware now that I got over some MAJOR shit – for good – because of what we did together. Having this happen was not inevitable. When I met him I was under a horrible spell, and he helped break the spell. He wasn’t some altruistic mind-reading savior. First, I had to let him into my secret awful world and I had to be honest about what was going on, even though I was so scared of anyone knowing. And he had to listen to me, not take any of it personally, and decide to get on board with our “mission”.

Challenge accepted.