Of all the unexpected elements in Off Campus – and there are so many – episode 6’s “rewind” was the one I did not foresee! Half of episode 6 was Dean and Allie. When we return to Hannah and Garrett, they are behaving like an old established couple, comfortable and “settled”. The contrast was effective.

I read the books to get perspective on the adaptation. The montage opening episode 5 condenses full scenes in the book (Hannah cooking food for the house), whittled down to 3 or 4 seconds. I am overall okay with what they did there. Half of episode 6 tells the story of Dean-Allie’s secret relationship, shown in a series of vignettes, some short scenes, some long, some scenes connect to events we’ve already seen. I heard some dismay from book fans that half of the Dean-Allie book (book 3) was smushed into episode 6, but that’s not true! The most radical change, I think, was deciding to move some of book 3 into book 1, as well as stepping away from our two leads! I am on board with it. Along with the fun of Dean and Allie, the switch-up gives us a false sense of safety in re: Hannah and Garrett’s relationship. They’ve emerged as a strong couple, they are good now, it’s fine to focus on Dean and Allie since those two are settled. Uh-oh.

The Dean-Allie book is so much more than their secret relationship. There’s his family’s expectations, there’s her family, her relationship with her father, opportunities arising in her career, as well as Sean still hanging around and hanging on, the Beau event, Dean’s spiral, Dean coaching kids’ hockey, making him question his chosen path (law school? that’s not even a hint of a thing in the series …) There’s the famous “call Dean” scene in the book, as non-negotiable to fans as the mutual-pleasure scene in episode 4. The actors are asked about “call Dean” on the red carpet. Will call Dean be in season 2??

Pushing early incidents from book 3 into book 1 is fine. We have a ways to go. I don’t think book 1 and book 3 occur simultaneously. There’s no overlap. Book 2 follows right on the heels of the book 1 – with Logan still crushing on Hannah. Maybe Dean is already hooking up with Allie in book 2. Not sure.

In the series, the two separate relationships between two sets of best friends happen on parallel tracks: one is out in the open and the other is hidden (including from us for half of the season). The ‘rewind’ into the Dean-Allie “breakaway” revisits karaoke night, drunk Shakespeare, spilled-popcorn, the Thanksgiving phone call … from Allie’s perspective. We now know what the hell has been going on behind our backs. Jumbling up the chronology was so fun on a first watch! The two relationships started on the same day! Hell, they basically started within the same HOUR. The Midsummer Night love potion was powerful!

I appreciate, by the way, the very clear nod in the chess scene to one of the teen rom-com prototypes, so important to Off Campus‘ scaffolding:

 
Off Campus episodes cram a lot in. Episode 6 covers a crazy amount of ground. Dean and Allie take up a full half, we touch base with Hannah and Garrett, “Yellow Haze” re-enters the chat, there’s the set-up of the Garrett-Logan conflict, and the episode closes out – as is typical for the series – with a big event, the fund raiser. There’s also the Justin-Hannah “breakup”, Allie and Dean “sneaking” around, Logan and Garrett fighting, and Hannah’s panic attack in the streets. Huge tonal shifts. The moods are mixed throughout: as Allie says to Hannah, “It all can’t be sex and fun.” Dean and Allie are “sex and fun” but it doesn’t start that way. It starts at the fire pit, where they have a serious conversation about life. I’ll get to this but I think Dean – like Garrett – “falls first”. If it was unexpected for Garrett to fall first, it’s mind-blowing for Dean. And I think he falls for her at the fire pit. In other words, right away, during their first full conversation.

The thing about Dean is: he does what he wants to do when he wants to do it. This includes falling for someone when he’s never fallen for someone before.

Series Allie is different from book Allie. One of the issues, in my opinion, is the villainization of Sean in earlier episodes. Allie’s attachment to him in the series makes us question her judgment. We should see what she once saw in him. The breakup “messes with her head”, as she says. She’s concerned about jumping into another relationship so soon after breaking up with Sean. The thing with Dean has rebound written all over it. Making Sean so negative impacts our perception of Allie. Underscoring Allie’s monogamous nature and relationship history might have helped, particularly since Mika Abdalla is so appealing. Yes, she’s so sexy, but let’s not fall into the trap of assigning too much meaning to her sexiness. A girl can be super sexy and also monogamous. She’s “Team Girlfriend”. She started dating Sean her freshman year. She went on “dates” in between her breakups with Sean but Allie is the living embodiment of Kelly Clarkson’s anthem. She does not hook up.

Hooking up with Dean is totally “against type” for her. She can’t believe she’s doing it. (This isn’t really dwelled on in the series, as much as it is in the book.) Allie can’t help but be intimate emotionally, it comes naturally.

I feel like what Mika Abdalla is playing – mainly – is confusion powered by pleasure. This is NOT an easy combo to embody!! To us in the audience, the choice is so obvious. She needs to get over herself and be with Dean. But … the character is her own person and she’s not entirely sure what she’s doing. Younger actors (and even older actors) sometimes resist playing mixed emotions like this which may generate a negative reaction in the audience. They want to be liked and don’t want to “lose” the audience. You can almost see this in the performance. Scripts are the same way: writers (and networks) shy away from mixed motives or anything that isn’t immediately understandable. They don’t want blowback from social media. Network execs are lowest common denominator people who don’t read. The do not get INFERENCE. Off Campus is all about inference.

We can look at Allie’s situation and wonder why the hell she is freaking out about Sean … and why is she so afraid of being out in the open with Dean … and why is she resisting this in such a weird panicked way? Some of the qualities of book Allie are important – however problematic – and these things aren’t present in series Allie. There’s the Sean problem. “Never give up on love?” But Sean didn’t love you, Allie. He wanted you to abandon your DREAMS, whereas Dean wants to hear about your dreams, and supports you in the pursuit of them: immediately, at the fire pit, without question. Hell, he becomes a fan of her as an actress at Drunk Shakespeare.

The fact that Allie does not put two and two together about what is actually going on with Dean makes her interesting. Equally interesting is Dean falling for her. Nothing we’ve seen prepares us except for the emotional intelligence he has already shown, with Garrett in the weight room, and also in his easy acceptance of one of his BFFs coupling up. Dean doesn’t TRIP about things, a key to his character. He doesn’t trip about hockey, he doesn’t trip about sex, he clearly doesn’t trip about school. Despite Dean not having an ounce of neurosis about … basically anything he does, Dean doesn’t lack depth. He just doesn’t stress about what he’s FEELING. Maybe he does in some things but not about Allie. Kalyn only has moments to convey this depth. He gives a very nuanced performance in what could have been a total bro-cartoon.

One last thing I will discuss is episode 6’s distinct look, and how it utilizes visual effects we haven’t seen much in the series – here and there, but not to the degree of episode 6, where the effects take over. Cinematographer Colin Hoult goes almost Sean Price Williams at points – the episode’s look is very dramatic. I am sure there was a lot of post-production tweaking to get the streak-of-blue-light effect, in particular. These things are deliberate, in other words, not an accident, not happening naturally. I go into these two effects in separate sections at the bottom of the post. I don’t know WHY these effects are used so insistently, I haven’t seen interviews with the cinematographer – and, obviously, with a job like this, a gig-for-hire for Amazon – you don’t have artistic freedom to just go off, king, and make all the kooky choices you want to make – but the cinematographer is a central part of the team and is present at table reads and story meetings, working in close collaboration with the director and showrunner. The show’s look must feel cohesive, and it does, but episode 6 looks different. This makes sense, since we’re entering a whole separate timeline with a whole different couple. So, regardless of the WHY these effects were used, or who is responsible ultimately, I have some ideas about what these things are doing, diegetically.

Both effects – the “bokeh” effect and the “anamorphic lens flare” blue-light-streak effect – work really well on the BIG screen. They work best when seen LARGE. Bokeh gives the illusion of the screen dissolving, the background melting, turning almost liquidy – we don’t get a lot of bokeh in Off Campus, except for in episode 6. Bokeh is the visual language of the Dean-Allie relationship.

You usually see the anamorphic lens flare in huge spectacles, sometimes involving outer space or “close encounters” because the streak makes the light look otherworldly or supernatural, like a big space-time-rift is happening. The blue-light-streak is rarer in smaller stories, with Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love a notable exception. I would bet you money that Colin Hoult knows Punch-Drunk Love like the back of his hand.

Spoiler alert, the entire series opens with a sequence featuring anamorphic lens flares, so I’ll just give you a glimpse of what I am talking about:

 

As for “bokeh”, it overwhelms the screen during the penthouse chess scene. The look is impressionistic to nearly absurd degrees, and the visuals carry emotion. And so, Off Campus uses big screen effects for the small screen. If you projected Off Campus in a theatre on the big screen, the visuals would still be stunning – maybe even more so – and vivid enough to fill the space. To say this is not common for streaming shows – made mostly for small screens and PHONES – is an understatement.

Both effects are deeply poetic.

At the bottom of the post I’ve put together a couple different sections:
1. Props and Technology
2. Bokeh
3. Anamorphic lens flare
4. Dean’s fashion sense

Let’s get to the nuts-and-bolts of the episode.

Episode 5 “The Cold Turkey”

Directed by Erica Dunton
 

 

Dean’s skin-tight shorts send me. His body is HUGE. Clearly everything on him is muscle but he’s also smooth somehow. He’s aerodynamic.

 

 

Allie looks at Dean in a panic, she looks helpless and scared. Her expression was so striking to me on a first watch, not so much because she was in a panic, but because the way she was looking at Dean showed me they were already DEEP into this “thing”. I felt like, “wait, how did we get HERE??”
I can’t help but compare series Allie to Allie in the book. To be clear, I’m fine if Allie doesn’t quite “make sense”. Love isn’t known for inspiring sane behavior. She’s torn, and she worries too much about what other people are thinking, and she second guesses herself. This might be frustrating for an audience but it is completely relatable and understandable behavior. The Sean thing is only part of Allie’s confusion. It can be awkward when two mutual friends hook up with each other because if they break up, the friend dynamic could be ruined. This happened a lot in college, particularly in my fairly incestuous theatre department. More importantly, everyone knows Dean sleeps with everyone. So what does that say about Allie? Is she just another notch, a puck bunny? Does that mean Allie’s a “whore”? Allie’s slut-shaming of herself is front-and-center in the book, not so much in the series.
Allie’s growth journey is – unfortunately – interrupted (and corrupted) by Actress Lady in episode 7, who swoops in in her ugly outfit that looks like a costume sketch for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, spouting horrible advice.

 

While Hannah was singing “Cherry Pie”, Dean was very busy picking up two women. Malone’s, man, who knew a diner/bar could present such social possibilities, especially at … KARAOKE NIGHT?? In what universe, Off Campus, come on. I would bet Dean made out with the woman in the ladies’ room, and she said, “Let me text my friend to join us.”

 

 

I reject Dean’s sweater aesthetically and emotionally but I find it a fascinating choice – possibly because of my antipathy towards it.

 

Briefly, we enter into not just rom-com territory but screwball territory, where two people bicker with conviction sparked by love/lust/irritation. Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth. Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable in It Happened One Night.
 

Or Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. One of my favorite lines:

Allie is basically like, “Oh, Dean, you’re wonderful, in a loathsome sort of way.”

Translated into modern rom coms, we see this dynamic in When Harry Met Sally, and others. It’s not exactly “enemies to lovers”, but more like distaste masking weird attraction. Dean is immediately taken up with Allie on the couch, forgetting the two girls he brought home with him. I love how the one woman says to Allie, friendly, “Hey! You’re the girl from the bathroom!” Jealousy in this particular circumstance would be ridiculous. Dean and Allie throw barbs at each other, with the two girls seen between and behind them. Once again, Off Campus decides to root us in a rom-com cliche, just to start us out. They orient us in the familiar and then immediately undermine the cliche.

 

 

I don’t smoke pot but I love its casual matter-of-fact inclusion in this scene. I remember the revelation that was The Breakfast Club, especially how smoking pot was shown as a positive social lubricant. Unheard of in a teen comedy in the ’80s, when weed was still illegal. I remember “thinkpieces” about it at the time, grownups worrying about what it all MEANS. Grown-ups are always gonna grown-up. I was basically the age of the kids in The Breakfast Club, and I didn’t smoke pot or drink or anything but many of my friends were stoners, so … smoking pot never seemed like a big deal to me. To show smoking pot as THE thing that helps these different types of kids break down the walls and actually open up … ground-breaking.
 

 

 

Dean and Allie smoking a joint out by the fire pit, and talking – for the first time – with no walls – about deep things – owes a huge debt to The Breakfast Club.

 

 

In watching YouTube reactors, men love Dean but they also miss some of the subtlety. They see him as entertaining comedic relief – they love his episode 4 advice – but then are surprised when he is shown sadly waiting for a text from Allie. They miss the way he looks at her at the fire pit, they miss the expression on his face when she leaves the photo booth, or the look on his face when she walks out of his family penthouse. Men think every moment for Dean is all about sex. Kalyn, playing an extrovert like Dean, is a subtle actor. He has said he was so excited to show the softness in this big jock guy because Kalyn is also a jock and he is also a softie. This duality exists but actors are rarely given the chance to play it. Kalyn doesn’t have a lot of real estate in the role to add shadings and nuance but he accomplishes it. You have to keep your eyes on Dean. Kalyn said the main thing he loves about Dean is how closely he pays attention to everything. Another actor playing Dean would say “I love how Dean lives life to the fullest” or whatever. Underestimate Dean at your peril. Do not be surprised at his depth of feeling.
I’ll go one further. He falls in love with her during this conversation at the fire pit.

 

 

Dean and Allie are drawn to one another in what I would call a natural – even animal – way. Not animalistic, but in the way animals of the same species “recognize” each other. They stop to check each other out. Dogs seeing each other on the sidewalk are like, “Oh hey! You’re like me.” Or like babies in separate strollers, seeing each other in passing, and holding out their arms, like, “Hey! Hi!” Dean and Allie make no sense on the face of it – and in the book they really don’t – but there’s an affinity going beyond sexual attraction.
They also have a lot in common because they both know what it means to devote yourself to one pursuit.
Allie has devoted her life, from a young age, pre-Sean, to being an actor. It’s her dream.

 

 

Meanwhile, Dean is living his dream as well. As far as we can tell. He skates hockey at a high level, although he isn’t as gung-ho at going pro as Garrett or Logan. He might get drafted anyway. He’s a good defenseman. It’s what he wants to do, he loves it, he’s good at it. Dean takes life easy but he has the discipline to work out every day, skate every day, take care of the newbie freshman players. As a kid, Dean had the seriousness to work at hockey until he was good enough at it to do all of this. You don’t play hockey in college if you haven’t devoted the majority of your life to it. You see those 19-year-olds on the baseball field, basketball court, ice rink, and what you are seeing is a decade-plus of focus and work. Dean is rich as hell and doesn’t deprive himself of anything – at least not unwillingly – but he deprived himself of things for hockey because he wanted to do it. And so when he asks Allie what she wants, and Allie pours out her reponse, he completely 100% without question understands it. He gets having to be single-minded, and giving up other things so you can chase your dream.

 

 

Not for one second does he play devil’s advocate, or line himself up with the male “position”, the way guys sometimes do because they feel a certain sort of way when a woman talks about a problem she has with a man. This is the hashtag-not-all-men contingent, who can’t let women speak their truth. You guys have got to stop this. We have to listen to you all generalize about women, we are so used to it we don’t even notice anymore. This is what you must do. Otherwise, you are being boring. Dean finds Allie enormously appealing, but he’s not “making a move” at the fire pit. Even when he does make his move – putting his contact into her phone – he does it in a way that gives her the space to make it her choice. Dean “clocked” her on the dance floor at the costume party, and because he notices everything, he clocked more than the sexiness. Allie’s boyfriend wants traditional things. Dean understands intuitively that she is not a traditional woman who can live in Vermont. Dean bowed before her on the dance floor. WhatEVER she wants is up to HER and he respects her dream for herself. He doesn’t tell her what to do. He just asks, “So. What do you want?”

 

 

Dean listens, and remembers what Allie says, as evidenced in episode 8. “I get it now. You love love. That’s what you said at the fire pit.” How closely he listens is Dean’s rare genius, not his sex prowess. Besides, guys who are good listeners make the best sex partners. Allegedly. How does one “vet” men for listening and curiosity? They are my two non-negotiables. Without listening and curiosity, nothing is possible, and you can FEEL it in someone immediately. Men sometimes fear these things because it’s vulnerable to be curious, especially about a woman you find attractive, it’s vulnerable to ask an open-ended question and then give her the floor. Dean asks the question because he’s curious, and then he listens when she answers. And retains what she says, keeping it in mind during future interactions.

 

 

Dean and Allie on the dance floor is the sexiest scene in the whole series, but what it does is to establish the “animal” recognition thing, which goes deeper than “let’s fuck”. Something ELSE was activated, and you can see it both their faces. Here, smoking pot at the fire pit, they dig into it a little bit. Dean asks “impertinent” questions – “so you’re breaking up with your boyfriend?” Allie tries half-heartedly to protest, but when he jokes about her blabbing her business at karaoke, she starts laughing at herself, and he laughs too. Allie was being ridiculous and messy at karaoke and it’s OKAY. Can girls be allowed to be ridiculous in public, please, without predators pouncing on them? For God’s SAKE. Somehow, Allie allows Dean in, letting him see her confusion and sadness and frustration. He totally understands, even though he doesn’t question himself in the same way (not that we know of, anyway.) Dean keeps things simple by being the “casual sex guy” … but as I said, he doesn’t “trip” about these things, turning himself into knots of justification. Allie turns herself into knots. Dean offers her his wisdom, and it’s great advice. We should not be surprised. He already showed his sensitivity with Garrett in the weight room. Dean is promiscuous but he isn’t sloppy. (This tracks with Dean in the book, who also has a whole thing about making sure he gets consent, and we hear the backstory on this: he fucked up once in high school, and he’s still haunted by it. Would love if this was explored in season 2.)

 

 

Allie is transparent with this playboy. “I want to be in love.” She tells him about her parents’ beautiful relationship and even – for the first time – hints that her mother has died. Her father was there for mother “even when …” They are clearly saving this for Season 2. I’m interested to see what they do with her dad – his illness and how that impacts Allie’s decision-making. Here, we get just a taste of the story but it’s fascinating that the first time we hear about it is when she talks to Dean. She doesn’t mind him seeing her more “traditional” wants and desires. She shares them with this guy who might judge her or think she’s “square”, but he doesn’t. He likes being “casual sex guy”, she “wants to be in love”, and so they just share space, discussing it. I love this scene.

 

 

What Allie wants becomes a theme, as she spirals into a tizzy about this “unwanted” relationship with Dean, her feelings of loyalty towards Sean (YOU BROKE UP WITH HIM.), her jealousy towards the puck bunnies who “know what they want” … Dean cuts through her confusion later by saying, “I know what I want.” When he says it, he is being lascivious but … Think about what’s going on behind the scenes. He hooked up with Allie and then stopped hooking up with other people, and didn’t even NOTICE until she points it out to him in episode 8. Allie not knowing what she wants is her “struggle” through the next episodes. Sometimes it’s annoying – yes – but it’s a very common and relatable thing, particularly with relationships when you’re in your early 20s, and you’re not sure of what you want, because you’re 21 years old and the answer to that question changes because you’re changing. It’s okay to say “I don’t want this anymore” but … we have to learn how to do this.
In the episode 3 re-cap, I did a whole riff on the question’s centrality to the series, and how it impacts each character.
“What do you want?”
To quote Hamlet, that is the question.

 

 

Here’s where it gets interesting. Something happens at the fire pit which is the key to everything, where everything changes. The moment is visible to the naked eye, even though a lot of YouTube reactors miss it because there’s no dialogue. The moment is brief and quiet, happening solely on Dean’s face, similar to Garrett looking at Hannah’s Instagram at the block party. You can’t just listen to Off Campus. You have to watch. The moment at the fire pit has an equivalent in episode 1 when Hannah says to Garrett, “Why, because you like beating people up?” Garrett isn’t pissed or defensive. He is rattled. Hannah throws this comment at him because of her experience with what the sport is and how hockey has impacted her life. Her comment has nothing to do with Garrett. But here … Allie asks Dean “which one of his ex-es” taught him to be so insightful. I had to slow this down to catch it, but this is Dean’s first reaction to her questioning how it’s possible he’s never had a girlfriend. Blink and you might miss it.

 

 

“I’m Six Flags, baby. Everyone wants a ride, they come for a good time not a long time and that’s fine by me.”

 

 

This is a helluva line and the confidence radiating behind it, including the “baby”, is … outrageous. How many times has he said these words? I’d bet many. This is his “brand”. People probably laugh at the audacity, at Dean’s whole vibe, and he wants them to laugh. He projects the vibe he wants to project. His words also signal: “You know what you’re getting you’re with me. Nobody’s getting tricked. It’s your choice.” (A brilliant strategy but … be warned. You have to really know you can deliver on such a promise. Dean has no doubt he can. And does.)

 

 

But underestimate Allie at your peril, too. She’s an actor. Actors pay attention to behavior. (The stereotype of actors being superficial and fake is completely incorrect, usually spouted by people who’ve never met an actor. You find more phonies on Wall Street. Actors might be overly expressive but their whole job is trying to understand people and trying to step in other peoples’ shoes. They know how to listen. All good actors are good listeners. There are no exceptions.) Allie perceives Dean’s whole THING in its totality. When she says she hears he’s “easy”, she’s not judging – well, maybe a little bit – but she’s basically letting him know she knows. When Dean throws her that Six Flags line, at point-blank range, saying it’s “fine by him” to be viewed as Six Flags, she doesn’t laugh, like most people probably do. She just looks directly at him. Asks, “Is it?”

 

 

And Dean is SHOOK. Nobody – ever – not his parents, his friends, his hook-ups, his coach, no one – has asked if “it’s fine by him” to be Six Flags. Dean has never asked himSELF that. Now, Dean is not a sad clown, he presents himself as fun because he is actually having fun … but nobody has ever asked him what might be going on behind the Six Flags exterior. Everybody treats Dean like the life of the party. And he IS. Season 1 doesn’t tell us what’s behind the exterior, but the LOOK on Kalyn’s face opens up a whole world.
Allie doesn’t just “see” Dean. She sees THROUGH him. This must be so unnerving for him. You can see him unable to re-erect the Six Flags mask. The mask falls totally.
Dean thought she’d laugh. She might respond, “You are not for me, dude”, and that’d be fine with him … but he never expected … “Is it?”
When someone sees right through you, it’s natural to recoil. We choose our masks for often very good reasons. Allie rips his mask off and maybe he didn’t even realize it WAS a mask until she pointed it out.
Dean might feel, somewhere deep inside him, “Wow … finally.”
He didn’t even know the “finally” was within him.
Kalyn conveys all this in .5 seconds.

 

The look on Dean’s face after Allie asks “Is it?” is one of my favorite moments in the whole series.

 

I think what I am getting at is that their dynamic shows there has to be a willingness to be open to the other person, especially in early stages, when it’s riskiest. It’s okay to let someone be right, or to concede they might have a point, especially if the overall vibe is friendly and open. Allie lets Dean be right a couple of times in this scene. And Dean lets Allie be right, even if he’s “shook”. Allie allows herself to be open to this guy. He speaks NOTHING but the truth out there at the fire pit, and he supports her without even knowing her. I see so much toxicity out there, people’s walls are up – and I get it – my walls are up too. But if we are ever going to progress … we need to let other people in. “Letting people in”, by the way, is not about sex.

 

 

 

I go into the visual effects at the bottom but I want to point out the dramatic lighting in the fire pit scene – the flames in the foreground, the dreamy bokeh background, blurred-out strings of lights floating through undifferentiated black – all this abstracts the realistic backyard space. The same thing happens in the loading dock area behind the theatre, as well as the two of them having sex in the Midsummer Night’s Dream backstage area, with all those golden colored drapes and gauzy curtains. We know where we are but the space itself is unclear, not stable or solid. Their first sex takes place in a boundary-less environment of color and soft fabric and soft light, no walls. There’s a moment on the loading dock where Allie is shot in close profile, and a huge gleaming golden orb takes up half the screen. What IS that light source? If you look at the wider shot of the loading dock area, it looks like the light source might be a tiny sign on the brick wall behind, blurred out until it transforms into a liquidy blob of color. The background is blurred out to such a degree we reach impressionistic surreality. This will be common with Dean and Allie’s relationship, and the look is unique to the series.

If you notice in this scene: the two of them do not move. They remain stationary but the way it’s shot, with the small shifts in camera moves, and the lights behind Allie in particular, the effect created is that the background circles around them.

One theory: Dean and Allie are a sexy couple having sexy times. I would suggest the lighting tells a different story, or at least complicates what seems simple, deepens what could be mistaken for surface. The bokeh lighting, the liquidy abstracted blurs floating around them, sometimes in front of them, all around them, places them in a Midsummer Night’s Dream. They first have sex IN the “dream”. They never leave the dream. Garrett and Hannah don’t have INTENSE romantic lighting like this, even though their story is very romantic. Lighting Dean and Allie’s sex romp shenanigans in such a dream-y-poetic way, with lights floating around them, places them in an impressionistic liminal space. The choice is deliberate and unusual.

 

In other words, don’t be fooled. This is a love story.

 

 

Half an hour ago, Allie was having a meltdown, babbling about pancakes and the missionary position. Dean was awe-struck at her brilliance as an actress. Dean has no idea Allie officially broke up with Sean but her crash-out lets Dean know that … well, things have certainly deteriorated since the fire pit! He doesn’t move in on her, letting her know he’s still available. A less sensitive show would have had Dean trying to worm his way in now that the waters are clear. Oh no. Allie has to come to him. Dean is no dummy.

 

 

I want to mention one of Dean’s verbal “tics”, because it shows up repeatedly. “And yet …” Beau speaks this way too. Nobody else does, but Allie falls right into it in response. “And yet …” She repeats: “And yet …” Leaving the sentence unfinished gives her space to meet him halfway, and acknowledge the “and yet”-ness of the situation. I haven’t counted all his “and yet”s but it’s enough to make it a recognizable THING.

 

 

Dean’s outfit really is an outfit: he looked in his closet and carefully picked all of those items, checking himself out in the mirror, thinking, “I look awesome”. The camo/cardigan/sneakers doesn’t match at all with her ethereal corseted chiffon and tulle fairy queen costume … but it’s also weirdly perfect.

 

 

Allie and the glowing gigantic golden BLOB.

 

One thing I like about their dynamic and it might be hard to describe, but I’ll give it a shot: my response is a reaction to a general unfriendly vibe out there between men and women. I understand the unfriendliness but it’s depressing. In Off Campus, Allie lets Dean be right without giving up her power. Dean lets himself be right – he knew she would call – without chipping away at her power. He is cocky – he knew she would call – but he isn’t mean about it. SHE had to choose. Like, guys, why are you so mean to women? You’re so WEIRD. Allie is a little ashamed because she said she wouldn’t call, and also she just broke up with Sean. She doesn’t hide this from Dean. She tells Dean all of this. He doesn’t talk her out of it, he just does his “And yet …” thing, which leaves her the space to own what she’s doing. He’s not twisting her arm. In other words: they want each other and it’s okay to want each other and admit what you’re doing, even if you’re embarrassed or you feel weak or whatever. The two of them are already in a space of truth after the fire pit. (A similar thing happens with Hannah and Garrett, who find honesty irresistible with one another from episode 1.) “I said I wouldn’t call.” “And yet …” “I want to call Sean.” “But you’re calling me.” “Yes I am calling you.” In each exchange, they give ground without giving UP their agency. To me, this is a utopia for male-female romantic relationships. (I mean, all relationships, but I have the experience to weigh in on men and women. It’s ROUGH out there.)

 

Dean: “You lied.”
Allie: “About what.”
Dean: “You like roller coasters.”
Allie: “No. I fucking love roller coasters.

 

 

Mika Abdalla is a screwball comedy heroine. She carries the torch for Irene Dunne, Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard … and I don’t say this lightly. We have so few of these figures anymore, mainly because screwball comedies are a thing of the past. Romance is bogged down in seriousness and … romance. The skill set doesn’t exist anymore because the material isn’t being made. Screwball isn’t about being silly or kooky. It’s being chaotic while also being 100% sure of yourself, a magic comedic formula. Be insane while also being sure you are right. You have to be willing to look ridiculous. Like Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby correcting her snooty aunt, “One bone.”
 

 

You are just making everything up as you go, Susan!! Or love-sick Carole Lombard gazing off into the distance in My Man Godfrey, sighing directly TO the man she loves …

 

 

There are people who walk around IN a screwball, whether or not they are actually appearing in a 1930s screwball comedy. It’s more of a sensibility than a skill. Glen Powell does this. Watch Powell in Everybody Wants Some!!, made before he was famous. He swooshes into rooms so theatrically he could carry off wearing a cape. He specializes in light banter, ribald jokes, and eyebrow-wagging lascivious flirting, which manages to be friendly but also goofball-ish in a screwball way. He’s Groucho Marx at a party.

 

 

 

Not everyone is a screwball, but Mika Abdalla is. As her “affair” with Dean explodes into its fullest form the moment they touch each other, she disintegrates into a nervous monologue about what they are doing. Dean is trying to rip her clothes off, all as she says, “I can’t hurt Sean … we can’t tell anyone … this has to be a secret … Oh God … I can’t hurt Sean …” It is totally ridiculous and kind of annoying – especially because … SEAN?? But screwball heroines are often paired with dweebs before they find the right man. The other thing, though, going on with Allie in this Midsummer backstage hookup (so indiscreet!), is her laughter. You hear her laughing hysterically in the bathtub too. Laughing throughout the episode. Real laughter. A free and open GIGGLE. She’s turned on but she sounds HAPPY too. Sean makes her miserable, he deflates her.

 

 

 

The scenery is beautiful and dreamlike, you can’t even tell where they are. But these diaphonous curtains protects them from the party still raging elsewhere (meanwhile … Hannah rolls up to the hockey house looking for Garrett) … everything is soft and golden with no edges, no borders, everything flowing, but … look at that big gleaming blue blurry thing in the corner of the screen. The blue adds a shimmering contrast to the gold, and the object’s edges are indistinct, you can’t even tell what it IS, it’s more like a dream of an object rather than a three-dimensional object. Things have lost solidity and we’ll see this in the background/foreground throughout Dean and Allie’s relationship. Their “thing” is dreamy. Pure love potion from the forest in Midsummer. Nothing is real. All is magic. Everything is possible.

 

 

I love how Dean handles Allie’s babbling about Sean, of all things, during sex. He laughs. How does Stephen Kalyn do it? Meanwhile, he is struggling – mightily – like an 18th century man – to untie her corset. It’s hot as hell to have Dean Di Laurentis have to untie someone’s corset. Pure fanfic. Even hotter is how he’s like “fuck it” I’ll just yank the dress aside and get to work. I think back on Allie and the sex calendar and I am happy for her. But before that, as Allie babbles, Dean works at her corset, and he is in a HURRY, but he can’t get it undone, and suddenly Dean is in a screwball too, and whatever she says – whatever “demand” she makes – you can hear him agree. “Uh-huh.” lol “We can’t tell Sean.” “Uh-huh.” He’s not even listening. It doesn’t even matter what she’s saying because this thing is ON.

 

 

Banging in the kitchen at Malone’s is wild. Abdalla was talking in an interview about these intimate scenes and she said something about how by the time they got to filming them, she and Stephen were familiar with each other, it had been a month or so of shooting, so they knew each other and were comfortable, which helps a lot. This comfort really shows in these sex scenes, because they are graphic but they are also comedic. Garrett and Hannah are not having comedically-toned sex. This is screwball territory. Allie repeatedly insists, “This is the last time …” as Dean fucks the shit out of her. In the Malone’s scene – looping in with the comfort these actors feel, and the comfort they must have felt with each other and the director – Allie holds on to the counter, babbling “this is the last time” AS she is getting, I’m sorry, but pounded – they’re going to break that counter … and Dean laughs. He doesn’t engage. He laughs. It looks so spontaneous. It looks so real. Allie keeps saying what is, kind of, a “no”- not “no” for right now, but “no” for next time … but … she doesn’t mean it. This show is concerned with consent and how it looks. Well, sometimes it looks like this, too. Sometimes it’s even … funny? Like, how does Off Campus manage this?

 

 

A quick shout-out to the song stringing all of these vignettes together, “Touch Me”, by DevineDivine … because it’s sexy but it’s also funny. There’s a droning sound to the song – “backs against the wall … touch me …” and it plays underneath each vignette, and so we scroll horizontally past a scene we saw in Hannah and Garrett’s montage in episode 5, the two of them lying on the couch watching Dirty Dancing … into Allie’s room, where Dean is busy going down on Allie. This is – sort of – from the book. Dean was in Allie’s room and Allie was having an orgasm and trying not to because Hannah was out there in the main room. I need to mention again the lighting: dark and velvety, with those strings of lights – we see them often: Hannah has them, the hockey house backyard has them, Allie has them … Despite the comedic vibe, the LOOK is deeply and powerfully romantic.

 

 

Allie having an orgasm with her hand clamped over her mouth … sex and orgasm as comedy, Allie fluctuating wildly between lust and terror … this is Mika Abdalla’s wheelhouse. This is tough stuff! Putting together a sequence like this must be so challenging. You have to string together these vignettes, and each one lasts about 2 or 3 seconds, so you’re “dropping in” on the characters with nary a warning, you’re just peeking through the windows before the scene changes. So Abdalla and Kalyn have to believably create a sense of privacy and express what needs to be expressed about this developing relationship with only 3 seconds to do it in.

 

 

Allie might be saying “this is the last time” repeatedly, but the main thing we hear in these little vignettes is her laughter. She’s having so much fun, I want her to stop saying “this is the last time”. Come on, Allie. Sean wasn’t on your side. Dean clearly is. He already proved this at the fire pit! The bathtub scene, in the CLAW-FOOTED old-timey bathtub – with NO shower stall – is already iconic. The matter-of-fact presentation of the things people do with each other in bed (or in a bathtub) never ceases to amaze me. Especially with this comedically-toned overlay! It’s practically un-American! So here we see Dean and Allie messing around in a bathtub, holding a huge pink vibrator, and cracking up. Allie is giggling with abandon. We love to see it! More on this BATHROOM in the props section at the bottom of the post, because this bathroom is FASCINATING. As well as absurd comedic. A free-standing old-timey tub with no shower in the hockey house.

 

 

Whatever they’ve been DOING with the vibrator is none of our business but what is our business is the sound of Tucker coming towards the room. Tucker was not supposed to be home. Nobody was supposed to be home. That’s WHY they are cavorting in the bathtub with a vibrator. Dean and Allie freeze in terror. I love how Dean is terrified too. He is not nonchalant. You almost never see Dean thrown off. The two of them together in this scene … It gets funnier and funnier the longer it goes on and neither of them say a word. They just LOOK at each other, Allie shooting daggers of blame and Dean shooting daggers of “this is not my fault!” They look like mischievous naked cherubs. It’s HARD to make adult nakedness look innocent on film. But … they do it here.

 

 

 

Humorous story told by Mika and Stephen in one of the cast interviews they did. Finding a tub big enough to contain both of them was a challenge. The tub needed to be really deep, so she could believably plunge below the water, but the massive Stephen also needed to fit into it. The next challenge was Abdalla’s: you can’t just force yourself to stay under the water. “The human body floats,” Mika says in the interview. hahaha “I couldn’t stay under because …. the human body floats.” So she kept bobbing up to the surface. Once one of her legs popped up above the water line and Stephen said he thought it would be funny if Tucker came in, and Dean sat there, with a leg up in the air, but clearly it’s a woman’s leg, not a man’s leg. In this group interview, Mika said once she was under water, “Stephen held me down –” and poor Kalyn said, “That sounds really bad.” Her solution was to grip his shin underneath the water, with his hand holding her arm down to anchor her. Difficult scene because she had to be underwater for around 10 seconds, and then come up covered in suds. I could totally see Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable playing this scene – okay, maybe without the vibrator – in 1934!

 

 

The editing sequence here is great: we see Tucker and they make us wait to see what he sees.

 

 

The fact that Dean doesn’t drop the vibrator into the water, that he doesn’t have enough time to do anything, but he chooses to do THIS … turns it into a little “Ta DA” moment, while looking straight at Tucker … and SMILING … will never not be funny to me.

 

 

I’ll go into this a bit more down below. Dean and Allie play around with her vibrator in a bathtub. Look at the setting. They’ve put huge fat white candles all around the bathtub. Did Dean go out and buy them in bulk? The two of them lighting romantic candles for their vibrator play sums up Dean and Allie. The setting is realistic and decidedly un-romantic – it’s a bathroom – and a non-luxurious old-fashioned one at that – but the details in set decoration – the candles, the green tiles – roots this comedic sequence in romance.

 

 

“This is the last time” … she’s furious, as though Dean has been forcing her into all of this! Dean looks truly frightened, one of my favorite Dean moments. He is not flippant. He literally wants to do whatever she wants him to do. She wants to keep their thing a secret? Okay fine. He’s not sure why but he keeps it a secret because she asked him to, and he keeps coming back to her even though she keeps telling him they’ll never do it again AS they are doing it. He understands the routine now. It is probably the strangest sexual routine of his life, and he’s done it all. He told her they’d have the house to themselves. He reassured her. How could he know Tucker would come back? Now Allie is mad at him, clutching a vibrator, covered in suds, and Dean is scared to move. Best to just let her blow, don’t make any sudden moves, don’t make it worse. For me, this is almost as funny as his “pose” for Tucker.

 

 

In the book, Hannah and Garrett are judgmental of this new relationship. They’re judgmental, in general. When Allie crashes at the hockey house, Garrett warns Dean not to hit on Allie, especially because Wellsy will be pissed about it. It’s very annoying. If Dean and Allie want to hook up, they don’t need your permission. In the book, it makes sense why Allie would be hesitant to confide in Hannah. Hannah will judge. And Hannah DOES judge. Hard to picture series Hannah judging Allie for being with Dean. She might be surprised but a quick heart-to-heart would dispel any worries. This ties in to how heavily the book leans on Allie’s monogamy/slut-shaming sensibility. In the books, though, Dean is NOT trustworthy, and he’s kind of gross. So … the things at play in the book are not exactly at play in the series. Why won’t Allie tell Hannah? Hannah notices Allie’s VERY BAD lying, and the situation clearly cannot go on much longer. These two friendgroups are too intertwined now to keep such a secret.

 

Later in the episode, Dean tells Allie to stop thinking so much. Allie counseled Hannah to stop “over-thinking” her interactions with Justin. Watching Allie resist the thing with Dean – even as she submits (happily) to the thing with Dean – is crazy-making. Allie is crazy-making. Even though her behavior doesn’t always make sense, what I like about it is the character feels specific and a little chaotic. She is not a clearly-drawn character with clearly labeled qualities. She’s “both/and”. She’s confident AND insecure. She’s a sexpot who yearns for comfort. She gives great advice to others and doesn’t follow it for herself.
At the end of the day, everyone has to ask themselves, “What do I want?” No one can answer for you. But you have to ask the question in the first place, and a lot of people don’t! Allie is not accustomed to asking herself this question. She wants to be an actress. She has chosen her path. She dated Sean for three years, because she presumably loved him, and she loves being part of a couple. She never questioned this until the latest breakup. Now with the Advent of Dean, Allie finally has to ask herself this question, as an adult, and it is up to HER to come up with the answer. This is hard for her. Looking at her you wouldn’t think it would be hard. You see her on the dance floor in her JLo dress and think, “Wow, that woman is so confident!” And she is! But she’s also pretending she’s JLo.
When someone asks Allie “What do you want?” she short circuits. And episode 6-8 is one long Allie short-circuiting. It is sometimes hard to watch, especially when Actress Lady saunters in and interrupts Allie’s growth process. Thematically Allie’s short-circuiting fits. She’s having an existential identity crisis. She always thought she knew what she wanted. Now she’s going to have to choose again. We can see how good Dean is for her but those things are not always clear on the ground. In the book, the waters are muddied because Allie slut-shames herself for being with Dean. Her “crisis” in the book is more like “Oh my God I feel like such a dirty whore now.” Thank God we don’t have to be subjected to THAT.

 

Dean: “All roads lead back to Dean.”
Allie: “This is just a ride.”
At this point, I don’t blame Dean for being like, “Okay, Allie, whatever you say.”

 

 

As Allie walks to Beau’s car, the song playing underneath is Winifred’s “Can’t Get Enough” with its chorus of “can’t get enough of your love, can’t get enough of your love, can’t get enough of your love” over and over again … I love the needle drops. Playful. Allie is the last to know she can’t get enough of Dean’s love. I will say, if you told me back in the M. days, “you are in a relationship with him” I would have reacted similarly to Allie in episode 7 when Actress Lady “breaks the news”. I would have said, “Get the fuck out of here, I am not.” I would have meant it. My friends threw me a birthday party at the bar where we always hung out. At the end of the night, M. left to “get the car”, holding all my balloons and presents. My friend Ann Marie, who noticed everything, said to me, “He is being such a husband, Sheila. Are you watching this? Look.” I looked and saw my raucous playmate of a couple of years loaded down with gift bags and glittery cards and colorful balloons, headed outside to go get the car … and I couldn’t deny what I was seeing. I turned back at Ann Marie in horror and she burst out laughing.
One thing I like about this whole situation as presented is a little bit niche: it is possible to be in an intimate relationship with a person and not realize it. You can walk around oblivious to the fact that you are, in actuality, dating someone. Maybe you have to be a specific kind of dumb-dumb to be in this position (I am speaking of myself). This happened to me with M. – and it all worked out – so I connect to Allie’s obliviousness, her insistence that they are not in a relationship even when they clearly ARE. I get it.
Allie isn’t fully conscious yet of how much Sean held her back. Allie does not want to hop into another relationship. Her resistance is understandable, to a point. Making rational choices is not a known characteristic of romantic relationships, especially new ones. I remember dating a guy for a couple weeks in my early 20s, and he was more into me than I was into him. I wasn’t sure how to handle it. Breaking it off with him didn’t occur to me, I had no idea what I was doing. Reacting to his clear feelings for me, I assumed a persona of breezy devil-may-care-ness when he’d try to make plans with me. I’d be totally noncommittal, giving off “Sure, if I’m around then, we’ll see … ” I was a total nightmare. At one point, this guy – who was quite funny and charming – said to me, “You are being FANATICALLY casual.” lollllll He was not wrong. I think Allie is trying – and failing – to be fanatically casual. And Dean? He’s fallen for her. He does try to be casual, but only because she wants that. But inside? Mr. Casual Sex Guy is not casual at all.

 

 

Beau finally steps into the spotlight. I mentioned in episode 1 it took a while to even figure out who he was. I don’t think I even caught his name until this episode. He’s not a hockey guy, but he’s always around. When I read Book 3, my reaction to Beau was, “Now I wish I HADN’T met him because he is a fucking pig.” Beau is changed for the series and all changes are for the better. He’s a football player and his sister is a successful actress. He is the living embodiment of the theatre-jock crossover territory I’ve talked about. We’ll get to Joanna Maxwell later, although I wish I didn’t have to. Allie idolizes Joanna Maxwell, and they now share an agent. Beau and Dean grew up together, or at least they go way back, which may explain their “And yet …” verbal stylings-shared lexicon. I love SO MUCH how Off Campus positioned this first meeting of Allie and Beau, with Dean as a fifth wheel. In the book, Beau leered all over Allie constantly, wanted a threesome, blah blah. The guys in these books, blech. Here, though … To be honest, I think Beau already suspects something’s going on between Dean and Allie, but he betrays nothing. He’s friendly and nice, and riffs with Allie on theatre and musicals, loving how annoyed Dean gets. He’s totally into it. It’s so charming and real!

 

 

I cannot speak to Elle Kennedy’s knowledge of hockey but her descriptions of games and strategies, etc. ring true, but I will let a hockey person weigh in. I CAN weigh in on Elle Kennedy’s presentation of music/theatre students. Simply put, it’s … not great. I went to school for this stuff, undergrad, grad school, I was acting since I was a kid … Every theatre department is different, and acting school can be toxic. Granted. But what I don’t feel in Kennedy’s presentation is the camaraderie involved, the PLAY at work in people like this, the jazz hands-ness of it all. Hannah’s FURY at her duet partner wanting to add a choir to the song and going on and on (and ON) about it to Garrett, etc. … I mean, okay? She’s just so ANGRY and she sounds petty. In fact, she sounds like every high-maintenance toxic person I ever went to school with. It’s hard to be on her side. The whole thing is a little dumb, sorry. Being a theatre student means you cannot pursue your dream alone. You’re not an engineering student. You don’t sit at home and read books as an acting student. You’re not just doing monologues and soliloquies. You have to be with other people. You are in rehearsal with people every night, people whom you see all day every day, maybe you’ve dated a couple of them, but when the show must go on, you come together. I don’t get that at all from Elle Kennedy’s books, but I do from the series. Drunk Shakespeare NAILED the vibe, first but it was with this conversation between Allie and Beau – where they reference Lynn Nottage, “J. Groff”, Merrily (you wouldn’t need to fill in the rest of the title if you were talking to a theatre person), where – in this alternate universe, Zendaya is starring in David Mamet’s Oleanna on Broadway, apparently – where “Omigod you guys” would stop you dead in your tracks because of Legally Blonde: The Musical … where I realized, “wow, there are some serious theatre nerds on the writing staff. This is exactly how it is.”
“SHUT UP!” squeals Allie.
“Fuck off,” says Beau.
Dean is aghast. How has this happened?
Instant friends.

 

The bar is in hell for men. Falling in love with Beau for being a nice friendly funny person, open to this new girl catching a ride with him and his best friend, finding her funny as well as finding Dean’s annoyance funny … enjoying “ganging up” on Dean, never being creepy or sexual, getting a kick out of Allie, etc., not afraid to share his love of Broadway musicals … all of these things show a normal well-adjusted person’s behavior. Barest of bare minimums. So. Congrats, Beau? Depressing that this feels fresh and new, but here we are.

 

“You guys JUST met.”
Dean is no match for these two.

 

 

Allie and Beau singing along with the Legally Blonde Broadway soundtrack is so funny. Look at Dean.

 

Why on earth are they depriving us of the video of Dean dancing?

 

I think Dean’s “I will kill you” is genuine. He does not want Allie to see the video. Have we ever seen this from Dean before? It’s strangely vulnerable.

 

Then there are two cuts: one to the exterior of the car driving down an very un-New-England-like un-Thanksgiving-like road … and then a cut back to inside the car, where we see this: Look at Dean:

 

 

This is such a specific relationship moment, meeting the best friend (even though Beau supposedly doesn’t know). It’s kind of important you get along with the friends. The books trudge through murky stuff where the other guys are pervs to their friends’ new girl and … here we have Logan, but he doesn’t perv out, he just mopes around for five episodes, and at least we don’t have to hear him ask Garrett if he can take a crack at Hannah after Garrett’s done (irredeemable). Beau and Allie bonding is one of the little specific eccentric details Off Campus so often provides. The show invests in the friend GROUP. Beau has been hanging around for episodes. Here, he emerges into clarity, Allie pounces on his theatre nerd bona fides, and he is happy to participate. A celebration of platonic friendship! The show didn’t NEED to include this little scene. It’s not in the book. The Beau-Allie-Dean meetup is gross in the book, and so here it is re-imagined, sparkling the interaction with drama kid vivacity.

 

It is also, dare I say, potentially romantic-adjacent. Or at least it could conceivably spark softer more romantic feelings in our two screwballs. In a conventionally told story, Allie and Beau getting along so well might annoy Dean or – worse – make him jealous. Dean’s “annoyance” in the scene is him playing a role, they’re all having fun with it (let’s just keep annoying Dean), and it feels really good to include your new love (uh-oh) into your world, and see her fit right in – and your best friend is so cool. Dean basically doesn’t want the car ride to end. He is having the best time. He loves her. I’m sorry. It’s not too soon. He texts her, “Friday seems so far away.” Friday is literally one day away, Dean. He already misses her.

 

 

Here’s why Dean is unusual. Without hesitation, he texts her what he feels right as he is feeling it.

 

Allie can’t help but be girlfriend-y, which we will see strongly in the penthouse scene. She is way beyond “casual” at this point, and doesn’t realize how intimate she’s being. Intimacy is her natural sensibility. She’s bonding with him and doesn’t even know it. She gets freaked out. But what’s really unusual and unexpected is … Dean is in the same situation (except without the neurosis). He texts her while she’s sitting right there in the back seat, essentially saying, “I miss you already,” smiling at her in the rear view mirror. That’s boyfriend behavior. He’s never had a girlfriend. Undeveloped muscles. But he already knows how to do it with Allie.

 

 

Look at Dean after she reads his text. To go back to our theme: he knows what he wants. He’s uncomplicated but also deep.

 

 

Allie has a soft excited smile on her face when texting with Dean. The string of texts from him shows their dynamic, the teasing banter, how he “pushes” her, slightly, but not before she already signals interest with her “Mayybeeee?” She’s practically squirming with anticipation. She is going to leave Thanksgiving dinner with her family to go meet up with Dean! “Friday seems so far away.” They can’t even make it through a single day.

 

 

Allie’s costumes, I swear. That COAT. This is also my favorite Dean outfit. When he opens the door, you can see it. He’s different. I mean, he’s already changed, but here … he’s letting the change be visible. He’s soft and happy to see her. Allie does try to wriggle free from his intensity. Fanatically casual.

 

 

Even having a glass of wine is “too much” for Allie. Poor Dean. He has to downplay what he’s doing, even though … he picked out the bottle of wine carefully. You know he did. Overall, though, Dean wants her to be comfortable. He’s been looking forward to seeing her all day. I mean, his family’s gone. He’s probably eating take-out. He doesn’t want to “spook” Allie. We can already see here that … Allie’s crazy-making is starting to affect Dean. He’s not fully “allowed” yet to be as into her as he really is.

 

 

“Let’s see it. Your big move.”
This is Allie putting the wall up. Looping herself in with all his other “conquests”. Okay, you’re giving me the tour you give all of them. You can’t really blame her for this. I get it. At the same time, things are already different. You can’t really KNOW that, though, until you get a little bit further away from the moment. She needs to remind Dean of his “promiscuity”, basically in a subliminal “slow your romantic roll, dude, I know you’ve given this tour 275 times.” You can see him resist. He’s ONLY about her. But … well, she does have a point. It’s awkward, though. I like the awkwardness. Things are starting to get real.

 

 

I love to see Dean getting a little flustered. He wants her to be happy, he doesn’t know what she’s getting at, what does she want from him, why is she acting like he’s holding something back from her, why is she putting him on the spot … he doesn’t even realize he might be “acting” a little bit. She’s forced him into it, though, by being so “fanatically casual”. He’s trying to do and be what she says she wants. I find this little stairway interaction really interesting. Because what Allie is saying isn’t so much an impatient “Drop the act” as the much more girlfriend-y plea “I want to know you. Please be real. Be yourself.”
I’ve watched this tiny scene a number of times and I see new things in it each time.

 

Ultimately, Allie is right, although her delivery is a little confusing. She reminds him of his playboy past and then says … “I don’t want that. I want you.”
Allie. Look at what you are doing. You are being a girlfriend and it’s okay.

 

 

Hours later (night has fallen), the two of them sit on this high long table-bench piece of furniture, playing chess. Why on earth are they sitting up there on that thing? Well, to re-create one of the most iconic final shots in teen rom-com movie history. Dean and Allie perched up on a table is such a clear nod – and we get an even clearer nod to Sixteen Candles in the shot in episode 8 when the car goes by and Garrett is revealed standing behind it.

 

 

I go into this strip-chess scene in the “bokeh” section below, with great detail. The visual effect is so much a part of this romantic love scene it’s hard for me to see anything else. But I will say: this might be as openly – and even stereotypically – romantic as Off Campus ever gets, visually and otherwise. This is what I say below in the bokeh section though: using this frankly romantic style to film our sexy sidekicks is deliberate and (should be) attention-getting, thematically. Garrett and Hannah aren’t filmed with this swooningly romantic melt-ing style. They want to make sure we get it, in case we missed it somehow. Dean and Allie are falling in love with each other and – frustratingly – fighting it.

 

 

 

My one observation: Allie asks Dean questions about his family. The answers aren’t especially illuminating, at least not in terms of potential “trauma”. His family is rich, they have a house in St. Bart’s, he has a sister named Summer and a brother named Nick. Their father taught them all how to play chess. “It’s a family tradition.” Allie listens, open to him, but also making the leap: “It seems like you miss your family.” These are the words of a woman who loves love and falling in love, as Dean observes in episode 8. You listen to what someone says, and when you are falling in love, you listen carefully, and you care for the person AS you listen to them. You desire to be closer to them. This is not “hook-up” behavior, and Allie is unaware – right now – how intimate she is being, how much she wants to know him and be close to him. In the book, there’s a scene where Allie has a bad day and she immediately wants to talk to Dean about it. She stops herself from texting him, horrified. She wants to TELL HIM ABOUT HER DAY. NOOOOO. I like how soft Allie is here. She’s going to pull up the walls in the scene later in the bedroom when she suddenly realizes just how close they’ve gotten, and instead of being okay with it … she runs.

 

 

Allie: “People will ask what this is.”
Dean: “No. Nobody’s going to ask that.”
Allie: “They’re not going to ask YOU that.”
This is a really important exchange, although it’s brushed by a little quickly. Allie’s comment is mean. “They won’t ask YOU what this is because YOU sleep with everyone. YOU’RE the slut, not ME.” This is closest to Allie’s freak-out in the book. Off Campus buries the lede with other things – “I can’t hurt Sean” etc. but “They’re not going to ask YOU that” is the important objection. Slut-shaming herself – and Dean – happens in the book. Watch the look that flashes across Dean’s face when she says that. Dean is hurt. The scene moves on. He’s pretty clear and he’s BEEN clear: “We haven’t hurt anybody.” He doesn’t get what’s going on. Her “they’re not going to ask YOU that” is not elaborated on, and Allie is out of there before they can really argue it out. It’s important though.

 

 

What time is it? 11 p.m. or 2 a.m.? How long will it take Allie to get back to Brooklyn? Depending on the hour, it could take her forever. An Uber ride from Manhattan Brooklyn could be over 50 bucks. Who can afford that? And tomorrow’s Friday. Is she still catching a ride with Beau and Dean? Or will it be awkward now? Dean’s the only one who has to be back at Briar on Friday so maybe she decides to catch a train back, just to avoid Dean.

 

We are caught up now to our main timeline. There are a couple things that need to get done before the fund raiser where the characters converge and … things split apart.

 

 

 

Hannah and Garrett now look like an old settled couple after riding the roller coaster with Dean and Allie. The details are eloquent: Hannah is alone in Garrett’s room, playing the guitar. Garrett lies down next to her and listens to her play, lazily reaching his hand out to touch her knee. These two actors are amazing because the body language has to be so specific, and projecting chemistry is one thing, but projecting “I am so comfortable with this person” is a whole other thing. They both exude comfort.

 

 

It literally feels like Hannah and Justin have been collaborating for eight months. Like, are we done with “Yellow Haze” yet? I actually feel bad for Justin. He doesn’t lie later in the episode when he says, “I put my heart on the line …” Listen, the lyrics aren’t great, but … he has been working for two straight months on this thing, with everything else he presumably has going on, and continues to work with you AFTER you reject him and choose Garrett – nobody would blame Justin for saying, “I am really busy, I need to back out of this project.” It speaks to his character that Justin doesn’t. Don’t worry. We’ll put “Yellow Haze” to bed very soon and we can all move on.
Even though “Yellow Haze” is not the most thrilling subject, I do like that we see Hannah and Garrett discussing it. They’re talking to each other about their days. Things have normalized and stabilized after Thanksgiving, they can now just settle in to being a couple. He says, “What is a yellow haze?” lol So I may be bored of hearing about “Yellow Haze” but it’s satisfying to see them talk about regular things, NOT their traumatic pasts. They deserve it.

 

 

Garrett has that shy almost “inappropriate” smile flash across his face before he settles in to say again, “I love you, Wellsy.” I wrote about that smile in the episode 5 re-cap. This is all Belmont. A more conventional actor would never play the moment the way Belmont plays it. Garrett isn’t smooth with it. He wouldn’t be, now would he? He’s never told someone he loves them before. He’s not uncertain about what he feels but SAYING it … it comes out beautifully but it is not smooth and he has to take a little breath to re-arrange himself to say it properly. That’s Belmont. Here for all of it.

 

 

This is a very well-written scene. A great friendship scene, showing the development of both characters, Hannah in love, Allie with a secret, but still doing her best to confide in her friend without giving it away. Allie talks with Hannah about her mother’s advice: “Never give up on love”, and how Allie is (incorrectly) interpreting it, which Hannah – as a good friend – perceives. Allie is not “giving up on love” by breaking up with Sean. Sean is not the one! I love how Hannah listens to Allie, and then realizes what’s happening, saying, “This is about your mom.” We don’t know anything about Allie’s mother. We heard a tiny bit at the fire pit. Now we know there’s a whole backstory we are not privy to. Really looking forward to season 2, because – for me – Allie’s family situation was the most interesting part of”her” book.

 

Allie is conflicted. She’s probably avoiding Dean and yet she’s yearning for him, and hating herself for being “weak”. Allie makes her own problems. She turns herself inside out to try to make it okay to have a “fling” or a “fuck buddy”, even though what’s going on with Dean is way beyond a “fling”, and I think somewhere she knows it. Downgrading to a “fuck buddy” … at some point it’s just semantics, especially if you’re the kind of woman who says “sounds like you miss your family” to your supposed hook-up. This is where we hear a little bit about Allie’s dating history during Sean breakups. I don’t like Hannah’s line “fraternity brothers who don’t believe in soap”. The problem wasn’t that they didn’t believe in soap, the problem was Allie lives in a hook-up culture and she doesn’t hook up. It is fun to see, though, the intimacy between these close friends, and how they have been so there for each other. Allie going on dates with people, and coming home to process what happened with Hannah. These two are up to date – to the minute – with one another. Allie not confiding with Hannah is unsettling.

 

 

That doesn’t look like any college dining hall I’ve ever heard of. With a huge Amazon logo on the wall. At least it’s not a Liquid IV logo.

 

Hannah and Garrett are on a “date”, and the hockey guys all join them, saying they “saw it on Fifth Line”, even though Jules isn’t there. This is GROSS. I’m sorry. Jules snaps a pic through a window at Hannah and Garrett having a meal, and posts it on Fifth Line. I’m old enough to remember Jimmy Kimmel going after Gawker for their new Gawker Stalker feature, where in-real-time celebrity “sightings” were posted, a clear violation of privacy and also potentially dangerous. Listen, SOMEONE needs to remember these things so we don’t have to keep re-inventing the wheel. Jules posting a pic, alerting people to Hannah and Garrett’s location, isn’t charming, I don’t care what Off Campus tries to tell me. Jules isn’t even in this episode and they’re still pissing me off.

 

 

I might be wrong but it looks like Logan wants to sit next to Hannah, at first, and then thinks better of it. This must be the day after Thanksgiving break, since they’re welcoming each other back. I love Dean asking Hannah how it was meeting “Papa Graham”, with Tucker right there next to him, looking over at Wellsy. They like her so much. Hannah’s new friends.

 

 

I feel bad for Garrett in this scene. He says “no” to Logan’s request. He is polite and firm. He says: “Not this year.” End of discussion. Logan doesn’t accept this. Not only does he push, he calls up Phil afterwards anyway. Sorry. This is a break-up-able offense. There’s an edge to his mockery of Garrett offering up his jersey. Logan, Garrett said “not this year”. If you want him to tell you why, you have got to be a better friend. He notices Garrett’s discomfort when Thanksgiving comes up, he notices Hannah reach out to take Garrett’s hand and isn’t like, “Huh, I wonder how Thanksgiving went with the man who supposedly is my best friend. First time he’s taking a girlfriend home, too – would love to hear about how it all went.” Nope. None of that. Instead he brushes it off, “Yeah. Family. It sucks.” Logan, you are the worst “best friend”. Compare to Allie and Hannah’s conversation in the scene prior. Even with Allie keeping a secret, look how well they know each other. How up-to-date they are. It’s a two-way street. Hannah knows her friend and can take the leap – “this is about your mom” – because they’ve discussed it. Garrett is under no obligation to discuss his trauma with Logan, especially when Logan is clearly NOT a good person to talk to about deep stuff. Logan does appear to be “getting over” Hannah, though. About time.

 

 

The fund raiser isn’t as show-stopping as Drunk Shakespeare – what is? – but we can include it in Off Campus‘ tradition of ending episodes on some big event, where every character is present. The scene is almost 25 minutes long. A LOT happens, and if these were small individual scenes occurring in different locations as disparate little events, it might feel very jarring and “rushed”. But when all of these little conversations happen in the same location, surrounded by swirling chaos and party fun, with lots of music and lights, it places these relationships in the larger context of their shared world, as opposed to isolating the characters in little page-long one-on-one scenes. Even if Logan and Garrett are talking, you feel Hannah just off-screen. Dean and Allie’s interactions are all taking place surrounded by their entire friend group.

 

 

Like I did with the chess scene, I discuss the lighting effects in the fund raiser scene below, because it’s very complicated and cool, and I would love to know how they did it. It looks chaotic but you know it’s all planned, so much coordination between direction, edits, lights, and cinematography.

 

Jules isn’t at the fund raiser. Thank God because it means Logan actually gets to interact with other people! So weird to have Jules at karaoke – Jules RUNS karaoke – and not this hockey event. Jules makes no sense and I don’t miss them. Logan did an excellent job putting together the event, I will give him that, although his treachery is about to be revealed.

 

 

The place is packed! Justin’s band After Hours plays the All-American Rejects’ “Dirty Little Secret”, which Dean requested “for” Allie. They communicate to one another through song requests. You two need to stop it. Dean and Allie are communicating “covertly”, throwing glances at each other, Dean moving towards the stage, looking at Allie, constantly checking in with each other, and then CALLING each other, standing there, looking at each other across the room, and talking. Literally everybody knows you’re hooking up, guys.

 

Love to see Dean playing emcee! In his cardigan emblazoned with a huge “D”.

 

 

More than a linear push of story-lines beat to beat, we get a collage of noise and movement and behavior during what feels like a very real event. This is Off Campus‘ ace in the hole. The team really REALLY knows how to do this. Because this is how these things happen, right? We don’t just sit in chairs and talk about our relationships in a quiet room. We talk about our relationships as music blasts through speakers, or we talk about our relationships as we’re on a dance floor. You really feel that in the fund raiser. It’s a more complicated sequence than the costume party!

 

 

Dean asking Allie to “meet him in the bathroom in five minutes” is … desperation on his part, although he is not radiating desperate. I don’t think he thinks it will work. I actually don’t think he even really wants to do that. He says to Beau in episode 8, “She wants Six Flags.” Implying he doesn’t anymore. He’s trying to still be Six Flags for her here.
She reacts appropriately to his proposition, in my opinion. Not just because it’s the bathroom, not just because all their friends are there, but because he already has hooked up with girls in there in the past. She saw him doing it. Is he out of his mind?
In episode 8, Dean says to Allie, “I get it now. You love love.” Listen to his words: “I get it now.” When he makes this suggestion to Allie in episode 6, he doesn’t “get it” yet.
Part of Allie’s crazy-making behavior is she doesn’t know how to do any of this without love being present. And that is perfectly valid, no matter what stupid Miss Jean Brodie says in episode 7! Nobody should tell you not to be monogamous if you are, in fact, monogamous. If Allie wants to sample sex with other people, she should do it because she wants to, not to “prove” anything to some Weirdo Famous Lady. Don’t even get me started.
Dean does not know, in episode 6, what freaked Allie out at the penthouse on Thanksgiving. They had a great time, he thought, and then something changed and he doesn’t know what the fuck happened. He’s grasping. He hasn’t made the connections yet – and neither has Allie.
So far, Dean has not noticed that his interest in other women has plummeted off a cliff. He HAS noticed he doesn’t “want any other girl”, which he says to Allie a bit later, but I don’t think he’s even noticed he stopped hooking up with other people. He didn’t plan to say “I don’t want any other girl” … but when he felt it, he said it. Wanting to be with her is not complicated for him. And Allie is not being clear about what the hell happened on Thanksgiving, probably because she’s not sure herself.
Dean is trying to just get them back to where they were. He sees no reason why they should deprive themselves of each others’ company. Maybe she would like to come and fuck in the bathroom? She is sexually adventurous, he loves that about her, maybe she’d be into it? Yes? No?
It’s a mis-fire. She tells him “I’m not that kind of girl” and he says, “But you want to be.”
She shoos him off, and something happens on his face, a little shift, a flash of something, up to interpretation. I think it could be: “I probably shouldn’t have just said that …”
He doesn’t care about hooking up in the bathroom. He just doesn’t know what happened. He reminds her, “I’m not delusional. I just know what I want.”

 

 

Why on earth are they holding this beer-drenched event the night before their biggest game of the season? (I know why. They needed to end episode 6 the way they did, and they needed the game to happen the next day so Garrett and Hannah wouldn’t have a chance to connect … but still!)

 

 

Garrett, Tucker, Dean, Beau, and the two freshmen players are crammed into a booth, with puck bunnies clustered around the table.I wish the “puck bunnies” thing had been excised, and they were just regular college girls who like to party, or sorority sisters, or whatever. The groupie thing … in college? Hannah says, “The puck bunnies are kind of cool.” They are? Stop trying to make “fetch” happen, Off Campus.

 

I love Garrett being totally oblivious to the puck bunnies. While a big deal is made out of Garrett being “captain”, we don’t really see him in this role except for here at the fund raiser where he’s lecturing everyone and making them watch clips, etc. I think Off Campus could have done a better job at establishing Garrett as captain. We KNOW he’s captain but we really don’t see him in action in that role. Is he a good leader? I feel like he might not be. His comments to the news reporter sound drone-like and self-focused: “I expect the best from myself …” So what is Garrett lacking? Is he unprepared to “be there” for other people, or is he good at it? Does he build up the younger players? Is he obsessed? We are told he is, we “know” he is, but we aren’t given scenes to show him in operation AS captain. We also don’t really get to see him shine on the ice. The first time we see him play a game, he’s in a spiral because of his dad. He has a good period in the game against St. A’s in the next episode … but of course his triumph is short lived. I would have loved to see more of his skill on the ice. ESPN reporters say he could very well surpass his father. I don’t feel like we see that. When Hannah urges Garrett to join the party (which I really don’t like), he says, “Coach wants me to step up as Captain, so I’m stepping up.”
I would have loved to have seen that conversation with the coach. Why did the coach ask him to “step up”? Was something lacking in Garrett’s leadership skills?
Episode 6 feels a little bit late to show us Garrett in the role of team captain.

 

 

The look of disgust on Allie’s face as she watches Dean interact with the puck bunnies …
Allie is already “acting like a girlfriend”. This was already happening at Thanksgiving, when she asked about his family. She is not a casual person. If you insist on hooking up with someone, then you have to not be a jealous person, otherwise you will drive yourself insane. Allie getting jealous about puck bunnies … when she is not Dean’s girlfriend and he is not her boyfriend … would be confusing. I’d be confused, too. And I also might feel upset, like, “I can’t even hook UP with anyone. What is WRONG with me.” Her natural tendency is towards closeness and coupledom, and that’s fine. Dean would be up for it, but I don’t blame her for hesitating, especially not when he just told her to meet him in the bathroom. What if Dean disappears with a puck bunny? Is she just another puck bunny?
I get Allie’s nervousness, and I understand her not knowing how to handle herself in this situation. She doesn’t hook up with someone and then see them two weeks later at a party and say, “Hey, what’s up.” There’s nothing WRONG with that if you can do it, but Allie doesn’t, she doesn’t want to. She TRIES to tell this to Miss Jean Brodie in episode 7, but her protestations are overridden.
She wants to be intimate with Dean, and she resists what she wants to do. If she did what she wanted to do, she would stalk over to the table, step in front of the puck bunnies, drag Dean away and say, “Stop flirting with those girls!” Very much Allie’s style. And you know what? Dean would have loved it.
But of course she can’t do something like that. Only a girlfriend can do that!
Instead, she seethes, judges, and puts in a song request of her own.

 

Allie: “God, it’s so hot when someone knows what they want.”
Mika Abdalla is so good.

 

 

I get frustrated by Allie BUT I appreciate the portrayal of a young woman who is confident in so many areas and yet insecurity in other ways. This is real. We aren’t smooth-surfaced perfectly-curated-proportioned beings. I did not “come up” in the #girlboss era, I came up in the #riotgrrrl era, but – just as an observer, particularly in the realm of characters and stories, I think the girlbossification of female characters has …. not been great. What happens is … vulnerability is viewed as weakness. I’ve heard stories from my friends who’ve been acting teachers for 25 years. Suddenly, in the last 10, 15 years, they’re teaching acting to students who don’t want to show vulnerability. Actors! Or students who judge the characters they are playing. Blanche DuBois seen as a pathetic “victim”, for example. It’s a big problem in acting circles and it’s had a huge impact on the way women are written onscreen. Women always have to be confident and sure and great at everything they do. Their flaws are circumstantially-based, or just something cliche like “you’re uptight, you have to let your hair down!” It’s like those jokes about answering interview questions with, “I think my biggest flaw is I care too much” … Or writing in your performance review on what you need to improve: “Sometimes I am too organized.” lol You know what I mean. I won’t blame it all on girl-bosses, but it’s definitely been an element! Supernatural fans watched nuanced complicated sometimes prickly adult female characters disappear, to be replaced by interchangeable girlboss teenagers. Someone like Allie is “aspirational” in so many ways, though. Like, do you want to know how to be a good friend? How to be present to your friends? Watch Allie in Off Campus. But she’s not perfect. She totally gets in her own way. She’s not girlbossified. She feels chaotic and real.

 

Hannah’s stamp of approval for having a “fling” is reassuring to poor Allie, who has no one to talk to about any of this! She needs an outside eye, she needs Hannah to talk through this with her. She needs to tell Hannah about Dean. Unfortunately, Hannah says what Miss Jean Brodie says in episode 7: “Pick someone who will never catch feelings for you. Who only wants sex.” Allie, who only wants Dean, thinks … “hmmmmm maybe I can turn the Dean thing INTO that?” lol Wayyy too late, Allie.
Also, it’s already too late because Dean has already caught feelings. All the feelings.

 

“This next request goes out to Maverick.”
Probably everyone here was at the costume party. Everyone saw him as Maverick. You two are not being sneaky!

 

Is Pink’s “U + Ur Hand” really all that well-known now? Maybe! I don’t know! 2006 is a long long time ago.

 

 

Dean, apparently, recognizes the song – and its stings him a little, if I am interpreting these tiny flashes on his face. You can’t keep Dean down, he’s resilient, but … he recognizes that Allie is having some kind of tailspin, she doesn’t want to be with him, but she does, but she doesn’t, and he’s understandably baffled as to what is going on. He’s not used to having to “push” – with her, with anyone. Pushing is against his credo, anyway, if you think about it. Nobody should be pushed. Everything is choice and want. Knowing what you want. It’s hot when someone knows what they want. How hard should he push when someone keeps saying “no”? It doesn’t feel good to him. Again: consent. Consent must be a living practice.

 

 

More girlfriend behavior from Allie. Put in a zinger of a song request, and go dance with your girlfriend, making a big show of how much fun you are having, while periodically glancing over at him to see how he’s taking it. Allie! Look at what you are doing!

 

 

I realize we’re focused on Dean and Allie right now but I just have to ask: WAIT. What in the heck is going on HERE.

 

 

Dean starting to laugh at some point during this whole ridiculous charade makes ME laugh.

 

 

 

Allie in Full Jealous Girlfriend Mode: “Look around. Any girl here would be happy to stick her tongue down your throat.”
Dean: “I don’t want any girl.”
Allie: “Guess you’re stuck with your hand.”
Standing across the bar, talking to each other on the phone. I will just point out that this little phone call section brings back in the bokeh, and adds to it these swirling pools of light, crossing across Dean’s face – and, if I’m not mistaken, when she hangs up … the footage is slowed down just a tad, another almost-too-much stylistic choice. I say “too much” because we’ve spent a total of about 20 minutes with this couple. However: we need to establish them as worth tuning in for for Season 2 (April 28!). But also, thematically: feelings are important, and this is a very emotional visual style, connecting – or at least trying – is important: Off Campus really cares about these things, cares about its characters. You can feel it in all of these details.

 

 

Logan makes Hannah ask him “what’s GHA?” so he gets to tell her Garrett’s not-so-flattering nickname – coined by Logan? I am not in the mood to view Logan charitably. You can see Hannah do her forced-laugh thing she does when she feels awkward and maybe like she’s supposed to laugh. She laughed like this when Justin babbled about Haley Joel Osment.You’re making things weird, Logan.

 

Overall, though, this conversation goes okay. Part of it is necessary exposition about the stakes surrounding tomorrow’s game. If the stakes are so high, then why are you all out drinking the night before? Hannah says, “What are friends for?” and gorgeous Anthony Cipriano smiles … which is nice, I suppose. I still think there’s just something “too much” about Logan’s energy with Hannah. We can at least thank heavens that Jules isn’t present. We don’t have to be subjected to another “how’s your crush on Hannah” conversation.

 

 

“This is a party. Party’s are supposed to be fun.”
I don’t blame Garrett for saying, “Winning is fun, too.” Hannah is inhabiting a trope I don’t like, what I call the “wet blanket wife”, the wife always asking her man to stop working and come to bed, put down the Bunsen burner, future Nobel prize winner, and help me set the table, or, like Eliza in Hamilton, telling her Secretary of the Treasury husband to “take a break”. Wives are “wet blankets” to male ambition – an over-correction to the smiling starry-eyed self-sacrificial supportive wife of the 19th century, and the 1950s, or whatever. I wrote about this extensively in a 2011 post here – !! – about the wife in Field of Dreams, and how she is the opposite of a “wet blanket wife”. I don’t want to make too big a deal out of this. Hannah just wants Garrett to have some fun but still … YOU HAVE A GAME TOMORROW WHAT ARE YOU ALL DOING. Garrett is CORRECT to want to cram before the game!

 

 

Garrett is “stepping up as captain” and Logan says he’s “boring everyone” (I wish Hannah hadn’t repeated this to Garrett) – but Garrett puts aside his work and asks her about …. “Yellow Haze.” lol We’re about to lower the curtain on that plot line. Finally. I like how in each others’ business Hannah and Garrett are now. They are totally up-to-date with each other. “How are you doing with that issue we discussed two hours ago?” (This is why the look on his face in episode 8 when Hannah tells him she dropped out of the showcase is so heartbreaking. Garrett feels so lost that he didn’t know that, that all this stuff was going on with Hannah and he had no idea.) I love how free Hannah feels in girlfriend mode! I love their behavior together, especially since we know how hard-won all of this has been.
These are the little conversations you always want to see post-happily-ever-after. You want to hang out with the couple as they go about their day.

 

 

There are complicated things at work in the Logan-Garrett argument. In episode 8, Logan will ignore Tucker’s advice and reach out to Hunter, telling Hunter it was Dean’s idea. Terrible. The issues between Logan and Garrett are way too tangled to assign blame on one thing. The argument Logan makes to Garrett is compelling and correct. It’s difficult to argue with his points. But again, he comes at these things with a thinly veiled anger at Garrett’s “privilege” and a total lack of curiosity about what the hell is going on with Garrett. I don’t think Logan even likes Garrett, to be honest. These two friends aren’t “set up” to handle conflict, they don’t know how to do it – which isn’t necessarily weird, a lot of people don’t know how to handle conflict. The one attempt we’ve seen – in episode 1- when Logan gives Garrett a pep talk, the problem is apparent in embryo. “Nobody expects you to BE your dad.” Logan, of course they do, and even if it’s not real, can you understand why Garrett – your best friend – feels the pressure anyway?
Logan didn’t ask WHY Garrett didn’t want his dad to donate merch. In Logan’s mind, “all they ever do” is consider what Garrett wants.
I haven’t seen too much of everyone catering to Garrett like that. Maybe, when Garrett is studying, and Tucker makes him lunch? But … really? This comment from Logan might make more sense if we had actually seen Garrett’s behavior as captain. Is he a “my way or the highway” captain? If so, then why would Coach Jensen ask him to “step up”?

 

 

Hannah (correctly) tries to stop Garrett from charging over to confront Logan. Garrett is so triggered he snaps at Logan in front of people. This is why, of course, Hannah encourages Garrett later to tell someone other than her about the abuse he and his mother suffered. Garrett can manage, as long as … nobody ever mentions his dad, he never has to see his dad … Hell, Hannah is standing right next to him here, and she can’t stop him from flying off the handle. Hannah knows how much support she needed in dealing with what happened to her. She knows Garrett needs more.
Think of how infuriating Logan’s timing is: On Thanksgiving, Garrett learned his dad was abusing Cindy. Massive trigger. A couple days after the Thanksgiving break, Garrett tells Logan that Phil won’t donate merch this year. It wouldn’t surprise me if Logan texted Phil later that same day, muttering “fuck you, G.” as he typed – and asked Phil to donate something. Phil and Logan then would have had a text conversation back and forth organizing the donation. From Phil’s perspective, to know that, after the Thanksgiving blowout, Garrett’s best friend would still be fine reaching out would confirm Phil’s narcissistic attitude towards his son. Yes, Garrett stormed out of the house, and Garrett’s little girlfriend probably doesn’t like me much, but his friends still come with their hands out. I won. Logan, you don’t even know what you’ve done.

 

Logan’s anger comes from a real place, and is totally understandable. The class issue is really important to Logan’s story, and his book is really about that: the choices he makes, the family pressure, etc. Logan was a poor kid, who needed the fundraiser to pursue hockey when he was a kid. Garrett saying “It’s not all about money” is infuriating seen from Logan’s perspective. Nice acting moment from Cipriano.

 

 

Still. Your friend tells you “no”. Accept the “no”. Maybe pull your friend aside and ask them privately what’s going on and if he’s okay. Maybe make the case to your friend and see if they could change their mind. Maybe notice that your friend is more upset than usual. Something, ANYthing.

 

Watching Allie’s varying responses to “Yellow Haze” is soooo funny. She’s supporting Hannah. She looks on the bright side: “Maybe people will love it!” Then they listen. Watch Mika.

 

 

 

 

“We are indivisible.
Together we’re a number prime.”
Oh dear.

 

 

I do not blame Justin for being like, “You know what, Hannah? I’m done.” I like that Off Campus allows Justin to score some points off the show’s leading lady. This is unusual. He is exhausted and a little hurt. After all the months of work, and wondering why she keeps force-nervous-laughing every other second, and is it sexual chemistry or is she just weird, and is she dating Garrett? oh wait she isn’t, okay maybe I’m into her, here I am on a date with her, cool! oh shit, she’s breaking up with me WHILE we’re on a date and … she’s madly in love with Garrett the next day? wtf? … and now she’s yelling at me that my lyrics “don’t make sense” … I mean, I gotta be honest. I think Justin is pretty restrained here. I’d feel toyed with and I’d be pissed as hell. What Justin says to Hannah stings, but it’s totally fair.

 

 

Hannah is left, once again, up against herself. She’s said, “Lyrics are hard for me.” “I don’t write like that anymore.” She hasn’t led us by the hand, she does not tell us more than she tells us. Episode 7 will connect the dots (if we haven’t already put it together). This is the deeper level she’s been trying to address in her collaboration with Justin, but really the “collaboration” was just another way for her to hide from the truth. That legal pad in the police station. This is what she sees when she looks at a piece of paper. She wrote her truth once and look what happened.
I love so much, though, that Hannah doesn’t say this out loud. She never says it out loud. We are told only through the visuals. They trust us to put it together.

 

As we had in episode 1, both Garrett and Hannah have confrontations which stir up deeper waters. Simultaneously. Everything will fall apart in episode 7, but it really starts here.
Garrett faced the trauma of his childhood by sharing it with Hannah and allowing himself to feel the hurt and heartbreak. If we thought a good cry would cure him somehow, well along comes the fight with Logan, where Garrett seems pretty triggered. He’s got that hypervigilant look on his face. Unresolved.
Hannah faced the trauma of being raped by sharing it with Garrett and trying to “work on” the sex part of things. It went very well, don’t you think? But … there’s another piece, rolling along on a parallel track, of how the rape affected her writing. How the rape affected her ability to express herself in her own words. She’s triggered any time she puts pen to paper.
Collaborating with Justin was part of “the deal” – initially – but I think eventually it became an easy way for Hannah to avoid facing the other aspect of her trauma.
Again: these two things happen simultaneously at the fund raiser. The same way they were both triggered simultaneously in episode 1. The fund raiser events pours almost inevitably into the twin spirals of episode 7.
The duality of these experiences, and their simultaneity, is very well-designed.

 

 

Tucker: “He’s been weird tonight, right?”
Beau: “So weird.”
I love these men.

 

 

“Touch Me”, the Dean-Allie sex-soundtrack sound returns, as Allie – trying not to look obvious, and of course looking totally obvious, makes her way to the “out of order” photo booth, where Dean’s legs can CLEARLY be seen underneath the curtain. Not subtle, guys. But appreciate Dean’s swing at communication from the stage. He’s right. They need to talk. He has no idea what the hell is going on. It’s not fair to him. He’s been nothing but open and transparent, and has never tried to force her to do anything she didn’t want to do. He’s also not afraid to talk about this stuff. He’s not avoiding it.

 

 

It was around here where I first had the horrible thought … “I think Allie is going to break Dean’s heart and what is THAT gonna look like.”

 

 

Kalyn and Abdalla are so good together. He’s a natural presence, and so is she, but she is doing some pretty complicated character work, and she really has to PLAY all these things – a woman who doesn’t know her own mind – and she has to do so while not totally turning off the audience, or being shrill, or unsympathetically unpleasant. Hard to thread this needle. One of the binding agents is their mutual attraction. But also their honesty. Yes, they’ve been hooking up all over campus, but the whole thing started because he overheard her crying about her boyfriend, listened to her talk about what she wanted in her life … all before anything even happened. They are “up to date” with each other, for the most part. She doesn’t have to pretend like what’s happening to her ISN’T happening. I love the line: “This fucking breakup is totally messing with my head.”

 

I think what we DON’T want to feel is that Allie is lying to herself. Or resisting the power of the attraction for … whatever made-up reasons. So many rom coms do this. They “delay” gratification for trumped-up reasons. They manufacture misunderstandings or miscommunications, the characters avoid one another, go out of their way to NOT communicate … there’s a tiny bit of that in this episode, but it doesn’t linger on endlessly. Dean makes sure they address it now. He’s truly trying to understand.

 

“Every time we do this I feel –”
“Amazing.”
“Guilty. I feel guilty.”
“Are you Catholic?”
“No. I’m just a girl. I have to figure out what everybody else thinks before I can figure out what I think.”
I have mixed feelings on this line! But this is very real for Allie. She stayed with Sean for way longer than other girls would have. She does care about what people think, and she cares (too much) about what Sean thinks, about what her dead mother would think. She’s caught up on the short amount of time between breaking up with Sean and calling Dean. I’ve seen some male YouTube reactors wince, thinking Allie called him too “soon”. Maybe I’m old, but in MY day when you break up with someone you are DONE. My dudes, she could break up with Sean at 9 pm and call Dean at 9:01. I know it’s hard when women have autonomy.

 

 

“Tell me what you want,” says Dean.
There it is. Again.

 

She whispers, as her answer, “Meet me at mine in an hour.”

 

 

Reader, I held my breath watching Dean alone in the photo booth, reacting to what just happened. “Meet me at mine in an hour” is not what he wanted to hear. It’s so interesting. I wouldn’t say he feels like he’s being used as some six foot tall vibrator … no. But at this point, Dean definitely knows he is into her. Bad. And because he’s Dean, he’s not tripping about that. He’s not tripping about labeling it, either. Or “making it official”. She’s overthinking, she’s short circuiting. Whatever they want to be doing is fine as long as they’re safe and not hurting anyone. He thought he was okay with that. But it looks like this little glitch in the matrix – from Thanksgiving to this moment in the photo booth – has changed things. You can almost see him realize …

 

 

 

“Ohhhh shit. I’m that guy now. I’m that guy who wants more.”
He has never been here before.

 

 

Hannah: “You and Logan going to be okay?”
Garrett: “We’ll be fine.”
You can get away with “we’ll be fine” if you’re just saying it to yourself. But you’re in a couple now. Someone actually knows you now. This will continue to be a challenge – it is in the books – I hope it is in season 2. You don’t just magically become a member of a couple, totally good at communication and keeping your walls down and letting the other person in. If you have no experience, no good father figure, a history of being beaten, and a self-protectively fraught relationship with women, you’re not going to find becoming part of a couple an easy transition.
What’s great about this whole thing is it shows Off Campus‘ emotional intelligence. You’re never all “set”. Or in the clear. Trauma doesn’t work like that.
Sitting here, right now, at Malone’s, Garrett feels safe. He’s with Hannah. But you can see he’s regressed a little bit. He says he thinks Phil “won’t be hard to ignore” and he appears to believe it. His body language is a little out of his control. As they’re talking, all those little mini-collapses-twitches we’ve seen before are happening, like he’s wriggling out of where he’s at, trying to get around it, move back from it, but whatever “it” is is inside him. He looks like an adolescent. He’s not okay and … he doesn’t know how not okay he is.
Hannah doesn’t like that she’s the only one who knows about his past. She, too, has never been in a relationship, but she knows trauma. She urges him, “You need to tell someone.”
Hannah feels safe with Garrett too, sitting here, right now. He’s her man. He’s got her back.
Trauma’s a bitch, isn’t it.
Just when you think you’re in the clear …

 

 

Considering what happens in episode 7, their little goodbye conversation is poignant, tender, and sad. Their bond is so strong but they’re not going to be able to withstand what comes next. A lot of things “set up” in episode 6 play out in episode 7, mostly in chaotic and pretty awful – but (honestly) – predictable ways. Not predictable as in cliched or bad but predictable as in … this is the way things go in life. You think you’re fine and then you are most decidedly not fine. You thought you had something handled, managed. You didn’t realize you were still susceptible to an “ambush” of the bad thoughts. The things that happen in episode 7, and so MUCH happens … as bad as much of it is, for me it doesn’t feel like “too much”, or on the nose, or like wayyy melodramatic. To me, it feels like … sometimes everyone has a really shitty terrible day at the same time. You realize how important mental health is on days like that, and having strategies to get through it. Hannah urging Garrett to tell someone OTHER than her doesn’t feel, in the moment, like foreshadowing. It just feels like what it is: a concerned girlfriend, who’s recognizing something that might end up being a problem. “It’s what girlfriends do.”

 

The red lingerie, the red robe, the red lipstick … Allie looks so good and she preens in the mirror. She is sooooo excited to see Dean. Allie, you are going to break this boy’s heart!

 

 

Dean’s “disguise”. And now that they’re “back together”, notice how happy Allie is, pulling him into the room and laughing.
Your feelings are yelling at you, Allie! You LIKE this guy. It’s oKAY.

 

 

As Dean and Allie have sex – on the couch – in the dorm room’s common space – Hannah texts Allie from Malone’s, saying she’s on her way back. Even though we just saw Hannah crumpling up pieces of paper with lyrics scribbled out … judging from what we’re being shown, something else might be stirring up in terms of a melody. She’s at the piano (because, of course, any time Hannah needs a piano, poof, one is there), and … I’m just interpreting what I see … she’s getting somewhere with a melody. She still can’t write the lyrics so she’s backing her way in. We know that two days later, “The Girl That I Am” is fully written – and performed. What I really like is Hannah’s courage: she sticks with it. She just had a “breakup” with Justin and he said some pretty harsh things. But Hannah is strong enough to absorb what he said, and maybe even realize, “He’s right.” Art isn’t just the big pop showcase performance. Off Campus shows Hannah working. Art really is like that. A song doesn’t fall out of the sky whole. Well, sometimes it does. “Yesterday” was in Paul McCartney’s head – whole – when waking up one morning. He scribbled down the lyrics on an envelope. However, let’s not take the wrong lessons from that. The only reason why this could even happen is because McCartney was in the zone already, he’s primed the pump, he’s kept his “instrument” open to whatever comes. This is a practice! And so I really like that Off Campus shows Hannah’s struggle over the first six episodes … scribbling in notebooks, playing around on a piano, all of it … this is what being an artist looks like MOST of the time. She thinks something’s “wrong” – and of course she has writers’ block – but the only way to get through a block is, unfortunately, writing your way through it. So here Hannah is after a kind of upsetting night, the crashing and burning of “Yellow Haze” (a YouTube reactor I absolutely adore said, “Is the song about mustard gas? I don’t understand.”) … what does she do? She gets back to work. An artistic process is often the opposite of “inspiration”. It’s drudgery. It’s sticking WITH something, even when you AREN’T inspired.

 

 

Satiated, satisfied, giggling, relaxed … at this point I’m sick of it! You two need to just be together. There is zero ambiguity about what is going on between you! Look at Dean’s face. hahahaha

 

 

“HUSTLE!” “You look so good!” Dean’s frantic pulling on of clothes, etc., is done reluctantly – but she’s so ferocious he doesn’t protest. I like, though, that – yet again – Allie is in girlfriend-mode, and doesn’t realize it. She is still into him, laughing as they kiss, totally affectionate – AS she’s ordering him like a drill sergeant to LEAVE, get OUT. I think having a lead character not know what’s going on is very intriguing. Frustrating to watch, yes, but I prefer to be frustrated as long as I’m interested. I love Allie. I get her panic. She’s caught up in her own feedback loop, and isn’t accustomed to being in this situation. Her natural tendency is girlfriend-ish, which she totally is here. She’s ordering him around, at the same time she’s giggling and finding him adorable and funny. Her body/spirit is telling her what is going on, but her brain isn’t putting together the pieces yet. She’s literally making choices that will ensure she’s not going to be happy. I don’t know, I get it’s a bummer, but I find it very real. And Dean … Dean is almost at the point where he is going to put his foot down. He almost says, “No, Allie, I’m not sneaking out of here like a criminal, I’m staying. I’ve had it.” But when a woman in red lingerie claps her hands at you and barks, “HUSTLE” you do what she says. But I think he’s about done with this shit.
The look on his face in the photo booth after she left was one of recognizing what he actually felt, and acknowledging what was going on for him. A reckoning.

 

 

Unfortunately, in this moment, Stephen Kalyn looks like Logan Paul.

 

 

Sean shows up at Allie’s door – unannounced – at 11:25 p.m. He deserves what he gets. I don’t feel sorry for him at all. He and Allie broke up a month ago. He has no business being there. Allie is not constitutionally organized to be able to “get her back up” at Sean. She can’t hold her head up and remind him he should have called first. She herself is conflicted about “moving on” from someone she “supposedly loved”. This is Allie’s achilles heel, and boy does Sean know it.
I wonder if Sean passed Dean in the hallway on his way to her door. He had to, right? He shows up less than a minute after Dean leaves. Maybe he put it together later. Maybe getting a glimpse of Dean leaving is what propels him into the “call Dean” scene in season 2.
We are not done with Sean!

 

 

One wonders what would have happened if Hannah “got the news” about Delaney while Garrett was still with her. If you want to avoid the explosion of episode 7, you have to walk backwards pretty far. A lot of things have to converge – from different directions – to create the cataclysm. The episode cracks apart in its final sequence, becoming the Big Daddy of PTSD flashbacks, overtaking Hannah with such totality she’s still drowning through all of episode 7.

 

 

“The Ghost Is Me”, playing over this haunting frightening final sequence, is by Flora from Kansas, an artist who is still in high school. She wrote it about her “middle school rage”. You know, the rage she felt two or three years ago. Amazing artist! The music supervisors did such an excellent job with the soundtrack. “The Ghost Is Me” has an eerie childlike sound before everything explodes.

 

 

 

The campus is deserted. Hannah is so alone. It’s so upsetting. You want her to be safe, be with someone, anyone, Allie, Dexter, go inside at least. Ugh, it’s so scary. I believe the dorm room building she collapses in front of was featured in Supernatural multiple times.

 

 

 

Quinten James plays Aaron Delaney. James is an actor and a hockey player. You see it’s him out there, you see him in action, there’s none of the trickery being used in editing, etc., to make it LOOK like it’s him out there. He clearly can skate. I looked it up. James is 6’2″. Belmont Cameli is 6’1″. There’s not a huge height difference between the two men, but the angle makes Delaney just LOOM over Garrett. He’s probably standing on a little platform to make him even taller. There are lots of lens flares going on as the camera moves up, creating a really catastrophic feeling.

 

 

Blurring out Hannah’s face as the episode closes is so powerful. We are witnessing her obliteration, trauma wiping her out. Episode 6 is the most obviously cinematic in the season. I haven’t heard any complaints although there may be some out there I missed. I feel like episode 6 is a good place to flex the visual muscles: the drama in the effects, all those blue streaks and dramatic blurring – throughout, and then closing out the episode – express the emotions. They’re used for a purpose, not just to be pretty or “cool”. Off Campus doesn’t do anything at random.

 

Off Campus episode recaps

Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Episode 5

Props, technology, set decoration

Dexter might not make a personal appearance in episode 6, but he’s present in Allie’s phone, texting her, “I’m sooooooooooo drunk rn”. While Allie was belting out “Take Me For What I Am”, what was Dexter up to? I love that he feels the need to reach out and give her an update on his inebriation. Even funnier is the Sean welcome screen, with Dexter’s debauchery superimposed over it. College life. Plus Allie’s rings and nail polish.

 

 

Dean putting his contact information in Allie’s phone, parts 1 and 2. Plus, Dean’s ring. Plus, Allie’s rings, nails, and joint.

 

 

 

The little snack cart in Allie and Hannah’s kitchen-less dorm room. Flaming Hots at the ready. I find it so interesting that these two don’t have a television (as far as we can see).

 

 

The inner sanctum of the hockey house: the bathroom. The bathroom has a free-standing old-fashioned BATHtub – with clawed feet? And old-fashioned faucets. Plus green tile. It looks like it belongs in an orphanage from the 1930s. There’s not even a shower stall. For four hockey boys? I know there are other bathrooms, presumably ones with more modern accoutrements – but all of the hair/skin products cluttering every surface tells me these guys use this room. There’s a free-standing red light-bulb on one of the little cabinets … Dean? Is that there for sexpot shenanigans? What is going on here. I love the detail that the toilet paper roll needs to be changed. Is someone waiting for Tucker to do it?

 

 

Like, what in the rickety-Dust-Bowl-boarding-house is going on with this bathtub? I think it’s SO FUNNY.

 

 

The reveal of Allie’s nickname for Dean in her phone. These two are NOT being subtle. And Dean is being romantic. He misses her already. And he doesn’t feel bad about it. The thing about Dean is: he is not confused about what he’s feeling and he doesn’t resist it. This might be the most unexpected thing of all.

 

 

Brooklyn has houses like this? I’ve been in big townhouses but … they don’t look like this. This is a house in Greenwich, Connecticut.

 

 

Dean bombarding Allie with a stream of texts on Thanksgiving while Allie is on the phone with Hannah. So … Allie heads out into Manhattan after Thanksgiving dinner? To meet up with Dean? When she leaves Dean’s penthouse is it like 1 a.m.? Are you NOT riding back with Beau and Dean, Allie? As I’ve mentioned countless times, the handling of technology and texts in Off Campus is so good. And here, we see the teasing banter between these two, and how Allie resists – coyly, almost – and Dean pushes, but not in an obnoxious way. Maybe some girls would find it obnoxious. He’s definitely pleading, but he’s positioning himself as the one who Knows Best – but he’s doing it lightly, flirtatiously … he also knows she wants to. “Mayybeee”. Oh, Allie.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dean’s chunky substantial chess board.

 

 

The magical realism – and doubling reflections – of the penthouse at night.

 

 

Finally we get a good look at THIS wall in Hannah’s room. I love seeing what’s going on on the shelves of her adorable bookshelf: a teddy bear, heart-shaped sunglasses, books, some kind of glass jar with fruit on the sides, and is that a turntable? Everything in her room is gentle and soothing, filled with the things she is inspired by, personal posters and pictures … she has hidden her composition notebook in a storage container at the top of her closet and surrounds herself with things she loves.

 

 

I have a question about this whole “request a song through a QR code” thing. What if I requested an old Jerry Lee Lewis song? Can they play it? Or do they have a set list of songs to choose from? They put PINK on there? All-American Rejects? What if someone put in Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B’s WAP? Now that I’d like to see. One funny thing, never really commented on: After Hours is basically a cover band. So Justin being asked to write an original song with Hannah must feel like a really fun project for him, even though the process – as shown – does not look fun at all.

 

 

Maverick on the line.

 

 

Let’s take a look at what’s on auction at the fund raiser. Excuse me: Dinner at Malone’s is $250?? What do they serve there, lobster, champagne, and truffles? Or is this dinner for the whole YEAR? Is this “dinner for 50” people? How much are Della’s fries anyway? Speaking of Della: a $100 goodie basket is also available: “an indulgent baked goods basket overflowing with freshly baked cookies, brownies, and blondies”. 2 Briar Hawks unisex T-shirts, valued at $60. Now that pricing checks out.

 

 

I couldn’t get a full view of the lit-up sign over the bar, but I did squint and see “IT’S WICKED COLD”. Spoken like a true Bostoner. However, judging from the proliferating greenery outside, it’s not “wicked cold” at all.

 

 

A Hannah-Allie text. We haven’t seen that yet! Allie is looking for an item of clothing (since Hannah regularly raids Allie’s closet). A “mini” skirt? Hannah guesses it might be in the bathroom – where is the bathroom in their palatial dorm room, by the way? Either Hannah isn’t at home, she’s at Garrett’s or something, OR they are texting each other from their respective rooms – equally plausible. Allie, ever the effortlessly supportive, finds the skirt/dress and shouts at Hannah: “ICON”

 

 

I know Hannah is having trouble – ‘thursday brings forgetting” something something … but I am a bit in awe that she can just sit down and start scribbling, wherever she is. I cannot do this. At all. I have to do this whole ritual, I end up cleaning and organizing, putting it off, and have this whole ritual to even be ready to even start thinking about writing. I do, however, write by hand! First drafts, always by hand: it helps me slow my roll. And it feels more dawdling and free, which is the vibe I need to get the courage to start. We love to see Hannah writing by hand.

 

 

Love seeing how Allie and Hannah decorated the outside of their door. We did this in college too. Any chance to personalize your environment.

 

 

Dean’s jacket – and cozy scarf? – on the desk they have in the main room, where Hannah stayed up all night writing her “Yellow Haze” melody. Hannah’s sheet music on the wall, her guitar, and this random BUREAU I don’t think we’ve seen.

 

 

The little posters hanging in the entryway for Malone’s. Listen, I care about these things. There are a couple of posters for the fund raiser – which they have called “WINTER WONDERLAND” – which I find strangely adorable since it actually feels like the title a bunch of college boys would come up with. No reference to hockey? Also, all of your friends are there and the puck bunnies. You all eat at Malone’s every day. Nobody is going to spend $250 for a dinner at Malone’s.

 

 

 

Okay so this is cool, and something I only noticed when I screengrabbed, especially because this moment is so upsetting. Hannah types in “Delaney”. One of the results that comes up is Delaney Rowe, the brilliant Delaney Rowe, whose sketches on TikTok and Instagram – not only skewering romantic comedy tropes but celebrating them in sometimes wholesome ways – made her a star. Her stuff makes you cringe, they are often unbearable: she’s a brilliant actress too. I love that they included her in the results, since she rose to the top paying homage – in often excruciating ways – to every rom com trope known to man. I was into Delaney Rowe before she blew up, and I love watching someone so cool and talented rise! Rise to the heights of being shown in search results on a text exchange in the rom-com-trope-heavy Off Campus. I hope she knows. Because you know she’s watched!

 

 

So chilling.

 

 

All that Bokeh

 
Like any visual effect, bokeh can be pushed too far. Josephine Decker pushes bokeh – and blurring effects in general – to the extreme, keeping a pinhole focus on a dewdrop in the close foreground, with human beings blurry – it can be very destabilizing. I love Decker’s early work. From Decker’s second film Thou Wast Mild and Lovely:

Some photographers lean on bokeh too much, and the effect can tilt into style over substance – empty prettiness – but when used specifically – as it is in episode 6 of Off Campus – bokeh can be an effective storytelling tool.

I associate bokeh with the blurring-out of lights, creating an almost watercolor-y space behind the characters, with splotches of color, light sources blurred into abstraction … Bokeh is the opposite of “deep focus”. The style can create a mood-poem of melancholy, romanticism. The world is clear, the corners are sharp … but the inner world is soft and boundary-less. I am thinking of Christmas, Again, a favorite since I reviewed it in 2015. Christmas Again was shot by the brilliant Sean Price Williams, one of those talented photographers whose style is almost immediately recognizable. Here’s a frame from Christmas, Again – a beautiful melancholy film about a lonely guy selling Christmas trees on a street corner in New York for the month of December.

The look is so DREAMY. Sean Price Williams is in demand because of work like that. I was at a festival of short films in a basement space in Bushwick a couple years ago – where the short film I wrote screened!, and one of the short films was so gorgeously shot – very New York noir – with puddles filled with wavery reflections of red stop lights, and rainy blurry air and blobby fuzzy streetlamp light, I thought, “huh, that looks like Sean Price Williams’ work” and … it actually WAS Sean Price Williams’ work.

The BOKEH going on behind Dean and Allie starts at the fire pit, where the strings of white lights hanging in the back yard are blurred out, no longer instantly recognizable as prosaic regular objects. They are pools of light floating around behind Allie, peeking out through her chair, circling around her head. The effect removes Dean and Allie – more specifically, what is happening between them – outside the boundaries of the everyday world. When the camera is on Allie, she is circled by shimmering blurry lights. When the camera is on Dean, his background is a wash of green and blue, equally not “realistic”, an impressionistically vivid color scheme. In front of them is the fire pit, and the flames add to the effects, hitting their faces with warmth, the flames sometimes flickering in the foreground. The two of them are connecting in a real way for the first time. They talk about her boyfriend, her dreams for herself, they talk about what she wants … literally two hours ago they were sniping at each other in the ladies’ room at Malone’s.

And here they are now, in a romantic dream world.
 

 

Why I think this is such an interesting effect is because it’s being used to tell the story of Dean and Allie. Dean and Allie develop a traditional “hookup” set-up. One might consider such a set-up to be devoid of poetry or dreams or real intimacy. It’s more about two people hot for each other getting their needs met. Fair enough. But the STYLE surrounding these hook-ups is romantic to an intense degree. Garrett and Hannah’s love story wasn’t presented traditionally either – there were all the split screens, there were specific color schemes (the really dramatic reds and blues and shadows at the end of episode 1, the quiet darkness of Garrett’s bedroom with the moonlight coming in through the blinds, etc.) – helped ground their relationship in an environment which I would call safe and calm. And also romantic! But we EXPECT our leads to be presented romantically!

We don’t expect our comedic sexpot sidekicks to be presented romantically.

All this bokeh probably works in subconscious ways, but people who have watched the show – and might not notice the lighting effects specifically – already knows what the story is telling them. These two people are not “just” hooking up. They are actually falling for each other. Hard. This is a love story and it should be viewed as such.

The bokeh expands into Milky Way-size once we move to the penthouse and the couple sits on that high bench, a la Sixteen Candles, playing chess. Nighttime has fallen, and the lights are low inside the penthouse. The gleaming skyline, and the traffic below, all blur out around them, the plate glass basically dissolving, until the two of them are floating out there in these splotches of color, sometimes the reflections make it look like they are outside, hovering in the air 20 stories up, as opposed to being inside. No other scene in Off Campus looks like this.

This is the most romantic style possible. It’s almost too much. It’s almost gauzy-filter-over-lens music video for a power ballad. It’s ALMOST too far.

But they’re being strategic with it. There’s a reason the effects show up so strongly in this scene they overwhelm the action, drowning the couple in blurry colored lights that have no actual connection to the real world.

But again, and I’ve seen some YouTube reactors somehow miss the fact that Dean is falling in love. They can’t conceive of him that way and they are pretty invested in him as a funny sexy guy. Which … he still is? They aren’t watching him closely enough, for what’s going on on his face in between the lines, and they also aren’t picking up on the radical stylistic visual shift, for this scene in particular.

We don’t NEED a really strong romantic style for Garrett and Hannah. We know what we are watching when we watch Hannah and Garrett is the story of two people falling in love. The style can support that, but it doesn’t need to SCREAM at us. The bokeh, in the fire pit, and in the chess scene and the phone call scene at Malone’s, is screaming at us. Dean and Allie NEED this romantic a style.

The style turns the entire visual world into a subjective space, almost like the world is now an emanation of your personal inner mood. The pathetic fallacy made cosmic. Dean and Allie might say they want to want to keep it light, but their inner mood is luscious and luxurious and soft and romantic. Their sex is, overall, presented comedically. Slapstick. If you’re only paying attention to the comedic sex, and missing somehow the visual language surrounding it, then you will be surprised at the end of episode 7 that Dean is bummed out Allie isn’t texting him back. (I’ve seen some You Tube reactors be like, “Oh wow, I guess he really likes her.” They mis-read Dean, and they miss what the screen is SCREAMING at them.

So let’s have a bokeh gallery for the chess scene because … once you clock into what’s going on back there, and how they are floating in a sea of shimmering completely non-realistic color … it’s hard to see anything else, and the effect is so much a part of the mood between these two characters.

The romantic lighting with blurry circling twinkling lights continues in the fund raiser scene, where the blue-streak-of-light becomes just as insistently THERE as the bokeh was in the chess scene … when Allie and Dean talk on the phone to each other, staring at each other across the bar, there are all kinds of effects happening, behind them, and circling over their faces – nothing is static, all is in flux but still … but still …

… the overall mood created by all of this is dreamy swoon of romantic emotion.

Not exactly what we would associate with Dean and Allie, but … that’s the point.

These floating melty blurs of color reminds me of a song done by one my favorite singer-songwriters – Bleu – in a duet with Carly Paige, called – appropriately – “Where the Colors Bleed”. I went to find a clip of it just now, and found that there is a music video, which I had no idea existed. But I think the lyrics – about colors bleeding into each other – has a lot of thematic resonance, appropriate for a love story.

“Where The Colors Bleed”

I’m not as funny as I used to be
I used to see the silver lining in everything
But lately I’ve been seein’ differently
I think I’m running low on dopamine

I’m not a cynic like I used to be
I only ever found the brokenness in everything
But lately I’ve been seein’ differently
I think I’m having an epiphany

I was never open to contrasting emotions
But seeing your idiosyncrasies
Maybe it’s all in the complexities

Life is more than black and white
It’s every shade of light
So maybe I could meet you in between
The reds and the yellows I see
And all of the blues that you breathe

Yeah I can meet you where the colors bleed

You wrap me up in all your rainy days
My little melancholy heavy hearted Hemingway
You show me the sun also rises babe
Sometimes I kinda even feel ok

I was never open to contrasting emotions
But seeing your idiosyncrasies
Maybe it’s all in the complexities

Life is more than black and white
It’s every shade of light
So maybe I could meet you in between
The reds and the yellows we see
And all of the blues that I breathe

Yeah I can meet you where the colors bleed

Blur into the air, I’ll meet you where the colors bleed
 

Dean carries Allie off to bed, we hear her giggling, and the two of them literally “blur into the air … where the colors bleed.”

 

Anamorphic lens and the blue light streak

 

Along with intense bokeh, Episode 6 heavily uses the anamorphic lens-flare where lights are shot head-on, creating dramatic effects, like the tell-tale horizontal streak of blue light. The blue light shows up mostly in the fund raiser, an effect of the swirling disco lights, yes. So it COULD be construed as realistic and “this is what happens when blue lights swirl around.” Sure. But the way it’s utilized in Off Campus is deliberate, it is not just an accidental by-product of the lighting present in the bar. The blue-streak is a “tic” of the episode.

Lens flares are popular but can be controversial (does anyone remember the brou-haha about JJ Abrams’ use of them in Star Trek? It’s probably the most dramatic use of the effect in recent memory).

 

 

 

You can go on a deep dive into anamorphic lens flares, technically. I found a kind of fun video, but there are lots of these. Like any tool, lens flares can be overused. Any effect can be overused. There is the whole teal-orange color palette thing. It’s beautiful but when every film has the exact same color palette, maybe that’s a sign. Anamorphic lens flares are often used in a sci-fi context, because the effect makes things look supernatural or otherworldly, like there is something “other” about the light source. Think Close Encounters.

Off Campus is not sci-fi. But there is precedent for using these blue streaks as insistently as the episode does. I want to mention my favorite – #1 – use of anamorphic lens flares: Paul Thomas Anderson’s beautiful heart-breaking masterpiece, Punch-Drunk Love. This film is color-coded within an inch of its life, and every single lighting/costume/production design element is meticulously chosen. Perhaps the most striking thing about Punch-Drunk Love is the omnipresent blue streak of light. It’s everywhere, even in scenes where you aren’t sure what the light source is.
 

 

 

 

Look closely: the blue streak goes through his head, barely noticeable but there. Notice the reddish shaft of diagonal light between them, connecting them.
 

 

 

Punch-Drunk Love is a tender and painful love story. Barry (Adam Sandler) is destined to live a small unhappy lonely life. When a woman (Emily Watson) asks him to hold her car keys for her, everything changes. In Punch-Drunk Love, love isn’t just love. It is a miracle, totally unforeseen, totally not even asked for because Barry couldn’t even imagine something so marvelous. What’s more supernatural than a miracle? The supernatural blue light streak sometimes drowns the characters, sometimes trembles like a thin uncertain thread … reminding us of its presence, of the possibility that something ELSE, something NEW, might be being born.
 

 

Episode 6’s fund raiser can barely go three seconds without a blue streak of light piercing across the screen, but once I started paying attention and looking for it … I saw it elsewhere, even before episode 6.
 

Let’s not forget the series starts with a lens flare:
 

 

These lens flares, sometimes white, but more often a horizontal Punch-Drunk Love streak of blue, connect Hannah and Garrett in the rink, through the split screen, as he skates and she cleans. The blue streak connects them both to hockey, the thing that brought them together.
 

 

The horizontal blue streak is present in episode 5’s first scene, when Garrett wraps his arms around Hannah in the broadcast booth. A lovely and subtle effect, a watercolor-wash of blue, but maybe it’s an uneasy foreshadowing of where episode 6 will end, when Hannah sees, in her minds’ eye, the hockey team walking out onto the ice to face off with Delaney, streaked with horizontal blue light.

The visuals are so beautifully designed, their placement deliberate: they serve the story, as opposed to just being used as a flourish to add “interest”.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The use of the blue streak in the fund raiser is so noticeable it looks like they’re all playing laser tag! The swiveling blue spotlights create the effect – naturally – but none of this is an accident. Considering everything we’ve just talked about, these lens flares open up another type of non-realistic non-linear space where things can connect, even if the connections aren’t immediately apparent, but all this is made complicated in the fund raiser scene due to the ricocheting connections between every single character present. The blue streak of light could be signaling “system overload”. There’s a criss-cross of blue light, connecting the multiple dots. There’s Hannah and Justin, Garrett and Hannah, Logan and Hannah, Dean and Allie, Hannah and Allie … (Tucker’s busy dancing with a mysterious brunette) … all of this happening in the space of a “fun” party. Hannah and Garrett connect, Logan and Hannah connect, Dean and Allie connect, as do Hannah and Allie. Everything is in flux, though. Nothing is stable. Still, connections aren’t easy to sever. Allie tries to sever with Dean. Hannah severs with Justin. Logan and Garrett sever ties.

The blue streak of light tries to cut through the noise, tries to make a clear connection, but it’s just light, after all. You can walk right through it.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I mean, I could go on.
 

Dean’s unique fashion sense

Dean makes statements with his fashion. WHAT statement he makes is up for debate.

Hats off, as always, to costume designer Charlene Akuamoah.

 

 

Of course, Dean is usually seen mostly when he’s naked or half naked. But when he DOES put on clothes … he’s a little flashy with it. Unexpectedly flashy. You’d think he’d be in track suits 24/7. Oh no.

 

 

He’s big on tank tops and soft sweat pants. Arms are usually on display.

 

 

First of all, I didn’t realize Dean was reading a puck bunny’s palm. Dean. Stop. So he’s got this kind of baggy denim type shirt going on … a slightly unusual look but gets downright bizarre when you zoom in.

 

 

… the shirt has a pattern, of what looks like flowers or vines. We will learn that Dean loves prints. Now we haven’t heard much from the costume designer on her concept for Dean, but I wonder if – subtly – before episode 4 – they are signaling to us not to write Dean off as some dumb jock bro. He wears shirts with flowers and vines on them. He wears sweaters with big gloopy circles on it. Does a jock bro dress like this, stereotypically? No. Dean is big and huge and all muscle and he is dressed in ways that add ambiguity. He’s got a flash, a fashion spark, his outfits often don’t make sense, but … he likes it. He has looked in his closet and chosen his outfits. He’s not just throwing on a sweatshirt. He has sweaters and cardigans and weird shirts and lots of patterns. This is deliberate. Garrett doesn’t have a “fashion sense”. Dean really does.

 

 

Case in point. Dean’s “jacket” – or windbreaker – is a doozy. Flowers and vines twirl around him. He’s wearing jeans, but come on, nobody’s looking at that. People are looking at Dean and SEEING an “outfit”. He’s confident and dresses the way he wants to. He’s not trying to “fit in”. He’s doing his own thing with his clothes.

 

 

I just love this choice even though I don’t understand it. I love the the image of Akuamoah looking at this and thinking, “This is something Dean would wear.”

 

 

The kelly-green cardigan worn open – clinging to every bicep curve – is also attention-getting, maybe a little preppy, but without the preppy conservatism. He’s chosen it because he looks good in it and it also makes him stand out. I’ll get to the pants later, because we will see them again. Pairing these pants with that sweater is a CHOICE. Meanwhile: Beau has a similar fashion sense, although a bit more muted.

 

 

The way the seams are inside out add to the distinct quality of his clothes. Lots of guys don’t dress to be noticed! I love how both Garrett and Dean are usually wearing necklaces. I’ll say one more thing, and others have noticed this as well: Clothes repeat on Off Campus. Hannah wears the red-and-white striped cardigan, her embroidered jeans multiple times. People don’t wear different outfits every day, especially not poor college students. Dean is rich, but his clothes repeat too – like his pants here, and like this tank top, with the gentle ribbing, which he wears to Drunk Shakespeare.

 

 

Of course he wears his hockey jacket unzipped.

 

 

I mean, we have to include this.

 

 

 

The Maverick coveralls. Look at his pose in the top photo. He offers himself up as a pagan sacrifice.

 

 

At-home, arms out – of course – and the soft sweats. This is more what we would expect of a guy like this. But then he gets dressed up for karaoke and out comes the PRIMARY COLOR BLOB sweater.

 

 

Adidas placement. I love Dean in bright colors.

 

 

Now this is the jock bro look, perfect for the scene which changes everything, which undermines everything we’ve assumed about him (even though we’ve somehow missed how he’s usually covered in flower patterns and colored blobs) … He HAS to be the jockiest jock who ever jocked in this scene so Off Campus can make the points it wants to make.

 

 

The cardigan Dean busts out for Drunk Shakespeare is maroon with little hearts on it OVER his heart. May I remind you of the love potion at work during that sequence. He’s basically WEARING his heart (on his sleeve and) OVER his heart.

 

 

And then we see the rest of the outfit. Camo pants and white sneakers, and that soft ribbed tank top. He chose to pair the heart cardigan with the camo pants. He looked in a mirror and nodded in satisfaction. He looks awesome. He looks like nobody other than himself. He wears it well and it makes no sense. He is a trend-setter way out there in front of everyone.

 

 

Arms. Soft sweat pants from episode 3.

 

 

The tight T-shirt. Ouch.

 

 

Dean’s “underclothes” … and the skin-tight-ness of it all – is hot as fuck. Garrett had the same boy shorts – well, I guess that’s redundant – when Hannah first came up to his room. These boys are not shy.

 

 

Welcome to the show, sweater that looks like it could be hanging at MoMA.

 

 

Dean leans towards patterns as well as … shirts that look like they come from an autobody shop, or … a bowling alley, maybe? Look what the patch says:

 

 

lol

 

 

My favorite Dean outfit. He looks amazing.

 

 

Member what I said about his shirts? Okay, so we’ve got cardigans, tank tops, flowered shirts, and … a shirt that makes him look like he’s in the stands at NASCAR. On the left side, we have the logo: DEUS SPEED SHOP. On the right, in swirly cursive: Ain’t We Got Fun! The whimsy is strong.

 

 

 

 

 

Bust out another cardigan with this huge D on it. He’s got the rings, the necklace. Dean is the kind of guy who sees a cardigan with a D on it and has to buy it. He loves himself and he’s proud walking through the world … as himself. His clothes aren’t just clothes: they ANNOUNCE him. Dare I say, and I hate to do it, but this is Off Campus: he dresses the way we assume girls do more than boys. Choosing clothes as some kind of statement. He also knows he’s going to be seeing Allie at the event and he wants to look nice. Bust out the D. And he pairs it with black track pants with a white stripe down the legs. I am not even paying attention to what Garrett, Logan and Tucker have on. I should pay more attention, but they dress pretty regular, whereas Dean moves his way through the crowd, smoothly, announcing his presence easily. He’s not a peacock. He’s not a fashion plate. He’s something else. Let’s float this out there: Dean would be comfortable in any room. But … he’s a weirdo and I don’t think anyone knows it.

 

 

Dean’s “disguise”. Where did the HAT come from? I’d bet it was in his car. Trucker hat? It looks like a John Deere logo.

 

 

Again, with the skin-tight almost leotard-like “undies”. He looks like a powerful aquatic mammal, sunning himself on a beach.

 

 

Finally, we get to the pants we saw him wearing in episode 2. People. LOOK at these pants. With tadpole-type shapes squiggling over it. Who wears patterned pants? Am I out of the loop? Also the slight bagginess of the pants set them apart. They look comfortable. The other guys are literally wearing jeans and hoodies. Dean isn’t exactly bedazzled but he is wearing patterned pants.

 

 

Another patterned windbreaker – he likes patterned zippered windbreakers, this one has Jackson-Pollock-ish splotches on it. He’s at home and he is not in a tank top and sweats. He probably came in from class (do you go to class, Dean?), and had no time to change before Logan called the emergency meeting. I like Dean in green, he wears it a lot.

 

 

Already iconic. The “Daddy” T-shirt, worn in the scene where he is having a total crisis because he’s realized he doesn’t want to be with anyone other than Allie. As he gets insecure and freaked with Beau … he is wearing a DADDY T-shirt.

 

 

The black jacket has white stitching. His fashion sense is made up these little details, flashes of specificity. He’d love it if you said, “Hey, Dean, cool jacket.” It’s why he wore it.

 

 

His body looks outrageous in these tight long-sleeve shirts.

 

What does all this add up to? Dean is chaotic, he likes what he likes, he likes to look good and he is not afraid to make statements. He is not afraid of patterns or flowers or colors. He likes his arms. He has no self-consciousness about any of this. Clothes make the man but the man is the one who really makes the clothes.