hbomax is removing love life and i’m going to miss this show
When some techno-futurist cracks my skull open to examine the makings that have moulded me into a full person (a retroactive vision board for the neural net, perhaps), they will find a fleeting glimpse of the second episode of Love Life, season 01. I love this scene so much. I’ve tried describing this scene in words many times before, but I come up short. Words are frail; this is visual synecdoche. What happens before or after in the story doesn’t matter as much as the emotional cinema of the moment. The details don’t quite capture the weight of it, the heaviness of what’s happening.
scene: The National’s “This is the Last Time” croons overhead (oh, when i lift you up, you feel—). Anna Kendrick sits in a near-empty subway car, slumped over a small box of her worldly possessions. She feels the tears coming before they show; she blinks, doesn’t want the tears to fall any faster. Bites her lip, but her mouth betrays a quiver. Her chin sinks into the palm of her right hand, and all is lost. Opens her eyes wide, reveals the flare of wet lashes. (and i said i wouldn’t cry about it.) She looks back, to the side, as if an audience is watching her little meltdown; but nobody is, everyone has their own problems in this city. There’s nowhere to hide.
This is a good subway cry. To find catharsis in the anonymity of a sunset-hued R train. Nobody seeks it out; it simply rises to the occasion.
The moment is almost always coming back from something else, rarely on the way to something new. On the way back to somewhere safer, more secure, soon—but, you just couldn’t hold it all in. It explodes out of you. Mews, then claws its way out of that sunken ship in your chest. Your face scrunches up, contorts, looks even uglier in the washed-out fluorescence. Almost have the good sense to be embarrassed for a solitary sob, but fuck it, this is the New York City subway.
I wish I could count the number of times I’ve sobbed in an underground tunnel, but I’d peel my hands away from my face and my fingertips would be wet with tears.
It’s terrible. It’s a whole life fallen apart over something stupid. It’s one cry in the mosaic of all the other cries for something that felt irrefutably lost, ruined beyond repair. A mourning cry, an apology cry, a cry because you need help but don’t know how to express what you need anymore. Private devastation rendered public.
Everything preceding the cry is now a backgrounded footnote. I don’t think any of it matters, still. I’m nearly certain. But it hurt enough at the time that it couldn’t wait. I couldn’t contain it, couldn’t tame it into a manageable form on my way home. I had to drown a little, then and there.
This scene understood the bubbling mess of the subway cry and unabashedly portrayed it on the small screen. A trip on public transportation as a substitute vessel for the guts and aftermath of the moment before. Sometimes I’m back on the subway and I’m still drowning. Sometimes I’m sitting in one of the orange seats and I think about this scene, my former woes rattling along the metal tracks with me.
Love Life found me in the late spring, early summer of 2020. Two and a half years since the first season’s debut, HBOMax is permanently removing this show from its catalogue for whatever reasons related to profitability and platform management. In short, it means this show will be inaccessible to audiences, soon and forevermore. Blink and it will be gone.
I didn’t seek out this show as much as it stumbled upon some shell of myself, and decided it would make a temporary settlement. This time period is a hollow; like if I stared down the curling spiral of that year, I’d see a pitch-black vacancy where my personhood used to be. The cavern is cold and carries an echo—listless, impressionless.
To exist in a lack is to sit alone at the bottom of a well, hardened and insulated and numb. Sennights spent staring ahead at the walls of wallow, so when the light passes from above on occasion, its rays scarcely reach whichever self-pitying pit has been dug deep. When your own feelings and faculties have abandoned you, you look for it where others offer their emotions so readily. Forgeries of externalized experiences, like this silly little show about millennials looking for love in the city. It makes you wonder why there’s all this bother for human connection and why people keep hurting themselves over it. Watching repeated failures rekindles a recalcitrant hope, against all odds.
When I think about this time period again, there’s nothing on the wall; what could have been memories have since curled into a tiny ball and collapsed in upon itself. In this plume of dust that remains, I remember there was this show with a good subway cry, and a largely forgettable plot and protagonist, and a final line about eggs that clings to me like a friendly ghost.
Shows don’t always need a narrator. Most shows haven’t perfected the delicate art of pithy tidbits for their self-insert, third-party omniscient voices to float lazily about the main scene. When they do, they have Kristen Bell confidently snarking at the helm of Gossip Girl or Julie Andrews gossiping about the ton in Bridgerton. Love Life’s first season presented a middle-aged woman with an affected British accent, but it kind of worked. It was a show about romanticization in its heart of hearts, and there’s nothing as deeply affirming in the millennial mind’s-eye as a life worthy of a witty British narrator.
There’s one line of the show that has since stuck with me. Over the final narrative beat of the season, our main character recognizes the estranged feeling she’d spent her whole life (and ten episodes) chasing after:
“Finally, Darby had stopped wondering whether or not she was worth loving and simply cracked herself open. Simply cracked her whole life open.”
She simply cracked herself open; simply cracked her whole life open.
Let that sit for a moment. Let us dwell in that mutual realization. As in, cracking open was the simplest and most difficult thing she needed to do all this time, but she hadn’t earned that knowledge until the end. It meant letting the right people in, letting the wrong people out, sometimes letting herself be that right and wrong person. It meant putting up the pretense and pretentions, and crumbling under the missteps and melodrama. It meant everything and nothing at all.
All she had to do was make herself legible.
Cracking oneself open looms impossible, formidable, inconceivable. How might it feel? It asks us to shed our shells and bare our fragile yolks. Urges us to spill over, the messy run of it, spreading and staining everything we touch.
This is the egg as a liminal object. The egg catches us in between beginnings and endings, as the flux between formation and formed. Cyclic, imprecise. Eggs, boiled and peeled and cracked; open.
I won’t miss Love Life, but its imminent absence from the planes of media existence has recalled a dormant ache for a time when there wasn’t much, but this show was there when I reached for it. I had been unformed, and maybe this is where I started to put myself back together.
I ask myself all the time—what would it be like, if I simply cracked myself open?