In this world without, we seek a saviour within

Popular culture has blithely resisted corruption from its assumed superiors. Two decades ago, it set a very high bar with The Sopranos. Picture: Supplied

We are fortunate today that the cultural vacuum left by a High Culture that has largely abandoned its mission is being consummately filled by cable and internet television. That mission was, once upon a time in the West, exemplified variously by Homer, Plato, Raphael, Shakespeare, Bach, Jane Austen and Nietzsche all wrestling in their different ways to make sense of the human condition, its woes and tragedies. The grand tradition worked through stories and their interpretation. A century or more ago this High Culture began to lose its nerve, collapsing into such dismal art as Duchamp’s porcelain urinal, the theatre of the absurd, the philosophy of linguistic pedantry, and university humanities courses gone ideological, blinkered to see exploitative power politics and nothing else writ everywhere. The search for truth had been replaced by the impulse to tear down and shock. In effect, the tantrums of the unstable teenager, all scream and no content, had taken over as the defining mood of once serious art.

Popular culture has blithely resisted corruption from its assumed superiors. Two decades ago, it set a very high bar with The Sopranos, followed by Deadwood. Both addressed the existential threat faced by characters trying to make sense of lives stripped of traditional religious belief — lives challenged by an ordeal of unbelief. Among what has followed, Fleabag, a British TV drama released in two seasons, 2016 and 2019, has more recently continued the discussion of the potential aimlessness and dread pulsing at the heart of the modern condition.

The central character, known as Fleabag, but otherwise unnamed, is 30-plus, the age of many principal characters in literature faced by turning-point life crises — Hamlet, Dostoevsky’s Nicholas Stavrogin and the narrator in The Great Gatsby come to mind. She is similarly afflicted. She fills the void with meaningless sexual encounters. The scandals monopolising the headlines here at present may be taken to reflect a similar existential panic, in which the sexual becomes unhinged and dissociated from any integrity of self or moral compass

The people around Fleabag are empty caricatures, their presence dispiriting. A businesswoman sister is cold, repressing all feeling, obsessed with propriety, rude, and without charm; her alcoholic husband, whom she doesn’t like, sponges off her and is cowardly, foul-mouthed and soaked in resentment. There is a dithering father, never finishing sentences, who is too nervous to be alone in a room with Fleabag. And his brashly domineering and insensitive fiancee, a contemporary artist producing clumsy, low-skill works designed to scandalise. Humanity is squalid with little to admire. Fleabag is herself hardly more than another empty caricature. A psychotherapist quotes her describing herself: “You’re just a girl with no friends and an empty heart.” She reflects at a retreat: “I just want to cry, all the time.”

Then things begin to change. The main agent is a priest, whom she falls in love with. The story reaches its climax with Fleabag talked into entering the church confessional and opening up, vulnerably and honestly:

“I want someone to tell me what to wear in the morning … Every morning … What to eat. What to like, what to hate, what to rage about, what to listen to, what band to like, what to buy tickets for, what to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in. Who to vote for, who to love and how to tell them.

“I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far, I think I’ve been getting it wrong … and I know that scientifically nothing I do makes any difference in the end anyway, I’m still scared. So just tell me what to do.

The priest tells her to kneel. She hesitantly obeys. In effect, she has found something to bow down before; something to believe in. The viewer glimpses obscurely, and flittingly at first, then more confidently with time, what it is. It is she herself. The transformation had already begun, with her resurrecting a small cafe, which has become packed with enthusiastic customers — vital and buzzing. She slowly brings her sister back to life, getting her to leave her husband and spontaneously rush off to meet a prospective lover. She becomes close to her father, relaxed with him, and he with her, thus freeing him — the metaphor is a trapped foot — to go ahead with marriage. In choosing the priest, it is suggested, she may have chosen God, and made love to him. An association is made with Mary Magdalene, via a painting on the church wall: Magdalene the repentant prostitute who undergoes redemptive metamorphosis in the presence of Jesus. Somehow a divinity has entered Fleabag’s life.

The priest is not, of course, Jesus. The role he plays is that of enabler rather than saviour. In fact, he himself is left stranded between a celibate vocation, that he has chosen in order to make everything firm and fixed in his life, and his passionate love for her — symbolised by a wild fox he sees stalking him. His vocation is partly inauthentic, as illustrated in a hypocritical rationalisation he makes to Fleabag, that he is just trying to help her.

Fleabag regularly speaks out of camera, directly addressing the viewer. These asides signal detachment from the events of her life — life is a painful joke for her. They also signal self-insight. The asides stop once she becomes intimate with the priest, but return in the final scene, at night, as she walks off alone into the distance, turning back to face the camera, waving and smiling, accompanied by the lyrics: “I’m going to be alright.” The ending is reminiscent of Mark’s Life of Jesus, which closes with a young man dressed in white sitting inside an empty tomb, looking out to address the reader: “Don’t be alarmed!”

Although the significance of Jesus has been lost on most people today, a kind of saviour longing seems to endure. The Messiah is forgotten, but his archetype continues to throb at the heart of Western culture. In the case of Fleabag, it is not an external figure, the priest, arriving to point the way and tell her how to live her life — although she does ask for that. What she discovers is rather a saviour within herself. Her story vindicates the authenticity maxim of our time: to your own self be true. But only if that self has found its own centre of gravity, equilibrium and purpose. This is precisely what Tony Soprano, in The Sopranos, seeks and fails to find, with his own private ordeal of unbelief spinning his life fatally out of control. Fleabag has somehow connected with the inner fibre of her being, to find it awakened and speaking through her life as lived. The crying is over.

John Carroll is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, La Trobe University.