Review of ‘Friends: the Reunion’: the one where they grew up
“Friends: the Reunion” - cathartic rumination on days gone by or exploiting nostalgia for profit?
Image from Flickr.
Nostalgia is bound to the very concept of “Friends”; the nomenclature of each episode prefigures future reminiscence, “remember the one where…”, and our obsession with nostalgia is perhaps devastatingly acute now, as experiences have translated into memories. The sentimental, if saccharine, reunion demonstrates our need to cling onto the past.
From 2019, “Friends” was no longer a comedy, but an antidote to isolation – in both its abstracted and physical, pandemic form – a comforting fantasy of an age of innocence. But it is indeed a fantasy: conversations now harmonise with ringtones and notifications; inter-gender adventures are mediated by a culture of distrust, and, consequently, film and television have often relocated the sexes into ladies’ nights and mens’ clubs (think “Sex and the City”, “The Hangover” and “Bridesmaids”).
Marta Kauffman, the show’s creator, describes “Friends” as “about a time in your life where your friends are your family” and, indeed, it is an ode to twentysomethings – the liminal phase of adulthood in which intimate friendships lend a kind of structure lacking in career or romances. For myself, someone who watched the series aged 12 and is now entering my twenties, the show’s dreamscape dimension, a false reality in which days are punctuated by pizza deliveries and little else, exists as a safe escapism. For my mum, who, like the characters, was in her twenties at the time “Friends” aired, each episode has the function of a mirror. They reflect who she was when she watched it, yet also distort and romanticise.
Watching the sextet 27 years on shattered the rose-tinted glass: while the chemistry still thrummed, so did time – many years had clearly passed. When they were not visible in the delicate, Botox-concealed lines that adorned the friends’ faces, they were manifest in the emotional chasm between the six. While Le Blanc embodied Joey’s unabashed charm, Perry, who physicalises sarcasm in the show, tempered an intense vulnerability with painful levity. The six actors, who enacted the script with such cursive and calculus, at times seemed to conflate with their fictional counterparts, yet here Perry reminds us that, for the human beneath the character, life is not backed with a laugh-track.
The currency that “Friends” has generated among Gen-Zers is a testament to a rare cultural phenomenon that has only become more phenomenal with age. In conversations with my friends, “moot point” often becomes Joey’s bovine equivalent, “I’m fine” accrues two octaves in a Ross-like pitch, and I frequently analogise my frizzy hair in this heat with Monica’s Barbados curls. Although simplistic in its formula, a portrayal of six post-collegiate friends: Rachel (Jennifer Aniston), Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow), Monica (Courteney Cox), Ross (David Schwimmer), Joey (Matt LeBlanc) and Chandler (Matthew Perry), the staple of the series is the comfort that comes from the absence of mobility. None of the central characters are driven by a corrosive ambition (and in ‘The One That Could Have Been’, we understand why). Perhaps why the final episode, some twenty years ago, felt painfully symbolic, was because reality had superimposed itself onto the oasis, disturbing the temporal space in which I believed our six friends would be in perpetual stasis, without a future. Yet change – its inevitability and its irrevocability – flowed, and, with it, youth ebbed away. The ode ultimately became an elegy; the familiarity that was the intangible hook of “Friends” gave way to a melancholic metamorphosis, and the delicate limbo they inhabited was fractured. Like all good things, it was ephemeral, yet the thereness that is the leitmotif of the series transcends time: as the Rembrandts mused, they, indeed, will always be there for us.
The timelessness of “Friends”, however, is somewhat undercut by the dated notes of transphobia, homophobia, and sexism; where Chandler and Ross are lustful quasi-celibates, Joey typifies the chauvinistic woman-eater, consuming women like “ice-cream” (“grab a spoon!”, he advises Ross). Gender difference forms the locus for much of the humour, particularly when socially codified qualities are transposed and twisted: in one episode, Joey’s sensitivity and idiomatic “it’s not what you said. It’s the way you said it”, is equated with femininity – “oh my God, I’m a woman!”. Further, glaringly, the reunion did not confront the imperative for the diversification of the cast, despite an increasingly inclusive television landscape and the fact that the guest stars raised a glass to the multiculturalism of the world that Friends touches. Such bon mots as “no uterus, no opinion” have seeped into the vernacular of more than 100 countries due to the show’s international syndication.
The “Friends” reunion was, ultimately, a perfectly-timed déjà vu-fest, teleporting us and provoking intergenerational meditation on youth: for some, a past long gone, and, for others, the future. I hope that in my twenties I will find myself in the Friendszone, in a Manhattan circumscribed by a coffeehouse and an apartment in the West Village, shared with friends like the six we love so dearly. But I also hope that Manhattan will be a much more inclusive one.