TV Review: Normal People
Maeve Hastings reviews BBC Three’s latest hit TV series.
BBC Three’s new adaptation, Normal People, captures the rawness of Sally Rooney’s second novel with a tale of young, requited love punctuated by melancholia; a tale of two people coming of age, but also coming apart. Throughout the twelve episodes, directors Hettie Macdonald and Lenny Abrahamson have created a requiem for first love, set against the heady tones of Dublin and matched by the intoxicating murmurs of Frank Ocean.
Lead actors Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones breathe life into an old tale, rendering Connell and Marianne with a renewed timelessness that both resists and embraces the vectors of millennialism. There exists a kind of symbiosis between the two: both are, at different times, the ember and the other the oxygen. At times, it even feels as though they speak, or, achingly, don’t speak (Connell!), in a shared vernacular only understood by the other. Camera pans and mirroring capture their magnetism; their love often transcends lust and becomes one of unity. Each half an hour episode is beautifully understated, centring almost wholly on their humming chemistry, as they come in and out of sync. Yet Normal People isn’t just a love story: it is a bildungsroman, a story that is as much about finding themselves as finding one another – although we cannot help but hope that they will find each other again.
Rooney has been dubbed the chronicler of what she calls “that weird age where life can change a lot from small decisions”, and as time goes on and we see Connell and Marianne mature, the shaping effect of university, through loneliness, self-questioning and drunken truths, is tangible. Her vision of student life is embedded in the contemporary, with musings on feminism and free speech that form the rhetoric of English Literature freshers. The novel occupies a lacuna within literature, existing between the young adult fiction of high school romances and the adult fiction of marriage, in the liminal space between childhood and adulthood that is navigated at university.
Abrahamson and Macdonald hone in on the irrevocable shifts that Connell and Marianne undergo in the book with an evocative candour: Marianne metamorphoses into a social butterfly and Connell an alienated introvert (being in Dublin somehow exacerbates the class differences of rural Ireland) who struggles with being liked. From the point of view of an undergrad, the ebbs and flows of being a student are handled with a deromanticised realness, as the series has created an experience that feels universal. Part of the allure of Normal People, whether it be the book or its visual form, lies in its simplicity. It is moving precisely because of the nostalgia it provokes.
Connell’s softboy aesthetic operates within the same vein as Timothée Chalamet and Harry Styles, with the vulnerability of detoxified masculinity. The three of them are a synecdoche of some new age, in which the trope of bookish, sensitive male is a defining sex symbol. Feeling and mystery find host in this ocean-eyed Irishman who is as equally versed in feminist classics as he is in Gaelic football. Twitter feeds are littered with lyrics in what has become an everlasting sonnet, in which everything up to Connell’s inarticulacy has been sexualised. That chain (you know, the one that boasts almost 170,000 followers on Instagram) is a small whisper of femininity, wrapped around his manly neck like a paradox, fitting for a character embroidered with complexity.
The (un)erotic scenes in Normal People are a far cry from the sanitised yet disembodied sex which frequents our screens. However, the discussion around Connell’s treatment of Marianne is somewhat disquieting: it feels congratulatory, and has the effect of denaturalising consent, which is portrayed as anything but the norm. Perhaps unsettlingly, the depiction of sex and consent has been praised like something almost fictional, and group chats have placed Connell within the realm of a feminist dream (“imagine someone actually respecting you like that”), highlighting the problematic Hollywood wordless intimacy, bodies bedewed with sweat and little to say. In contrast, Normal People’s sex scenes feel like an extension of their conversations; watching does not feel like we are voyeurs so much as eavesdroppers.
What makes the jump from book to screen so masterful is the success in translating the interior monologue of the novel into pillow talk; between the sheets, intimacy is equally verbal as it is physical. Marianne’s dialogue feels like a stream of consciousness - “I kept thinking how much I wanted to watch you have sex, I mean, not even with me” - almost verbatim of Rooney’s lucid prose, and what is left unsaid is redeemed by introspective stares. The cinematography lingers almost uncomfortably; there is no flinching away from the waxing and waning of depression, from the fallout of abuse. The linear effect of the series is destabilising: when each fleeting vignette is put together, from the ecstasy of the first kiss to the letting go, we watch them grow up – and their goodbye to one another feels like a goodbye to their youth.