The series My Brilliant Friend has come to an end

As I have written about in previous posts, the Italian author Elena Ferrante wrote a brilliant series of books, My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child (the Neapolitan quartet), that were turned into a television series called My Brilliant Friend that currently airs on MAX (formerly HBO Max) (A New Yorker in Oslo: Elena Ferrante's brilliant Neapolitan quadrilogy; A New Yorker in Oslo: My Brilliant Friend is a brilliant HBO series). 

The series is one of the few television series that manages to capture the intricacies and the emotional depth of the books and to describe the complicated and often warped friendship between Lila and Elena. It also manages to capture the heavy and claustrophobic atmosphere of the Naples neighborhood where they live, in an almost perfect way. Each book was filmed as one season, so there were four seasons in all. Each season, with the exception of season four, consisted of eight episodes; season four was ten episodes long. We watched the last episode tonight, which was an emotional experience for me, knowing that the story of Lila and Elena's lives has now come to an end. We will never know what happens to Lila; she disappears from Elena's life without a trace. Elena, now in her sixties and living in Turin, has had no contact with Lila for a number of years prior to her disappearance. Apparently Lila had not wanted that, even though they parted as good friends when Elena left Naples with Imma to move to Turin. Lila's son Gennaro is understandably upset about his mother's disappearance, and calls Elena to ask if she has heard from her. She has not. It is at that point that Elena decides to write the entire story of their lives together--when she knows that Lila has left her life for good. She is angry at her for disappearing, but at the same time I think she realized she was finally free. 

There are several ways to interpret the ending. One afternoon, after Elena has been out walking her dog, she returns home to find a medium-sized package in her mailbox. When she opens it, she finds the dolls that she and Lila had when they were children, and which they threw into a damp dark cellar at Lila's prompting. When they went to retrieve them a day or so later, they couldn't find them. Lila said at that time that she knew who had stolen them, but as it turns out, it was likely Lila who had retrieved them and hidden them away for many years. Why, no one knows. The motif of the hidden doll reminds me of Ferrante's other book--The Lost Daughter--where the protagonist, a middle-aged woman, finds a doll on the beach and hides it away in her vacation apartment, fully knowing that there is a little girl on vacation with her parents who has lost that doll. There was an evil streak in Lila that surfaced from time to time; she could be mean and spiteful, and then suddenly nice and even kind. She pulled Elena toward her and then pushed her away. It was that kind of friendship, and Elena let it evolve that way, even accepting her role in its evolution. She rarely stood up to Lila, choosing more often to observe and reflect on the ups and downs of their friendship (and to eventually write about them). So if it was Lila who sent the dolls to Elena, why then? It was Lila's way of admitting that she had lied all along to Elena about what happened to the dolls. It was Lila's way of letting go of the past, of apologizing, of moving forward with her life after all the suffering she had been through (the disappearance of her daughter Tina) and all the suffering she caused others. But what happened to Lila? Did she 'disappear' in order to live the rest of her life on her terms? Did she commit suicide (she had talked about wanting to be deleted from society)? Did she meet an unhappy end? Did she reunite with Enzo and did they live 'happily ever after'? Did she spend the rest of her life wandering around Italy searching for her daughter Tina? Or did she accept that Tina was probably dead? If so, then she could move on with her life, live and travel without the burden of grief. And to be a bit provocative, is Elena Ferrante (a pseudonym) really Lila, or Elena? I have always thought Elena. We'll never know the answers to these questions.  

I think that with the arrival of the lost dolls, Elena understood that she and Lila were now free of each other, free to pursue their lives independently of one another. It was a strange complex friendship and a rather unhealthy one. They were both dependent upon each other for different reasons; Elena on Lila because Lila encouraged her to write and forced/challenged her to have confidence in her abilities, even though she was envious of her. Elena was also driven by fear--fear that Lila would capture Nino's heart, and a fear (that she never completely shook) that Lila was (or would have been) the better writer. Lila needed Elena because Elena provided her with emotional and mental stability and a sense of normalcy. She could depend on Elena. Lila was emotionally-unstable, whereas Elena was more rational and cold in the sense of being the observer. 

I will miss this series, miss the depiction of women's lives in Italy over many years, starting in the 1950s when Lila and Elena were children in Naples. How painful it was to see how difficult it was (and still is) for women to write and raise a family under a patriarchal system (personal and societal) where men ruled, and the often disturbing family dramas and conflicts. Elena, despite her success as a writer, is foolish when it comes to her love for Nino, who is nothing but a shallow womanizer like his father--an intellectual pretender. Nothing I write here can really do justice to either the books or the series; they have to be experienced in order to understand the depth of the emotional lives of two Italian women who each considered the other to be the more brilliant friend. But it was Elena who wrote the books, and who considered Lila to be her brilliant friend. Lila was fiercely intelligent, even brilliant, but her talents were thwarted from a very young age by an unsupportive and abusive father and by the subsequent mistakes she made as she grew up. Watching the series, you realize how important it is that children get a supportive and loving start in life and the chance to amount to something. Without that, their lives are often stunted and damaged. Elena's father gave her that chance despite the patriarchal rigidity of their generation, Lila's father did not. 

My blog posts about My Brilliant Friend

For those of you who are just now discovering the HBO series My Brilliant Friend, I can say that you are in for a real treat. I've watched all three seasons to date; the fourth season has been announced and production is underway, with new actresses to play the parts of Elena and Lila. I'm very much looking forward to the new season. The series is directed by Saverio Costanzo, Alice Rohrwacher, and Daniele Luchetti. And if you want to start with the books by Elena Ferrante on which the series is based, you can find them on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. 

Here are two posts I wrote in 2019 and 2020 about the books and the series respectively; I'm posting them again today: 

A New Yorker in Oslo: Elena Ferrante's brilliant Neapolitan quadrilogy (paulamdeangelis.blogspot.com)

A New Yorker in Oslo: My Brilliant Friend is a brilliant HBO series (paulamdeangelis.blogspot.com)

2018 - Max Richter - My Brilliant Friend (OST)

Wonderful musical score to the brilliant HBO series--My Brilliant Friend. I'm now watching season 3 which corresponds to book 3 (Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay) of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quadrilogy. Season 3 will end shortly; at least I can look forward to season 4. Quality television all the way--a pearl in a sea of mostly garbage. 

 

My Brilliant Friend and The Gilded Age

Both My Brilliant Friend and The Gilded Age are currently streaming on HBO Max, and I have to say that I am immensely glad for that. Both series make for a perfect streaming experience in the midst of the wasteland that linear television has become. Linear television is a joke; there is nothing of real value being offered for viewers. Bad reality tv has won out completely; most shows have no substance and no real value and are quickly forgotten. What happened to tv shows like Everyone Loves Raymond, Seinfeld, King of Queens, The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Friends, and The X-Files to name just a few of the shows that were popular during the 1990s and early 2000s? I could continue, but it would be pointless, because it's unlikely that linear tv will ever invest in quality programming again. If there were no streaming channels, I'd quit watching tv altogether. 

That's not to say that everything on Netflix or HBO is of high quality. It's not. Many of the crime series on Netflix are trashy and easily forgettable. I have become much more selective about the crime series I watch; I simply don't want my mind contaminated by a continual rehashing of the same themes--rape, revenge, gratuitous violence, and so on. Women are nearly always the victims of rape and gratuitous violence. It gets repetitive after a while. Then there are the psycho films; woman meets man, woman marries man, man has a secret life/lover/past and a tendency toward violence. Woman ends up being the abused person until she grows a pair and fights back. I could write this stuff in my sleep. 

Thank God for the good series like My Brilliant Friend and The Gilded Age. I've written about My Brilliant Friend before (A New Yorker in Oslo: My Brilliant Friend is a brilliant HBO series (paulamdeangelis.blogspot.com); I've read the entire Neapolitan quartet by Elena Ferrante and seen the first two seasons of My Brilliant Friend on HBO. Season 3 is now being shown and the quality of this season is just as good as the first two seasons. For me it is a perfect tv show; when I watch it I am transported to the world as it was in Naples Italy during the 1960s, a time when there was a lot of political upheaval and societal changes. The acting is excellent, likewise the storylines and the sets. I recommend the series for anyone looking for quality entertainment and a show that you will not easily forget. 

The Gilded Age was an era in US history extending from 1870 until around 1910. The HBO series focuses on the opulent lives of the New York City elite in the 1880s and the clash between 'old wealth' and 'new wealth'. The series is the creation of Julian Fellowes who was the creator, writer and executive producer of the multiple award-winning ITV series Downton Abbey (2010–2015) (info from Wikipedia). It has a Downton Abbey feel to it, but transferred to the fast-moving society of Manhattan. It is quality tv all the way, with very good storylines, sets, and acting. It mostly shows the rich as rather petty, snobby and vindictive, in other words, it's a soap opera offering quality entertainment. I've watched four episodes so far and am hooked. 

My Brilliant Friend is a brilliant HBO series

We're in the midst of a corona virus pandemic and lockdown, which I'm contemplating writing about at some point. I probably will in future posts; right now it feels like overload--everywhere you turn, there's more news and info about the virus. I've been trying to adjust to working at home five days a week, to going out very little except to shop for groceries and to take an occasional walk, and to stopping myself from freaking out every time I turn on the news. I do less and less of the latter, because it causes me such anxiety. All of us are watching videos about how to wash your hands properly, how to disinfect all items that come into your home, and how to practice social distancing and self-isolation. I'm not having major problems with the latter; stay home and flatten the goddamn curve. Keep the healthcare professionals healthy by doing so. Stop complaining that your life has been curtailed if you are complaining--no one wants to hear it. We're all in the same boat. And it doesn't help the rest of us who want to try to help the doctors and nurses stay well.

So, in these strange and apocalyptic times, what have I been doing for enjoyment? Once my work is done for the day, I watch the brilliant, moving, riveting Italian series on HBO--My Brilliant Friend. I wrote a long post in February 2019 about this series of four books, the Neapolitan quadrilogy, by Elena Ferrante: https://paulamdeangelis.blogspot.com/search?q=elena+ferrante . They haunt me to this day, and the HBO series will haunt me for the rest of my life--it is that perfect. Never before have I experienced a film or series that captures so perfectly the books on which they are based. I watch the series (so far books 1 and 2--My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name--have been filmed) and it feels so real--this is what it must have been like to grow up in Lila and Elena's small neighbourhood in Naples in the 1950s. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give the HBO series a 10. Like the books, it evokes something so utterly visceral and primal in me; it is phenomenally well-acted. I feel like I am right there with the characters--in their homes, on the dusty streets of the neighbourhood, at school, hanging out with friends in the neighbourhood or at the beach on Ischia, and experiencing the angst and pain of first love and rejection. All the actors and actresses are superlative; the two young girls who play the preteen Lila and Elena (Ludovica Nasti and Elisa del Genio) are incredible, as are the actresses who play the teenage Lila and Elena (Gaia Girace and Margherita Mazzucco). I cannot imagine the actresses themselves not being affected by the parts they play. It would be interesting to hear their thoughts on the series. I hope there will be a season 3 and 4 so that all the books are covered. It will only get more interesting from hereon in. I know it takes time to produce the series; season 1 came out in 2018 and season 2 in 2020; if all goes according to plan, perhaps season 3 will show up in 2022 and season 4 in 2024. I hope the current pandemic doesn't delay the filming for too long, I read yesterday that the virus is now rampaging through the south of Italy. We'll see what the future brings. In any case, I can wholeheartedly recommend this series, and the music soundtrack by Max Richter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W14_WJatKSE

Elena Ferrante's brilliant Neapolitan quadrilogy

I just finished reading Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quadrilogy, and I recommend it highly: My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child. It would be hard for me to summarize her books adequately in this post, but the impressions they made on me will stay with me forever. Italian men, at least at the time when the author was young (1940s and 1950s), do not come off well at all, at least in the non-educated part of Italian society, specifically, Naples at that time. They beat their wives and children regularly; the women accepted it and the children became afraid of their fathers. Men raped their wives/forced them to have sex. Poverty was rampant, as was corruption. Many of the married men had lovers with whom they started new families while still married to the first wives. Homosexual men were beaten to death. Violence was a huge part of the society at that time.

Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym for the author of these powerful books. Given their subject matter, given the author’s desire for privacy, I think it is fitting that she wrote that way. Why do we need to know who she really was? The important thing is the books, the message, the freedom with which she wrote, not holding back about anything, really. She writes from a gut place; sometimes I got the feeling that the books just poured out of her. They are fiercely honest books, filled with events that are embarrassing, cringe-worthy, frightening, and horrific (the abuse that Lila endures, for example, at the hands of her first husband Stefano, and earlier, at the hands of her father). Elena and Lila are lifelong friends; their friendship is an odd one, not easily explained and not easy to read about. It is raw, honest, at times abusive (at least Lila’s behavior toward Elena), but there is a love there that is hard to define. They seem to need each other; Lila needs for Elena to become a successful writer (she does); Elena needs for Lila to break free of Naples and to reach her potential as the smart woman she is (it is unclear if she really manages that by the end of the series). But Lila is the person who Elena looks up to. Lila is by turns brash, aggressive, rude, mean, non-compliant, ambitious, passive, passive-aggressive, kind, loving, and then not—all over again. She is mercurial and beautiful—the type of woman that all men want, at least in Elena’s eyes. She is also fiercely intelligent, which Elena talks about often--but her ambition for higher education is thwarted by her family and her circumstances. Elena is also beautiful, but much less sure of herself, and certainly not mercurial and mean like Lila. 

All of us have known a Lila in our lives. They are the women who walk into a room, and it becomes quiet—all eyes on her. She is the woman that many other women fear, because she does not seem to need men in her life, even though there is always a man there. And the men fall for that type of woman because they think she will make no demands of them like most ordinary women, never realizing for a second that this is exactly the trap that Lila sets for men. She is the femme fatale who lures them in, and then uses them for all they are worth. Given her background of abuse at the hands of the men in her early life, it is perhaps no surprise that she behaves that way and that this is the type of woman she has become. Elena grows up differently; her father doesn’t directly abuse her, but he shows little interest in her. Her mother is emotionally abusive to her, and their relationship is strained for years. Elena is smart, and as luck would have it, her intelligence as a child is recognized by a teacher who essentially orders her parents to let her pursue higher education. Since there is no money for that in her family, the teacher helps her out with books and other materials, as does Lila when she first marries Stefano, who is wealthy. Elena always wonders why the teacher never did the same for Lila, whose parents also had no money. The difference was also that Elena’s parents, while resenting the teacher’s intrusion into their lives, obeyed her orders, whereas Lila’s parents would never have done so. So Lila was not as lucky as Elena when it came to being able to pursue an education. Lila tried for years to keep up with Elena, and Elena helps her by sharing her books with her, but Lila realizes that it is impossible to keep up, and because she cannot enjoy what Elena is enjoying, she rejects it utterly and begins to snipe at Elena’s progress and success. And so it goes for many years. Most of the Lila types in this life do not end up with happy and successful lives; rather they crash and burn in middle age when their beauty starts to fade, and they often end up friendless.

Elena and Lila’s friendship is a strange mixture of caring, not caring, jealousy, envy, ambition, thwarted ambition, fear, abuse, melancholy, bitterness, sometimes happiness, but most often confusion. Elena is never sure where she has Lila, and by the time she stops caring about exactly that and begins to live life on her own terms, she is in her late twenties. By that time, she has watched the married Lila seduce Nino, her first love, run off with him to live with him, and then watch as Nino leaves her behind and disappears. Lila’s life descends into a chaotic mess, but as time goes on, she achieves some sort of success; she lives in Naples with Enzo, the man who rescues her from Stefano, and with her son Gennaro (who is Stefano’s son). They learn about the computer world together, and start their own computer company. For a while, they earn good money. But as always, life steps in, tragedy hits, and the misery starts all over again.

Elena leaves Naples and marries Pietro, and they have two daughters together. She tries to keep writing after the success of her first novel that was published shortly before her marriage, but she struggles with her ambition and trying to find time for it all—writing and taking care of a husband and family. She struggles with confidence and lack of it, with confusion, with trying to understand the society and politics around her, and with trying to understand her relationship with Lila. She feels guilty, I think, for her success, certain that it is actually Lila's doing. She never seems to be able to accept that she is just as intelligent, if not more so, than Lila. Her intelligence includes being able to adapt to situations, to accept what she cannot change. Lila never learns that, and becomes brittle as she ages. Elena is by turns reflective and realistic. She understands that even though Pietro is an academic like she is, he does not support her academic endeavors, or perhaps more correctly stated—he does not think that her academic career is as important as his own. And then Nino reappears in her life, and her life descends into chaos. Suffice it to say that Nino is a destructive force in the lives of those he inserts himself into. Smart women, foolish choices. Lila and Elena are two women who fit that bill.

Elena Ferrante grew up in the 1940s and 1950s; we grew up in the 1960s and 1970s. By that time, roles had changed for men and women, or at least the expectations of what men and women would have as roles when they married. Feminism changed a lot of things, for better and for worse. Strangely enough, it never occurred to me when I was young that anyone would want to punish me or any other woman because we were intelligent, or try to stifle it, or try to dominate us and force us to pretend that we were not smart or that we would not use our intelligence. I understood later that there existed people—men and women—who wanted to do just that, out of envy and spite. Sometimes men were downright abusive to women who were intelligent and ambitious--the women who wanted a marriage based on equality and mutual respect. When I have spoken to priests and other adults about how women were often treated badly by husbands, some of them would say that women should ‘do their duty’ and submit to their husbands.  I once challenged a priest by asking him why women should ‘obey’ a man, as in “Wives, obey your husbands as you obey the Lord. The husband is the head of the wife, just as Christ is the head of the church people”, when so many men forgot the other saying—“Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it….” I got no answer, and that’s because there are very few men who love their wives as Christ loved the church. He knew that just as well as I did, but he couldn’t admit it.

Ferrante’s novels made me reflect on so many things, and those reflections have made me sad, as I knew they would, because they reopened personal wounds and touched on events that happened many years ago. But my life is so much richer for having read her books. When I look at our society now, there is perhaps less violence (there are laws against wife-beating and child abuse), but there is rampant use of pornography that has become increasingly violent against women. I don’t know what to make of society anymore, and I often ask if we really do want peace. I am looking for respect between the sexes, and I don’t see much of it. Even in the Catholic Church, there are huge problems when it comes to attitudes toward women. I think that the church needs a huge overhaul and that it needs to re-evaluate where it wants to go, because at present, it is no longer the moral force in the world that it used to be, and that people want it to be. I also think that it needs to clearly examine its attitudes toward women; it does defend them, yes, but it has a problem, like most of society, with highly-intelligent women. I have seen some very good marriages in my lifetime, but I would not define most as happy. Marriage works well if there is love there (including sexual love), but since no one can really define love properly, there is an element of luck in all of it. People can and do change over time, and become better people, and that will lead to happier marriages, but when I look at the pain caused by one party toward the other, when I look at all the unhappiness I have seen in marriages, I am surprised that the divorce rate isn’t higher than it is, at least in Westernized countries. Having said that, I think that marriages where both parties work (inside the home or outside of it) and respect each other’s abilities, where both have similar education and value systems, also when it comes to raising children, have a better chance of success than very traditional ones where the wife has been forced by a man, a society, a patriarchy, or a religion, to choose that traditional life, which often leads to frustration and unhappiness. Unfortunately, Catholic men are also quite unenlightened about many things concerning women, their wives/sisters/ mothers/daughters, and what women want, regardless of whether we are talking about Naples, Italy, southern Europe, Britain, or the United States. Ferrante’s novels work because she throws light on attitudes and behavior that most people would prefer stay in the shadows, in the dark. She throws open the doors and the windows and says, these are women’s lives and they are not easy lives. Pay attention.