Hanna Fahl: the Russian doll makes me wish that time is not going straight forward the whole damn time

The year is so far the best series, the ”Russian doll” (Netflix), and I don't know how many tanketexter I read about it the last few weeks, for it is exactly so fastidious intricate and balanced that it invites layers of interpretation.

Natasha Lyonne (who created the series along with Amy Poehler and Leslye Headland) plays Nadia, a game programmer with intimitetsproblem, stuck in a tidsloop where she repeatedly dies and is thrown back to a specific moment in the bathroom on her own 36-anniversary. (To get it over with: yes, the concept is similar to ”groundhog day” with Bill Murray from 1993, and no, there is nothing you need to devote energy to be annoyed at.) After a bunch of failed attempts to escape the inevitability of death, she runs to Alan, who is stuck in a similar tidsloop that seem tightly intertwined with her own.

It should be repetitive dull to look at, but instead it's hypnotic sucking. Small details change; the worlds, or the copies of the worlds, which Nadia and Alan are harvested on a conveyor belt, degenerates slowly. Fruit rot, things disappear. Natasha Lyonne shimmers in the starring role, or ”shimmers” is the wrong word, for she is so far from the centuries you can get – she rasps horse, has a blasé body language, draws credible take deep drags.

It is circular is eternal. But it linear, which means change, it also has a direction: inexorably and relentlessly forward towards the end.

”Russian doll” am I of an essay by author and writer Meghan Daum: ” My life at 47 is back to what it was like at 27.” It is hauntingly perfect bredvidläsning to the tv series. After a couple of decades of what Daum himself describes as ”as close to beat me to the rest that I will ever get” (that is to say, a marriage), she is again single, and life has formed a circle. She is back where she once was, at a messy desk with cheap sushi and a the exceeded deadline, Friday evening, alone in a skruffig apartment in Manhattan.

A real-life tidsloop therefore, it is not a depressing essay. A bit melancholy, but the Daums realization that the pendulum was destined to swing back to exactly this position is deeply satisfying. What would the young Daum say, she asks, if she saw herself now? ”It is as far as we ever were meant to be. (...) At some cellular level it will always be Friday evening at 20 o'clock, at a single messy desk. (...) How antiklimaktiskt it is, it is also just as it should be. Everything has its fixed point.”

The cyclic has its definite charm. And is not a part of the horror of ageing, the idea of not being able to repeat the same old cycle? Not having access to it, where the deep-rooted state of the center point to revolve around, to lose something you once had. It is not by chance that Nadia in the ”Russian doll” is stuck in just his 36th birthday, that she constantly wakes up in the middle of a wild party which had been able to celebrate a 28 - or a 19-year-old. The circular is eternal. But it linear, which means change, it also has a direction: inexorably and relentlessly forward towards the end.

is all about – even if it receives to shrink the series to a simple moral – is human relationships and how they build and attach a. Without them rattling around loose in the existence, outside and on top of the actual passage of time. It is true after all. But I want to defend myself against the description of the loopandet as something fundamentally tragic. It can be a favor, to which Daum find a satisfaction in getting to live the same moment as twenty years ago. A messy desk. A härjig birthday party. A sense that time may not have to go straight forward the whole damn time, and if not around, at least in a tight spiral.

Here you can read more texts by Hanna Fahl, for example, about how she thinks the story of Fyre-the festival is a great work of art.