The Unreliable Unreliableness of “The Affair”
When it comes to television, The Duchess and I have very low standards. We’re talking The Ranch on Netflix low. I will not apologize.
So, take my thoughts on the scripted dramas I consume with a grain of salt, because I am a guy who is at least willing to feign amusement at watching The Ranch in order to make his wife happy. Though I do not, it should be noted, feign it well.
Another show we watch is Showtime’s The Affair, starring Dominic West’s American accent and Ruth Wilson’s epic eyebrows. If you’ve never watched it, it’s about a middle-aged man who blows up his affluent family by having an affair with a woman he meets while on vacation in the Hamptons, and the ongoing ripples going through everybody’s lives as a result. It’s a bit melodramatic and soapy, but it’s fun. Except for the unreliable aspect.
Part of the show’s pitch (which I’ve discussed in a previous post about the show) is that each episode is divided into two sections, usually, from two different points of view. For example, the Season 4 premiere was split between Noah and Helen, a divorced couple, showing much of the same events from their different POVs. In theory this is interesting—sure, it’s been done before, but unreliable narrators that are explicitly unreliable are always interesting, in my opinion. Playing with the idea that reality isn’t set, that we all bring our bullshit to our memories—not to mention the fact that memory is itself incredibly unreliable to begin with—has a lot of potential. And there is some fun in the way The Affair will show us how one character perceives another. In Noah’s section in the premiere, for example, he sees himself as occasionally confused or upset, but generally sane and rational. In Helen’s memories he’s a jittery asshole who causes more problems than he solves.
Cool. Cool cool cool. The main problem is that instead of making these differences subtle and rational for the viewer, they go off the deep end.
Seriously, Mariachis?
The unreliable nature of everyone’s memories make the characters seem insane, because they are remembering vastly different things—in every sense. For example, in the premiere Noah tags along with Helen, their kids, and her new beau to a Mexican restaurant. In Noah’s recollection, the place is a lowbrow joint with a Mariachi band and a lot of loud chaos. Helen’s memory sees every detail of the place differently. There is no band, there is no noise, and the place looks totally different.
Why does this bother me? Because when two people go to a restaurant they might remember the evening differently, but they rarely hallucinate a Mariachi band. Or the lack of one.
In other words, the show is using a machete on the unreliable device where a butter knife would do. I’d argue that the unreliable aspect of the POVs would be even more effective and powerful if they kept the spot-the-difference stuff to the small things, the tiny details, and made those details more thematically interesting. I can totally buy that Noah and Helen remember each other completely differently. But when you throw in such stark differences in the visuals and physical aspects of their memories, I get distracted.
There’s a lesson there for us writers, of course: Less is more. Unless your whole point is that more is more, in which case of course you can ignore this lesson, this supposed rule I just made up, and do your thing. You can break any ‘rule’ or do any sort of ill-advised literary trick if you can pull it off. The Affair‘s problem is that it’s not pulling off what it’s trying to do.
