Subtitled Ep 2: Normal People DiscountEDU

Episode Notes
Normal People: College Relationships, Mental Health, and the “Perfect” Man

V: Hi, this is Victoria Benefield. 

L: And I’m Lami Zhang 

V: Welcome to Subtitled, a podcast where two fake film students take a look at popular movies and TV shows. Seriously, Neither of us can get into any film classes, if anyone knows how please help us. 

["Wirklich Wichtig (CB 27) ," by Checkie Brown, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0]

L: This episode contains strong language, and discussions of mental health and familial abuse.

V: And the overwhelming hotness of a chain-wearing Irish man. 

L: Today, we're talking about Normal People. An Irish show that follows Marianne and Connell through high school and college, as they weave in and out of each other's lives. The show focuses on relationships, mental health and masculinity.

V: Today we have a special guest Kevin Park, a second year vocal performance major, who's a big Normal People fan.

K: What up. I love this show a lot. 

L: The show starts off with a pretty toxic relationship between Marianne and Connell. 

V: They both have a lot of growing to do at the beginning, because it's high school and they're both dumb and Marianne had never been in a relationship before. And then they jumped into things pretty quickly. There was a lot of that, like first love, like it's super exciting, but then they also have no idea what they're doing at all.

L: Right. It's kind of a weird mixture of a physical relationship and like a really twisted, buried underneath emotional connection that neither of them kind of know how to go forward with. 

K: But they get to explore feelings and thoughts that they've never had to experience before. They got to express how much they feel like through intimacy and through, you know, sex, which I think like brings up this larger topic of like how intimacy is dealt with within relationships. And also just in film and TV in general. 

L: I read this article that said, that there was an accumulative 44 minutes of sex portrayed in the entire show. And I was like, this is interesting. They make the sex and intimacy seem really realistic, especially like your first time and your first love.

K: There's like one part that I remember. It was just like the first ever time I've ever seen, in like popular film or TV, consent just being shown, so normally, just a part of sex and a part of like having your first time. And I thought that was very powerful, cause that's something that has been a dialogue within our Northwestern community. 

V: I think a lot of times in media, film and TV specifically, there's kind of this implied consent that’s shown where like the couple, just look each other in the eyes and they just both know that now's the moment, right? And then I feel like this show really breaks that standard.

L: Right? Like one of the major themes of the show is communication within a relationship. 

K: It's like a mirror to us in terms of like, how we think that we are being communicative. Like Marianne asked, do you love me or something? and Connell’s, like, obviously, but she's like, who is it obvious to? You know, there's this level of miscommunication between the two of them that really mirrors to, like, are we being communicative to our partners and our relationships, whether, romantic or, you know, like a friendship or whatever.

L: The first time they broke up in college was pretty memorable, when Connell goes back to his hometown and he's afraid to ask Marianne to stay at her place. I was really confused as to why they broke up, cause clearly they're so in tune with each other physically and mentally, but their failure to communicate kind of just ruins their whole relationship.

K: We all know when we watched the show, like, just say it just like talk to them, just talk to them. Right. And like, we talked to our friends about relationships, whatever, it is, like, just talk to them. But none of us really, really want to do it. And I think it shows