lucifer season 4 thoughts
May. 13th, 2019 04:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mswyrrThey start off as emblems of seeming opposites in S1: Chloe is dutiful and selfless, always putting doing the right thing and doing for others above herself, and Lucifer is all about pleasure and selfishness. This is only superficial, though. He used to be an angel, a being entirely defined by duty and obedience. And she has a wild, rule breaking side, and a longing for fun.
What’s more, they’re both achingly lonely in these extremes. The show’s core meaning/beliefs are all centered on psychological truths, so the goal isn’t to be wholly selfless - that is the kind of service that broke Lucifer. And it’s clearly not making Chloe happy. But total pleasure seeking and selfishness has left Lucifer just as unhappy. In order to have true love and satisfaction in life you have to be able to give to others selflessly sometimes, just not all the time.
So they… mingle their lives, their feelings, they reach for, in each other, the things they want to connect with and express. They dance around, strive for union and balance with each other.
The reason why 4x10 reads so well as a tragedy is that it is this perfect flip of their roles: Chloe has come to a place where she can prioritize choosing the pleasure/selfishness of loving him over everything else. She knows who he is and she wants this anyway simply because it makes her happy. She’s claiming the right to do something just because it makes her happy. But, at the same time, Lucifer has come to a place of total selflessness: willing to surrender to a living death in hell to protect everyone, to chain himself to a throne he despises, to embrace duty so wholly he has no life left.
It feels “whole” in a tragic way as a resolution because it strikes the chord of the deeper themes (selfishness/pleasure vs. selflessness/duty) but in a painful way because these people have loved each other so much and learned from each other so much that they are separated by the very success of that deep connection.
It’s like a tragic version of the situational irony in the old O. Henry short story, “Gift of the Magi,” where, you know, a woman sells her long hair to buy a chain for her lover’s pocketwatch even as he sold his pocketwatch to by beautiful combs for her long hair.
Lucifer chains himself to duty for all eternity just as Chloe has figured out how to let herself want him simply for herself, simply for the joy of it.
It’s Good Stuff. But it’s also *not* in keeping with the sense of psychological truth the show is centered around, where the goal is to be allowed to be your full self - to give to others and also take things for yourself. To live instead of burying yourself alive in duty or chasing pleasure so much you have no deeper satisfactions or connections in life.
All of S4 was about how Lucifer is both his dark and light sides and trying to split them up is harmful, instead of achieving balance. Same with selfishness/selflessness IMO.
As a mythological “divine union” they represent basically everyone’s longing for wholeness. To get to be part of something greater than yourself, to be dutiful to your family/community/etc, but not to be swallowed up by that. To get to have things for yourself and be yourself too.
Anyway, that’s how I can really respect the ending, since they found the perfect way dramatically to make a tragedy work. But also why I think it cannot stand, because the story is supposed to be an affirmation of life/comedy/romance in psychological terms, not a tragedy.
🤞🤞🤞 for season 5.If Chloe didn’t have this moment:
I’m terrified! …Every story of good and bad from throughout history, throughout time, says that you are the embodiment of evil. [4x03]
And work through it, she couldn’t have had this moment:
You always talk about how much you hate being blamed for humanity’s sins.
You know, “The Devil made me do it,” and I think I know why you hate it so much – because, deep down, you blame yourself just as much… You have to stop taking responsibility for things you can’t control. [4x09]
Loving yourself isn’t easy and if it seems easy for someone else to insta-love you (coff coff Eve) they’re probably deep in some issues that have nothing to do with seeing you honestly.
I love Eve, she’s another in their beautiful array of well written complicated female characters. But she makes it really clear why she could seemingly insta-love and accept:
I thought I wanted you, but I realized I’ve just been missing the person I used to be when I was with you. [4x10]
If somebody offers to be your Stepford Wife that isn’t a good thing actually.
If it’s super easy to love someone (and they claim they have no struggles loving you) they’re probably not being themselves with you - they’re probably playing a role, the way Lucifer and Eve both were with each other.
That way lies exhaustion and resentment. Because nobody is getting to live their truth or be loved for themselves.
It’s not super easy for Lucifer to love Chloe this season: because she finally knows the full truth and he gets her full truth… that she is capable of weakness and mistakes. And that is a good thing. The best choice the writers could have possibly made.
In addition to parenthood, S4 was a meditation on what it takes to make a long-term commitment (including full knowledge of the other person, bad and good) work - just blown up to the show’s usual huge, mythological proportions.
It’s really beautiful how they work through their shit and re-discover their capacity to be there for each other very naturally: by the end they’re moving together like they used to, with that deep trust and comfort and understanding. And this time it’s wholly earned, not predicated on keeping Chloe in the dark.
It was freaking good. And it all hinged on letting Chloe be a person instead of a reward.
The romance and both of their growth arcs hinged on letting her be human like that. His entire freaking arc would be trashed without that growth and their partnership.
This show writes romance more like Pride and Prejudice–everyone has to grow and change and recognize their faults–rather than typical male fantasy romance, where it’s like… a woman just exists to be your pleasing reward.
They very clearly set up how destructive the idea of a woman as a reward is, with how Eve was created for Adam and has been trying to fill the aching hole that’s left in her sense of self ever since. If you put a woman written as a real person in that role she’ll go a bit crazy and need to get out of those destructive patterns.
They put that there to contrast with the earned, real thing Chloe and Lucifer struggle to have together. And the fact that, as a story, they refuse to make Chloe exist solely as an easy reward.
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Date: 2019-05-14 03:09 pm (UTC)Season four was SO GOOD ♥
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Date: 2019-05-15 10:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-06-19 01:16 am (UTC)