Outside of my healthy appreciation for her swag, her looks, her sense of style *insert drool emoji*
Me: Dude, have you seen Master of None season 3?
To my horror. To my shock. But not my total surprise…
Him: Nah, Lena is on my prohibited watch list
I googled my good attractive sis and found that there seems to be a thread of people who aren’t fucking with her work. Granted, the artist’s life is one of pure subjectivity, WHICH IF YOU WATCHED, she takes us on a poetically shot cinematic expression of just that struggle.
Look, I get it.
“Them” was a hard watch. It wasn’t just hard, it was demoralizing, and at times the brutal nature of the imagery was unyielding. I could only stomach a few episodes. That type of mental foray into the worst side of humanity is hardly my jam. Overy cruelty gives me nightmares. There were moments in Them where I didn’t know what the story was, but rest easy with me, saints. MON isn’t that, I promise.
Is it an easy watch?
Eh, but at least it is beautiful. Without too many spoilers, it’s a deep dive into the concept of love, divine timing, love over time, growth, and discovery. But is any of that stuff ever really “an easy watch”? As someone who has just turned 30, I take full authority of telling you all, Nah bitch-it ain’t.
And that’s ok.
Denise and Alicia made complicated events look beautiful; she gave space for the actual realness of life to come amplified on the screen with dignity and curiosity of an everyday experience.
My favorite part of the entire bit was the episode that focused on her partner, Alicia. Played by Naomi Ackie, who gave me everything I asked for and more. She is a newly single, divorced, brown queen that wants to have a baby. While the IVF narrative isn’t necessarily new, she does us the justice of giving basic education to the depth and effects that the bipoc queer community must navigate in pursuit of starting their families. While it may not be everyone’s story, it is someone’s, and the telling of this one story opened my eyes. It didn’t force the gratitude of being a heterosexual fertile woman down my throat. Instead, it offered it gently in the persistence of Alicia, in the tension of her voice over phone calls with her doctors, the humanity that bubbles up when she’s looking at the obstacles mounted against her. It just felt normal.
Everyone deserves normal.
There is so much beauty in the race our characters are running. She makes it easy to forget we are always running, love, or from it, then running back at it again.
The best part is in the complexity of the ending; there is some time hoping that fell a bit out of place for the format of the first two seasons, but I hardly mind.
To see Denise and Alicia present in their love yet distant in their lives is truly a homage to the complexities of love in this age. To see them back in their kitchen, except not theirs, back in their element, except using borrowed moments from the world that once was ripped my heart out and left it thumping in front of me. This is a fate I’ve grappled with multiple times for myself, leaving the man I love to pursue the things I love, yet with him, my love remains. Unchanging through time and space. Sweet, beautiful tragedy. It’s the exploration of such an idea that made me love the entire season.
So no, she ain’t canceled… but if she were, maybe she’d want to hang out or something kick it in remote hiding, smoke a blunt, and teach me how to take simple expressions of emotion and make them magical.
