Transparent - Table of Contents

Season One: 

Pilot
The Letting Go
Rollin
Moppa
Wedge
The Wilderness
Symbolic Exemplar
Best New Girl
Looking Up
Why Do We Cover the Mirrors

Transparent – And I know that he loved his family.

Transparent: 1x10 Why Do We Cover the Mirrors.

Ali: So why do we cover the mirrors? What does the bible or the Torah say about that?
Raquel: It’s not in the bible, it’s a tradition. It’s about being free of vanity, it’s about being free of that extra level of being seen, just letting us be. 

It’s Ed’s burial, but the funeral itself and the shiva afterwards are, of course, not about Ed at all, nor about the effect that he had on his loved ones, or his life. The most moving speech comes from the female security officer of the retirement home he lived in the last few years of his live. She recites a poem and seems more affected by his passing than any of the assembled mourners, some of who, when asked about a favourite memory, either “pass” or tell stories about themselves with no connection to Ed. This is, naturally, what the Pfefferman’s are about: with all of their drama, there is barely ever place for anybody else, and they don’t make the effort of including anyone – until the final moment of the episode, which feels like family, finally, everybody including Josh’s biological son, so ill-at-ease with his politeness and manners, connected at the dinner table. 

But Raquel’s explanation of the tradition works in many ways. For one, the whole season has been about Maura’s need to be seen by others the way that she sees herself, to be able to strip the costume that she has been forced to wear her whole life, to become herself in the eyes of her loved ones and then the whole world. Sometimes being seen is necessary to be, and not being seen – because she is forced to hide for her own safety or to keep up a façade – is profoundly hurtful. On the other hand, the shiva is meant for Ed, meant to have him remembered, so perhaps Raquel is asking everybody to forego the constant process of self-revelation and self-involvement for the evening, for the sake of the man who only wanted to bring cheer to the lives of those he loved. It fails, of course, inevitably. 

Ali: Did Josh ever tell you that he loved you?
Syd: You know how a serial killer wants to see in your eyes, you know you’re gonna die. Well, Josh wants to see in your eyes that you love him. You never met anyone like him before. What’s crazy is he told me about that but then it was still happening, I was still that person looking at him, it was just a total mindfuck.
Ali: I don’t even really care about that. I mean. It’s really just the fact that you lied to me, that you both lied to me together.
Syd: So… shall I go to the shiva?
Ali: You don’t have to come to that.

This works with the mirrors too. Josh reaffirms his importance and his existence by seeing that others love him, but he never reflects on how he feels about the women in his life. When he comes to the realization that he loves Raquel (and he has professed his love several times before, to Rita and others), he assumes that it will change everything, that the mere words change reality, while from Raquel’s perspective, she is only just realizing what it means to be in love with a person like Josh (Ali tells her that Josh is addicted to being loved, and when Josh realizes that someone has been talking to Raquel, he lists those who could possibly be responsible, who are qualified to make that statement about him – and it’s a long list, one that doesn’t even include Ali). 

And then there is Colton, desperate in a very naïve way to discover where he is from – the very place that we have just discovered in detail – and so earnest in his wish to find a connection to his biological father. 

Josh: It’s just terrible timing cause I’m really fucked up now. I’m fucked up all the time. And I’m not sure you’re gonna like me.
Colton: No matter what happens I’m always gonna like you.

It’s the promise that Josh desperately needs, someone who likes him unconditionally, someone who is already saying that he will forgive even though he has only just met him. 

Ali: Because that’s our family religion, right, secrecy.

Ali has been trying to figure herself out this whole time, and she has failed utterly, mostly falling back on imitation, trying on different suits to see if they fit. Raquel’s words resonate with her, and she imagines what her life would have been like with more guidance, if she hadn’t been left to her own devices – if she hadn’t been allowed to call off her bat mitzvah (she was adamant that she wanted it called off, but also finds it impossible to forgive that Maura went along with it because she wanted to go to the camp). It’s the kind of fight that has been building up for years: Ali, completely financially dependent on Maura, is denied the right to call her out on her mistakes because of her dependence. Maura, still frustrated and angry over her children’s lack of support, asks: “I have a question for you, now that you’re not on the payroll anymore. Do you like me? If I didn’t give you any money, would you even talk to me?” Mutually unforgivable things are being said. 

They are all around the dinner table in the end, but also all still broken, Josh without Raquel but with a son who sees something in him that he can’t see in himself, Sarah about to get married to Tammy, an idea that can only end in disaster, Ali back at the table but reluctant to join the circle, and Shelley and Maura, still so oddly close in their mutual dysfunctionality and shared history, feasting on the remains of the wake in the home that has housed all their secrets. 

Random notes: 

Tammy uses the shiva as an opportunity to point out what she’s done to Maura’s house. And laughs in Sarah’s face when she asks her to marry her (we don’t see how this is resolved but Sarah tells Maura later they will get married, if this is based on something that happens later or Sarah’s wishful thinking is a question for next season).

As genuine as Raquel and Josh feel in their joy and attraction in the beginning of the ep, somehow you just want her to run run run away from this family to protect her sanity. 

“Just because you are from this family doesn’t mean you have to be like this family” says Len. 

Transparent - I’m constantly hurting you?

Transparent: 1x09 Looking Up. 

Relationships are often a mystery from the outside. Transparent explores them, explores what people do to each other and how they are transformed by how they connect and relate to each other, and most of the time, it captures the complexity of how its characters feel about each other. In 2014, Maura, distraught by the fact that her children did not care enough to support her in her brave performance, seeks out the only person that she thinks will comfort her: Shelley. Because as rude Shelley often is, as reluctant and mindless to use the correct pronouns, they’ve shared most of their life, they’ve mostly raised these kids together, and Shelley, even when she wasn’t supportive, was at least involved in Maura’s path. This is what the look back at 1994 shows: a Maura desperate to take Shelley with her on her path, desperate to include her in becoming her real self, and a Shelley who is so caught up in worrying about what everyone will think (her main sticking point is the fact that Maura leaves the house, “dressed like that”) that she can’t manage to salvage the relationship. Maura attempts to share, Shelley is incapable of sharing, but twenty years later she still knows Maura (and their children) well enough to be a shoulder to cry on. At the same time, she is struggling with her responsibility as her husband’s primary caretaker, she is clearly overwhelmed by that task, a task that nobody shares. Ali is horrified when she realizes that Maura and Shelley are planning to euthanize Ed, who Shelley claims is fading quickly, and would rather not have to suffer, but none of the kids were ever there to be supportive, they never saw the whole picture of what it takes to be completely and solely responsible for another person who will not grow up, or get better. The show doesn’t really make it clear if Ed is in fact deteriorating, in the end he is still mobile enough to escape – a gesture that could be interpreted as both an exasperation with how self-involved everyone else is (Ali is the only one giving him the benefit of the doubt of still being able to express himself), or his own choice of how he wants to go (he did love those ducks). Either way, the frustrated and angry outburst that Shelley has in front of her children shows that they do not comprehend her situation at all, or ever gave it anymore thought. Ali was satisfied by the demonstration of happiness that Ed occasionally gave, with his limited ability. Josh and Sarah thought that coming by occasionally, to talk, was sufficient. None of them understands the desperation and loneliness, in part because Shelley isn’t the kind of person that one would presume either desperate or lonely. 

A show about people changing in relationships, but also about the terrible things they do to each other without truly intending to, just because they misinterpret, miss things, don’t pay close enough attention: like Ali with Syd, sometimes all it takes is not wanting to know something, being so attached and comfortable in the status quo that another person’s suffering doesn’t register. Ali finds out that Syd has been sleeping with her brother, and in the course of their fight about it, Syd reveals that there is more to the story: 

Ali: I don’t know why you’re acting like a fucking jealous girlfriend.
Syd: I feel terrible constantly. Constantly. I just don’t even exist in this. Like you’re not listening to me. I don’t understand, stop yelling at me and stop making me feel bad about this.
Ali: What do you mean, you feel terrible constantly? I’m constantly hurting you?
Syd: It’s just hard… I feel like since… like since 8th grade I’ve just… I’ve had. Feelings for you like... That are confusing, that aren’t just like friends feelings, that are more than friends feelings, and I don’t know, it just seems weird that you haven’t noticed those before.
Ali: I’m just confused. If this is how you feel… then why are you sleeping with my brother?
Syd: If you’re feeling possessive, does that mean you might feel the same way towards me?

Ali never noticed because it was convenient not to notice, it gave her permission to share all those stories that Syd, naturally, was constantly hurt by. “I’m buying you drugs, and you’re like, thanks for the drugs, now I’m gonna do them with somebody else.” They were stories about being left out of the life of the person she cared for the most. At the same time, it’s the most terrible moment to share her feelings, since she does it out of defensiveness, as a justification for her own transgression (since sleeping with Josh behind Ali’s back is a betrayal between friends, she kept it a secret because she knew it would upset Ali). 

In a way, this storyline ties in with Maura’s reveal to Shelley: because Shelley’s concern is what it says about their past together, if this means that everything has been a lie. “

And how long has it been you? Was it you when we met? Was it you on our wedding night?” They both thought they knew and finding out something new is impossible to integrate, because it changes the past, while both for Maura and Syd, this truth has always existed (or at least existed since 8th grade, which is basically forever). 

Sarah: We’re helping by listening.
Ali: No, you’re helping by helping.

I love the final scene, Ed’s introduction to the children, the exact opposite of Maura. A man who tells a joke to make them laugh, because that’s what he wants to do: “I’m just here to make you happy”. It was a promise to them and a promise to Shelley, and then his body betrayed him, but the dignity is in trying. 

Random notes: 

Carrie Brownstein kills it this episode and it’s even more of a pleasure to watch her after seeing her killing it on a different stage, on tour with S-K. 

It’s hard not to root for Len a little bit, considering that Tammy is the worstest. “I know a little about being jealous, because people have been jealous of me my entire life.” 

The episode also shows, for the first time, the connection that Sarah and Len might have had in the past, the intimacy that comes just from being together for so long and having children, much like Maura and Shelley. 

The kids’ reaction to finding Maura at Shelley’s is hilarious: obviously two spheres of their lives that haven’t mixed in ages. 

Josh’s messy life: allowing Bianca to move in after she’s kicked out as a live-in babysitter, then inviting Rabbi Raquel over, and realizing he’s in love (the same way that he did before, the same way he always has his realizations), expecting it to change everything in everyone else’s life because somehow, things are never quite real to Josh unless everybody else acknowledges it as well. 

Transparent - We’re just a bunch of bodies, that’s it.

Transparent: 1x08 Best New Girl.

Best New Girl is one of my favourite episodes in the stellar first season of Transparent. It takes place completely in the past – in 1994. For now, we’ve watched things change gradually, characters slowly moving into new lives, making choices, adapting, but this episode captures a moment for each of them that had an impact. Transparent is so inherently about memories and how people think back on their past, trying to make sense of their present and their identities that way, and Best New Girl offers a new insight into why the Pfefferman’s (and not just Maura) are the way they are. It’s almost entirely Maura’s episode, who, in 1994, pretended to go to a political science conference but in fact joined Mark and Camp Camellia. Ali conveniently decided against having a Bat Mitzvah, which freed Maura to leave, and we get a glimpse of how desperately Shelley cares about the impression this leaves on her community, fearing that her daughter’s decision will impact her own standing (which is also an insight into why Maura couldn’t even consider living openly in 1994, if Ali’s decision alone kept Shelley awake at night). Shelley laves too, escapes from putting one and one together, distancing herself from her whole family because she cannot deal with Maura’s unexpressed needs. That leaves the children to roam freely. Sarah goes off to a protest (on the bus on the way there, a girl saves her from a gross boy – the episode doesn’t show any more than that). Josh takes off with Rita, and we get a sense of how utterly smitten he was with her, how those memories of the past must look in his head. Ali is left to her own devices, and hitchhikes to the beach, where she picks up a much older man, who does not take advantage of her. 

Maura’s experience is more complex. Camp Camellia, at first, is exuberant for her, being surrounded by people who seem to be similar to her, who can walk freely and be themselves in the safety of a camp, away from their families and everyone they are keeping secrets from. But the experience is soon tarnished because Maura realizes that this isn’t quite her community: a previous member is now frowned upon because she chose to actually transition. Maura is shocked to hear Marcy express that they are still men, just cross-dressing men, and later on, Marcy has a much easier time in transforming temporarily back to Mark when he calls his family (and he is shocked when Maura insists on keeping her dress and wig on for the ride home – being herself is bliss for her, and she will enjoy every hour that she gets). It’s a fundamental difference between the two. Maura watches how pragmatically the wife of someone at the camp is dealing with the situation (even if it was a struggle for her too), and realizes that Shelley will never be that woman, will never allow her to be herself, all the time, that she will always be stuck pretending unless things change radically. Mark doesn’t want things to change radically, he is perfectly happy becoming Marcy occasionally, while away, as a respite of sorts. There are more layers to this, as the episode hints that Mark may be in love with Maura, and realizing that she wants something else than he does hurts him too (the show is brilliant at showing how people hurt each other inadvertently by not noticing, or not caring enough, or not being on the same page emotionally). 

There is always the contrast between the idea that Maura is trapped, trapped in a body that is not yet allowed to express its identity apart from these secret places, trapped in a marriage where she cannot be herself, and the sheer exuberance and joy when she just gets to express herself and be wholly in a moment, as she is with Connie in 1994. 

Random notes: 

The title song for this episode is different. 

There must be some kind of dark magic involved in how perfectly the children are cast, and how completely they resemble the people they will eventually become in the present time. 

Mark tells his son to "man up", and the transphobia (and misogyny) coming to the surface is awful. This is not Marcy's Shangri-La.

Ali’s performance is captivating.

Transparent – You treat me like a stranger.

Transparent: 1x07 Symbolic Exemplar.

Transparent - Is there anything you want to say to me?

Transparent: 1x06 The Wilderness.

Maura: This is my family. Leonard, I am so sorry. This is my fault. I should have called you. Honey, I should have taken you out for lunch, and we should have talked. And I am sorry about the Mort, and the Maura, and the he and the she. But I am just a person. And you’re just a person, and here we are. And baby, you need to get in this whirlpool, or you need to get out of it.

One of the things that is happening, now that Maura is speaking openly about herself to her children, is that they speak openly to her as well: it’s an ambiguous thing, because in part they are more honest now because they feel that her confession justifies some of their past failings and transgressions, but it is also the opening of a dialogue, the beginning of an opportunity. Josh is struggling more than the others, especially with the question of whether his father’s identity devalues everything that happened before, if the fact that Maura used to live a lie before means that nothing was genuine. He is also struggling with his own identity as the son of a transgender woman, even though he would never speak so openly about it. He has a very deeply rooted idea that Maura’s existence is only okay as long as she lives it behind closed doors, as long as nobody else becomes aware of it, while Maura, after every fight that she has been through, has a deep desire to be open and not hide any longer. She isn’t going to be apologetic about who she is, not to anyone, not to Josh. 

Josh: You guys think it’s real? So what does this mean? Everything dad’s said and done before this moment is a sham, like he was acting this whole time?
Ali: This means that we have to start over. 

Starting over is terrifying, but it is also an opportunity, and all three of them have already started to start over anyway: Josh lost his job, and is nursing a pipe dream of owning a record label of his own, even if it is just realistic if he has the proceeds from the sale of the house. Ali is thinking about going back to college for gender studies (all three of them have dreams very profoundly connected to Maura’s identity), a dream that is only possible if she has the money from her dad to fund it. Sarah, forging a new family for herself, wants the house for what it still means to her: the source of family, the nourishing place where communal dinners are being had, where true connection happens, as much as this never happened in the past (and as much as it works for some time, until Leonard comes bursting in to destroy the harmony, until Tammy’s redecorating of their shared past becomes an issue with Josh). 

Maura wants to support all three of them. She wants to support her son, who she feels is slipping away from her; she wants to support Ali, the child that reminds her of herself the most (“You know, I saw so much of myself in you, when you were just young and growing up, and experiment in your gender confusion.”), even when Ali is so insistent that this is not the case. She wants to support Sarah, because she sees that Sarah is rebuilding the idea of family on something new with a courage fuelled by the excitement of discovering yourself. 

She wants to give the house to each of them, for each of their purposes, except of course there is only one house to give, and no conversation between all of them – but there is a family table with a newly assembled family, Maura and Davina, Sarah and Tammy, the children and Bianca, attempting something new and making it work for a bit, while Josh kisses Raquel. And I think they are all trying hard, perhaps even Leonard, and the worst thing is trying hard and still failing – all the crazy stuff is blended in with the good stuff, always, that’s the definition of family. 

Random notes: 

Flashbacks that show how much Maura attempted to somehow fit this into her marriage, and how much grim unforgivable stuff probably happened, all these wounds that will never heal – and other flashbacks of Maura and her friend, dressing up in public the first few times, and the exhilarating liberating feeling of existing publicly and being seen as female. 

Ali attempts to make sense by talking up a trans man in her gender studies class (Syd used to date the teacher), Josh tries to make sense with online porn. 

Tammy: I love books. As a design element.

(Tammy is often the worst)

The title of the episode refers to Rabbi Raquel at the synagogue, speaking about how only those born into the wilderness, not into slavery, get to see the promised land – which, of course, asks all kinds of questions about Maura and her kids (Wilderness is also a Sleater-Kinney song, with the lines “All our little wishes have gone dry / Made it to the water, waded in the lies / When we felt the heat, couldn't turn it into fire / Too caught up in our own desires”.)

The hard part about the show is seeing how each of them just inevitably lets the other down, because that is also something that happens (Maura setting herself up for so much disappointment when all she asks for, in return for all her promises, is her children’s support during her performance at the LGBT centre). 

Transparent - No more secrets.

Transparent: 1x05 Wedge. 

Wedge, as an episode that is in the middle of the first season of the show, feels like it mostly serves to set up things for later. Josh and Tammy clash over what’s to be done over Maura’s house, because Josh in traditional Josh fashion is incapable of just having girlfriends (Syd is a betrayal, because she is Ali’s friend, Kaya was someone he managed, Rita was his babysitter, his new girlfriend is, suitable, a realtor). Maura finds out about an upcoming talent contest at the LGBT centre and recruits Davina to team with her for it, and she proves that she is getting stronger and fiercer in being herself, when she meets someone she used to know (an experience she will build upon in her choice of song, later in the series) and uses the fact that he turns out to be a cheater to negotiate being “found out” as a trans woman. It’s gorgeous to see how well she is handling the situation, but devastating at the same time considering the only way that Maura is safe is by MAD, mutually assured destruction. Josh voices his frustration and shock over his mum knowing about the babysitter sleeping with him when he was fifteen for the first time, realizing that this was a seriously screwed up situation in his youth only after Syd pointed it out to him. 

The most important development comes for Ali, who seems to be struggling more than Sarah post-reveal, enough to re-examine the conditions of her childhood. The way she is invested in finding Ed when he goes missing shows her frustration and exasperation with how careless everybody else in her family is, and has always been, how self-involved they are: as she goes on to try and find her stepfather, lost in the endless similar rows of the retirement home, everybody else seems to enjoy the ironic hipster fun of having drinks at an awful restaurant. It goes far enough that Ali ends up outing Maura to Josh, not realizing that it would have a far greater impact on him than it had on her or Sarah, that he is in no way equipped to deal with it properly, or linguistically or mentally ready to realize what it means for Maura to have lived that way all her life. 

Random notes: 

It’s even more set-up: Tammy and Sarah seem happily set up in Maura’s house as their love nest, and just then, Tammy’s ex-stepdaughter comes by, and is quickly recruited as a “summer girl”, which builds up a toxic parallel to who Rita used to be, back in the day, to all of the children, but especially Josh. 

Namaste

Hey girl hey. 

This episode brings Kathryn Hahn’s first appearance as the rabbi who is supposed to read to Ed, with the kids’ mum’s only worry being that Raquel will find out how careless she is (and she will become the talk of the temple). Raquel is an interesting and necessary character, a beam of humanity and reason in a household of self-involved selfish people who barely manage to look out for anyone but themselves and mostly hurt each other more accidentally than because they mean to. 

Maura: This is, er, some people call this a necklace. This is a.. I guess you would call it a wrap. This is a ring. 

Gary: That’s fingernail polish, huh?

Maura: How’s Helen? 

And it is revealed that the mum knew, but only far enough to call it Maura’s “kink”, without any capacity or even intent to take it seriously. She knows that it screwed up her marriage, and the way they tiptoed around it seriously fucked up their kids, but she still doesn’t take it anymore seriously, or is willing to engage with it beyond calling it Maura’s “kink”. She dismisses her identity (which is understandable to the extent that it must have hurt her, but at this point, she is too far gone for that initial reaction to still shine through, there seems to be barely anything left that could be called empathy or compassion with either Maura or Ed). 

Ed comes back in the end, but he really shouldn’t. Everyone is the worst.  

Transparent – You really don’t wanna be alone, do you?

Transparent: 1x04 Moppa.

There are two moments in this episode in which somebody else names Maura – the first instance is her newfound friend, Mark/Marcy, in 1994, deciding that the name she chose for herself sounds too “strippery”, and going with Maura instead – in the second, her daughter, who has just seen her dad as her authentic self for the first time, choosing “Moppa”. In one instance, it’s someone trying to provide an elegant name for someone they admire, a name that fits – it’s a generous donation to Maura’s process of finding herself. In the second instance, it’s a child trying to make sense of someone she has known all her life who has just revealed something that changes everything she thought she knew. Both things come from the heart and are honest, deeply felt, but they connect an episode that brings many difficult moments for Maura. It’s the first time we truly see her struggling with how the outer world perceives her – she is safe and sound when she tries out make-up with Sarah and Ali, at the mall, but not so much when she chooses to go into the female bathroom later on – and her choice to move into Shangri La seemed good before, a step towards herself and away from what her family home signified, but in this episode, it’s made clear that it’s not quite as unproblematic, since she isn’t entirely part of the community that she finds there. 

The hostility is new. It’s not just her stories now, of being brave, it’s portrayed – the other women in the bathroom, fighting what they perceive as an intruder and therefore denying Maura’s very identity. Sarah’s stands up for her, fiercely, because that’s who Sarah is (and also, Maura’s choices reflect her own to chase that happiness against all odds), but it’s not quite enough to make Maura feel safe. She’s not okay, but maybe she will be, later (except later she has to content with a party next door that she isn’t invited to, that intrudes, that makes her feel not at home in her new home). 

Elsewhere, something else is set into motion. We find out that Josh is sleeping with Ali’s best friend Syd, and probably has been, for a while. Syd begs him never to tell Ali, because she is aware of how weird it is (and it is weird, in light of what we will realize about her feelings for Ali later on). She is also the first one that Josh takes seriously when she points out to him how screwed up his babysitter’s behaviour was, all those years ago, and how wrong his parents were in not intervening in what they considered an affair, but what would be more realistically have been rape (as Syd points out, if the genders had been reversed, nobody would even question it, and Josh’s argument that it was every 15-year-olds wet dream fades in the background). It’s the first time that he really confronts that babysitter about it, all those years later. He has never really worked through what it meant for him to be in that relationship, to have it be such a formative experience in his life, and he still can’t walk away from it, or really make his point. His parents were so wrapped up in their own misery (all the children keep asking if “mum knows”, but the thing is that she does and did know, and it affected her entire behaviour throughout their childhoods) to take care of their children, and that included Josh. Nobody intervened, so here he is now, incapable of being in a healthy relationship, not knowing what he really wants from one, constantly returning to the only thing he knows how to navigate. 

He doesn’t want to be alone with these thoughts because they scare him, and finally having to listen to them means maybe having to change things. It seems clear cut from the outside: the babysitter was 25, he was 15. It’s more complicated within that relationship, within the intimacy that they share, the amount of knowledge they have of each other. They can’t talk to each other like strangers, because they are not strangers, regardless of what happened, what the power dynamics were. 

And Sarah keeps asking Tammy to tell Barb, keeps trying to explain to the one person she loves that she can’t do this half-heartedly and can’t have Tammy do this if she’s not in it completely. The show bothers to portray both sides (even if Tammy continues to be hard to empathize with) – Tammy is worried about her wife and her struggle, while Sarah doesn’t seem to be worried about Len at all, he is an afterthought in this entire process because the chase for what she knows are her authentic feelings is just too important. It’s selfish, but it’s also completely unavoidably true, and she demands that Tammy follow her to prove that she is just as serious about this as she is. It’s messy, as life always is. 

Sarah: I fucking left my husband for you.
Tammy: I never told you to do that.
Sarah: You said that you wanted to spend the rest of my life with me. You said, I wanna fuck you every day for the rest of my life.
Tammy: When we were fucking
Sarah: So?
Tammy: People say shit, when they’re fucking, it doesn’t mean that their entire lives are changing.
Sarah: I love you, and I feel so ready and open and honest right now, but I’m afraid that I’m making this shit up in my head and that you’re not coming with me, and I feel like you’re just gonna delay and delay and delay. I have doped out every fucking piece of my life, and I need you to tell her the truth.

Random notes: 

“No one’s ever seen me except me.”

Sarah: Outing a trans person, it’s like an act of violence. It’s like stripping someone naked in the middle of a cafeteria and making them eat alone.

!

It works perfectly: Maura AND Ali have no idea about “femininity”, or the whole process of going to a mall and having free make-up applied but being expected to buy everything – Sarah does, because it’s what she’s known all her life. It’s an interesting parallel between Maura and her daughter, and in the process of dealing with what she now knows about her dad, Ali goes from trying to embrace that femininity to getting a very short haircut and eventually dressing up herself. 

Sarah’s “Why? Why did he wait so long” in response to Ali complaining that Maura is doing this at all is beautiful. It’s all about her, of course – why did she wait so long, why did she waste so much time in an unhappy marriage – but in defending her own right to being happy, Sarah is also always defending her father’s. 

Lovely moment at the end of the episode, with Ali and Josh dancing. The show is very good at portraying how characters connect with each other, what they share, why they are close.  

Transparent – I’m so glad you get to be who you are.

Transparent: 1x03 Rollin.

My parents moved from an apartment complex to a house when I was eleven years old. I moved with them, of course, and would only discover in the next few years what it means to leave a place behind, in an irrevocable way where the closest you will likely get to seeing it is standing in front of it. Many of my childhood memories are connected to that place, the way the light hit the wooden floor, the texture of the wallpaper in the living room. Once I did manage to go back, just walking through the park where I’d played as a kid, and made friends that by that point, I’d already lost: it was creepy. It was perhaps more haunting than it should have been because I never felt I’d really finished there, being eleven, I didn’t have a concept of what it means to move, or the rituals one should maybe consider performing in order to exorcise possible future ghosts. It was the first time I left something so definitely. 

Transparent seems to understand this feeling very well. Maura has spent years in the house that she is now packing up. She has raised three children here, gone through a divorce, survived pretending to be someone else every single day. It must be fraught, but also profoundly difficult to let go of all her memories. We will also discover in the following episodes that each of the Pfefferman’s associates different things with the photographs and collectibles of a lived life, that they have a shared history but also very divergent paths through their respective childhoods. 

Maura: Honey, are you okay with me?
Sarah: Oh god, yes, I’m happy.
Maura: Happy?
Sarah: Yeah. It’s inspiring, I’m so glad you get to be who you are. That’s who we should all be. 

All of the children will react differently to Maura coming out to them. Sarah appropriates it to an extent, uses it as inspiration to make sense of her feelings for Tammy: from the way she speaks about her, it becomes clear very quickly that she is falling, or already has fallen, in love with her again. Maura’s choice to live openly and freely seems to give her permission to claim the same for herself – to end her unhappy marriage, to chase that happiness she feels with Tammy, to be herself (“I just wonder what it would feel like who is actually moved by loving you.”) Maura watches her cautiously, both marvelling at how love looks like from a distance, but also aware of the difficulties of making these choices. 

It’s almost like Maura is fuelling Sarah, and her need to lead an authentic life becomes so pressing that she can’t help but tell Len almost immediately, after wandering the very impersonal, clean and empty house they share. He suggests therapy, because he thinks it’s a fixable problem. 

Sarah: Len, it’s me.
Len: You’re not allowed to do this, you know.
Sarah: I don’t know how not to.

It’s a debatable point, if this is a question about morals or human decency, if Sarah has obligations, if being authentic and loving completely beats all other considerations. Sarah leaves, and makes an excited phone call, overwhelmed by her own courage almost, expecting that Tammy would feel exactly the same thing she is feeling (because that’s what happens when you’re in love), and would immediately draw the same conclusions about her own unhappy marriage. Except of course, Tammy is much more hesitant than Sarah. 

Sarah is travelling back to her past, although very little is revealed about how her relationship with Tammy unravelled that first time; meanwhile Josh has been stuck there all this time. Back in the day, the babysitter that the Pfefferman’s hired to take care of him started a relationship with him. Nobody would hesitate to call it abuse if the genders were reversed, so it feels hypocritical not to do the same here – Josh has been abused by his babysitter since his adolescence, and it has profoundly influenced how he connects to other people and views relationships, and it still continues to this day, he constantly goes back to her, even when he believes himself to be in love with someone else. Even more terrible, all of the Pfefferman’s knew about it, and nobody intervened to protect him, instead Sarah, when she calls him to tell him she has found their love letters stored away in old cereal boxes, frames it as some kind of transgression on his part. He was fifteen years old. She wrote to him about wanting to marry, and have children. And now he has no clue what he needs or wants out of a relationship, or to even be in one: Kaya is no longer picking up his calls and is avoiding him. 

Maura has every intention to come out to him in that way that the first time doing it (if it’s easy, if it’s good) spurs you on and carries you – but she can’t do it in the end once she sees him in the driveway, and instead dresses up again, deflecting his guess that she is dating a much younger woman, judging be the perfume Josh can smell on her. It’s different with everyone, and it’s different with sons. 

Ali is on the sidelines in this episodes. She picks ups drugs from Syd, who listens to her stories and plans but is visibly disappointed when she realizes that Syd has no intention to take the drugs with her, but is taking them back to her newly found sex buddy and fitness instructor (to try and seduce his roommate into a threesome, as graphically described). In retrospect, it’s easy to imagine Syd going through this for the past fifteen or so years of her life, listening to these things, trying to find the right face and the right words while suffering profusely. It takes all her energy to pretend not to care, or at least not too much, or at least not in the wrong way. Another thing this show is about: how people incidentally hurt each other, not necessarily intentionally but by not caring enough and not paying enough attention. 

The episode also starts to hint what it meant for the children that Maura was leading a secret life, all the small ways that it influenced their childhood. The sneaking around. The secrets. Maura leaving her children in the car, waiting, walking into the magazine store, considering buying one, and then making that exhilarating discovery that she is not the only person in the world (and later, the desperate one that there are still a million ways that people can be different, even if they share some things). Mark (Bradley Whitford) is discreet, and helpful, and he is in the same position that Maura is in – needing to keep the two parts of his life separated. Still, there is a massive difference between something being a profound part of someone’s identity, at the core of it, and something being a play on identity, more a performance for the sake of exploring than anything else.  

They are all trapped, and sometimes it only becomes obvious in retrospect, in realizing how certain events have affected them and the course of their lives, the decisions they later allowed themselves to make. Josh can’t untangle the babysitter from every other relationship in his life, because it was his first experience with love, and it shaped him. Sarah is only now allowing herself to make choices that she didn’t when she was younger, but in a way, that can only work if another person is in the same spot, as ready as she is, and that timing between two people is so very rare. She walks through the empty house – the beauty and at the same time sadness of seeing all the traces of the past, the lines that the furniture made on the carpet, the way the house grew old with them and is still recognizably theirs, except at the same time no longer, since it lacks everything that would make it a home. It’s a haunted place now. 

Random notes:

Josh ends up getting fired when he can’t take a hint that Kaya doesn’t want him around anymore – his boss is surprisingly accommodating up to that point, hinting at the things that white straight guys sometimes get away with, but he crosses a line when he becomes physically violent and threatening (shouting “she doesn’t feel safe with me?!” at some point).   

Heartbreaking moment, Sarah watching Tammy and her dinner routine with her family, but ultimately being on the outside of it (last episode, Maura was part of the routine, but at the same time, because of who we know her to be, on the outside of it). 

Josh: I’m trying to do the right thing.

Ali gets thrown out while high takes a taxi to her dad’s. 

Transparent – This is a really big journey that we’re on.

Transparent: 1x02 The Letting Go.

Maura: Since I was a kid, ever since I was five, I felt that something was not right. And I couldn’t tell anybody, about my feeling inside, it was a different time, very different time. I just, I just kept all these feelings to myself. […] Please let me do this. People led secret lives, and people led very lonely lives. Then of course the internet was invented…
Tammy: Can’t hate on that internet. It’s magic.
Sarah: I’m sorry dad, I’m just trying, can you just help me out here. Are you saying that you’re gonna start dressing up as a lady all the time.
Maura: All my life, my whole life, I’ve been dressing up like a man.

One: Let the person do it on their own terms. Don’t push anyone. Don’t be impatient, everyone has reasons. Never, never ever take someone else’s story and tell it for them without having their permission and before they can tell it themselves. Listen. 

Transparent is a comedy – or billed as a comedy – which means that the following set-up is possible: Sarah has just “reconnected” with her great college love, Tammy. She has decided to take Tammy back to her childhood home to sleep with her. Cue Maura, Sarah’s dad, walking in at an inopportune moment, catching his daughter in the act but also being caught in – what she points out, isn’t in fact a costume – but her real self. Maura isn’t telling Sarah that she changed, or that she has discovered something new about herself. That’s the terrifying part – not, “I am different now than I have been” but “I have kept this a secret from you for all your life, I have known this about myself for a very long time but couldn’t tell anyone”. It’s terrifying, but also exhilarating, for Maura, because even though she wouldn’t have chosen that moment (the moment just presented itself and she ran with it), she has wanted to tell her children about herself for a while now. When she planned to come out to them, it didn’t work, because they were too inattentive and caught up in their own issues, but getting Sarah in this situation means she has control (because now she is keeping a secret for Sarah, they are both finding out new things about each other in that moment). It’s also interesting, even though not explicitly stated, since presumably Sarah must have had a similar moment at some point in her past – her family is well aware of what Tammy meant to her when they were in college. From how Maura speaks about Ali, as the person who seems more observant than her siblings, and better able to see her for who she is, you’d expect that she would find it easier to speak to her younger daughter first, but Sarah makes sense on many levels. 

One, allow the other person to adjust. Don’t suffer abuse, don’t make yourself smaller, but take into account that humans need to time to process new information. Two, don’t be unreasonably kind of you are met with unkindness. 

I like how the scene develops because it tells the viewer so much about everyone involved in it. Sarah instinctually asks Tammy to stay there with her and not leave her alone, even though it is clearly a very personal moment for Maura, who has no close connection to Tammy, and even though Tammy seems quite eager, and awkwardly so, to leave. This carries over to Tammy and Sarah’s relationship throughout the first season, one of them rushing head first into this amazing new thing, with no hesitation, while the other seems very conscious of all the things she stands to lose in case she does go for it. Sarah wants to rely on Tammy; Tammy doesn’t seem all that excited about being someone that Sarah wants to be able to rely on, at least not yet (to her credit, she insists on the correct pronouns, later in the car – “That was brave of her. It was. It’s hard.”). It takes Sarah some time to adjust but eventually, when she does, she turns into the most articulate supporter of her dad’s choice, someone who constantly points out when other people are being inappropriate or hurtful to Maura, or use questionable language to speak about her (which they mostly do, speak about her rather than to her). For Sarah, the two things become immediately connected, she has realized that she wants to be with Tammy, not with Len, and she sees Maura claiming the right for herself to finally be herself rather than having to perform for everyone she loves (because the secret lives lead to loneliness). The show goes back to 1989 to portray how utterly impossible that step would have been for her in 1989, even though Maura worked as a political science professor, a job that at least allowed her to keep her hair long. Only 25 years ago, there was no other conceivable option for her except to dress up, and discard the clothes that she feels would have expressed her identity. It’s dreadful, filing through secret magazines in petrol station shops with the kids in the car, wondering how to smuggle one of them home or even deal with having to walk with the magazine to the counter. The world is filled with impossibilities, and the best that he can do is connect to someone who is going through a similar struggle (except as the show will later argue, before the internet, “almost the same struggle” had to do, there was no other option, and there are in fact worlds between Maura and the friend she makes). Maura was giddy, in 1989, to have met someone who was at least more like her than anyone else she has ever met, as she is giddy now, after having come out to Sarah, for having made the first step towards being able to live openly and happily in front of her children. It’s exuberant, celebratory, and carries her through the episode, into a new friendship and towards a very big life decision. 

Sarah’s affair is dreadful, and exhilarating. They both have kids. Their respective partners connect over golf. The episode captures both the exhilarating process of Sarah falling in love again, while both of them behave like teenagers essentially, or at least have to (perhaps that’s where some of the excitement comes from, even), and the dreadfulness of an essentially failed marriage without any possible non-hostile communication suffering through its last breath, with no possible outcome that won’t leave anyone hurt. Len isn’t a villain in that story, sometimes he almost articulates that he feels like he is and has always done the right thing and just doesn’t comprehend that this doesn’t automatically lead to Sarah’s happiness. He seems to have the ambition to do the right thing, always, but at the same time the arrogance to assume that this alone should earn him everything he desires, discounting that the other people in his life have identities too (sort of a nice guy problem). They sneak out of their homes to meet each other, and talk about the compromise each of them made to have a family. 

Meanwhile Josh finds out that his girlfriend is pregnant and, the way that Josh does, since he knows nothing about himself, immediately also realizes that he wants to have that child, because it looks like a romantic and good life in his head (that does not take into account the other people involved in it, or any possible complications that deviate from his vision of living in a cabin in the woods). There are some connecting themes in the episode: how Tammy and Sarah chose to be with people they weren’t completely satisfied with to make a family, how Maura got married the first time, to the person standing closest when she was 25, how Josh interacts with his niece and nephew and realizes that he wants children. It’s more about the idea and the story of having children than the reality of it, of the other person involved. 

Maura understands her children more than they understand her, because in part she has spent the past decades of her life making choices that constantly balanced trying to be herself and having a traditional family. There will be plenty of insight into all the ways that Maura and the kids’ mum made life terrible for their kids, at least sometimes, but it’s a more interesting quest to see how they created each other, how everybody’s choices fed back and affected the other lives. 

Davina: Tell me about your kids.
Maura: Sarah, she is my oldest. I told her, and she took it, she actually took it very well. Maybe too well. I think she’s internalizing the whole thing and next thing she’s gonna have shingles. Then there’s Joshie, he’s my very successful son. He’s in the music business, he is very very very image conscious. You know, always, the now thing, the now restaurant, the now jacket, the now sunglasses, the now girlfriend, the now dungarees. And then there’s Ali, she’s my baby. That girl does not seem to learn, very smart, 99th percentile on her SATs. Out of the box smart. She just doesn’t seem to be able to land.

There is so much tenderness in her voice when she describes her children, capturing them perfectly and also summarizing what they struggle with, but not in a judgemental way. It’s a beautifully realized scene, Maura expressing her love for her kids while walking around in Davina’s flat, observing the artefacts of her life, admiring how this woman carved out a place for herself (and at the same time lived Maura’s nightmare, losing everyone in her family when she made the choice to come out). 

Davina: You know, sweetie, this is a really big journey that we’re on, and you just started on it, so you gotta learn to let go of everything anybody thinks. A really really good friend of mine said this to me, when I first transitioned. She said to me, in five years you’re gonna look up and not one of your family members is still gonna be there. Not one.
Maura: Was your friend right?
Davina: Yup.
Maura: That’s so sad.

This is what Maura is most afraid of, but at the same time Transparent is about letting go and moving on: she is moving out of her house. She makes the choice to move into a recently available flat at Shangri-La, to have a room of her own surrounded by people who have gone through a similar struggle, and in part she does because of everything that this house signifies for her, discarding the freedom that the women’s clothes promise to come home to her family, idyllic and lovely but at the same time the cage she had to live in for so many years. It’s about the joyfulness of human connection and the horribleness of being trapped together with violently different ideas, of identities clashing in close confines, but also the beauty of sharing a life and being seen by other people.

Random notes: 

CAUTION WHILE PASSING THROUGH THE GOOSE POPULATION

One of my favourite things about the episode is the contrast between the support group that Maura goes to and the dinner party that happened in the previous episode – here, when Maura speaks, everyone is listening and watching her attentively, giving her a chance to tell her story without interrupting or interpreting and judging. (and also the understated way in which the episode addresses the prevalence of alcoholism and drug abuse that comes with having to go through that struggle in a mostly hostile world).

Also a good parallel: the way that Maura was unconditionally supportive of Ali in the last episode while her mother’s first question to her is, “did you get a job yet”. 

Transparent - It is so hard when someone sees something you do not want them to see.

Transparent: 1x01 Pilot.

Sometimes shows find you at the right point in your life. Sometimes they don’t and when you come back to them, after something has fallen into place, they just make that much more sense, and figuring out why they didn’t the first time around becomes part of understanding the show and yourself better – but sometimes, rarely, they come around at the right moment straight away, and are all the more resonant and powerful for it. 

Transparent is a show about family. It is a show about the relationships between siblings and children with their parents, the way growing up in specific households, with their customs and rules, shapes us – to the extent that they only really appear as customs and rules when we are capable to step out of that normalcy and develop the capacity to contrast and compare, rather than just take for granted what has always been reality. This is what growing up is, realizing that parents are fallible, that other people live different lives in different conditions, that things you take for granted, good and bad, aren’t normal in other people’s lives. 

Transparent takes its time to flesh out these characters, Maura and her three grown-up children, it goes back and forth between the past and the present to convey how they grew into the people they are now, how the past shaped them, and how much each of them still lives there, to an extent. It’s Maura’s decision to live authentically after so many years of dressing up as someone she wasn’t that triggers the children’s hesitant investigation of their past. It opens wounds but also possibilities to revisit wounds sustained in the past, it forces them to go back to decisions they made, consciously or not, and maybe reconsider them. Maura spent years hiding who she was, and figuring it out at the same time – the power of secrets, to both force into hiding and force into investigation – but her three children seem utterly lost in their present existence, Sarah stuck in an unhappy marriage that she seems to just have fallen into and accepted as the daily routine that it is, Josh, successful but with absolutely no clue what he wants or needs from himself and other people, in his relationships, Ali, bright and brilliant but incapable of focusing any of that on a project, scattered through iterations of herself that only obscure who she is, or could be. 

There are no simple answers on this show. The flashbacks to the past are there to paint a picture of what it meant to exist in the Pfefferman household, both from the perspective of the kids and the parents. The pathologies that the children exhibit are rooted in these experiences, but Transparent is more interested in a panoramic, atmospheric view of the family life, picking small significant moments for individual characters, but also capturing the other side of the coin: Maura struggles to become herself throughout the years, but she also knows exactly what she would risk by living more openly earlier, before her children grew up, before 1989 became 2014. She pays the price for not living freely before, but this isn’t a story about suffering – more often than not, the show captures moments of giddy triumph, when she finds a language to express her identity, and people who understand at least part of her struggle. On the show, in the beginning, Maura knows who she is – that is the process that she has gone through, those past 25 years we see in flashbacks – and she is at the point of wanting to communicate her identity to the world. She is coming out. As she is doing so, her children realize they have no clue what they want or who they are, and their father’s quest becomes a sort of catalyst. At their worst, they appropriate Maura’s struggle and rather than being supportive of her, they are too caught up in their own issues to even listen to her (in the first place, they make it impossible for her to tell them about being female when she first tries to, at the dinner table, by just making the assumption that she has cancer and refusing to afford her the opportunity to speak for herself). Often, everyone on this show is at their worst, most self-involved and selfish, incapable of perceiving other people’s struggles and suffering.  At the same time, they are all starting a  process of self-discovery, if at different speeds and with several mis-steps, that connects to their father’s story occasionally. Most of all, they are entangled in each other, both by how they relate now, as a family, and by their shared past of growing up in the same household and being shaped by similar experiences. 

It’s an interesting choice that is made in this episode, to show the children first, show them in their daily routines, their habits, and only then introduce Maura, wanting to tell her children but still wearing the costume they think is her true identity, and then failing, at the dinner table. Josh is too busy being in love with one of the musicians he is meant to manage (and we will later learn that he doesn’t know himself well enough to even be able to say “I love you” to anyone and truly mean it) – and balancing that relationship with something that looks like an affair in this first episode, but will later be revealed as something much more complicated. Ali is looking for a new project, something to focus her talents on, but for now she is stuck with having written a book six years ago that no longer pays any bills, an idea for a book to be sold at the Urban Outfitter’s Checkout Line and an obsession for a fitness trainer she laid eyes on in the park. Sarah has just re-encountered Tammy, a woman that her siblings remind her she was very serious about in college, to the extent that they planned adopting children, except now she is married to Len (and has two kids) and Tammy is married, and has a child, with another woman. 

Maura can’t bring herself to tell her children what she wants to tell them, so she gets there gradually and informs them that she intends to sell the family house – the very house that all of their shared memories are set in. In one of the most beautiful scenes in this episode, Josh and Ali go through the record collection together and find one that they both love (by a singer that Josh would not be able to represent, for all his stylistic shortcomings), and it is clear how much these siblings love each other, as much as they bicker, and how well they know each other, despite the fact that they so very much do not know themselves. Josh wants the house for the money, Sarah wants the house for herself (perhaps because her own home is so empty and loveless, sterile compared to this place filled with memories), Ali is financially dependent on her father. It’s a fraught issue, and the question of why Maura even wants to move out (which isn’t stated clearly, but maybe it is the place that she has been forced to hide herself in for such a long time, more a stage on which she had to perform an identity that wasn’t her own, that she just wants to move on and have a symbolic break with her pasta). Josh and Sarah leave abruptly, and only Ali sticks around (both because she still needs to ask for money and because she is someone who cares enough to stick around, which also makes her much more vulnerable than Josh and Sarah, or at least more obviously). 

Maura: You know, out of all my kids, you are, you can see me most clearly. Probably because we share the depressive gene.
Ali: I’m not depressed.
Maura: Boy, it is so hard when someone sees something you do not want them to see.

Which is kind of what the show is about: knowing things about yourself but hiding them, not knowing yourself well enough and only existing in a costume that you don’t even realize is one, not living authentically, and both the terror and the giddy excitement of finally coming out and being able to share yourself with others. For now, Maura only has that support from a LGBTQ group, and she has to dress up to speak to her children, a performance that takes out all of her energies, that she suffers from having to put on after so many years of not having a choice. As much as the show is about her, it is also about the children – and how Maura, in spite of contributing to a childhood that was so defined by the secret lives everyone lived, knows them so very well (while all three of them are equally completely self-involved and lack any kind of self-awareness – “They are so selfish. I don’t know how it is I raised three people who cannot see beyond themselves.” says Maura later, during a meeting). 

Ali cannot look at herself in a mirror without hating herself (and at the same time, looking for someone to push her beyond herself rather than indulging her lack of ambition and focus). Sarah cannot have a genuine conversation with her husband, because they no longer speak to each other about important things, they don’t have the time for it and they seem to have grown careless with each other, if they ever weren’t. 

The first one to find out is Sarah – after taking Tammy, her college girlfriend, back to the house she grew up in, where Maura walks in on them. 

Random notes: 

I saw the original pilot rather than this one for my first viewing of the show (as far as I can tell, only the scenes in which Carrie Brownstein and Melora Hardin took over were reshot) – and was a bit saddened to find that some of the changes made in Tammy’s and Sarah’s first encounter didn’t work as well. I thought the original was much more subtle and less clunky in terms of exposition, and perhaps a bit more playful in terms of chemistry. It doesn’t bear down terribly on the rest of the season (since in a show of people who are the worst sometimes, Tammy is very often the worstest), but it was a very enjoyable scene in the original pilot that is sadly lost here. (there is some awkward exposition here that fades in subsequent episodes – the clunkiest by far might be “I AM MARRIED TO A MAN NOW”). 

Also revealed a bit awkwardly – their parents got divorced when Josh was fifteen, and Maura got the house, while their mum Shelly remarried a man called Ed who is now handicapped after a stroke. 

I am usually apt at reading chemistry but the Syd reveal that happens later this season took me by surprise – oddly, because it’s all there from the beginning. Syd is the kind of friend who is relentlessly supportive even when she knows that a project will fail, who will never state openly that she feels left out, who only conveys her feelings through the things that she doesn’t say, while hiding behind superficial gestures of approval (and she’s been through all of this for so many years). 

Josh’s “I can’t sleep without you next to me now” is only romantic on the surface, it is in fact the first most important thing we learn about him – he cannot stand to be alone with himself, and making people love him, having a constant re-confirmation of their love, keeps him from having to confront himself.