‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’ Destroys Delusions, And Does It With A Song
“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” isn’t a stereotypical musical romantic comedy; with a giddy but gorgeous leading lady, her stoic lover, and their story told through perfectly pitched tunes. But the show’s protagonist really wants it to be.
Main character Rebecca (Rachel Bloom) lives in a delusion. Season one started with Rebecca quitting her job at a high-profile law firm to move to California. She moves to try to be with Josh (Vincent Rodriguez III), her ex-boyfriend from camp when she was sixteen, after she runs into him on the street. She desperately wants her happily ever after, even if the circumstances don’t make a lot of sense.
Each episode has two original songs, written by Bloom, that give us insights into Rebecca’s thoughts and how she views the world. She prefers to romanticize her life through song. Rebecca’s songs are blunt and narcissistic, telling the audience exactly what’s on her mind. They’re pure satire to monologue show tunes sang to an audience on stage during a musical. Each song is framed like a music video, with perfect execution, choreographed dances, and impeccable costumes. Rebecca almost always looks better in these videos than she does in normal scenes. The songs tell stories of Rebecca’s highs, lows, humiliations and devastations — but she is almost always the star. But even her musical reality is distorted, when Rebecca actually tries to sing outside of her head her voice is pretty terrible.
Rebecca does not care about what is right. She doesn’t want Josh as he truly is, even if he seems like the center of her life. Rebecca views Josh as a fascinating, uniquely bright guy, when in actuality he’s kind of a dumb deadbeat — he can’t even get hired at an electronics shop without Rebecca’s help. Rebecca romanticizes everything in her life to make it better than what it actually is. Rebecca is the star of her own musical life, just as we are the protagonists in our own everyday lives. While her lack of reason is exaggerated, it isn’t totally fiction. We live our lives inside of our heads, coming up with scenarios that will probably never happen, daydreaming about what if’s and could be’s. Rebecca just does all she can to make those possibilities happen.
“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” is the TV manifestation of a revenge fantasy about passionately singing a love song to your secret crush at a school talent show and getting a standing ovation. But Rebecca actually would actually do it. And even if the whole audience were still sitting, if her crush was confused and embarrassed, she would still love every second of it.
Rebecca is stereotypically intelligent. She mentions repeatedly that she went Yale and Harvard. She has a whole different work persona when she gets serious about being a lawyer. But all of those smarts go out the window when she tries to make decisions about her personal life. A theme of season one is Rebecca spending thousands of dollars on outings and gifts to make Josh like her. This makes the show appealing because it mocks romance in America, people will play dumb, disregarding logic and academic smarts to be likable to people they’re interested in.
When Rebecca first moves to California, she dumps all of her anti-depressants down the drain, and then in desperation runs to the first therapist she finds to beg for more pills. When her therapist denies her request, she swallows a random pill that she finds on the floor of her therapist’s bathroom. This epitomizes Rebecca’s decisions; she will do anything to feel different than what she is feeling in the moment. Rebecca highlights restlessness and unhappiness in American youth; so much pressure is put on millennials to make a name for themselves, to be charming and extraordinary at all costs. Rebecca’s decisions stem from self-loathing; as we see her thoughts (or songs) play out you see there’s not much of a divide between how she sees the world in her head and how she acts it out. Most of us are much better at hiding our ‘crazy’, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Rebecca is a physical reflection of everyone’s hidden, insecure, ugly thoughts.
While romcoms and musicals usually amp up the mundane, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” takes it one step further, showing us what it would be like if a romcom musical was shoved into the real world, where everything can’t be perfectly glossed over with a song. Rebecca is not a ‘normal’ person, she has a lot of personal and mental issues that many people don’t face; but she does have moments of relatable human desire for love, validation and happiness. Unfortunately, she looks over what could make her happy in her career and her relationships because of her tunnel-vision quest to Josh.
Season two starts with an entire change of theme song. Not the same song with a change of scenes to show the characters’ growth, an entirely new song. Season one’s theme song gave Rebecca’s backstory through a chipper song that contrasted with the bleak undertones of Rebecca’s narrative. In the first theme song visuals she is the only real person, all of the rest of the actors are shown as cartoon characters. This displays Rebecca’s narcissism on a literal level, making her more “real” than the rest of the characters. She’s the center of attention, just as she desires. When the supporting characters sing their part of the song and call her “the crazy ex-girlfriend,” she responds with lines like, “what? no I’m not!” “that’s a sexist term!” and “it’s a lot more nuanced than that!” In this theme song, Rebecca reinforces and defends her own delusions. She manipulates the people in her life who critique her choices by calling them sexist and arguing with them. This works because Rebecca, like all of us, has a fantasy of power. She views herself and her issues as the most real, as she is the title role of her own life and the show itself. In her mind everyone else might as well just be a cartoon.
In season two’s theme song, Rebecca is alone surrounded by background dancers. There are no supporting characters that we’ve seen from season one. The song starts with Rebecca singing, “I’m just a girl in love / I can’t be held responsible for my actions,” which basically encompasses Rebecca’s whole thought process. Rebecca has a lack of control over herself, she wants to do whatever she wants but she doesn’t want to take the flack. She’s grasping at reason, searching for something to make her choices sensible. The background chorus chants, “they say love makes you crazy / therefore you can’t call her crazy.” She’s just in love! Can you blame her? Well, yes. You definitely can. Rebecca is still as deluded and annoying as she was in season one, but now she’s even more self-involved.
As season two begins, no one is indulging in Rebecca’s delusions anymore. When Rebecca first moved to California, everyone was enamored with her. She was suddenly shoved in the spotlight she so craves as a hotshot lawyer. She was ivy league educated, now working at a small, not very impressive law firm, and no one was even really sure why. She embraced her role as a rich city girl changing up a small boring town. Even when Rebecca finally admits that she moved to town to be with Josh, the people around her are still intrigued by her. Season two shows that Rebecca isn’t being babied anymore, people are expecting her to act like an adult even though her perfect fantasy world is crashing down around her. She can’t blame everything on love; nobody is convinced anymore. The change seems to stem from Rebecca’s clinging attachment to Josh, which has hit new heights, because at the beginning of season two he finally maybe starts to show reciprocal interest in her.
Rebecca isn’t the only character living in a delusion, even though hers is the most prominent. Josh repeatedly denies Rebecca now that he’s kind of dating her. He clearly liked the chase; he romanticized Rebecca when he couldn’t have her. He looked past all of her flaws because she was unattainable; he refused to see who was truly in front of him. For the first couple of episodes of season two, Josh crashes at her house and sleeps on Rebecca’s couch, not even in her bed. He lies to Rebecca and is uncomfortable around her, doing anything to get out of the house as quickly as possible in the morning; but Rebecca will do anything to make him stay. She creates a drawer for him to use in her apartment, and even convinces herself at one point that she’s pregnant in a last-ditch effort to get him to date her for real. After she realizes she isn’t pregnant, she breaks into song, but there are no lights or flashy costumes. Just Rebecca, and her off-key belting — right in front of Josh. The delusion is broken when Josh cuts her song off. No other character in past episodes has done that before. This scene shows the inside of Rebecca’s mind leaking into reality, taking her out of her own thoughts. Josh proceeds to break up with her, and Rebecca is left in silence.
Rebecca’s best friend Paula (Donna Lynne Champlin) hates her normal life. A mother of two kids, married to a man who doesn’t pay attention to her, Paula just wants some excitement again. When she meets Rebecca and discovers who Josh is, she’s thrilled, and begs Rebecca to let her in on the scheming. Paula builds a reality to escape her own, just as Rebecca uses Josh as a scapegoat to ignore larger issues in her life. Paula does anything for Rebecca, blackmailing Josh’s girlfriend, tracking Josh’s mom’s car and even befriending Josh’s sister just to get inside information. But beginning in season two, even Paula has given up on Josh. She finally wants to focus on her own life. She applies to law school and pops her fake reality bubble to finally nestle into her real life. This should be a red flag for Rebecca, because Paula begged her to keep chasing Josh at the end of season one when Rebecca almost let him go for good. But Rebecca cannot give up hope. The show explores those who live in a personal dream bubble, and those who attempt to break out and join the real world. It questions the definition of maturity, and when it’s time to give up your out of reach dreams to embark on something more realistic.
“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” shows us that life isn’t a musical, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile. The writing on the show is extremely self-aware and smart; Rebecca’s character development and regressions are not just for humor, they’re a critique of the usual narrative of a ‘ditzy’ girl dropping everything to chase a guy. “Crazy-Ex Girlfriend” uses entertainment value to do more than just provide pleasure with catchy songs; the music and the narrative point toward and expose reality for what it really is. Rebecca isn’t a princess, or a red-blushed perfect heroine. While many characters feed into fantasies, Rebecca always ends up choking on hers. Life cannot always be rose-tinted, for Rebecca or for the viewer. We are not always good people living our dream lives, even if we love and are loved in return. Sometimes, just like Rebecca, we have to wake up and face the music, even if for us it is not so literal.