Persuasion has only been available on Netflix for a few hours, so there’s no real way of knowing if Fleabag star Phoebe Waller-Bridge has watched it yet. Hopefully it’s not too late to stop her, because the sweeping wave of full-body terror that will overwhelm her seconds after pressing play can’t help but hurt.
Because if it wasn’t for Phoebe Waller-Bridge, this new version of Persuasion would never have been made. Of all the adaptations Jane Austen’s novel has undergone, Fleabaggy is by far the most telling. It’s not just that Dakota Johnson’s Ann Elliott talks to the camera, or even that she seems pathologically inclined to look at us when something happens. No, she does all this while drinking wine from the bottle, crying in the bathtub, and cuddling a small pet. This is, hand on heart, one pencil haircut away from entering copyright infringement territory.
Reviews of Persuasion were terrible across the board. One called the film an all-time disaster, while another suggested the forcible imprisonment of anyone involved in its production. And while many of the reviews (especially the British ones) have an element of territorial outrage, they also contain a lot of truth. It’s the kind of inelegant modernization that allows a character to describe himself as an empath, and his comedic ambition peaks during a scene in which Johnson says with a sigh, “There’s nothing worse than thinking your life is ruined, and then realizing you have a lot more to fall for,” before immediately literally falling flat on your face.
Honestly, imagine you’re Phoebe Waller-Bridge right now. You’ve spent years of your life diligently crafting one of the best, most precise comedies of all time, and now you’re forced to watch all your hard-fought sensibilities bleed unused into sludge like this. The closest equivalent I can think of is J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose impressive work in the field of calculating fast neutrons led directly to the creation of the atomic bomb. As Oppenheimer watched the first nuclear detonation in July 1945, the terrifying explosion dominating the New Mexico skyline before his eyes reminded him of a quote from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I have become Death, destroyer of worlds.” If Phoebe Waller-Bridge ever has the misfortune of watching Persuasion, she should probably go and get this quote tattooed on her leg.
Of course, that’s how comedy works. A brave new voice enters the arena and then everyone in the world rips it off for years and years afterwards. Look at the deluge of irony that seeped into the culture after David Letterman first went on the air, or the way everyone started inserting Gervais’ sarcastic little “Yes” into every sentence in the years since The Office launched. “. It’s perfectly natural, but if you’ve ever been around a gang of morons who are still doing 50-year-old Monty Python bits to each other, you’ll know it gets old fast.
The press doesn’t help much either, actually. As soon as Fleabag reached its full cultural capacity, every new show that featured a woman was dubbed “The New Fleabag.” Back to Life, Run, Mood, I May Destroy You, This Way Up, The Duchess, All I Know About Love, Out of Her Mind – all these shows (and many others, including the French remake Mouche) are marked with the same lazy label. There have been so many new Fleabags over the last few years that we’re all in danger of forgetting what we liked about the old Fleabag.
Still, there’s something so aggressively disgusting about the way Persuasion casts from Fleabag that it feels like the death of something. I feel like the Persuasion creative team made this movie specifically to poison the ground where Fleabag once stood. If so, they have been completely successful. I finished watching Persuasion 25 minutes ago, and if I ever see another character look wryly at the camera, I’m going to lose my mind. More than that: I don’t want anyone looking at me in real life with their eyes, in case it triggers some sort of Dakota Johnson PTSD episode.
Listen, Fleabag is great. It remains a nearly perfect TV. But maybe it’s time to separate it from everything else now, before it takes all the fun out of it.
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