Fleabag, we come to learn, confesses to conceal. She uses the audience to hide from the other characters, to hide from herself. Throughout the first season, there are flickers of a memory haunting her; only at the end, a terrible truth is revealed, implicating her in her friend’s suicide. For the first time, she evades the camera: As it moves in on her, she backs away.
“I’ve spent most of my adult life using sex to deflect from the screaming void inside my empty heart,” she says flippantly but truthfully in therapy. Detachment and deflection are hard habits to break. “Forget heroin,” the novelist Edward St. Aubyn wrote in the final Patrick Melrose novel. “Just try giving up irony, that deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.” The people who come to care for her try to anchor her in the present: “Look at me,” an older woman tells her, taking Fleabag’s face in her hands. “People are all we’ve got,” she says. “Get out there.” The implication being, of course, to get out of her head, where we live, her rapt, adoring audience. Her pathology is our pleasure.
In 12 episodes, we don’t see a character being built up through scenes in the conventional way. We see the opposite. We see her dismantled, speaking less, becoming more opaque, pushing the camera away until the final scene, when she walks away from it and forbids us to follow. The happier she is, we come to realize, the more the show must come to an end; she must extricate herself from an audience, from performance. There is no dialogue in this scene. Without uttering a word, a show vaunted for frankness and wild outspokenness makes its powerful case for privacy.
Parul Sehgal, How ‘Fleabag’ Seduces Us, Then Accuses Us
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