LITBC Ep 3-4: What Does Eating Pasta Have to Do With Your Tough Past?
One thing I really have to commend the book Love in the Big City for is how fucking effectively it utilizes information reveals to recontextualize entire sections of the book, entire understandings of Young’s character/psyche. So much of the time I spent reading LITBC was focused on getting to know Young as a character to learn about his life, his past, his present reality. So it is such a fascinating twist, and at least for me, a gift to enter this show with Young’s point of view in my head.
I’m really interested to see how people who have not read the book already engage with the show, engage with the character of Young, and engage with the reveals of some of the pieces of his past. Because for me going into it, experiencing Young’s life with the knowledge of Young’s history is such a different emotional experience than learning about Young for the first time.
I’m thinking about the rockfish and flounder scene here and the way that Young tries to flirt by saying he’s chewy and should be called rockfish. And the way that Hyung responds and says he should call Young “flounder” instead because he can “see right through him.” And it’s fucking bullshit, and we see how that unfolds especially throughout episode four. I think it is absolutely fascinating not having that internal monologue to guide viewers through the television version of Young. Because the way Nam Yoon Soo plays Young has this smiley, care-free, proud sort of quality to him that is in large part still an act but a much harder act to identify because we don’t have access to how or what he’s thinking.
And while you see the losses of Mi Ae, for example, I think only watching the show puts you in a position to much less deeply understand the level of pain that Young is constantly carrying with him. Which, to be clear, isn’t a bad thing per say, it’s just interesting because even as the novel did recontextualize some things, I had a much different impression of how Young might present himself. The reveals of things like Kylie, for example, in the book serve more to provide an explanation as to why Young thinks Like That, is as dissociative from his own emotional state as he is, etc. So it is interesting to see Young be more of a happy!sad as he is in the show (at least in my opinion).
I will be curious to see how people who haven’t read the book react/reacted to the reveal of Young’s institutionalization. It feels like a much smaller, less clear moment in the show than in the book, and there is definitely a complete lack of demonstration from the show that he wasn’t just hospitalized but that he was in conversion therapy. I don’t think that it is hard to make the leap, especially with Young’s mother’s religious zeal, but still they spend a lot less time on that piece of Young’s backstory in the show than they did in the novel.
But to know from the second the show started about Young’s past, resulted in a visceral rage that hit me straight in the chest when Hyung told Young “you don’t know anything” after Hyung’s run in with his activist seniors. And again after they have sex when Hyung says “someone like you can’t even imagine [the suffering I’ve been through]” As if Young has had this easy, picture perfect life, when I know, I KNOW that Young is taking care of a mother that once forced him into conversion therapy when she found out that he was gay.
Like, watching Young engage in queer culture as openly as he does, watching Young say that people don’t care, that Hyung’s seniors will still see him as their junior. To want to wear matching outfits, and go have romantic pasta dinners, and sit close to each other in public is so goddamn important because Young had a period in his life where other people were forcibly trying to make him believe, make him act otherwise.
And it is still so interesting because we don’t know that much about Hyung. We don’t know what Hyung has suffered outside of an alcoholic mother, we start to get a hint at it with the writing around Christianity and homosexuality that Young finds on his computer later, but for a man that said that he saw right through Young he has no fucking idea how much Young has actually overcome. Hyung is stuck in his own little rut, and Young is absolutely goddamn right to say “You call yourselves activists, yet why are you so ignorant? Fucking bastards. You only act progressive- ” it angers Hyung, but Young is fucking correct.
And I love the little moment that Young pauses in his tracks while Hyung storms off. The way that Young is in fact the person that saw right through Hyung in that moment while Hyung is clinging to this false belief that Young has never suffered for being queer. I love this very charged cut straight to the Bible and Young’s mother right after that. Because I know. Because Young knows. Because Hyung does not, has not, and will never know.
Hyung lives his life in hiding, wallowing in his own self loathing and internalized homophobia, so wrapped up in his own misery that he refuses to consider anyone else. He doesn’t tolerate anything that Young wants to do, he invents this completely loving, uncomplicated relationship between Young and his mother based on what he sees at a distance. Hyung has never looked at anything up close he refuses to, he exists in the universe, his scale is the universe, and his own suffering is as present and as powerful as that universe so there is no room for anyone else.
Sure it’s dazzling to hear “I like the universe that is you” I get why that shit woos Young, but at the end of the day what does that fucking mean? It means nothing to Hyung, who is embarrassed of Young, who hides his affection for Young until they are behind closed doors, who doesn’t ever want to step a toe out of line despite saying he’s an activist, despite saying he’s progressive. And it has me thinking more about his Tree of Life tattoo and its association with the Revelations passage that talks about the tree of life being a reward for those who overcome.
Hyung runs and hides from his desires, and he suffers for it. Young chases his desires despite what he has suffered. And in the end Hyung will continue to have a miserable life, and Young will live. As a lot of us know, there is more pain coming for Young, but there is so much beauty, learning, growth, and rain waiting for him too.
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