‘Russian Doll’: Night(s) of the living dead
My take on death and the Netflix series, Russian Doll
“How do I know you’re not a murderer?” someone asks Natasha Lyonne’s courageous leading lady in the refreshingly authentic Russian Doll, Nadia Vulvokov. Her answer, “My sparkling personality?” seals the deal; this is a series like no other. The Netflix original, created by a vehement trio of women consisting of Leslye Headland, Amy Poehler, and Lyonne herself, is not without it’s unwavering charm and dark humor. However, it also carries a substantial amount of themes and lessons solid enough to feed anyone’s budding existential crisis. The unusual adventure stretches over a single Sunday night — and occasionally the day after — as well the numerous alternate occurrences that you can possibly think of. At the helm of the story sits Nadia, a flashy, bold, software engineer whose personality can be encapsulated in a single line in which she says, “Hello, uh, more drunk, please.” In the span of (a convenient) eight half-hour episodes, we follow her as she navigates through those events, and witness how change can happen in one seemingly long night.
Our starting line is a bathroom. Broodingly dark and glossy, but generously lit, Nadia stands in front of the mirror accompanied by the sound of running tap water. She turns it off, so we can hear the song playing outside more clearly: “Gotta Get Up” by Harry Nilsson. She approaches the uniquely designed door and its handle which is, fittingly, shaped like a gun. She pulls the trigger and the doors open to unveil a party on the other side. From the looks of it, very modern and nonconformist, with cool-people-music echoing around the stylish Alphabet City loft. The avant-garde shindig, if I may call it, is thrown in favor of our main character’s birthday. Nadia is turning 36 and is about to have one hell of a night. You know, the kind of night where a person would die over and over again, and then proceed to come back to life every single time. That kind of night. Definitely not a typical way to spend a birthday.
Nadia’s first death, unremarkably, was at the hands of a cab driver that happened to hit her as she was crossing the road to chase her cat, Oatmeal, who had been gone for three days. Not a second later, we see her back at the starting line (a.k.a the previously mentioned bathroom), where she was just minutes ago. Nadia is alive and well, but all the while confused. She tried to rationalize her apparently occult experience by double-checking her surroundings and consulting her friends Lizzy (Rebecca Henderson) and Maxine “Max” (Greta Lee), who is also the party hostess. Her first suspicion fell on Max and the cocaine-laced cigarettes (dubbed “Israeli joints”) she gave her before the cab accident that resulted in her “death”. In order to prove her hypothesis, she embarks on a quest, to the point of tracking down Max’s drug dealer and ask about the joints herself. Unfortunately, this reasoning was proved to be unreliable.
In the next episodes we witness Nadia, alone, scampering to find answers to a situation she can’t even fully comprehend. Once, we see her trying to make sense of this by half-heartedly blaming the unlikely and illogical possibility that she could be experiencing menopause. Another time, she thought that the bathroom where she keeps coming back to was somehow accountable to this. At one point, she even believed these repetitive deaths are happening to her because her party was situated in what used to be an old Yeshiva. “Do you ever think it’s weird? You know, just, like, partying in an old Yeshiva school? […] Because, this was once, you know, a sacred place,” Nadia suspiciously points out to Max, who instead responds lightly with “It’s New York. Real estate is sacred.” Ultimately, to no avail, Nadia’s quest of finding a correct explanation reached a dead end.
This endless unsuccessful pursuit forced her to start the same night all over and receive endless amounts of Maxine’s “sweet birthday baby”(s) every time she walks emerges from the bathroom. Oh, and having to undergo the process of dying multiple times as well, of course. Various methods of dying encountered by our protagonist include falling into the river, falling down a sidewalk cellar door, falling down the stairs by tripping on the steps, falling down the stairs by hitting the bannister, falling down the stairs by bumping into someone, and some others that don’t include any form of falling. After death number who-knows-what, Nadia even jokingly said to Max, “I got bigger fish to fry. I gotta figure out how to get down the stairs.” As we get further into the series, Nadia’s deaths become more unconventional (as if they were unconventional enough), such as being present for a gas explosion, freezing to death, or even choking on a chicken bone. However, regardless of how, when, and where the deaths occur, Nadia returns to the same exact time, place, and situation. Well, eventually we learn the situations are not always exact. Turns out, each passing death leads to anomalies in her world. Yet, just as when she starts to reach nowhere, she meets Alan (Charlie Barnett).
Though elevator encounters are not that uncommon, the fact that these two were introduced to each other while plunging several floors down adds a fun twist to the state of affairs. “Hey man, didn’t you get the news? We’re about to die,” Nadia points out to a random guy — who turns out to be Alan — standing beside her. His unexpected response goes, “It doesn’t matter, I die all the time.” A friendship is forged. We found out that Alan has the same fate as Nadia, that is, being trapped in a daunting pattern of constant death and resurrection. Required to relive the same night in a never-ending cycle might be something these two have in common, but the events that occur in Nadia’s case are different than Alan’s. For the former it’s her birthday night, returning to a crowd of people celebrating her each time she dies, but for the latter it’s the night in which his long-term girlfriend Beatrice (Dascha Polanco) breaks up with him, shattering his intention to propose. Besides that, Nadia and Alan also had different and somewhat conflicting views of their set of circumstances. Nadia is always seem to be hurrying to find a way to escape the loop, but Alan stated that he could benefit from this. “Do you think it’s possible to correct your life? I find myself in this position of finally being able to do things the right way,” Alan would say to his friend Ferran (Ritesh Rajan). He even went along and confessed to Nadia of his positive outlook. Well, that was before their encounter during the elevator drop, which according to him, flipped that positivity upside down. “[…] and personally, I liked it. I had control, I knew what was coming. […] You showed up and everything has gone off,” he says to Nadia. He was not wrong, because after meeting her, his next repetition of the night was thrown off of the predictability he expressed before.
Even though they are polar opposites — Alan being a person who is self-conscious and believes in the duality of good and bad, while Nadia has more comfort in the idea of independence — the unlikely pair have something in common that we get to discover and see them discover it for themselves as well: they are both aversive to the idea of help. A person’s form of aversion is different than the other’s, in which Alan needs help but doesn’t want to accept it, afraid of what others might think, while Nadia doesn’t acknowledge that she needs help in the first place, incessantly insisting that she can fix things alone. Later on, they discover that they always die at the same time, which means there is a reason to think that these deaths are happening because they are intertwined somehow. This exposure to the idea of having to depend on another person may present itself as a novel idea to them both.
“You know, your friends can’t help you if you won’t let them,” Max informs Nadia. When Alan came into her life, Nadia acknowledges that she doesn’t want to face this alone and she needs him, and her friends. But only until the penultimate episode (“Way Out”) that Nadia grasps the full picture and finds that it’s a two-way street: people also depend on her. “I don’t know, man. [I can’t promise that you’ll be happy]. But, I can promise you that you will not be alone,” she tells Alan. Although, in other times her good intentions are expressed in a different way, like: “I never stick my neck out for anybody, but I feel like fucking Rocky right now.” For Alan himself, the experience has led him to make peace with imperfection. He found comfort to have no shame of being imperfect himself, and to accept the help that he needs. “We are very unreliable narrators of our own stories,” said Ruth (Elizabeth Ashley), Nadia’s therapist and subsequent mother figure. Like the importance of using mirrors in seeing our reflection, we need “another pair of eyes” — other people — to gain a better understanding of ourselves. Nobody can do it alone.
I could go on and on about things I’ve learned from this series, but another one that I personally think is of significance is the concept of relativity. At one point, while talking through their ideas, Nadia explains to Alan that both time and morality are relative, not absolute. Good or bad, short or long, it’s not universal and can’t be measured objectively. Relativity means that our comprehension of a certain concept is only as understandable as our familiarity and experience with it. This whole ordeal that may have felt like an eternity for them, was only a small number of time for others.
Relativity explains so much of the intricacies of our experiences, especially the ones that are hidden from the naked eye. Our experiences that occur internally — like going through change or, I don’t know, a series of temporary deaths — may feel lengthy and momentous, and only the person going through it can completely understand the scope of it. In other words, it has to do a lot with dealing with it alone. For example, Nadia, who once admitted that she doesn’t like to be tied down to others, holding things in and unknowingly dodging away people who care about her is like second nature. But when we allow someone else on the journey with us, letting them help us and if we are willing to help them as well, the trials and tribulations might not be so bad. In the end, maybe that’s why most of our best nights are spent with others who are willing to roll it along with us, however long that night may be. So, to those special ones in my life (and you), who are rolling this along with me, I give you my favorite line of Alan’s: “Thank you for changing my life. Lives are hard to change.”
