The Girlfriend: Robin Wright and Olivia Cooke’s show is a saas-bahu serial that hates its women, even though it’s made by them

In The Girlfriend, Laura’s relationship with her son is a little too comfortable, which gets increasingly uncomfortable to watch – the introduction scene in the pool, the hanging out in the sauna, and the eventual checking out of the nude photos – hints at a major Jocasta complex, and after you get a hint of that early on, the mother-son relationship doesn’t seem all that virtuous. And for Cherry, the class divide is big enough for the viewer to question her intentions. While both these women are at each other’s throats, sometimes literally, all for some attention from Daniel, you wonder if years of patriarchy and conditioning for the ultimate male validation have gotten us to a spot where two clever women have put in all their energy in winning a self-inflicted war for a man, who is presented like a fool and can’t read beyond the surface level. He is just oblivious to the power he holds, and the show pretends that he is an innocent lamb stuck in the claws of vultures, when in fact, he is the one who holds power over both these women.

Laurie Davidson and Robin Wright in The Girlfriend.

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The saas-bahu soaps on Indian television have long been criticised for being anti-feminist, where women set other women up with impossible tasks and make them feel small, and men come across as innocent bystanders who are just quietly going about their day without a care in the world. The Girlfriend is like one of those serials, dialled up to the max. Here too, Daniel acts like a gullible buffoon who believes whatever he is told, as if he can’t think for himself. Yet, it is him who is supposed to be the decision maker in this war between the women. For the viewer, the events are presented in a Roshomon-esque style as you question, ‘Who would Daniel believe?’, and you wonder, why his decision matters here – Is it because he is superior in this lot, or because these two women have placed themselves in service of this man, and are now looking for his approval?

With Cherry, you learn that she hasn’t had any significant male presence in her life, ever since she pushed her dad off a building (the circumstances of which are never clearly explained except that he was ‘trouble’), and with Laura, you learn about her infant daughter’s death, her husband (who she has pushed to have an open marriage even though he desperately wants to have a monogamous relationship), and her bleeding business which has only survived because the said husband has been pumping money into it for years. So, not only are these women portrayed as somewhat crazy in trying to get Daniel’s validation, they are also declared to be failures in their careers and personal lives, while they continue to believe that they need to save Daniel from the clutches of the ‘other’ woman.

Towards the end, after the mother drugs her son and the two women are literally throwing punches at each other, we are shown this entire struggle in a way where Daniel could choose either one of them, leaving the other one to die, but by this point, it doesn’t matter who gets to live. Because no matter who comes out as the winner, this show leaves you wondering why a bunch of women would come together to paint women as the manipulative gender, and men as the ones who are being manipulated without their knowledge.

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