The story of Ilana and Abbi in Broad City is one of female friendship at its best
I’m not a poo joke kind of girl. No thank you. Yesterday I retched when someone described a smell. And yet the wild, warm effluviant humour of Broad City only made me like it more. This was a platonic love story about two women who adored each other. Rather than compete over boys or success, they supported each other unconditionally, and their very best days were spent yomping through the hot streets of New York complimenting each other’s bodies and/or choices. In the final episode, the two paused to stare out over the river, and Ilana told Abbi: “I’ve never felt so cool as when I’m with you.” Despite the fact that a filthy toilet they’d been dragging across town sat between them as they said goodbye, this was the first scene in 48 episodes that made me cry.
And it shouldn’t have taken me this long to realise it, but of course, of course, the gross moments were never just cheap jokes, never just plopped in for effect. It took five series to reveal to me the real role of poo jokes in this beautiful show but, yep, I realised that by opening the toilet door they offered two things. The first, an appreciation of women’s bodies as something other than sex-meat to be gazed at. In fact, as working machines, but ones that sometimes fart, and without shame. The second thing was a new authenticity, which reflected the grand honesty of the characters’ lives, and their insistence on being free. You saw it in their yomping, the way they danced down the street, and you saw it in the way they each had sex, both intimate and regrettable, but mostly in the way they’d decided to prioritise each other, their main relationship, despite all conventions advising otherwise. And not the kind of authenticity we often talk about today in relation to social media, with its careful absences and earnest crops, but a lifting, playful thing that leans into the vulnerability of youth. A way of being that is fearless and easy, if sometimes unhygienic.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2UbIf0M
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