Here begins a love letter, warmly penned to an unusual lover: the British Netflix show, Sex Education. In proceeding forward, this feels familiar and high-school-ish: your illustrious crush laughs or smiles or asks a small question or yawns or ties her shoe or something trivial, unwitting to her own illustriousness and to the fact you’re paying rapt attention and basically ready to step forward onto one knee and propose, but of course you don’t since it would be so, so strange (I use “her” to accord with my romantic preferences). And yet… (*Slightly audible gulp*) listen up, ‘cus I’ve got love to profess.The Preamble
I’ll begin with a preamble, as I imagine a love letter ought to do, building tension. Bear with me as I begin on a slightly esoteric digression about myself1. In this digression, I paint myself as the character in distress for whom the lovely Sex Education comes as savior; I’m a damsel, as it were? And if you think the entrance is masturbatory...well, maybe it is, but if that’s the case I suppose I have no shame about it—I can assure you, after all: Otis and I don’t share the same problem. In summer of 2018, I read a book called Sapiens, written by historian Yuval Noah Harari. This is a canonical Silicon Valley read with 4.4 stars on GoodReads and 4.6 on Amazon, and the recommendations from friends and various authors sculpted a halo of (sometimes skeptical or jaded) lore around this work of Harari's. Sapiens reasons in terms of biology and sociology to explain how and why civilization has come to be what it is—in a metaphorical sense, how Homo sapiens became aware it was on a canvas, reached out to grab the paint brush, and then worked tirelessly on each subsequent stroke to slowly compose itself into a complex painting we title, "The Present." Sapiens walks through much of humanity’s history and many of its belief systems. I’ve heard folks challenge the veracity and academic rigor of some of Harari’s claims, and while I’ll admit I wasn't so detective-ish myself, I never intended to be. I didn’t read it as an academic, and won’t herein treat the material as such. What's more, I read this book more than a year ago, and most of its details have been lost from my distressingly imperfect memory. Rather, I was impacted by Harari’s methodology, which roughly accords to the following two-step prescription: (1) Observe a belief in modern society. Then, (2) understand how and why it came about. When we perform this methodology, we implicitly acknowledge that the many things we believe in—morals, definitions of success, etc.—are constructed. I’ve always thought this as fact, but until reading Sapiens never felt this as reality; there is a profound difference between knowing something as semantic knowledge, and feeling that thing as intuitive knowledge. As someone who actively searches for fundamental, immutable, capital-T Truths, suddenly feeling the constructed nature of my world was an experience that left me untethered from my life, the people in it, and my responsibilities. A hard and unwavering emotion crept up inside, shrieking loudly that none of the things I believed in were fundamental, nothing immutable. My defining beliefs could have been otherwise—each belief simply was as history, upbringing, and some biology caused it to be, for particular and—in principle—identifiable reasons. There’s nothing even remotely capital-T about my truths. That’s what Sapiens taught me. Summer 2018 turned into fall, and the sensation of becoming untethered grew in stride with the months as they strolled by. As I tend to do when I’m overwhelmed, I even wrote a poem about the untethering, which I figure I’ll include here because what’s a love letter without a poem?I hope prose and poetry are sufficient in combination to convey a sense of what I was feeling: profound detachment, debased from the grounding beliefs that gave existence any sense of justification. My schedule lightened in late 2018 and I wound up couch-borne, watching TV with a regularity I hadn't for many years prior. The lethargy dripped in at first, then flowed like a river of paralysis, locking me onto the couch and into a trap of cyclic thought, recursing ad infinitum. Stationary, something hit a tipping point and my psyche underwent a sad transformation: what had previously been a sensation of detachment, wrought by Sapiens, transmogrified into a fiery metropolis of meaninglessness. Abstractly, and in present tense for effect, here's how it went down:A sapiens with loose skin I read a history of the world and I’m obliged to report that it’s loosened my skin from the underlying muscle and bone. I used to revel in the stretch, love the predictable deformation each time I’d incidentally waltz through a moment and joy would bend an excited joint. This history incised somewhere, snuck in and slid right underneath, cut all the fibrous, connective tissue. My bridge had its supports blown up, out, now dust in cloudy crying skies. When I'm still, my skin flaps in the wind and pulls me sideways. When I walk, soft reverberations thrum and remind me. In a sprint, the loose skin is slung so hard I risk deforming my character; I will never recover my form. This is what it feels like to be corporeal but meaningless. My sense of strict adhesion to principles, predictabilities, assumptions is no more. I think we tend to think the knowledge we seek will bring pearl skin, gleaming and desirable and certainly beautiful. Maybe there’s some Truth to the idea that with sagging-skin age comes “wisdom.”In case you’ve never dealt with this sort of meaninglessness—which I really hope you haven’t—let me briefly explain what it’s like. Suppose you’re drinking a cup of steaming breakfast tea, perhaps with some milk. Ordinarily, the tea is fragrant and the flavors explode like fireworks, entertaining a gracious tongue. Ordinarily, you appreciate this, and think it's beautiful. But this time, a feeling undercuts it all: of course, this flavor is just the output of a set of material interactions, and your predisposition towards it is perfectly explainable given sufficient scientific instrumentation and analytical decomposition—and what's more, your contemplation of this whole thing is itself the product of material interactions which accord simply to the laws of the universe and nothing but. And this creeping feeling insidiously strips the tea of its fragrance and its flavor, until you’re just swallowing down something stifling, the heat deadening, now fixated on the fact that swallowing, too, requires analytically decomposable neuromuscular control. And so this flavor is false, in no sense beautiful whatsoever because your perception of its beauty is mechanical—arises for a particular reason based on the laws of physics—and even your original desire for the flavor is itself a material thing... This sort of crisis eviscerates your sense of purpose in anything and everything you do: playing piano, chatting with friends, sending emails, attending work meetings, learning. It’s the demolition of purpose that makes so paralyzing the materialism which leads to non-beauty which leads to meaninglessness: if everything is explainable, then there’s no purpose, so why bother moving to another place, another thought, another feeling? And by the way, your sensation of purposelessness is material, and therefore purposeless. What a mind-fuck. Before this crisis of meaning it was easy and natural, even reflexive, to see beauty in the world. In fact, the fact itself that I could perceive beauty felt like it gave an “ought” to humanity: humanity ought to exist because the subjective experience of beauty ought to be felt—it’s just that lovely. It’s almost beyond words to describe how powerful it is to feel that life is self-justified. Like, smiles-and-flowers, blue-skied euphoria. That powerful. My crisis of meaning, through the stewing process of the aforementioned psychological clusterfuck, eviscerated my sense of beauty, and that destroyed me because not only did I now have no purpose, but humanity didn’t either. My consciousness felt sick, ill at ease, with the distinct and unshakeable feeling that without beauty, nothing was worth it and, therefore, everything was unbearable. It was a depressed territory into which I initially and unwittingly followed discursive thought by way of Sapiens, and subsequently the emotion of this territory solidified in a pathological way, the apex and summary of which was my inability to see anything as beautiful. I even stopped wanting to see beauty in the first place.1. I feel a sense of awe, which is intellectually manifested as the experience of beauty; in particular, I believe beauty is a universal, capital-F Fundamental capital-T Truth; something that exists outside of me, which bears metaphysical significance. 2. I consider this universal beauty to be the source of meaning in my life. 3. I fixate on the fact that our beliefs are constructed through history, culture, and biology. Ouch. 4. I fixate on the fact that our beliefs and experiences are implented in matter, and therefore constructed by some physical mechanism. Ouch. 5. Everything can be explained, in principle, because everything has a mechanism and a causal chain of events behind it (i.e., materialism and determinism). 6. My sense of awe disappears because awe probably arises from surprise and disbelief. With full explainability dies surprise. 7. I don't feel awe anymore, so I no longer intellectually perceive a sense of universal beauty. 8. Because there's no universal beauty, there's no meaning in my life.A Sketch of My Love
And now, post existential crisis exposé, I begin the “love” portion of this letter, at long last! Sex Education is so beautiful that it taught me how to see beauty2 again. I watched it once through and beautiful things came back into sight. Then, I watched a second time (and third, and fourth) and now I don’t just see those beautiful things, but want to create more of them. I remember what it’s like to feel the magnetism in art and elegance. "Now, hold on," you hopefully say. "You just belabored the idea that beauty doesn't exist," you say. Yes, yes I did! Keep reading! There are three interacting faces to the beauty of Sex Education: the sensory aspects, the acting, and the social situations in the story that fluctuate rapidly between feather-light and anvil-heavy. Like a prism, it’s the conjunction of all three faces that feels so beautiful: turn on the TV, shine the light, and watch for the rainbow. Behind most moments in Sex Education is rich sensory experience: the vibrant colors reminiscent of the 1980s, the wonderful and well-timed music selection, the masterful camerawork. This sensory array, coming together with stellar and humanizing acting performances, forms a deep and dynamic substrate for the social situations. In other words, the sensory aspects and the acting in Sex Education were, themselves, beautiful; adding in the actual content of the show is what makes it a masterpiece. What, though, are these “social situations” to which I’m referring? Well, they’re many things! They’re Otis’s struggle with Jean’s helicoptering, and conversely Jean’s struggle to let go of the most important person in her life. They’re Maeve’s tough skin and soft heart. They’re Eric’s positivity. In each of these, there’s a persistent dynamic whereby the show rapidly alternates between humorous and serious, the transitions delivered by the acting, the highs and the lows plainly visible on the characters’ faces.A Close Reading
To better understand how this works, I’ll indulge and close-read my favorite scene in the season: Maeve and Otis, ft. Swimming Pool. To help, let me define a little axis for us here, from the serious/heavy (-10) to the light/humorous (+10). Zero is neutral. For each section of the scene I analyze, I’ll rate it with a sentiment score based on my subjective assessment. Not scientific, but perhaps insightful. Circa 29:30 or so in Episode 4, after a failed attempt at facilitating a sexual interaction between new lesbian lovers Ruthie and Tanya, we see a well-composed shot of Otis’s legs entering the water: visual elegance at work. [Sentiment score: 0]
The scene transitions and Maeve receives a text from Jackson. Asa cleverly uses an ear-grab to tell us how viscerally displeased Otis is that Maeve and Jackson are texting. [Sentiment score: -3 ]
Visceral displeasure doesn’t squash curiosity, so Otis asks Maeve how things are going with Jackson. Emma abruptly snaps, as Maeve’s character does when someone hits one of her unsheathed nerves. Note Asa’s body language following Maeve’s snap: head down and torso slumped, showing us textbook dejection. [Sentiment score: -4]
Note, also, the aesthetic composition of this shot. It’s dominated by aquatic blue and white, the only burst of color being Maeve’s hair—I’d be surprised if this weren’t intentionally symbolic. My non-expertise in cinematic composition tells me this whole shot looks really, really good. Maeve continues on to explain that she has loads of sex. [Sentiment score: +3] Immediately, Otis’s face reflects his effort to, as it were, keep his shit together. [Sentiment score: -5 (Have you ever listened to an active crush discuss how much sex they’re having? No fun, I assure you.)] Asa’s acting, again, is top notch: I couldn’t catch it in my screenshot, but he garnishes the look below with a very quick and telling eyebrow raise.
Maeve now comments that she doesn’t “do boyfriends.” Brilliant acting ensues:
Sentiment score: -2
Sentiment score: +1
Sentiment score: +4
In the course of a second or so, Asa brings Otis’s face through a range of emotion, essentially processing Maeve’s comment in realtime with the viewer. Otis asks why Maeve doesn’t “do boyfriends,” and Maeve then bashes rom-coms (to further compose for you a portrait of my romanticism in case it wasn’t already obvious, I'm a big fan of rom-coms), and follows it up with the sort of smile that makes many of Sex Education’s viewers fall slightly in love with Emma Mackey (pleading the 5th). [Sentiment score: +6]
Otis asks, “But seriously, what’s wrong with a boyfriend?” To which Maeve responds, giving dark insight into her character and implicating a heavily relatable reality of romance, “Just someone else to let you down, isn’t it?” And, at this moment, guitar kicks in. I failed to successfully screenshot it, but after saying this, Emma very briefly flicks her eyes downwards and it’s powerful—stellar acting. [Sentiment score: -6] Then, Otis laughs, and it’s light again. Next thing we know, Maeve’s pushed Otis into the water, jumped in herself, and the camera is now bobbing with water droplets on the lens, drawing the viewer strongly into the scene. To cap it off, loud music is playing in the background. [Sentiment score: +7] Maeve and Otis water-flirt for a few seconds against background music until they separate and Otis starts directing his now-infamous sex therapy towards Maeve. The music ceases. [Sentiment score: -2] “We don’t do that therapy thing,” she says. “Save that for the clientele.” Otis makes a face, and she decides to offer a real explanation for why she doesn’t want to date Jackson. At this point, my only qualm about the scene comes to bear: some overly sappy music plays which I think detracts from the warm tension. On the other hand, Maeve’s arguments against a relationship with Jackson are high-school-y in nature, so maybe sap was meant similarly to reflect young romance. [Sentiment score: -2] They exchange a few jokes about scrotum-biting, and suddenly Maeve is touching Otis’s eyebrows. We have something both light and heavy here: light because it’s so thrilling, and heavy because it’s so thrilling. As a side note, I wager I was almost as excited about this development as Otis was, given my emotional investment in Otis and Maeve’s yet-to-materialize relationship. Here, we see Otis’s “Holy fucking shit she just touched my eyebrows” face. [Sentiment score: -8, +8]
And then, we’re onto his, “Oh my god, that’s an erection” face.
It’s probably pointing out the obvious to comment on the quality of Asa and Emma’s acting here, but it’s worth rehashing just to demonstrate how their performances maximize the power of the scene. Otis tells Maeve they should get going, but decides to stay in the water. Deeply, deeply relatable—that’s all. Otis looks down with consternation, another solid detail from Asa. [Sentiment score: -6 , +6]
As Maeve walks away, her smile melts the viewer (still pleading the 5th). [Sentiment score: +8]
We have a shot of Maeve walking through the hallway and incurring a blowjob comment. Then Eric walks down the bleacher steps to the swimming pool, and Otis tells Eric what the savvy viewer knows already, and about which I’m still delighting with laughter: “She touched my eyebrows, and now I have an erection.” [Sentiment score: -3 , +9] To conclude the close read, I want to make a note on the impact of this whole scene: I’d watched this episode three times through before spending ~45 minutes stepping through the three-minute-long swimming pool scene for research. The absurd thing is that I’d watched the scene three times already and I still smiled for almost 45 continuous minutes. As articulated above, the sentiment in this scene oscillates (and the rest of the show follows the same pattern). I graphed the sentiment scores from the swimming pool scene to visualize the point.
As the scene progresses, the magnitude of the score increase as well, but the heaviness and lightness continuously flip-flop.Rocking the Chair
Let me recap so far. I had an existential crisis that left me unable to see or believe in beauty because materialism and causality absolutely demolished my sense of awe. Sex Education is a beautiful show and extracted me from that crisis. How, though, did this giggly-named TV show do that? (And what does it even mean for the show to be "beautiful"?) What made Sex Education beautiful were the fluctuations between the light and the serious, spanning all eight episodes, supported and made radiant by music, colors, and above all else acting. (I still haven't defined what it means for the show to be "beautiful", aside from the obvious sensory aspects like sounds, colors, etc...) Sex Education’s acting, narrative, and visuals are so powerful that they induced a sense of awe through the very biological route whose materialistic nature fucked me up in the first place. In particular, the oscillations in the story brought me—through material mechanisms, like my eyes observing and visual cortex processing Maeve and Otis’s facial expressions—to a point of awe. That awe is a material state. I then reflected on the awe intellectually, and it yielded a sense of beauty—but, the critical difference is that this wasn’t exogenous beauty, wasn’t capital-T Truthful. It was endogenous beauty, something that lived and lives purely in the realm of subjective experience, and I had such a profound sense of awe that this subjective internal beauty feels very real and significant. To add the opus-making cherry on top, since the show is about so many aspects of the human condition, it induced many kinds of awe at many different points, each translating to different experiences of newfound intrinsic beauty. All of these taken together, contrasting happy and sad, light and heavy, dull and bright, a world of unity and opposities—this gave me a sense of intrinsic beauty about being human. In other words, I found beauty in the fact of humanity again, except this time it felt (still feels) like the truth of it comes from the realness of my own conscious experience, rather than the universe or something outside of me. When I call Sex Education "beautiful," it's shorthand for writing "capable of inducing a sense of awe which, upon intellectual reflection, becomes the sense that being human is beautiful." Any serious show is ostensibly supposed to create a sense of awe or some kind of large-magnitude emotional impact; Sex Education does it particularly well due to the acting, the oscillation, and the scope of human experience conveyed in the narrative. I started Sex Education rather despondent and lost in a sticky, stinging, dark web of thought. Like a wise grandmother in a rocking chair, Sex Education oscillated between seriousness and humor; back and forth it went, back and forth. Every moment of pure focus on the ups and downs moved me a little further away from despondency. As I became attached to the characters—to Otis’s incredible and well-meaning awkwardness, to Maeve’s “complex female character”-ness, to Eric’s bouncy optimism, to Jean’s inability to let go, and so on—the oscillations impacted me more and more and more. Each time humor transitioned to seriousness and back, I was given emotional exercise needed desperately after months of stasis. And that’s how Sex Education worked its magic: its power was the strength it used to grip the rocking chair and get me moving back and forth, back and forth, until I was shaken far enough out of despondency to once again feel the quintessentially human sense of emotional engagement, and to not admonish myself for doing so. It got me up off the couch, out of my head, and moving, moving, moved by something fundamentally compelling. My present view on meaning and beautiful things can be summarized as follows: there’s no inherent meaning. Morals aren’t fundamental; they used to provide the sense of inherent meaning for me, and now they don’t. As a sociological phenomenon, the presence of morals make the most sense as a convenient way to keep our civilizations together. Before, I felt despondency at these facts. Gratefully, having been reintroduced to beauty by Sex Education and simultaneously acknowledging the reality of non-meaning, I now recognize a choice: in the face of meaninglessness, where there’s no metaphysical reason to feel one way or another, do I choose to feel the despondency? Or, do I choose to see the beauty, which I’m equally entitled to do under the doctrine of non-meaning? Do I choose to feel elation, thrill, awe, impact? I choose the latter. I choose to see beauty, and I feel beauty in the fact that I can choose to see beauty, and so I’m now back on my psychic feet.Adieu, à la Prochaine
The defining cause of my crisis was that, as described wonderfully in the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, analyzing an object or an idea often co-occurs with a reduction in the perception of that object/idea’s beauty. As the narrator explains,“When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. That is fairly well understood, at least in the arts. Mark Twain’s experience comes to mind, in which, after he had mastered the analytic knowledge needed to pilot the Mississippi River, he discovered the river had lost its beauty. Something is always killed.” (p.81)I consider myself lucky, and consider it a testament to the power of Sex Education, and consider it necessary to the mechanism by which Sex Education recovered me from my crisis of beauty and meaning, that I can simultaneously think about the show at an analytical level and perceive the (endogenous) beauty in it. I’ve always wondered what it’s like to work on a TV show or a film: do the producers, the actors, the writers, the crew, the directors see the show through the same lens I do? Or do the details of the creation, as with Twain, kill something? My hope for you—the producers, actors, writers, crew, directors of Sex Education—is that insofar as this wonderful show is concerned, you’ve been blessed with the same stroke of luck I have: the rare opportunity to both understand the details of its form and to appreciate, be moved by, and to feel alive on account of its beauty. At the end of the day, what this show has done for me is given me power over where and when I see beauty. I can take what’s around me and tell its story in a way that highlights the beautiful. I’m owning my narrative, I’m owning my narrative. And for that, I love you.
Footnotes:
1 “Esoteric,” not “erotic.” I figure the subject matter and/or essay title might have primed the reader incorrectly, as it did for me while editing…
2 I owe a quick aside on what I mean by “beauty.” There are multiple fields of philosophy and neuroscience devoted to this, and I'm neither an expert nor well-read in any of them. Here's my take as an introspective layperson who occasionally reads various things: the term "beauty" has so very many meanings. It's used most casually to describe things with simple sensory appeal, like a sunset. It's also used more abstractly to describe more complex things, like film. It gets used philosophically to describe, for example, an act of "beautiful" altruism. From the standpoint of linguistic determinism, all of the usages are valid, so I want to suss out a definition of beauty that encompasses all of them. My current version of this definition is that "beauty" is the experience and intellectual idea we arrive at when we contemplate the emotional experience of awe. Put otherwise, we have an emotional/physiological response of awe (which has a phenomneological quality and neurophysiological correlates), and then we think about this experience of awe, at which point the contemplated fact of the experience in conjunction with its subjective qualities turns into the concept-experience of beauty. When we experience something beautiful, we've experienced a sense of awe, and then thought about it.