“It’s a Coney Island”: Russian Doll and Millennial Dissatisfaction
The show Russian Doll focuses on the lives of two millennials in New York City, Nadia Vulvokov and Alan Zaveri. Russian Doll is a trippy science-fiction comedy-drama that combines dark time loops with body-swapping time travel. However, trippy may not be a strong enough descriptor to explain the plot of the show; it is more a funhouse of mirrors. The other characters in the show are mostly millennials with a few baby boomers peppered in as witnesses for the main characters. There’s only a few consistent threads to which the audience can cling and relate. The main characters have vapid friends who believe they are profoundly deep artists, elders who hoard the secrets of the past, and a longing for something–anything–to be different.
We empathize with Nadia trapped in an unending loop of celebration and death starting at her 36th birthday, but she is unable to enjoy the former and unable to avoid the latter. Perhaps this is more about a sadistic enjoyment of pain–inflicted, experienced, lamented over, No I don’t think so. Then what is it? It might be a lesson on gratitude and grace.
Nadia Vulvokov and Alan Zaveri are looking for their “Coney Island.” This idea is posited by Chez in the second season. He suggests that wishing for things to be different, to hope to change things, is misguided. “It’s a Coney Island–the thing that would make everything better if it happened, right?” For Chez, Coney Island represents all the joy and possibilities these people seek. It is a very New York sort of proverb. New Yorkers know that to get to that boardwalk, that beach, that amusement park is a long journey through Brooklyn to the end of the D train line. Most people who live in New York all their lives have never seen Coney Island–it’s a fun idea but not a lived experience.
Nadia and Alan are looking for their happy ending, believing that their own lives could have been different. However, they are limited in what they see as perfect and seem to wallow in what they did not have rather than on what they did have, and still do. They express themselves in every negative stereotype of millennials. Nadia tells her surrogate mother Ruth that she feels “so profoundly empty.” The emptiness presents itself in that they complain, blame, and self-medicate incessantly. As much as they interrogate their lives and the people in it, they rarely hold up a mirror to themselves, interrogate themselves. They just want their Coney Island, and they want it now. For that reason, they are trapped in a merry-go-round that rehashes the last day of their lives.
Nadia Vulvokov is brilliant, but self-centered and self loathing, hiding her frailty behind a brusque foulmouthed attitude. Her experience is always centered around her misery with little regard to her emotional impact on others. Believing that she is a loner, Nadia disregards her ever present motley tribe of friends. Maxine tells Nadia, “Your friends can’t help if you don’t let them. As I have said before.” Her feelings of loneliness are self-inflicted as everyone who reaches out to her gets shoved back, insulted, or abandoned. She also behaves as though rules are for everyone else but her–her smoking, her disregard for people’s privacy, even crossing the street. That is the point. Her view of the world is so myopic that she puts her life in danger without considering the consequences.
Interlinked, intertwined, or whatever one might call it, Alan operates as a tether and a foil for Nadia. He also struggles heavily with depression and anxiety, but instead of self-medicating like Nadia, Alan seeks to control his life in order to make sense of his own loneliness and emptiness. Where Nadia seeks unfulfilling one night stands, Alan organizes and agonizes over planning to propose to his girlfriend. He hopes to gain a sense of fulfillment and stability through marriage. However, just like Nadia, he cannot escape his last day, trapped on the same merry-go-round.
Regardless of how they approach their lives, Nadia and Alan are both dealing with the same ennui and frustration as often seen as characteristics of millennials. Being cosmically tied to each other, they are forced to continuously hold up a mirror to each other and point out their own flaws. The beauty of this connection is that their link begins through a bathroom mirror in the first season. To look at yourself is to be connected to others. Through each time loop and time jump, they start realizing the community–the one they insist does not exist–has been there in every single iteration of their lives. In both seasons, they face their selfishness, their lack of empathy, and their self loathing. They learn to look in the funhouse mirror and stop examining others and instead examine themselves which leads them to a sort of grace.
For now, they have stopped seeking their “Coney Island” and accepted the wild, strange real rollercoaster of their lives.
Seasons 1 and 2 are available now on Netflix.
