"Crashing’s" Lulu is the patron saint of little girls who tell the truth
a tragic character, for about 2 minutes
Contains spoilers for Crashing and Fleabag
I - Honest
In the opening sequence of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Crashing, we are introduced to Lulu as she plays her Ukulele, or Ukululu (Oh dear, the cheese), on a crowded bus. After a stranger tells her to be quiet, she sings about how that woman needs an orgasm.
These forty seconds establish a character who has to tell the truth.
This extends not only to important truths, like her feelings for her childhood friend Anthony, but also ones that don’t actually need confessing, like liking lesbian porn or feeling bad when homeless people have scabs on their faces. It also extends to truths that hurt other people’s feelings, like exposing to a crowded room that Anthony’s fiancée Kate can’t orgasm.
In fact, the whole premise of the “Truth Songs” game, which she makes almost every character in the show participate in at some point, is to sing a truth that you’re too afraid to say out loud, which often feels like her trying to make the people around her participate in what she herself cannot stop doing.
In all this though, she seems less bothered by dishonesty - we see her lack of objection to lying - and more so riddled with the need to confess.12
In that way, she is a predecessor to Waller-Bridge’s more well-known character Fleabag, whose similar inclinations manifest in falling in love with a catholic priest (and consistently breaking the 4th wall, obviously).
There is that theory that says writers have to write about the same thing over and over until we feel we’ve got it right.
On the same evening I watched “Crashing”, a few hours earlier, I went to a dinner. A family friend brought her young daughter. I noticed very quickly that that girl had absolutely no filter.
At some point, some of the women at the table showed around their prom outfits from the 90s, which she said looked “awful and weird” (when I showed her mine she proclaimed it looked “much better”, which felt like winning some kind of a medal).
There was so much relief in me when I noticed that nobody was reprimanding that girl or telling her she was being rude.
I turned to my family and said that I thought it was really cool how sharp and witty and blunt that girl was. Someone else said “Yeah, but it’s more than that, she’s also really observant”, telling a story of how hours before the girl had pointed out something everyone was too polite to bring up with each other, but also had been savvy enough not to announce it to the room.
Truth is, she reminded me a great deal of myself at that age.
One time, a friend’s mom made a comment about something like “In 30 years, we’ll all be older” and I replied something like “I’ll be older, you might be dead” (this was over a decade ago, give me some leniency in terms of exact quotation). For years, she told that story to my mom, saying how she was at first taken aback but then thought it was kind of cool.
(And maybe you’re reading this thinking “These kids are dicks”, but I want you to remember that children don’t understand what politeness is yet and that polite and kind are two different words anyway.)
This was not my usual experience with adults, though. If a little girl blatantly blurts out what she thinks or perceives, usually adults cope with it either by belittling her, deciding that it’s “cute”, or telling her off for being rude, expecting her to be able to conceptualize that without explanation. As if the cool and interesting thing about kids saying this stuff isn’t that they are actually not doing it to hurt your feelings, unlike adults. They haven’t learned to use the truth like a blunt weapon yet, because they don’t know they can. Yet they get scolded for it as if they do.3
I sincerely hope that little girl keeps encountering people who encourage her to speak her mind, but I doubt it, and when that thought hit my mind first, I started grieving for her already and maybe a bit for me too.
The world is not kind to little girls who tell the truth. Especially not when they grow up. And mostly, people just kind of want women to shut up anyway.
It’s like when Anthony says “Sometimes you just take it too far, Lulu” and she looks like he’s slapped her in the face. Sure, he’s joking, but is he? They’re always joking until he says they’re not, and he usually decides they’re not after she’s said something.
The problem, for Lulu, is she’s not a child. The problem is also that she is one. She and Anthony both are, when they’re around each other. It’s normal, it’s, as How I Met Your Mother’s Marshall Erikson coined it, “Revertigo”4.
As adults, we learn that sometimes the truths we tell hurt other people’s feelings. And then we learn that sometimes, they hurt their feelings because they’d rather lie to themselves. And then, that they might actually be happy that way. Or that they just think they are but they’re very not. Or that they want to have their feelings hurt. But they don’t want to want that so they still yell at you because that’s how they get to get it. Now try explaining that to a child.
II - Tragic
Lulu and Anthony are in love with each other. Or at least they think they are. That is the core plot of Crashing.
But because Anthony is engaged to Kate, who is thoroughly innocent, loyal, and weirdly endearing and doesn’t deserve the betrayal, we as the audience don’t really want them to get together.
Flash forward to the last episode, Kate and Anthony have sort of broken up/are in a fight, and Anthony sleeps with Lulu despite the chance of getting back together with Kate, seemingly deciding that he wants to be with Lulu, only to go talk to Kate the next morning, who does want to get back together.
And then he makes LULU DECIDE what he should do. As if he shouldn’t be able to make that decision for himself. But he isn’t. In more backhanded ways, he asks Lulu that question every episode.
As I watched that scene, my mind fast-tracked both options:
If she told him he should be with her, it would truly establish her as a self-serving character, at the same time I don’t know how much I want to fault her for wanting to be with someone who told her not a day ago that he wanted to be with her.
If she told him he should stay with Kate, it would make her character kind of tragic. Lulu isn’t a naturally selfless person, if she was, she wouldn’t be pursuing Anthony at all or responding to his attempts. Her selfishness is human and ugly. And she tries to do the right thing and says no, multiple times. So if she says no now, she gets to be alone with her feelings and truths. She’ll probably be off on another bus by the end of the episode, cut off from the community she found but knowing that for once in her life, she was the bigger person. That’s the shit about it, right? Doing the right thing doesn’t necessarily feel like a very rewarding experience all of the time.
So when she does tell Anthony to choose Kate, it is sort of sadly kinda what we want her to do.
But…the episode doesn’t end,
Lulu and Anthony find themselves in a secluded corner of the kitchen, IN THE SAME ROOM AS KATE, and Anthony kisses Lulu again. And she kisses him back. And fuck can you blame her at this point I mean, I guess you can, but make up your mind, man.
Brilliantly, Kate walks in and announces “oh, and uhm. I’m not fucking stupid.”
Show over. BRILLIANT.
The revoking of her rejection of Anthony makes Lulu a lot less tragic than she was 2 minutes before.
And as much as I personally am enamored with fictional people who choose other people’s happiness over their own, honestly, who fucking wants to be a tragic character these days???
In many ways, I think the Lulu who would have been back on a bus by the end of the series would have been on her way to becoming Fleabag. Who keeps her truth between herself and the audience. Who doesn’t ask Arsehole guy to choose her over someone else in Season 1. Who doesn’t ask the priest to choose her over God in Season 2.
Fleabag very much is the tragic character I keep writing around, who I’m a bit worried is at the end of the road for women who grew up blurting out observations until the people around them decided it wasn’t cute anymore. Maybe not so much anymore at the end of the series, but surely at the beginning of it.
I believe Fleabag and Lulu have the same thing, they’re confessional people. But Lulu brings it to a different, unexpected, and open-ended conclusion.
III - trying to draw a conclusion now
We don’t get to know what happens to Lulu and Anthony and Kate.
But we know what happens to Waller-Bridge’s confessional women.
We see Fleabag experience some actual relief and calm through confessing a love that has nowhere to go, and then sending the camera away, suggesting that maybe now she’s finally done confessing.
The world remains an unforgiving place for women who tell the truth. But the world is an unforgiving place for everyone. And that’s what you have to remember. Often, telling the truth is not polite. But sometimes, it isn’t kind. And being unkind because you’re nervous (because blatant children sometimes become nervous people) isn’t going to get anyone anywhere.
We learn to use the truth as the blunt weapon that it can be. Lost is that innocence that made you just say things without any larger motivation behind it than stating fact. And people fucking hate it.
When I was a child I told every truth I noticed around me. As a teenager, I started keeping all of them in. Then I got very angry about everyone including myself doing that. I miss that little girl sometimes, her reckless abandon, and was delighted to see glimpses of her in another child.
Shit, I don’t know. It just gets more complicated than that, doesn’t it?
I want to end this on a personal anecdote:
When I was sixteen, I watched the 1958 film “Some Came Running”, in which a man (Frank Sinatra), is romantically caught up between two women, Gwen (Martha Hyer), his intellectual equal and Ginny (Shirley McLaine), who he deems intellectually inferior to him.
In the scene that was most quoted around me, Shirley McLaine’s character says to Sinatra’s,
“I love you. But I don't understand you. Now what's the matter with that?”
When my boyfriend at the time pretty much insisted I give him a pet name, I started calling him Shirley5 and explained the context to him.
It was mean and very real. I didn’t think he understood me.
Looking back, I’d like to think I said it, partly because I wanted to say something that would make him leave because I didn’t want to be in that relationship and didn’t know I could just say that, and partly because I’d been raised to understand mockery as a viable love language.
But really, I said it because it was what was in my head, and maybe there wasn’t that much more to it than that.
This also makes her interactions with fellow housemate Sam very interesting, a character who cannot tell the truth, but whose truth she nonetheless unravels within their first interaction.
I believe the truth is a central theme of Crashing as a whole. Here is my personal analysis of the characters that I think have a significant relationship with it: Lulu has to tell the truth, Sam can’t. Anthony doesn’t want to hear the truth and Kate, much like her thematic successor Claire in “Fleabag”, creates her own version of it.
It unironically pisses me off so much when adults tell children off for doing things they should “know not to do” when they clearly don’t. Some people expect their kids to be chucked into the world with Emily Post’s body of work memorized.
I guess I didn’t remember the character’s name
Thank you for reading! Means a lot.
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I would also add that Fred tries to embrace his truth, but is constantly scolded for it in return (until the ending ofc).
ok wait also i am DEAD at using the pet name shirley. as you should . of course he didn’t understand