How I Hate Suzie destroys the ideal of the perfect female friendship
There’s a scene in I Hate Suzie, the eight-series dark comedy creation from Billie Piper and Lucy Prebble, where heroine Suzie sashays along the street, claiming that her relationships with men are secondary only to her first love, her beautiful female friendship. In the next scene, her best friend and agent breaks the news that she’s deserting her and going to Iran.
It turns the trope of the perfect female friendship on its head and not a moment too soon. In too much popular culture, friendships between women are presented as either a foil to the principle male story line (think The Bechtel Test) competitive and bitchy, or as the holy grail of all relationships-caring, supportive, sisterhood. In this sense, the portrayal of female friendships is nothing more than an extension of that other damaging trope applied to women — the Madonna or the whore.
In I Hate Suzie we see some of the common female friendship tropes of the ideal ‘Hollywood’ female friendship. Suzie and her best friend Naomi have known one another since childhood. They work together, they share the goriest details (Suzie is present in the room while Naomi gives a stranger a blow job, Naomi says ‘I only fucked him so you didn’t have to’), even their periods are in sync. Compared to Suzie’s hollow marriage, her friendship with Naomi seems to be her place of intimacy and authenticity. Except it isn’t.
For Naomi, the relationship is one way. She is her friend’s agent and cheerleader, knowing her better than she knows herself. She can exist only in the reflected light from Suzie, attending her sister’s wedding with her, attempting to follow Suzie’s path to marriage and kids even if it’s not what she wants. This is best shown when Naomi attends a Hampstead women’s event pretending to be Suzie. Devoid of other clients she tries to break free of Suzie’s grasp by building her portfolio, but ironically she can only do that by using her connection to Suzie.
Suzie too finds the relationship problematic. In the episode where she spends the entire day masturbating, an imaginary Naomi keeps invading her fantasies, criticising them and policing them. She chooses not to tell Naomi about her affair with Cob as she fears being judged. She feels betrayed when Naomi attempts a life independent of her, whether by finding new clients or by dating women.
When Naomi ditches Suzie it throws this problematic friendship into all its codependent sharp relief. Naomi is going to Iran and the only person she did not know how to tell, the only person she knew would not be supportive, was Suzie. Yet nor is Naomi’s quest beyond parody. As Suzie questions her friend’s decision, Naomi talks about the smell of the earth after the rain in Iran, making her sound as self-absorbed and silly as the friendship she is escaping. By this, I Hate Suzie manages to undermine both the perfect female friendship trope but also the classic escape trope, avoiding either Suzie or Naomi being the simple hero or villain.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing bad about showing a good female friendship on TV. But to exclusively portray them as positive and nurturing is to deify a relationship that can be just as real or problematic as any other. Rather than heap extra pressure on women, I Hate Suzie is the latest in a number of TV series (Fleabag) to show a woman muddling through making mistakes and surviving them, much like a man might.
I Hate Suzie could have had its protagonist find salvation in her friendship with Naomi. However the writers took it one step further and smashed the friendship idol too. In doing this, they made Suzie a real character, with real problems and crap relationships. Refreshingly, she could not be rescued by her relationships, romantic or otherwise, and was left staring into the nightmare she had created. In this sense, she becomes a real character with her own agency, not Madonna, not whore, not a perfect marriage, not a perfect friendship. Which helps the rest of us feel all right for not being perfect either.
