In every female friendship dynamic that has long ago reached a plateau largely for codependent reasons, there is one person in particular who has already decided before the other party is aware that it’s time to move on. Move on from the sort of codependency that can be summed up by the sentence, “We woke up in a pool of vomit and we didn’t know if it was hers or mine.” And yet, fear paired with a sense of obligation is what keeps the one wanting to break free in shackles. The exploration of this type of toxic rapport–wherein one histrionic, needier and self-absorbed friend feeds off the weakness of another more muted personality–was achieved with eerie perfection in Sandra Goldbacher’s 2001 film, Me Without You. Centered on two friends who grew up in childhood together, Holly (Michelle Williams) and Marina (Anna Friel)–made into the compound noun of Harina to give you some indication of how incestuous the two are–the venomous bond that forms between them is precisely the same scourge that befalls the friendship of Aisling (Seána Kerslake) and Danielle (Nika McGuigan), two friends in the winter of their twenties, an uncharted period in their lives that is suddenly starting to yield very divergent outcomes for both of them.
Living together in Dublin, Aisling whiles the days away in an office just waiting for the moment the clock strikes the hour that she can go drinking and clubbing with her best friend/roommate (always a lethal combination in crafting the recipe of sickening attachment), herself a college girl with a slightly more aspirational aura. And as Danielle’s art teacher encourages her to create work that actually means something to her as opposed to just drawing “well,” it’s as though the resentment that’s been bubbling up inside of her finally starts to shine through in her final project. Her flirtatious dynamic with a fellow student named Ferg (Muiris Crowley) also begins to take up a lot more of her time–or at least more time than Aisling would like. In point of fact, Aisling’s treatment of Danielle as more of an on-call therapist for her various melodramas is among the chief reasons why she’s been ruminating on making a break from the oppression of their evermore fractured alliance.
And as Aisling tries to cling more desperately to the way things were between them at a time when Danielle was eager enough to fuck around–dispense her hours so readily when the benefits of all her hard work weren’t at stake–Danielle becomes increasingly horrified and disillusioned with what is very clearly Aisling’s self-destructive alcoholism. Though it was once fun to Danielle to “wake up in a stranger’s flat because they were so off their faces,” watching Aisling’s spiral makes for an all too significant realization of just how unattractive it looks.
As the palpable strain on their former affinity grows more intense after an incident involving the unintentional theft of a car (losing control of the vehicle so that it goes about ten feet and ends up stalling in the sea), Danielle can’t ignore the differences that have mounted to an intolerable level any longer the way Aisling can. “I used to want to be a twin,” Danielle says weightily to one of the girls she babysits. When the child tells her that such a wish is silly, she tends to agree, an altogether separate epiphany washing over her.
In the meantime, Aisling is also treading on thin ice at her job, a fund management company called Sweeney Grimes and Hunt, where an affair with her co-worker, Lorcan (Laurence O’Fuarain), and a tense perpetual standoff with her boss, Kate (Amy Huberman), serves as a cocktail to further aggravate the ones she nightly downs to escape the nature of her reality–so masked to her in good times, merely a part of youthful folly. The pharmacist she regularly gets her morning after pill from is just one of many people on the periphery of Aisling’s life who display overt disgust for the choices she seems so gleefully to make, as though proud of what an embarrassment she nightly makes of herself. That even Danielle, the only other person who has for so long been willing to participate in her antics, is starting to visibly recoil from her is what sends Aisling off on a bender of epic proportions, one that leads her ultimately to be arrested for being a harm to herself.
In much the same way, Marina has a near panic attack after learning that Holly has gotten closer to someone other than her: her own brother, Nat (Oliver Milburn). So determined to keep the two apart so as to maintain her hold over Holly, she makes it come across to both of them that the other one isn’t as interested as he or she really is, and furthermore encourages Oliver to go back to his French girlfriend, Isabel (Marianne Denicourt). Aisling, too, has possessiveness issues over Danielle when Ferg starts to get under her skin. So concerned with losing 24/7 access to Danielle, Aisling even goes so far as to not tell Danielle when Ferg calls multiple times in a state of emergency while they’re out watching people “dogging” in the middle of the night by the water.
This unhealthy need to sustain control over a friend who should be considered an equal you want to grow and flourish rather than keep in a jar and allow to atrophy just so you can feel that nothing has changed is precisely why Aisling herself can’t find happiness. For it’s always the case that attempting to will things to remain the same ends up resulting in severe misery–fighting change is more implausible than Don Quixote fighting the windmills.
Yet Aisling turns to everyone except herself in finding a reason for why things aren’t as she wants them to be. Constantly declaring, “This has to be The Truman Show” as part of her self-victimization, Aisling’s sole outlet other than getting shit-faced is the assured cushion of having Danielle on her side and at her disposal. Thus, in episode two, “Drive on, Drive on, Drive on, Drive On,” when Danielle starts to develop more of a backbone in going against Aisling’s “fun-related” demands, Aisling pulls the “Thanks for leaving me on my own” card as Danielle tries to flee the scene of the crime, where the owner of the vehicle has now unearthed the location of his car. Danielle snaps, “You’re welcome to come home like a normal human.” Aisling returns, “Don’t bother bullying me now.” Irritated to the extreme, Danielle whisper-screams, “I’m not fucking bullying you. I’m asking you to stop being such a creep, taking CDs and lurking in the bushes at the scene of a crime.” Now on the defense, Aisling insists, “You ruin every single night with these fucking lectures. We’re having the best time and now you’ve ruined it.” So it is that the divide between what each girl views as “the best time” cracks irrevocably.
In the penultimate episode, “Release Me,” Danielle tries to make light of their faux car heist by asking, “It’s Bonnie and Clyde or Laurel and Hardy that stole the car?” Aisling smiles and says, “Thelma and Louise, and they had the excitement of driving off a cliff, not rolling slowly towards the sea.” The subtext of course being her genuine belief in her friendship with Danielle. That she thinks it’s so ironclad that Danielle would agree to drive off a cliff with her is what makes it all the more heart-wrenching to watch when Danielle can finally suppress her true emotions no longer. After getting lost in the woods due to taking a trip Aisling insisted upon, Danielle can’t handle the role she’s seemed to adopt as caretaker and surrogate mother, countering to Aisling’s declaration of missing her while she spent the weekend with Ferg, “You don’t know what it’s like to miss people. You use people as distractions. Like this today. You made me miss college where I want to be, where I’ve worked my ass off to get to.” With the gloves off, Aisling hits back with, “Wasting four thousand euro a year on learning how to color in?”
With all bets off on tiptoeing around how noxious their friendship has become, Aisling also goes the Romy route by essentially claiming that she’s the Mary and Danielle is the Rhoda. Danielle scoffs at this, remarking, “Oh am I bland is it? Because I haven’t been arrested for being drunk is it?”
In spite of all this, Aisling would still rather eternize their corpse-like friendship than permit Danielle the ease of making a clean break. Worse than going through a romantic breakup, Aisling is heartbroken upon hearing Danielle stoically and honestly state, “We’re not good together.” Just as Holly, too, must cut the cord, only to have Marina cry, “There’s no me without you.” Aisling, likewise, feels the same regardless of her claims of being the colorful, interesting one. For it is so often these personality types that rely on the compass and solidity of befriending a “bland” one. Creator Stefanie Preissner’s no holds barred assessment of how often an overly reliant friend can turn the relationship between two females sour is a sobering and welcome addendum to the Me Without You handbook, so to speak, on how not to be a shitty friend.
