Hi, welcome back. I’ve been absent while trying to sort my life out. It’s as sorted as it’s going to get for the time being, so let’s talk about arts and culture in Michigan (and maybe some environmental stuff, too, if I can manage actual reporting while wrangling the toddler).
Photograph by Sarah Shatz/HBO Max courtesy of Warner Media. William Jackson Harper stars as Marcus Watkins on Season 2 of Love Life.
Love Life on HBO Max is generally a lovely show. The anthology program spends each season tracking one New York City-based character through their love life. It hits many of my favorite notes; interconnected stories, romances between well-drawn characters that reference but elaborate on tropes, and a tendency to examine how other relationships (family, friends) affect our romantic lives. But it also bangs away at the New York City drum and lord, I am tired of that beat.
Tonally, Love Life is very different from Girls, an HBO predecessor that similarly deals with millennials discovering themselves in the city. Yet both shows feature characters from other places who feel like their most authentic selves only in New York City. If you look at nearly every other show set in New York, you’ll know it’s a common theme.
In Girls and the latest season of Love Life, the main characters are both children of professors from universities in Michigan. Girls’ Hannah (Lena Dunham) is white and is from East Lansing; Love Life’s Marcus (William Jackson Harper) is Black and from Ann Arbor.
I have fewer objections about East Lansing’s portrayal in Girls than I do Ann Arbor’s portrayal in Love Life. My biggest objection to the East Lansing in Girls is the notion that Hannah is somehow unique for having gone to New York. East Lansing is a big enough school district with enough high-performing graduates that Hannah landing in New York City is no surprise for a kid with professors for parents. Lots of people go to New York City after college or high school. There’s no test. You just get some money together and go (that’s a test in and of itself, but you get my point. There’s no more significant accomplishment in going to New York after graduation than there is in going to Denver). But I forgive Girls for the lazy East Lansing portrayal because it underscores Hannah’s belief that she is special.
But Love Life’s version of Ann Arbor, where two Black friends pick a hick bar with white guys in plaid and deer heads on the wall—and then feel uncomfortable—is just laughable (season 2, episode 3). First, I’m not convinced a bar like that exists in Ann Arbor. Maybe Ypsi? I don’t know—I haven’t been to all the bars in Ann Arbor. But I do know that there are enough bars in Ann Arbor that you don’t gotta go to one that makes you squirm in your seat. I found myself doing mental gymnastics, trying to explain away the bad bar choice. Maybe they were there for nostalgia’s sake. Maybe it was the bar closest to their homes growing up that didn’t card teens (then why did they have to drive there)? Maybe the drinks were cheap-even-for-Michigan. Plausible.
Whatever not-on-the-screen explanation you can come up with for why Marcus would go to Ann Arbor’s most redneck bar, it doesn’t explain why Marcus generally feels so uncomfortable in Ann Arbor. Much of his subsequent journey through the years on Love Life is coming to terms with and owning his Black identity. But he has a thriving Black community in Ann Arbor. His educated parents are proud of their identities. He has family. As portrayed on the show, his parents would have connected him with Black cultural experiences in Ann Arbor, Detroit, Flint. It’s in New York that Marcus finds himself buried in Whiteness, masking his true self.
Photograph by Sarah Shatz/HBO Max, courtesy Warner Media.
If you’re going to dig into why Marcus is uncomfortable in Michigan but tells himself he’s comfortable in New York, I think the explanation that works is that when Marcus is at home in Michigan, he is reminded of how far he is from who he wants to be. But I think the scene in the bar undermines that message. The bar scene says, “Michigan Sucks and the Only Diverse City on the Planet is New York City, As New York City Has Been Telling You For Decades Now.”
(Did Marcus even choose New York City or was he forced to live there because of his career in publishing?)
I suspect the Love Life writers picked the wrong university in Michigan to install his parents as professors. Western Michigan, maybe, would have worked. Perhaps Adrian or Albion or Kalamazoo College would have made more sense, suggesting an environmental tension between the values his family espouses and the broader community in which they live. But the entertainment media likes to portray Michigan State and the University of Michigan as the state’s only places of higher learning.
That’s unfortunate because you don’t need name-brand awareness of a particular university to understand what it means for a character to be the child of tenured professors. You don’t need to have a handy stereotype ready to understand the relative prestige of directional schools versus the University of (State) or (State) State University. It doesn’t take great fictional prowess to invent the name of a liberal arts college in some rural Michigan town, either.
One trope in coming-of-age narratives (and Love Life is one, even if the characters are already adults when the story begins) where the character leaves home is that of the Place as a character in and of itself. Much ink was spilled elaborating on how the “fifth woman” in Sex in the City was the city herself, for example.
It is not my favorite trope, truth be told. I remember coming home from college for the first time, reconvening with friends who had gone to school out-of-state or in other Michigan cities. Everyone talked about how much more themselves they felt in Evanston or Grand Rapids or New York or Ann Arbor. The lesson I learned is that there’s no magic in the water in New York or Grand Rapids (or anywhere else) that turns an ordinary person into the best possible version of themselves. It has more to do with independence, a sense of purpose and the opportunity to grow than with geography.