Meet Rebecca: "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s" musically underrated message about love, life and the self.

Warning: Spoilers below

Meet Rebecca! She’s too hard to summarize. At least, that’s how Crazy-Ex Girlfriend’s 4th and final season theme song goes. Looking closely, it’s true that she’s many things: she’s the titular crazy ex-girlfriend, she’s so broken inside, she’s just a girl in love, she’s a stupid bitch, she’s the villain of her own story, but also she’s a good person, yes its true. Overall, we’re not really seeing a common theme here…or are we?

These shards are a metaphor for her soul... get it?

If CXG aimed at one thing it was to deconstruct the very title attributed to the protagonist, Rebecca Bunch, by shifting the paradigm of love seen in most romcoms and dramas to one much more complex and non-typified. More than fall in love with the man of her dreams, she falls in love with a very beige town, with the people around her, and most importantly, herself, and not some idealized concept of love. The title of the show is a thinker, precisely because it plays with our understanding of what “Crazy” – “Ex” – “Girlfriend” means. I have heard the title of the show is off-putting because it screams «crappy and cringey CW drama», but that close-mindedness doesn’t do justice to this brilliantly written, ambitious and hilariously quirky, award-winning, feminist and conscientious show, that I highly recommend.

Diverse cast? Check. LGBTQ+ representation and realistic portrayals? Check. A very feminist production, crew, and content? Check. Body image positivity and mental health advocacy? Check. Original music and phenomenal triple-threat performers? Check, check, check. And though I could write about each and every aspect, I’ll focus more generally on the main message and takeaway through the protagonist, the crazy ex-girlfriend herself.

The idea is that Becks acts like your stereotypical obsessive, stalker ex-girlfriend, intoxicated by her desperate “love” for her old high school summer camp fling Josh Chan. She drops everything and moves across the country after him, only to learn he has a girlfriend – which doesn’t stop her from trying to woo him through her desperate sexy-fashion-cactus style, gobbling up any love kernels she can scoop from him. But, the story is much less about the pursuit of Josh, and more about the pursuit of self-love, happiness, purpose and within all that, identity. Who is Rebecca really, if not Josh’s beau? Or Greg’s? Or Nathaniel’s? (#TeamNathaniel**). The point of it all is, who is any woman, really, besides her relationship status? Where does this stereotype of a crazy ex come from, and why is it (almost) always women?

**Side-note: defending romantic ships is entertaining, because we all like to believe in OTPs and the fateful concept of soulmates, but isn’t it ironic that even with the lessons this show teaches, we hardcore fans still can’t help but argue over who Rebecca should end up with? Of course, everyone is #TeamRebecca putting herself first for real, but after all she worked through Becks does deserve to find someone who loves her for who she truly is, once she figures out who that is. Romantic love just shouldn’t be all she has going for her. By the end, Rebecca is so much more self-aware and has learned to be in love with life, with the people around her for who they are as well, that the romantic companionship she yearned for so long is well-deserved. And these 3 guys came a long way too and deserve the same, be it with Becks or anyone else. The shipping happening here truly is a fan’s yearning for both sides’ continuing journey, past the show’s end, to include some healthy romantic love and support, that I so happen to believe could work with Nathaniel, or to a very tied extent, Greg.

Part of the laser-focus of this show is how demeaning and even harmful the long-lasting expectation of a “happily ever after” with a “prince charming”, often sold from an early age to young women, can be (though men fall for this narrative too). The deconstruction of that idea at play here is threefold:

First, “crazy” can’t just be thrown into space, as it dismisses the pain or mental health issues that may lay behind one’s actions. Rebecca sure does a lot of “crazy” things, but it’s because she is not well, and is completely illusioned to think a fabricated love (which in reality isn’t more than an intense infatuation) with an ideal person will somehow “fix” her, so in that logic, everything is game in the name of “love”. It is clear though that she is not okay (that’s what you should’ve told her, Patrick) – between daddy and mommy issues, abandonment issues, regrets and a lack of comeuppance for past actions, a genetic predisposition to anxiety and depression, and a lack of self-fulfillment, no wonder she’s imagining Dr. Phil or asking Patrick for a manual in how to be “normal”. When it comes to mental health, words like “insane”, “crazy”, and “hysterical” have long been detrimental to the actual consideration for one’s mental state because its vague, when each individual matter is far too complex for said terms. “Crazy” can be used expressively and emotionally to describe individual actions, situations and reactions, but shouldn’t describe a person in full. The truth is there is no such thing as “normal”, and that thinking adds stigma to opening up about mental health, which applies to us all. Then, the term “ex-girlfriend” diminishes the person in question, making their existence or relevance lie solely on their relationship status. This show astutely uses this label as the premise for Rebecca’s antics in the beginning, and then as the driver for her eventual existential crisis when she finally learns and decides to not be defined through a significant other or her relationship status alone. By the very end, the question truly is, who is Rebecca Bunch, if not the crazy ex-girlfriend? Well, that’s just it, she’s an ex-girlfriend, as in, by then end, she’s no longer a woman who defines herself only as someone’s significant other. She can’t be cast into just one character-type, or into only one musical genre for that matter.

My faceless "West Covina" pretzel magnet homage...

So, who is she, what’s her story?

(ra ta ta…)

Through her lens, we see the wonderful world of West Covina in musical form; Rebecca processes the world and her problems through song, be it in parody of Beyoncé’s “Lemonade”, be it through the most on-point mockery of every boyband ever, or in summarizing the entire Beach Boys’ career in 4 minutes, or alluding to many landmark musical theater greats like “Cats”, “Chicago”, or “Guys and Dolls”, to name a few. To her, the world truly is a stage. Not only are these original musical numbers wildly creative and entertaining to watch, seamlessly inserted within the narrative, but this musical disassociation (a real symptom of her eventual BPD diagnosis) reveals what Rebecca’s ultimate journey really is – it’s the search for identity, belonging, and happiness, which isn’t all found in romantic love. She doesn’t ever think in just one musical genre; she’ll play off people’s expectations of her, she’ll project onto herself whatever cool she aspires to ooze off, and overall loses herself in these different performances and masks because she doesn’t know who she is. She has a personality disorder, and these musical numbers are an ingenious way to show it.

They are also standalone masterpieces, if you ask me, making this one ambitious, intelligent and layered show that deserves far more recognition. No other show I know has matched the amount of work put into it – work that adds production value and has serious payoff in the entire storytelling endeavor. This show is so criminally underrated despite its genius, that more people may actually have seen Netflix’s “Isn’t It Romantic”, a movie with a similar premise, instead of CXG. The difference is CXG presented the meta-deconstruction of romcoms first, in its intelligent and truly humorously way, all the while serving 156 (!) original songs. But it doesn’t have Thor or Rebel Wilson giving very subpar performances, so who cares, right? All I mean to say is that even if musicals or this particular weird, dark, and realistically sexual humor isn’t your cup of tea, don’t pass up on knowing its name, its value and its message, which is very expertly crafted.

With that, it is imperative to mention this show’s candid depiction of mental health once again. The first couple of seasons may, at the surface, have nothing to do with this for the casual viewer, with only a relatable sprinkle here or there of anxiety or depression related dark humor, but throughout the show, character work and plot build-up leads to a much deeper understanding of mental health and love. Looking back, all the signs of Rebecca’s diagnosis and mental health issues were all there from minute one. There’s her in New York looking completely sleep-deprived, looking up depression online, there's her having an anxiety attack about her promotion, and then there's her looking for advice coming from a butter commercial (and later, pretzels). In “A Boyband Made Up of Four Joshes” we also see her very real, obsessive, suicidal and depressive tendencies, only disguised behind her teenage-like infatuation (and Vincent Rodrigues III’s phenomenal performance). She even realizes she’s gone a little “crazy” when she reveals to Paula at the end of the first episode why she’s in West Covina, California in the first place; only to be encouraged by her new best friend, who meant well, to follow-through with the sad shenanigans to win Josh over.

There is the heartbreaking turning point in which Rebecca needs to get help and begins her true journey. The point never was for her to succeed in bagging Josh at last, marrying him, and that boom! “they’d never have problems again”. Instead, Josh, or rather her idea of him, an ideal “him”, was the catalyst for all her problems. So the first two seasons build up this character and these situations as nothing more than an ingenue waiting for one indescribable instant that will magically fix everything, only to flip it on its head and hold up a mirror to how that isn’t the ending we want for her – it isn’t the ending at all. As Rebecca points out in the finale, “Romantic love is not an ending. It’s a part of your story”. So, in the second half of the show, she recovers from a very emotional suicide attempt, gets a diagnosis, effectively dedicates herself to therapy, grows a lot but has fallbacks, changes career, tries to find redemption, acknowledges the darkness that plagues her, and finally figures out how to love herself, so as to then, maybe, grow in love with someone else (sans the unhealthy expectation of “glitter exploding inside of her”). As seen in the episode titles, the narrative shifts away from Josh immediately, because Rebecca’s the protagonist, she’s the one in command of her story. Borderline Personality Disorder is a difficult mental struggle to live with and this show did it fantastic justice in depicting the very real, very raw struggle behind it, without forgoing that Rebecca, and anyone, is human, and deserving of love, in all of its forms, even at their lowest and most vicious.

By the eleventh hour, literally, she asks herself this very question at last: “How do I still not know myself after all that I’ve been through?”, and proceeds to replay, in medley form, all the molds she’s seen herself in and let her self be seen through, personified by the very iconic costumes of the show’s beloved elaborate musical numbers – all in an abstract theatrical space no less. Her struggle to understand herself, to make sense of her life, of her actions, is the point. Life doesn’t make narrative sense. Rebecca thought her life would fall into place if she conceived it as tightly wrapped narrative, but that’s not realistic. By reflecting about these meta-fictional characters, we can reflect about ourselves, without falling for the illusion that life has a constructed, fatalistic narrative to it, that ties up neatly like a movie. In this character’s case, in Rebecca’s case, in true meta fashion for such a layered show and character, telling a story to yourself or others can’t sum up a life, a person. The situation is always a lot more nuanced than that. It isn’t until she finally lets Paula into her world and explains where she wanders off to in her head, and the musicals she imagines and process life through, that she finally gets a resolve. By telling her story, by writing it down, and working on it extra hard despite being tragically tone-deaf in reality, Rebecca finally processes and finds what she’s been looking for; herself, love (in all its forms), and finally the answer to that butter commercial – what, how and when she feels truly happy. So, I invite everyone to meet Rebecca, because I promise you, you’ll want to hear the song she wrote.