One of the great things about a movie like Marriage Story is that it takes you inside a relationship as it falls apart. It feels real, intimate, titillating, almost in just how mundane it is. It’s like peering into your neighbor’s fight in a way that makes you wonder what really goes on behind closed doors.
Then think about The Valley, which is that, but real. We’re seeing Jax and Brittany have a very honest fight between a man who has thrown his life and family away, and a woman who is pissed that she married a man as a way out of her small town and was completely bamboozled by him and the reality TV lifestyle he offered. It isn’t fictionalized, it isn’t imagined, it’s what the movies promise us we really want. But now that we have it? Girl, it might as well be last night’s Taco Bell leftovers because not only do I want it away from me as quickly as possible, but it is quite literally making me sick.
That is how I felt during that long final scene where Jax goes to visit Brittany to talk about their “boundaries” and how he can figure out what he can do for Brittany so that he can see “my son.” (Has Jax ever used that boy’s government name, or does Cruz only exist as a reflection of Jax’s ownership over another human being?)
Jax goes over to his house, the house he used to share with her, and he is initially struck by how it looks like he never lived there: all of his pictures, possessions, and stupid hockey bullshit are completely removed. As Brittany says, that is the point; he doesn’t live there anymore, but this man can’t get over the fact that he’s been erased from a space. He says in a confessional that he doesn’t know why lawyers have to get involved in their divorce. He can’t see why they can’t figure it out and just part as friends. Um, Jax, have you met yourself? The reason she needs a lawyer is you, because you are petty, vindictive, self-involved, and only care about winning. Of course, he doesn’t think he needs lawyers, because he thinks he can win.
Jax starts in on a common refrain that pops up several times both in this conversation and other places, that he can’t believe Brittany can “throw away” 10 years in the snap of her fingers. Excuse me? Jax was throwing away their relationship basically from the minute it started. Every time he talked badly about Brittany, every time he cheated on her, every time he put himself before their union, he was throwing it away. This is all ending because of Jax and his behavior, which is something he can’t fathom. As the exchange gets heated, Brittany tells him that she begged him to get help, to go to therapy, to quit drinking and drugs. He says he’s doing that now. “Now is too late,” Brittany says. “You already ruined our family.”
This is what I really can’t stand about Jax. It’s one thing to play the villain in a divorce like Jesse. The way he’s treated Michelle is diabolical, trying to make her life hell and not giving her even an inch. At least it’s honest. What’s worse than playing the villain is playing the victim, which is the only move Jax knows. He says Brittany is throwing it away, he says she’s keeping his son from him, he says every time he tries to talk to her, “you act so mean to me, you discard me.” What is crazy about Jax trying to play the victim is that we have been watching him and Brittany for the better part of a decade. He can’t play the victim because we know it’s not true. We saw him talk about her body in a derogatory way. We saw him put down her skills as a mother because she was drinking. We saw him cheat on her while lying in bed next to a 90-year-old woman. (That last one is embellished for impact, but you all know that it is essentially true.) He can’t pretend that he is the one being wronged when we’ve seen him wronging this woman forever.
Brittany then says one of the cruelest and most justified things that I have ever seen one human say to another: “I cannot let Cruz be anything like you. And you should feel the same way.” That’s the thing about Jax; he isn’t just unsavory, he’s actively dangerous. He is like pouring acid on metal or stuffing a Mentos into a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke. He is corrosive, and having him around will ruin everyone and everything he has influence over.
The problem is, after all of this, Jax will not change. He still doesn’t think he did anything wrong, and he’s already rewritten the story in his head about what happened. He was a great, giving father, and his ex-wife is a fucking crazy bitch who is keeping his son from him for no reason. We get a glimpse of how this divorce will proceed as the fight winds down. Brittany tells Jax that all she wants is for him to pay half of Cruz’s medical bills. Even then, he is demanding something; he is demanding that she doesn’t get full custody (and we all know that Jax doesn’t know what this means, and he thinks it means he will be indefinitely barred from his son’s life). He says that if she’s going to play like that, then he’s going to ask for alimony because Brittany makes more money than he does. This is the man who was just pleading with her not to destroy her son’s father, and now here he is threatening to take money away from his son just so he can prove a point. Ugh, get this man off of my television and never let him and his stupid little chin beard near me again.
This scene was definitely the highlight of an episode that didn’t have much else to offer. The other big event was that Janet, whom nearly everyone has turned on except Michelle and Scheana, goes with Jason to get tattoos. What are they going to get? Lines under their wedding rings so that it always looks like they have one on. This is why fans can’t stand Janet. Only she (and I guess Jason, but we all know it’s mainly Janet) would think up this cringey stunt of going to get their bodies permanently altered in relation to a stupid plot point on one season of a reality show. “Now they can never say he goes out with his wedding ring again,” they both say, yuk yuking their way under the needle. This seems like a permanent solution to a temporary problem. In 20 years, even if The Valley is still running, they’re still on it, and it’s still a hit, no one is going to remember this little storyline, but that tattoo will still be there, almost as if it’s looking back at them and laughing.
Janet and Jason then have a very heartfelt conversation about the effect the show has had on them as people and as a couple, but the conversation is just like the tattoo. It’s not what is going to win people over or win an argument. Janet says that the comments about her on social media are harsh and really upset her. What she hated the most was that everyone was questioning why Jason would be with her. She says she started thinking that there was something wrong with Jason that he liked her, and one day he would wake up and see all the horrible things about her that people were always posting about.
That’s a horrible way to feel, and an awful way for fans to treat her. I do think that the hateful comments, even about Janet, can go too far sometimes, especially when people make fun of her appearance and her relationship, even as I am paid to do similar things right here on Al Gore’s internet. Like Janet, I also hate that people keep saying she’s a fan, like that’s some bad thing, but, curiously, she accuses Kristen of reading the comments and using those things against her. Here, fans are accusing Janet of always living in the comments, and she is not beating those allegations by … sitting there and complaining about the comments.
That is exactly the fans’ problem with Janet, though. I don’t think she’s a terrible person, per se, but there is nothing authentic about her. Everything seems like an act. Everything seems more calculated than an algebra problem. Everything seems like it’s geared for maximum impact on reality television. I think Janet would do herself a great service if she were just being herself, if she stopped trying to create drama and just let it unfold naturally. The goofy, weirdo Janet who likes to go to Dave and Busters and eat hot dogs is a fun person, but I have a feeling that Janet, regardless of the comments, doesn’t like herself very much and is afraid to be that vulnerable on television. I get it, but the more real Janet we see, the more it would sand off those rough edges from this reality TV persona that she’s crafted for herself, that doesn’t seem to be landing.
Enough talk about The Valley’s litany of monsters. Let us talk about the one true angel on this show. Nia is possibly one of the best people on Bravo, a good friend, a supportive partner, and someone who has been through some terrible struggles but always fixates on the positive. It was terrible to see her go to a plastic surgeon’s office and talk about how she doesn’t feel good in her body, that she keeps comparing how she looks now to how she used to look. We do get some snaps of her in her bikini in the Miss USA pageant and, damn sis, if I used to look like that I would have a hard time aging too. I mean, I turned straight for more than a second looking at her. God damn!
But even before the scene in the doctor’s office, we saw her at home in the kitchen with Danny and their son. It’s when they were pretending to be wolves and howling at the moon. Nia is standing there without a stitch of makeup, in a nondescript tank top and a pair of grey sweatpants, and I thought to myself, That is a good-looking woman even just lounging in her comfies. That’s why it killed me when she was in the doctor’s office crying because he talked to her about the “extreme damage” that breastfeeding did to her breasts.
We all feel terrible about our bodies. We all wish we looked better naked. We all try to cover our problem areas and think that the small imperfections that stick out in our minds are all that other people see. We think if we just looked like someone else, like that hottie on Instagram, like that model in a magazine (do magazines still exist?), like, well, like Nia from The Valley, that everything would be perfect. We would be fixed. But here is Nia from The Valley telling us that she feels like shit about herself, too. It’s inescapable. It’s in all of us. If that isn’t the thing that should exonerate us from all of our self-criticism, from all of the unfair comparisons we make between ourselves and others, I don’t know what else will. There is no escaping it, so maybe just give up the fight.
I just want Nia to know that she is beautiful. No. That’s not it. I just want Nia to feel that she’s beautiful. I want Nia to see herself the way Danny sees her, the way Kristen sees her, the way that all of us at home see her every week. I want her to take that deep down inside and I want that feeling to radiate out of her like a glowing alien orb and transform not her body but her mind because the body, sister, it might not be as banging as it was during Miss USA, but it is the last thing that she needs to worry about fixing.
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