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“Hand aufs Herz” recap: Sweet Dreams, Beautiful Nightmare

So now we are at the crux of Jemma. They’ve danced around their feelings for one another, from a Martin Luther mambo to an epistolary pasodoble, and just when it looked like they’d found the right rhythm, Jenny was forced to confess that she’d done a little jig on the side, a little jig called the Ben Bugaloo. It’s really great how this episode starts; it’s totally abrupt, Jenny just going, “Ben and I had sex.” You know, a kick to the stomach, in case you’d forgotten how the last episode ended. Kasia Borek and Lucy Scherer are both a little bit brilliant at acting with their eyes, Kasia especially. And when Jenny says, again, that she slept with Ben, the light just goes right out of Emma’s face, like a flipped switch at night, a January Christmas tree.

This episode is when I was like, “Yeah, there really is something special going on here.” Not just because of the great chemistry between the actors, but because there’s more depth to this story than just some singing and misunderstandings. I mean, look, any old TV show can do a literal song and dance, pair up some girls and make them kiss; but it takes a special kind of TV show to layer its characters with real desires and real fears, and then see those things through with cohesive narrative. And that’s the thing that makes this story so popular, I think: Watching that raw desire flare up in Emma, tracing the dance from spark to near-consummation. And then this very true thing that’s about to happen where Emma’s ice cold fear splashes back against Jenny, like, “I was going to do it, you know! I was going to let your flame devour me!”

Love and fear – real love and real fear – are about as deeply honest as you can go, and when storytellers commit to that universal truth, it resonates across sexual stereotypes and gender binaries and historical prejudices and language barriers and borders and oceans and space and time. It’s 2011; if I want to watch two girls holding hands and kissing, I can find it on TV. It’s not that hard. But give me a lesbian story that whispers a spark of longing into one of its characters, and then fans that spark with the kind of fear and hope and confusion and desire I recognize (because it lives inside me too), and I’ll find it. I’ll find it in a county where I don’t live, in a language I don’t speak. You’ll find it. You’ll show it to me. We’ll treasure it together. 

Americans are arrogant in a million ways, I don’t have to tell you that. But some of our greatest hubris comes from our entertainment industry. Because it’s the loudest and shiniest, for one thing. I love the tales of how Great Expectations made its way across the Atlantic in serial form, and how Americans lined up in the harbors to shout to the sailors coming home from England: “Is Pip still alive? Did he make it through the winter?” That’s kind of how I feel about Hand aufs Herz. Only my harbor is Twitter, where news travels much faster, and less people die of smallpox and scurvy.

Jenny tells Emma that she had sex with Ben, yes, but that it didn’t mean anything, that it just happened. For a whole minute, Emma can’t figure out what to say, because everything she’s been afraid of from the moment it started getting warm every time Jenny walked into the room is warring inside of her. The first thing out of her mouth is, “I thought you weren’t into boys.” Jenny says she’s not really into boys at all, what she’s into is Emma, but she’d given up hope, and hopelessness took the form of Ben and a friggin’ bevy load of liquor. Emma grabs the letter out of Jenny’s hand – she brought it to school with her! – and tells her to forget she ever wrote it. She storms out of the room, and throws it down at Jenny’s feet, like it’s rubbish. Like the whole thing is just f–king rubbish.

Jenny follows Emma to the restroom where she’s hiding out in a stall, crying. She asks Emma to please come out and talk to her, and when Emma doesn’t answer, she says she’ll just stay. She picks up where they left off in the chorus room, promising that she only slept with Ben because she got trolleyed because she couldn’t stop brooding over Emma, and that she slept with him also because he is a dude. She says she could have never slept with another girl because of how she feels about Emma. Then she launches into my favorite kind of love confession, like, “What I am trying to say, very inarticulately, is that I miss you. My head’s all filled up with you and my heart’s all filled up with you, and I just want us to waitress together again and hang banners together again and hold ridiculous seances for disappearing classmates and share blankets in the middle of school riots. I can’t go back to the way life was before you kissed me like you meant it.”

Jerry Maguire did us wrong with his “You complete me” bullshit. I was 13 when I saw that movie, and I was like, “You need to complete yourself, dumbass.” My own personal favorite relationships aren’t about making me whole. That’s cheap in real life and it’s cheap on TV. My own personal favorite relationships are about sharpening me and laughing with me and and making the world warmer. And so my favorite fictional love confessions come from this place where Jenny is right now: “You turned a seven-shade rainbow into a cacophony of color, and being with you make everything brighter and more fun.” 

Jenny softly says Emma’s name, and Emma bursts out of the door just throwing every fear against the wall to try to find the thing that sticks. She lands, again, on the fact that Jenny slept with the dude-est dude she could find. And, like, that’s been Emma’s number one fear from the beginning, remember? “Is Jenny some kind of London snog-slut or did it mean something when she kissed me?”

Because here’s the thing about realizing you’re into girls. Hardly anyone I know has ever said, “Am I gay?” in the same way they say, “Hey, do you know what the weather’s supposed to be like tomorrow?” Like they just need to figure out how to dress for the occasion. No, when most people ask, “Am I gay?” they ask it with the kind of urgency they would usually reserve for things like, “Do I strap this parachute to my back and jump from this free falling airplane or do I nose dive into the ocean and hope the sharks don’t eat my remains? SINK OR SWIM? LIVE OR DIE? QUENCH THE FIRE OR BURN ALIVE?” It feels so urgent, and the reason it feels so urgent is because you’re probably not just asking, “Hey, do I want to make out with other girls?”

You’re also probably asking: What the hell are my parents going to say when I tell them I want to kiss other girls? And my friends and my co-workers and my classmates and everyone at my family reunion? And what’s that girl going to say when I tell her I want to kiss her? And how is my life ever going to be OK, and how can I go on being the same, and am I the same, and what else do I not know about what’s alive inside me? And who will still love me and who will start hating me, and is God involved, or the government maybe, and what if it’s only one girl I want to kiss, and how do I label myself and must I label myself, and what if I change my mind and, really, what if do burn alive?

So Emma’s thing, all along, has been: If it’s only a game to Jenny, I don’t have to tear myself open and answer all those questions. Emma only has to be real with herself if what’s happening with them is real for Jenny. And that’s where she goes: “Do you get that I was going to come out to be with you?” Do you realize how much of my own blood I had to spill to get to the place where I wrote you that letter? Do you understand how you made me make this real? And this is the saddest part of all: “It was just an experiment to you, wasn’t it? I was just an experiment. You want to know if it was successful? You want to know if you made little Emma think she’s into women? Yeah. You did. Congratulations.”

And then she leaves and tells Jenny not to follow her.

Here’s a thing maybe you already know, but it bears repeating: The heroines of the Bronte novels control the weather with their emotions. And, very similarly, Emma Müller, controls the songs of STAG with her mood. Today, they’re singing us out over Beyonce‘s “Beautiful Nightmare,” and Emma’s solo is so earnest that even Luzi is afraid her heart is going to burst on the spot. This version is better than Beyonce’s ’cause it gets to the heart of the thing. Like how you can lose a person once, but dreams and the moon conspire to make losing them perpetual.

Jenny reads her postcards from Emma for the one hundredth time. No pizza or P!nk ballet this time. Sweet dreams, beautiful nightmare.

Jemma, I don’t want to wake up from you.

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