The first season of ‘Tell me lies’ (Disney+), adaptation of the novel of the same name by Carola Loveringrevolved largely around a mystery, a web of secrets: everything surrounding a car accident after which too many people lied too much. It was the plot that was used Meaghan Oppenheimer to tell us about a greater mystery, that of love, or to be precise, “obsessive love and what we can do to ourselves and others when we completely lose ourselves inside another person,” as the creator herself explained in the podcast ‘The creative process’.
His suspense drama was also period. We knew the protagonists, Lucy (excellent, expressive Grace Van Patten) and Stephen (Jackson White), in 2015, when they met again at an engagement party after four years without seeing each other, but the action took place mainly between 2007 and 2008, when they met while studying at the fictional Baird University. That first season was a long and complicated ‘flashback’ dotted with Blackberrys, quite active Facebook accounts and songs from The Postal Service, Arcade Fire or Of Montreal.
Lucy’s crush on Stephen is instantaneous, so intense that it borders on the ridiculous. It is the kind of magical encounter that we have seen in many youth series. But this is not another typical college romance, but something much more twisted, daring and, of course, authentic. Neither Lucy nor Stephen are easy people to love, nor are they easy to love.. She begins the course in a strange state of emotional paralysis, as if suffering from anhedonia or a dissociative disorder. He is a complete narcissist who does not stop psychologically manipulating everyone around him, including his best friends and the alleged loves of his life.
The tumult of the flesh
Lucy is reserved, she keeps things to herself. He too, but he’s tongue-tied. They connect in bed, where she finally manages to enjoy something. None of the horrible things Stephen is capable of, including occasionally returning to the arms of his ex Diana (Alicia Crowder), seems reason enough for Lucy to wake up from a growing state of hypnosis, one that prevents her from hearing her friends Pippa (Sonia Mena) and Bree (Cat Missal) or the occasional friend of Stephen, like the rich but decent Evan (Branden Cook). All the characters mentioned, like the expansive quarterback Wrigley (Spencer House), they have their place in the spotlight, their opportunity to explain their own awakening to love and/or sex.
Let’s talk about sex. Or sex scenes. How sad it is to see them disappear from American cinema and series, in the middle of a strange wave of puritanism, and how valuable it is that Oppenheimer makes them an integral part of the story, in moments that speak of many different things, of liberation and ecstasy, of fear and confusion. If there is a series that ‘Tell me lies’ reminds us of, not just in the title, that could be the unjustly forgotten one ‘Tell me you love me’ from HBOin which sex (or lack thereof) was an (even more) important part of the emotional fabric.
war times
At the end of the first season we knew that the Stephen of 2015 is engaged to Lydia (Natalee Linez), Lucy’s lifelong best friend. The mystery of the second has to do with this last character. At the beginning of the first chapter, Lydia corners Lucy at Bree and Evan’s engagement party to say three words perhaps even worse than “we have to talk”: “I will never forgive you.” What is Lydia referring to? Will Lucy be a full-fledged anti-heroine in these chapters?
Oppenheimer warned in the aforementioned interview with ‘The creative process’: “I keep saying that if the first season is a love story, the second is a kind of war story”. We will see Lucy and Stephen return to university in September 2008, she as a second year student, he already in his final year. She wants to make him (and, incidentally, make himself) believe that everything they experienced is a distant memory. It’s the worst thing you can say to a narcissist: your imprint has disappeared, the hypnosis has ended. The war begins and the obsession continues. From Lucy, Stephen and the viewer.
