TV Criticism | HBO’s “Insecure” | Molly Made to March Towards Crumbling Myths of Success? | S04 E04
The writers use Molly’s character, every season, to explore a single thesis: how incredibly brittle traditional ideas of success are becoming, and how they almost certainly fracture under today’s pressures.
Every episode sees Molly trying to trace the blueprint most of us were given as kids (in terms of what will lead to success — lawyer, monogamous relationship, marrying w/i your own race, etc.) and, each week she’s let down. We’re forced to see how she deals with the let downs, and are asked to evaluate, through her, how these templates have not been the ‘sure bet’ this generation was promised.
From the hairline fractures she discovers in her parent’s ‘perfect’ nuclear marriage — and how that shattered myth laid the groundwork for her re-evaluating what was necessary for happiness in her attempt at being in an open situation with Dré — to the fracturing of her idea that she should be with a black man, to her strained reality of what it is to be the high-powered lawyer many aspire to…seeing the reality of it crack under the weight of real world race, and gender discrimination, as well as overwork.
They have fashioned Molly’s character into a thesis about the cautionary danger of believing in these myths, and a warning that that these templates, these pathways to conventional success, and these images can’t survive an encounter with the today’s world (though I don’t agree with the writers per se, that’s what we’re meant to take away from her character arc over these seasons).
She plays by the unspoken rules we’ve all been taught and is purposely left empty-handed — almost as if to teach us a lesson. Even in her new relationship, we watch her ask for a more well-rounded connection (one that involves sex and intimacy) and we see it fall apart. We watch her question if she didn’t ask for too much. We see others infer it. We, again, watch her re-evaluate and ask for less. Laughably, she’s even chastised for still being mad at her father’s infidelity, when her brother says, “Dad’s are Ni**a’s too, just all grown up.” When her brother said that it made me think, “Why are black girls not allowed to hold a certain vision for themselves without the world saying you’re asking for too much?”
To me, I was like, there’s an unfairness that we ask of Black women: the rules have changed but we are still asking just as much of them with absolutely no concessions….Or, maybe we were never being honest about what the rules were in the first place.
Molly is a stand-in to ask us if we weren’t all sold a bill of goods when Claire Huxtable always came home on time from her lawyering gig, never fought with her husband, and came from a rock solid nuclear family herself…What happens when these images at the heart of what we were told unambiguous success looked like for Black women have begin to show strain. The writers have made Molly a prop to explore that question.
