what does Odysseus want and why are the boys always watching
This is a show that is furiously literate. It is a girl’s journal, read aloud, and in the first episode it has the audacity to go to Anne Frank. It has the audacity to make its main character tremendously unlikeable by saying to her teacher that Anne Frank was lucky, but then forcing its audience to live with the truth that Anne Frank was a girl and not an icon or a totem and that her feelings about being trapped in an attic with a boy she might have liked might have been a little more ferocious than her fears about the Nazis. That maybe her feelings were completely unreasonable given her circumstances but were real nonetheless, and worthy of consideration, or at least, more than an aside.
What is amazing is that these are horrible people. Not horrible in the exceptional sense, but horrible in the everyday way most of us are horrible. Horrible in that they do not care about the reality of others or care to think much beyond the meat in which they live. They are perfectly normal, and acceptably balanced. But do not notice that they are already living in another person’s story.
It is important that the boys are always watching you; that you are watching the boys watching you and pretending not to be watched. Because to know that you are being watched and knowing enough to pretend that you are not being watched is the substance of girlhood, here. Knowing that you are always being watched and being wanted and being found wanting. This is the substance of a certain kind of boyhood, as well.
The fantasy of the family, the romance. The other life, lived better. Rickie is looking for the better version of himself. The only problem being that Rickie is wonderful. Everyone knows. But not him himself. “What does Odysseus want?!” “To go home.”
Jordan Catalano is beautiful. He does not deserve to be this beautiful. No one has ever deserved to be this beautiful. In the end, no one will be anywhere near this beautiful.