Poldark Betrayed Me

Let me begin by saying that I am impressionable.

Let me begin by saying that, since becoming a mother, my heart and mind have been tenderized by the constancy of care, and so the meat hammer of world news and marinade of adrenaline in Netflix series are more than I can bear most of the time.

Let me begin by saying that my sensitivity does not mean I hide from the suffering of the world. My faith enlists me to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with my God. The “walking humbly,” for me, means knowing that the daily barrage of “knowledge of good and evil” being held out to me will change me if I consume it.

It will confuse me about what is mine to bear. It will dampen my belief that God’s Spirit is still at work in the world. It will discourage my prayer life and harden my heart until I yearn for the sensational simply to feel again, and when the newsreel is not enough I will try Netflix or Prime, AppleTV or Hulu.

Let me also begin by telling you that… I can be a bit of a snob. I don’t want neat and tidy endings, clean morals, or saccharine love stories. Those feel hollow to me, like Marie Antoinette eating her cake while the world burns. I won’t hold it against you if you’re tuning into the Hallmark Channel this season, but I would rather watch the snow fall, or the thoughts drifting behind my eyelids.

So, that’s basically been my life for the last ten years. Watching barely any television at all, because I’m too tired at night for stories that will only irritate or disturb me.

But sometimes, Danny and I find a series we both enjoy, and Poldark brought me eight episodes into the second season before dropping me flat on my face. More than anything, it was the beauty. The waves crashing into the rocky coast of Cornwall, England. The horses galloping along the countryside. The hazy woods and wildflowers blooming in the heather. It bewitched me.

And it was the families and communities. The husband and wife. The cousins and friends. The very human work of fumbling through right and wrong, greed and consequence, love and loss. It was about fidelity, brotherly love, passion, and jealousy. But last night, the protagonist honed all of his pent up rage, grief, and lust and broke the code of his marriage.

“No way!” I said. “C’mon, Poldark! No way! I quit this show!”

My husband laughed good-naturedly at my outburst, and then I kept going.

“I hate it!” I yelled. “I’m gonna Google how it ends! I hate it!”

He followed me as I stomped through the basement to my computer and sat down to start my search. “Apparently I have to clarify WHICH affair I mean! Who is TESS?!”

His laughter turned a bit nervous, possibly afraid I’d wake the children two floors up.

“And then his wife has an affair. Who is Alistair? The Scottish soldier? That would make sense!” *type type type* “Ugh, it’s a totally different guy?! Where did he even come from?”

I spun away from my computer and stomped up the stairs. In bed, I returned to an ongoing conversation Danny and I have been having about the Evangelical movement and the impotence of American churches as they divert from the Gospel message in favor of prosperity and politics. That context was for you. For him, I simply said: “Set aside the fact that there are churches whose messages are ineffectual and just imagine stacking up all the hours Americans spend sitting in church every week. Then stack up all the hours they spend watching shows like this.”

“Yeah,” he said. The monstrous bar graph of streamed television looms high above our bed, teetering and threatening to crash down on the tiny bar beside it.

“Story matters.” My voice is urgent and pleading in the darkness. “It disciples us.”

“I know,” he says.

Affairs are everywhere on television. And they’re a special delicacy of literary fiction short story, which was the bread and butter of my entire course of study in creative writing. I didn’t mind being immersed in the goodness and beauty of Poldark, but I felt that much more deeply betrayed because it had enchanted me so thoroughly.

I have walked with friends whose marriage was shattered by alcoholism. I have shared my life with friends who later decided to swap partners with another couple. I have listened to friends navigate emotional abuse, and asked hard questions about bruises on arms, and watched a woman I cared about deeply decide to supplement her income moonlighting at a strip club.

There is nothing glamorous about these moments in real life. They are as dark and twisted as a horror film you cannot escape from.

It’s just entertainment.

It’s not meant to be a protocol for living.

It’s fun.

And so in the dark of our bedroom as my husband—who is, mercifully, made from stronger stuff and can therefore continue to function in the deep disfunction of his work in the emergency department—murmurs something about it being sad that we don’t have a show to watch together anymore and then falls asleep. I lay awake for hours, all the prickly spines of my mind activated and tormenting me with other dark memories and thoughts.

Even in the morning, I am waiting for him to hold me very, very tightly and tell me he will never be like Poldark, never make love to another woman, never break our marriage.

But such statements do not occur to him anymore than it would occur to him to promise our three-year-old son that no one will make him eat green eggs and ham in trains, or cars, or boats. The story is long vanished from his mind, and my loud and dramatic response to the fictional character Ross Poldark couldn’t have had anything to do with real life, and so was just sorted into the bulging-but-endearing file titled “Wife’s Quirky Behavior.”

He is as unflappable as I am mercurial, and we offer one another the chance at understanding how very much and very little any given moment can mean or reveal about the human condition. There’s nothing wrong with escaping into Netflix at the end of a long day sometimes, and there is nothing wrong with shielding oneself from any additional heartbreak in the world, fictional or otherwise.

One week ago I sat with a young creative writing student who shared, anecdotally, that his mom had made him watch Elf and he thought it was a dumb movie.

“What didn’t you like about it? I said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “My mom asked me that, too, and I don’t know. I just don’t like it.”

“Well, writers can learn a lot about themselves when they study what they don’t like about other stories. It helps define their personal style. So, let’s try to figure out what it was you didn’t like. I’ll give you an example. Yesterday, I was waiting for my appointment at the dentist’s office and they had one of those sappy Christmas romance movies on, where the couples are always going ice skating or slow dancing in the middle of the street at night, and the guy is always from a big city and the woman makes him fall in love with small town life, and…blech. It’s so cheesy. That’s not like real life at all.”

“What are the names of your books?” he said. At some level, he was calling me out on the fact that it’s far easier to criticize than create.

“I don’t have a book published yet. It’s actually a very long process, and it’s complicated, but the working title is (here I answer with the title, which features the word “love” prominently.)”

“So, you’re writing a sappy love story!” he says.

“No,” I said. “It’s about family love.”

“Oh,” he said. He gave a little shrug and allowed me to redirect our conversation to sensory details in settings, but of course he had hit an exposed nerve.

Redemption features heavily in my work, as do circumstances that require redeeming. There is loss and betrayal in the stories I write. There is sacrificial love and people refusing to let someone go even when it would be so much easier, even when it seems like the only possible solution. But I cannot lure the reader into one kind of story and sucker punch them with another, like the tale of two people promising forever and then one of them running into someone else’s arms.

It’s fiction, and it’s not.

We shape stories, and are shaped by them.

Whether they are twisted beyond recognition or predictably simple, they are telling us something about what we yearn for and expect from the world and one another.

Photo by Graham Powell-Wood on Unsplash