The Perfect Couple.
A maybe teetotaling rule follower, I have an inexplicable love of crime dramas. I cannot stop talking about OJ Simpson, and I have seen too many murder mysteries to count. The one I remember the most specifically (and have seen the most times!) is The Undoing on HBO Max. (I am perhaps belatedly obsessed with Nicole Kidman, ever since her role in Big Little Lies and of course her pre-movie spiel at the AMC Theatre). I think the wonderful thing about murder mysteries—from Agatha Christie to White Lotus—is that you know the format, you generally know how things are going to go, and yet, you can’t, for the life of you, guess how things are going to go in this one, this time, the specifics of this story.
One of the things that I dread the most in life (uncertainty) is one of the things I love the most about these murder mysteries. You don’t know for sure. As a black-and-white, logical kind of thinker, I love to know for sure, but when watching TV, even if the show isn’t super well-made, even if I know it has to be one of these guys, it’s the not knowing which one that keeps me watching.
I watched The Undoing all the way through at least four times and each time with someone different. I wanted to experience it again, but mainly, I wanted to experience it with someone who hadn’t experienced it yet, who could look at me and try to guess who the culprit was, which was the next best thing to me getting to guess again myself. (When I watched The Undoing with my mom, she was skeptical at first, and then she was hooked, both of us staying up late to see—after all of the hubbub—where things lied.)
The Perfect Couple is maybe not as craftily put together as The Undoing, but it’s arguably just as entertaining, especially for how many twists and turns there are along the way. By the time I found out who did it, I realized that I had no natural intuition for these kinds of things, and it delighted me, to be blindsided, in a way that I would not like to be blindsided in real life.
I guess that’s the lovely thing about fiction in general. We can want different things for these characters than we want for ourselves. We can want drama and mess and tragedy. We can want, when someone dies unexpectedly, for that murder to be sloppily handled so that we have more time to try to figure it out first.
I, with lots to do, made time to sit down and watch The Perfect Couple in a weekend because I could not handle the itch of this murder left unresolved. I, who has little tolerance in real life for wealthy White people, indulged all of their confessions and their tangled wants and needs, because I wanted to see this story through. Because as much as I love uncertainty in storytelling, I still wanted it to be resolved by the end. I wanted to slap my forehead cartoonishly and say, “Of course.”
In my own life, I want the resolution immediately. I want to know how things will turn out—in my professional life especially— but maybe in everything, it’s worth it to have a little suspense before you get your answers. Maybe we do not always benefit from getting the whole future, the whole end, laid out before us—maybe we need some time, like we do when watching TV, when reading books, to splash around, feel out the waters, imagine all the ways something might turn out before we are given, with certainty, the end.
Image: Netflix
