Red Flags Waving in the Wind

[brigid]

2-17-2023

And once again...



Fernanda was an EXTREMELY skilled professional ballet dancer whose career was cut short by a severe knee injury. I mean, she was in her prime. Famous. It’s a huge tragedy, an abrupt derailment of her entire life.

It was mentioned in passing then never brought up again.

Her knee will NEVER have the strength, flexibility, or range of motion it once did no matter how much physical therapy, exercise, stretching, etc. that she does, and it’s prone to re-injury.

Tango is a dance that involves the kind of twists likely to re-injure her knee.

Perhaps that’s why instead of dancing Seth is waving her around in the air. Flapping her around. Just whipping her around. Sweaty dancers slipping closer to feel the breeze of her passing.

I just... she's a collection of body parts loosely wired together, flopping around. This isn't how bodies work.

McEldowney has spent all this time rubbing his characters' sexy One True Love relationships into the Single Sad Lonely character's face but he made that character to so what's the point? What, sincerely, is the point of all of this?

Especially as he could be spending this time telling a story exploring, say, what it's like to have your career end over a decade before it should have because you fucked your knee up. What's it like to have the one thing that defines you taken away from you? To have what you love destroy you? To fall in love with, and marry, someone who's doing your dream job every single day. She's married to her former dance partner. He, older than her, is still dancing. She can't dance. What is that like? Her dancing is what initially attracted Seth to her. Now she can't dance. How does she feel?

And, God help me, I just realized that McEldowney ended her dance career so that Seth would have to admit he loves her womanly self not just her ~~artistry~~. He can't be in love with the way she dances if she can't dance.