The Startling Emotional Intensity of "Normal People"

I just finished watching episode 5 of Normal People on CBC Gem. I’m enjoying the series immensely. Looking for critical perspective on it, I found an interesting newyorker.com piece by Anna Russell titled “How Normal People Makes Us Fall in Love.”

Russell says of the show’s two leading characters, Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan,

Their similarities—they’re both bookish (they discuss “The Communist Manifesto” and “The Golden Notebook” in the novel), curious about the wider world, and intensely private—are undermined by an inability to communicate at critical moments, leading to heartbreaking misunderstandings.

That’s an illuminating point and helps explain Connell and Marianne’s on-again, off-again relationship. The word “intensely” is key here. Russell uses it again later in her piece:

They are drawn together again by an unbeatable first-love chemistry (“It’s not like this with other people,” Marianne says), replicated onscreen with startling emotional intensity. Over twelve half-hour episodes—any longer, and the viewer would surely combust—Marianne and Connell come together, and fall apart, and come together again.

That “any longer, and the viewer would surely combust” makes me smile. It’s exactly the way I feel now, and I’m only halfway through the series.

Postscript: I have a theory that might help explain Connell and Marianne’s crazy on-again, off-again relationship. It’s pretty cockeyed, but here goes. Passionate love feeds upon denial. Connell and Marianne unconsciously keep throwing obstructions in the way of their natural love for each other in order to intensify their passion. Freud put it this way: 

Some obstacle is necessary to swell the tide of libido to its height; and at all periods of history, wherever natural barriers in the way of satisfaction have not sufficed, mankind has erected conventional ones in order to be able to enjoy love. [“The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life” (1912)]