There are two reasons I ended up wanting to watch the Netflix series “Living With Yourself”; Paul Rudd and Paul Rudd again. In all seriousness, the Rudd-tacular miniseries caught my eye on the first view of the trailer, and upon watching the entire series, I was so enthralled that I decided to dust off this blog I haven’t written on in 9 months and write. So spoiler alert for the series as I delve into the plot and analyze the themes of “Living With Yourself”.
The synopsis, for anyone who hasn’t seen it, involves the main character, Miles Elliot (Paul Rudd), dealing with difficulties at work, in his marriage, and general depression. You know, life stuff. He gets an offer to visit a spa that will help him unlock his only goal: to be happy. Flash forward an episode and it turns out that the way this spa does that is by cloning the customer, and killing the unhappy version. This foolproof system runs into the hitch when Miles just doesn’t die. Waking up in a bag in a shallow grave in a forest, he runs home to find the world has “The Sixth Day”-ed him, with a happy, enthusiastic clone having replaced him.
The series goes on to deal with those implications; how do you feel about someone who looks identical to you living your life, with your experiences? What do you do with that? Plot wise, the show doesn’t do anything magic with the concept of a clone. Its shot really impressively, with multiple video editing magic shots to have Paul Rudd in a scene with himself, and a particularly impressive and dynamic fight scene between the Rudds; but what I loved, and what I really wanted to write about, were the themes of depression, happiness, and self reflection.
I’d say the biggest, central theme that’s very blatantly explored and touched on for the entirety of the show is depression. Miles is very obviously experiencing depression; fearful of change and of failure, paralyzed by self-doubt and heavy expectations for himself, Miles is a nuanced portrait of a person suffering from depression. Whats interesting in the way that is cast is that there is no singular event that causes it; though Miles and Kate had been struggling for a long time to have a baby, there’s no evidence to suggest any one event caused Miles to begin to suffer from depression. Rather it is the heavy burden, that anyone who is familiar with depression, of attempting to shoulder his high expectations of his own life by himself.
New Miles seeks to be the “cure” for that depression, by freeing himself from those expectations. New Miles’ attitude revitalizes Miles’ career, his marriage, and his overall life satisfaction, simply by treating all experiences he has as new, because to him, they are. Its pretty simple to believe that had New Miles never realized he was a clone, he may have truly believed the $50,000 he spent at the spa had somehow cured his depression. That altered mindset is the surface level of how those on the outside of depression often try to suggest those who suffer from it to cope; “Look at it this way” or “Every cloud has a silver lining”, but unless you, like New Miles, can truly embody that mindset, it isn’t an actual solution to depression.
Perspective is, of course, important; therapies like CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, focus on re-framing mindsets and combating intrusive thoughts. The technique is designed to retrain your brain to prevent you from being consumed by negative self talk, and specifically prevent those with extremely negative self esteem and self depreciating tendencies to combat them. However, even CBT openly states that it is not a singular solution to depression, merely a tool. Similarly, the cloning process appears to combine a re-framing mindset and employ a similar tool: a self-sustaining feedback loop.
Clone stories and self-replacement are far from un-explored territory; themes of self-reflection, self-discovery, and self-paranoia are rampant throughout the series, but the ways it wants to say these things are what captivated me. The happy, new, “better” versions of the customers show a zest for life and are outwardly beloved by the people around them, but its not clear why. What gives the clones that zest for life is the same thing that makes Kate, Miles’ wife, disgusted and disturbed by her clone husband. Though New Miles has a renewed appreciation for life and an altered mindset that allows him to look past the flaws and issues Kate has, she points out that New Miles has only shades of memories that her husband has, and none of the lived experience that comes with going through those same memories.
Its that issue that contextualizes the core of the flaws in the cloning process; the happiness that the clones feel is a result of a completely blanked mindset, a raw appreciation for new experiences they have felt before. The benefits of this altered mindset are numerous; the un-jaded outlook and appreciation of simple things in life undoubtedly bring self-satisfaction to the clones. Furthermore, that self-satisfaction creates an upward spiral; renewed enthusiasm for life enables a positive feedback loop, resulting in increased success for the clones. That success enables an uptick in confidence, resulting in an increase in life satisfaction; we have New Miles’ brief time taking over Miles’ regular life as evidence.
Though dismissed by Miles as “corny”, New Miles’ refreshing and simple pitch is beloved by not only his office staff but almost everyone who views it. Backed by Miles’ underhanded but authentic touches, it easily supersedes the international conglomerate that likely funneled lots of time and money into developing its own pitch. New Miles’ newfound confidence changed how people looked at him too: Kaylyn, the young receptionist at Miles’ workplace found herself attracted to the New Miles’ sincerity and confidence, even when Miles himself was confused and in spite of New Miles’ general ambivalence towards her. Embodied only by the memory of the love he had for his wife, New Miles even re-charmed Kate, who had been pushed away by Miles slow decline and depression. That constant feedback of success would have spiraled New Miles upward, into new heights, potentially indefinitely.
Interestingly and simultaneously, this same spiral is evident in downward spirals as well. The concept of the clone spa is initially introduced by Dan, a rival co-worker for Miles, who reveals he himself went though that same process. At the outset of the series, Dan is everything that Miles wants to be and New Miles demonstrates; he’s creative, positive, and enthusiastic, looking to rebound off of all the success he’s been feeling. However, once Miles enters that same spa, he returns and wows the same workforce and becomes the new center of attention at his workplace, in the same breath pushing Dan out of the spotlight he was beginning to cultivate.
Its then that Dan’s character, although on-set as comic relief and a butt-monkey, becomes way more interesting. New Dan’s lack of success and being overshadowed consumes him; the clone underwent the exact same procedure that New Miles did, and early on we see that same feedback loop that New Miles has. He was wow-ing his co-workers and on track to obtain that same happiness that New Miles was striving for; however, the introduction of New Miles prevented New Dan from ever reaching those heights. Instead, New Dan and his ideas were cast aside, and New Dan’s feelings were focused, consumed even, in bitterness and jealousy. New Dan is utterly incapable of dealing with this negative emotion; he only has memories of how he dealt with it, evidenced by his petty attempts to rile up New Miles and attempting to drown his sorrow in alcohol; a potential early indicator of depression.
Despite us as the audience having never seen old Dan, we can only gather that New Dan is the result of similar feelings to Miles; feelings of life overwhelming him, burn out, depression, and despite having bought into the magic idea of the spa cure for depression, New Dan is well on his way back into that same issue. In that way, Living With Yourself has something interesting to say on the fine line between happiness and depression, or more specifically spirals; they are dangerous, obsessive, and destructive, good or bad. Duality is difficult, moderation is difficult, and while its easy to say that the solution is simply balancing both sides, its a concept that is easier said that done; self-reflection, and acting on self-reflection, sucks.
That, in and of itself, is arguably the most interesting idea the series touches on. The things that make Miles jaded, made him cynical, gave him an entirely different perspective. Miles’ cynicism prevented him from reaching the heights New Miles had career wise, but its that same cynicism and emotional baggage that gave him the tools he needed to grow, and deal with his every day life. New Miles lacked that same emotional lived experience; he only had fleeting, implanted memories of what those experiences were like. That, at its core, is the weight of Kate’s assertion that having the memories and having actually experienced them are different. New Miles treats Kate asking him to leave as his very first break up, an experience that Kate can understand, even if its not necessarily logical; New Miles would have, realistically, had experienced a breakup before, but like his reaction to the sky, driving, and work, the first emotionally traumatic experience he actually felt was Kate asking him to leave.
This experience alone sends New Miles, the “cured” Miles, into a state of depression, where New Miles opts to simply end his own life, in a carefully curated and thought out manner. With such a massive emotional turmoil he endured, New Miles decides he cannot bear it; a trait that stands in stark contrast to Miles himself. Miles, despite his depression, irritability, and seemingly outward apathy to life, was set on achieving happiness; he was willing to take stupid, illogical, and dangerous risks to achieve that. Even when the cloning process had worked and Miles found himself in a shallow grave, by all accounts dead, he persevered enough to dig himself out and fight his way to his home, barefoot and clad only in a diaper. It serves, in hindsight, to underline how different these two men are, despite identical make up and lived experiences, which I think is another central point and theme of the show.
Nature vs nurture is a tried and true debate; what shapes the person we are, how we’re made or what we’ve experienced? And, I think, this show cleverly takes a stab at that debate.The cloning aspect removes all question of nature; Miles and New Miles are identical genetically, and in theory, should have the same nurture. So why are their outlooks so different? New Miles says to Miles that he (Miles) had everything he needed to be happy, but that he was too caught up in himself to take proper hold of it; but at the same time, as outlined above, New Miles has not actually had these experiences, only memories and shades of them. His happiness, his self-satisfaction is the surface level knowledge of the things that Miles has, an appreciation of them without the burden of struggle.
The reason Miles cannot find himself satisfied with trying to reap the rewards of New Miles’ work is the same reason that, at its core, New Miles’ happiness is hollow; neither of them are earned. Miles cannot achieve true satisfaction out of taking credit for New Miles’ accomplishments because he knows he didn’t earn them, and New Miles, though on the surface perfectly content to take Miles’ life, it becomes evident that though his feelings may be different, he understands Kate’s point that he cannot have the experiences with her that he thinks he craves, because he has none of the history or experiences Miles had. New Miles has to come to grips with the idea that he, through no fault of his own but burdened with the knowledge that he did not struggle for the successes he is achieving, will never be truly satisfied with his life.
There is so much to unpack with Living With Yourself. Infidelity, intimacy, and personal fulfillment are just a few more ideas the series touches on that I didn’t explore. If, for whatever reason, you’ve read this far and haven’t seen the series, I encourage you to. As a contemporary portrayal of dealing with depression, grappling with the idea of happiness, and trying to self actualize, I really feel that the series is a sleeper hit of 2019. Ultimately, Living With Yourself is about so much more than all of that, and at its heart, its a dark comedy about the implications of living with a clone of you that may or may not be better than you. However, the stories it tells and the themes it touches on transcend a simple comedy, and its that much richer for it.
WIP: Work In Progress 