The Psychotic Love Affairs of Ally McBeal

The central character Ally McBeal, from the American comedy series of the same name, is a pretext character, for a mostly hopeless and useless plot, that says very little about the causes of her alienation and madness, nor the causes of the madness she comes up against in society; reflected through her imaginary dialogues, where her fears, wishes, desires, and fantasies, get increasingly blurred with reality, into parody and emotional turmoil.

All this leaves us, the viewer, as a witness of a dialogue and plot, where reality and fantasy become increasingly indistinguishable and somewhat absurd, but this gives us an opportunity to have some idea of what she might be experiencing, imagining, or perceiving. We can then understand and admire her as a character, and empathize and relate to her struggles for love, and for meaningful relationships, and she’s a rebel without a pause who certainly has a place in my heart.

Some of her imaginary ridicule, of the petty-bourgeoisie and their delusional superiority, is intense, astute, very funny, and highly amusing, as it reveals both her repulsion at the society she lives within, and her tendency to day-dream about affairs that are not even started yet, or that don’t exist at all in reality.

Ally’s emotional obsessions, even get displaced and focused upon some of the other female characters, and which perhaps reveals a hidden subtext of meanings, but her mind also wanders into thoughts of sexual deviation and sexual fantasy about men, which makes her a very unique and human character for me.

What is so relevant about the character and series to me, is that it looks at the ways that the whole idea of relationships can be distorted out of all proportion, and how many people these days no longer really want to get to know other people properly, before they enter into any kind of relationship with them, even within their work and everyday environments. In this respect, Ally McBeal is a very poignant piece of social commentary on modern-day loss of love, and alienation.

In the storming, norming, and forming process of relationships, Ally gets stuck in the first stage, of storming (her mind is a mass of endless regurgitated ideas and information), and most of her relationships are over or fail miserably, because they never really get started in the first place.

She has a socially imposed image her self, and in some ways she allows others to negatively impact upon her, as her thoughts and feelings seem to operate within an interpersonal and social vacuum, without really focusing on the real social skills of open communication, shared interests, partnership and friendship.

Ally McBeal is not attractive as such, but she has great character in appearance (which I think is much more important than simplistic beauty), and what I admire about her as a character, is that she is never happy with the mediocrity, or merely content with very mundane relationships, and her sentimentalism and creativity refuses to be emotionally repressed, by the petty-bourgeoisie who misunderstand her, and who she has a very healthy mistrust of.

Ally McBeal, I love you, if no one else will.