Chelsea and the Curse of the Ride or Die
In the very first episode, Chelsea chastises Rick, “Oh, this is so on-brand for you. To be a victim of your own decisions.” And in a Mike White-esque irony, that same line ends up being the very curse that leaves her with a bullet in her chest and her face hidden beneath the surface of a flowery pond.
She would have been better off telling that to herself three times in front of a bathroom mirror.
I struggled a bit through this season’s White Lotus hype, not completely understanding the gen pop’s obsession with Chelsea and Rick’s relationship. In all honesty, I saw little to no beauty in them. I loved her teeth and her tendency to put Saxon in his well-deserved, spiritually hollow place. I loved her optimism and go-with-the-flow sisterhood with the French-Canadian high-class escort, Chloe. I loved her crochet cover-ups and her relentless willingness for enjoyment. But I could not get behind the sheer stupidity of her unconditional love and unquestioning loyalty: “Why are you with this middle-aged weirdo?” And I had to question if it was ever unconditional at all.
The grumpy (almost ugly) old man and full-of-life young girl trope is familiar to those of us who have seen at least a grand total of three movies in our lifetimes. She exists to remind us of the purifying nature of Woman; she reminds us of not the physical activity of homemaking, but the emotional or even the pathological version of it. She is the fairy who is a little weird and rushes through her sentences at the speed of light, but still manages to anchor a man in the softness he needs but cannot manage to find within himself. She makes him human, turning him away from the animalistic brute nature that his gender and his “trauma” bestow upon him. She makes him a boyfriend, a husband, a “life partner.” Her very being is service, and even as a childlike and childless wonder girl, she is Mother.
He is a monster. He is damaged. He is rude and takes no interest in introducing himself to her friends. He is antisocial and self-deprecating. He is both emotionally and physically distant. He is wealthy enough to provide an expensive vacation at a prestigious Thai wellness resort, but he isn’t “loaded” or slimy –like Gregary– enough to be dating a full on internet (implied) prostitute. He is not to be asked about the actual source of his income. He is to be tamed. And he is to be pried open like Pandora’s Box until he can finally admit his apparently hidden genuine feelings for his unpaid personal assistant.
My criticisms of that trope align with almost everyone else’s in the 21st Century. We have allowed the most basic tenets of Feminism to seep so thoroughly within the current cultural fabric that we know it is wrong to tell girls that it is their Duty to Serve a Man. And yet for some reason, so many of us still see what is between Rick and Chelsea as love, when that… feeling was never fully actualized. I mean, he couldn’t even muster up a placating I Love You, Too when she tried to comfort him after seeing his 70-something-year-old trigger at the breakfast buffet. All he could give her was “That’s the plan,” which was enough to bring her to both tears and fulfillment.
For some reason, so many of us still see that dynamic as “true love,” as something worth rooting for, as a relationship not deserving of tragedy even when we were explicitly warned of its messy fate from the very beginning. So many women still tell themselves they can fix him, they can tame the uncontrollable beast that is the fuckboy in a second-tier fraternity on their college campus, they can trick the male pop star into a happy and stable marriage, they can make the local plug turn away from his drug dealing ways and stay away from pressed bars, they can show their man true loyalty by putting some money on his books during his bid even when all his friends move on and decide to pay their own bills. And so many men believe that is what their simple birth owes them, even if they don’t say it, and especially when they do.
The unfortunate truth is many of these individuals will find each other and still believe the tragedy they know is coming will never come knocking on their doorstep, though. They’ll still act shocked when the brute remains a brute, and the fairy won’t stop trailing annoyingly in his shadow.
At some point, Chelsea’s whimsy and surface level wisdom became redundant. Me, as an audience member, began to feel like Rick in a roundabout way. By the fourth episode, I was ready for her to shut the fuck up. Because the fairy, although she performs as one, is not a Mother, but a nuisance. A pesky toddler who is playing dress up, not realizing that she, too, is in want for the guidance and the companionship that she insists she can successfully give. In the beginning, it was Chelsea who booked Rick’s appointment with Dr. Amrita (the “Indian Doctor”), and in the end, it is Chelsea who no longer remembers her name or her title. But that “Indian Doctor” is who Rick chooses to look for when he’s at his self-imposed breaking point, not the 20-something girl he brought with him to his suicide mission on the other side of the world.
Chelsea is just as lost as the man she swears she is guiding through the darkness of his childhood trauma and destructive habits. She claims she knew Rick was her destiny when he told her “his whole life story” the first night they met, but she had no idea the driving force of his tormented nature was this wacko-jacko story about his father who was murdered by some crooked businessman in Thailand, that his mom revealed to him on her deathbed? That seems highly unlikely to be a detail missing from someone’s “whole life story.”
We need to go back in time and remember one small comment she makes when Rick first tells her of his plans to leave for Bangkok: “Rick, leaving me… abandoning me?” She says it as if it’s a sin, a forbidden and unforgivable act—this is her greatest fear. She craves not to guide Rick to the light, but to be beside him whether he is there or not because She Cannot Be Alone.
Fear of abandonment is the root of her identity. It is why she cannot leave Rick even when he tells her to go away before he approaches his father, it is why she cannot leave when she sees him shoot his old man at point-blank range, it is why she cannot leave when he begins to exchange fire with not one but two fucking security guards, and it is why she cannot leave even with a direct line to safety behind the gong. She cannot leave Rick because she does not want to be left.
Where this came from, we do not know. We can speculate that maybe Chelsea, too, had a father who abandoned her or was “murdered by a crooked businessman in Thailand.” We can speculate that maybe Chelsea had been abandoned by previous lovers. We can speculate that maybe Rick, himself, had abandoned Chelsea before, just as he abandoned Frank after enabling his spiritual regression and return to bender-hood. We can speculate that maybe Chelsea learned this performance of wisdom as a survival tactic, out of an innate desire to be useful to someone, anyone. But it would be fruitless to partake in these guessing games because what truly matters is that Chelsea and Rick are cut from the same cloth; they are two sides of the same coin. And funnily enough, she knew this prior to her demise, referring to her and her balding lover as Yin and Yang, Hope and Pain–“One of us will win.”
Except I’d take her theory further and draw the claim that neither are Hope nor Pain, but are both Dumb. And I guess in the end, Rick did not abandon her. In his only act of service, to anyone other than himself, he carried her body to nowhere. But at least in the end he accomplished something, he did what he set out to do and sought the death his father’s killer. All Chelsea accomplished was making a philosopher out of a failed fuckboy on his family vacation and making her whole life into a fleeting moment of servitude.
All the proud Ride or Dies must see now, the ones they will lay their lives on the line for out of fear of navigating this world without a “lover,” get to die with dignity. They feel the sun shining on their skin one last time; with their eyes left open they get to see the grandness of the sky and all the opportunities that lie before them as they venture into the next life with their hand held. You, on the other hand, die faceless. Encompassed by the same darkness that you spent your whole life trying to save someone else from. A victim of your own decisions.