Xavia

CW: compulsory heterosexuality, bullying, ableism, commodification, femmephobia

 my meow meow beanz!

The first BM episode produced by Netflix and the first to be set in the U.S., it’s difficult not to read “Nosedive” as a commentary on the toxic positivity and bootstrap meritocratic ethos of specifically U.S. culture. While the societal problems present in the episode are by no means unique to the States, it animates stereotypes about USAmericans such as our propensity to smile constantly and ‘Midwestern Nice’ to point out how accelerating expectations of emotional labour in one’s personal life and commodification of affect and ‘authenticity’ worsen the precarity already threatening each of us daily. The whole point of “Nosedive” is that in a system where our only value is how well we fit into the system, where resources and basic human dignities are ‘earned’ instead of shared and breaks are only given to those who don’t need them (e.g. capitalism), everyone is one bad day away from completely losing everything. And when you’re queer, neurodivergent, and/or racialized, that risk multiplies: no matter how far you make it on the purportedly-egalitarian path to success, your security is contingent upon how little your existence inconveniences those around you.

At the start of the episode, Lacie is a 4.2 with a stable job, friendly acquaintances, and aspirations for a new, more luxurious apartment when her lease with her brother, 3.7 Ryan, is up. She’s extremely nice and upbeat, but it quickly becomes clear that this is a façade when she practices laughs in the mirror (neurodivergent headcanon accepted) or pretends she doesn’t hate her ‘burnt suede’ coffee and free cookie. While she’s certainly a social climber compared to Ryan, who doesn’t care about status and has actual friends he’s close enough with to room with, she doesn’t see herself that way. She’s simply trying to stay afloat in her charmed life:

Lacie: I don’t even have the something worth losing, not yet, y’know, I mean I’m still fighting for that.
Susan: And what is ‘that’?
Lacie: I don’t know, enough? To be content? Like, to look around and think, ‘well, I…I guess I’m okay’.

This episode is certainly about the hedonic treadmill and being satisfied with what you have, but I’m more interested in how it presents queer precarity. She’s not even asking for ‘the good life’ or luxury, she’s asking for “enough”, to be comfortable, safe. Of course, her standards of ‘comfort’ are much higher than other people’s because of her upper-class aspirations, but in a society with an increasingly-shrinking pool of available resources thanks to corporate greed and artificial scarcity, the search for some level of economic security and stable housing (which is ultimately the inciting incident—her impending lease expiry) is a relatable struggle, especially for marginalized people often barred from that security.

“Nosedive” is a great illustration of the difference between a gay/LGBT political project and a queer political project, between liberal assimilation and radical solidarity. On the surface, the world of “Nosedive” is a utopia, but its gestures of inclusion are quickly revealed to be tokenistic. (Diversity win: this high-security prison is gender neutral!) The best illustration of this is Ches, Lacie’s Black co-worker who is suddenly a 3.1 after a break-up with his boyfriend Gordon. In their first interaction, Lacie takes pity on him and accepts the smoothie he offers her, helping raise his ranking slightly. Because she’s still a 4.2, she has the leeway to do this, only taking a couple anonymous dings for ‘siding’ with him. However, it’s clear the office has already turned on him and is uninterested in redemption:

Lacie: Oh, poor Ches.
Ted: Nonononono, we’re all on Gordon’s side.
Lacie: Sure…uhuh obviously.
Ted: So Ches is kissing ass, trying to scrape himself back. Of course, if it drops below 2-5 then it’s [downvotes Ches] buh-bye.

When this comes to pass and Ches can’t get through the front door the next day, Lacie, who can no longer afford to take any dings, refuses to help him. We don’t actually know why he’s being shunned, because it’s irrelevant. As long as he performs homonormativity and is happily coupled, he’s accepted, but the minute his inclusion is inconvenient, he is shunned. (It’s also telling that the first person we see this happen to is a Black man, and how Ted goes out of his way to downvote him. Cishet men and white people still have the upper hand in this ostensibly ‘neutral’ popularity contest. Personally I think Ches should have been the man in the other jail cell at the end to give his story closure and to give them space to say what they actually think of each other, but that’s just me, I still think the scene with her and the stranger is fantastic.)

While I’m arguing that Lacie’s failure is queer in keeping with our previous discussions about failure, it’s crucial to note how little has to go wrong for things to completely, well, nosedive. There is zero wiggle room in a society like this, because even slight disagreements can quickly become a cascade of failures. Lacie goes from a 4.2 to a 0 (on a 1-5 scale; she has a damage multiplier which is how she gets sub-1) in 24 hours. She’s clearly having a shit day, as happens to everyone, and it’s led to a mental health crisis, but their society is nice, not kind. (“God, just fucking help me!”—one of the worst things she could have said, apparently.) Kindness, breaks, discounts and perks, trust, benefit of the doubt: all are reserved for those who need it least, those already deemed ‘worthy’ by having no struggles requiring kindness (stop me if this sounds familiar). And when you do show actual kindness to those in need, like when Lacie helps Ches, you get punished for it. That’s actually what starts her downward spiral, the first 2 and 1 votes we see her get. By going against the grain, even accidentally, she sets off a series of dominoes where each inconvenience triggers the next. She gets in a fight with Ryan over Naomi causing them to downvote each other pettily and causing her to miss her cab, who downvotes her, as does a random lady she accidentally runs into in her fluster, so that by the time she gets to the flight counter she doesn’t have a high enough ranking to get on a flight, causing her to panic and freak out at Hannah, giving her a full 1-point deduction and double-damage, making her need to take an economy car that’s in Czech and has no fuel adapter meaning she has to hitchhike, and eventually random passersby downvote her because they can, even though “I didn’t even do anything!” All of these are random occurrences such that if each was the only problem she faced she’d have been fine, which is why individual instead of structural analyses of inequality are inadequate: only when we see all of the incidents together do we understand what happened to her and why.

Because her world cares more about being nice than being kind, everyone is required to perform extraordinary amounts of emotional labour, from service workers to customers (imagine if customers were required to not be shitty, maybe they have a point…) and to navigate extremely complex unspoken social cues. Of course, the way this episode frames issues of emotional labour is femmephobic and slightly transphobic. The Sea of Tranquility character Lieutenant Duster “has no fixed gender,” and Lacie is shunned for not knowing this (well, and for saying she’s never seen their “stupid fucking show”). While it could be read as her being called out for misgendering Lieutenant Duster and thus pro-trans, it stereotypes those who defend trans people as oversensitive gatekeepers and aligns respecting non-binary identities with the over-politeness demanded of everyone. Similarly, the overwhelmingly pastel, hyper-cute aesthetic, constant use of rising terminals (a feminine-coded speech pattern), and hyperfeminine performances of self align femininity with oppressiveness. The most butch woman in the episode, 1.4 Susan, used to be a social climber like Lacie, but after her husband died she stopped caring, and now she’s a truck driver. Between her and Ryan, masculinities are lower-class expressions valued by the series and femininities are devalued upper-class expressions the series condemns.

So much of the conflict is passive-aggressive ‘mean girl’ bitchiness. Her conversations with Bethany in the elevator are patently fake and laced with condescension passed off as compliments. The real estate agent mentions a discount program for rich high-ranking people, but when Lacie asks “do I qualify for that?” she immediately says “no, no you don’t”. In her interactions with flight counter attendant Hannah (who deserves the world I love her), they’re both using their customer service voices, which is what makes their standoff so delicious. (Also Lacie goes full Karen and honestly I’m rooting for Hannah here.)

Lacie: Sorry, it’s just, I’m Maid of Honour. I [puts hand on heart] cannot miss this wedding.
Hannah: And I [mockingly puts hand on heart too]? Am so sorry about that.

This is most obvious in Lacie’s interactions with childhood ‘best friend’ Naomi, a 4.8. Naomi is the first character to give a rating lower than 5, when she basically negs Lacie by giving her post a 4. She asks Lacie to be her Maid of Honour in what seems to be a heartfelt request, but her actual motivation was that “the authenticity of a vintage bond low four at a gathering of this calibre played fantastically on all the simulations we ran”. Ryan is appalled Lacie stays in touch with her: “She was always mean to you […] what about when she cut your hair?” Naomi fucked someone named Greg, who we can assume was someone Lacie was interested in. In her speech at Naomi’s wedding, when she decides to take her down with her on her downward spiral, Lacie says, “I looked up to Naomi pretty much my entire life, which meant she was looking down on me.” In this moment, Lacie finally realizes all of her relationships were completely hollow because no one ever says what they really think.

That said, the situation is actually more complicated because it’s not necessarily that everyone is ‘fake’, just that all affect is commodified. A theme in earlier episodes such as “Fifteen Million Merits” as well, moments of ‘authenticity’ are immediately appropriated by hegemony and marketed back to the consumer: “authentic gestures,” her social media analyst tells her, “that’s the key”. The reason Naomi chooses Lacie is because it reads as authentic and because earlier Lacie posted a picture of “Good ol’ Mr. Rags,” a toy they made together as kids at art camp. It sits on her desk as one of the few things she genuinely loves, only for her to immediately turn it into a tool for her and Naomi to use each other:

Lacie: So it was just about numbers for you?
Naomi: Oh, cut the shit! It was numbers for both of us, you wanted those primo votes, don’t deny it, I mean it’s not like you could get them on your own.

She uses Mr. Rags as a prop in her Maid of Honour speech and cries on command, although to be fair Ryan calls out that this isn’t actually normal behaviour in their society:

Lacie, rehearsing her speech: “I love you, Nay-Nay.” Is the tear too much?
Ryan: You fucking sociopath.

In fact, her draft speech is too authentic, to say nothing of the raw speech she actually delivers. Her spamlikes of Naomi’s photos don’t necessarily means she actually likes them, nor does it mean though that she doesn’t—it’s simply that despite constant interpersonal feedback they have no way of knowing how people actually feel about them.

Because of this mandated hyperperformance of affect and the uncertainties it creates, it becomes very easy to read Lacie and Naomi’s relationship through a queer lens. The way Lacie talks to Naomi is extremely ingratiating, and when she rates Naomi at the end of the call, it pisses Naomi off. For Naomi, the true marker of intimacy (and of power) is not having to rate someone. Lacie and Ryan only rate each other when they fight, and they trust each other enough to say how they really feel. If we read Naomi’s reaction as genuine (as it’s one of the few times her mask slips), reaching out to Lacie is an attempt to hold onto something real in the face of her impending marriage, which is very clearly of convenience. Paul has much better chemistry with his best man (and they are very touchy-feely), and Naomi and Lacie are near tears on their initial call with each other. Paul and Naomi come off as beards for each other and their wedding a tribute to compulsory heterosexuality, not because LGBT people aren’t accepted, but because their affections are queer by virtue of being real. But because everyone is performing affect, performing authenticity, there’s no way to know for sure: are these held tears calculated sentiment to secure votes and favours, or are Naomi and Lacie constrained by the narrative to hold back tears of frustrated love?

A queer reading actually bears out textually. Ryan raises the possibility when he asks Lacie, “you two pussy pals now?” Naomi helped Lacie with an eating disorder (indicating at least some level of care), and when she asks Lacie to be there, she says “I want my oldest friend with me, my oldest friend” (emphasis in original). Lacie does everything in her power to make it to the wedding despite everything, and her crashing it subtly references the trope of the ex or lover objecting to the union. Her Maid of Honour speech tells us how she really feels about Naomi, which is certainly full of anger and criticism but also homoerotic energy. “Guys and me never worked out,” Lacie admits, later pointing out that Naomi “had this tight ass”. As she’s dragged away by security, she shouts: “I love you Nay-Nay! I’ve always loved you! I LOVE YOU!” Mr. Rags being on her desk makes sense again: her love for Naomi is one of the few things she’ll fight for no matter how anyone rates her for it. Regardless of what she actually thought of Lacie, Naomi was her “something worth losing”.