Pamela Adlon’s Musical Intimacy in Better Things
By Mara Tatevosian
Pamela Adlon loves music. “I collect hella vinyl,” she tells Pitchfork. For any music lover, every moment is begging to be filled with song. Something that takes an ordinary chore and transforms it into magic, reminding us that the insignificant parts of life are the ones that count the most – like being in the back of an uber home and feeling the hot breeze kissing your fingers through the window or redecorating your bedroom after a nostalgic phone call with your mother at midnight. According to Adlon, the everyday and the mundane are the fundamental pieces to our puzzle. Her show, Better Things, now heading into its fifth season, has quickly become a beacon of this thinking. To call it a comedy or even a TV show seems diminutive to the range of emotions viewers experience. For four years her show has been an ode to many things; namely motherhood, daughterhood, friendship, Los Angeles – and music. Better Things feels more like a love letter than it does a TV show.
Like most scrappy, earnest love letters, music is used as a vehicle for emotions that are void of words. Sometimes instead of words, Adlon gives us mixtapes – and because the episodes are so intimate with her own life, her own daughters, her own mother, it truly is her mixtape. As a devoted collector of music, from gospel rap to authentic dancehall to new wave to bluegrass, it was only habitual that Adlon’s romance with music became one more relationship to explore on the show.
For the first two years of the show's run, John Lennon's “Mother” opened every episode, crying mother you had me, but I never had you – preparing its viewers for the sort of therapy that wasn’t prescribed. Every episode is stuffed with musical cues that underline its emotional core. Her brilliant understanding of the tonal influences of music truly revealed itself in the season one finale.
The finale first uses Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman,” to pace the scene which was shot in one long take. The camera follows Sam (Adlon’s character) in the slow chaos of weekday mornings – school lunches, shrieks from her teenage daughters, phone calls, and dirty sexts from an old lover – all packed into five minutes. She is desperately trying to fill every role – mother, daughter, breadwinner, worker, sexual being – though she cannot seem to do them unabridged. This is the hand that takes, Laurie Anderson whispers, as if she were really there, guiding Sam through her morning and perhaps, even her life. It’s an inward feeling that is emotionally shepherded by song.
The episode is titled “Only Women Bleed,” after the Alice Cooper song, which Sam and her daughters eventually sing along to in the final scene. Contrary to common misinterpretation, the song is about a woman in an abusive relationship, not menstrustration. Adlon subverts Alice Cooper’s chauvinistic tune into a spine-tingling prayer. As they drive down an empty Los Angeles freeway, singing along to the track, there is a reclamation taking place.
Better Things is no musical, but there are moments when the songs are liberated from the soundtrack and find themselves part of the story, like when Sam, her absentminded British mother, and her two youngest daughters recreated the choreography from Christine and the Queens’ “Tilted” music video as a graduation gift for her eldest daughter in the season two finale. Or in season three’s touching conclusion, when she asked the Hollywood High School choir to perform a chilling cover of Florence and the Machine’s “Shake it Out.”
In the most recent season, it was Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” that brought the audience to their knees. The episode, “Father’s Day,” is an ode to single mothers and their subsequent children of divorce. Sam and her brokenhearted, exhausted group of women friends gather to read the letters they had written to the cruel men in their lives, in an attempt at forgiveness. But before the reading and ceremonial burning of these letters, they gather around a piano to sing. The genius of “Jolene,” is that it’s a conversation amongst women – the male subject in the song is rarely even mentioned. This dysfunctional comradery amongst women is emulated in Adlon’s scene. It is not a scene about men – it is a conversation between women attempting to free themselves from the weight of love and their inherent responsibility to make everything perfect; to fix everything. Here, this burden is momentarily comforted by the safety of other women – and by Dolly Parton’s words. Unlike any other show, Adlon has created something that explains the value of being a woman, a mother, a daughter, a friend – regardless of how exhausting those roles often feel. So they sing and they wail and they roar and they laugh around a piano, reminding us that music is the keeper of our spirit.