Freedom Falls

Pluribus and the limits of queer identity

(This post contains spoilers for the show Pluribus through Season 1, Episode 8)

When I first called this newsletter The Autonomy, I knew I was naming it after a lie. As much as bodily and personal autonomy live at the heart of many issues I write about—sexual freedom, gender beyond hierarchies, the sanctity of one’s own body—the notion is made tenuous by the permeable, interdependent way that societies and bodies function and the collective ways of living that are key to any liberatory vision. The fight for abortion, say, or transsexual medicine often deploy the rhetoric of bodily autonomy, and queer people often express our identities, desires, and rights in terms of individualized ownership—my sexual orientation, my gender identity, my pronouns.

Simultaneously, however, many reactionary forces—like corporations, capitalism, fascism—are eager for us to imagine ourselves as siloed, isolated beings with no obligation or connection to our neighbors. See how quickly the language of “my body, my choice,” was weaponized by anti-vaccine forces to defend their own freedom to expose their vulnerable neighbors to deadly diseases (which themselves betray bodily autonomy for the myth it is). Like our bodies, our identities and self-concept are dialectic, determined by our interactions with others. Liberal notions of identity portray them as internalized and innate, but in truth, they are interconnected and interdependent. How I live as a woman shapes how those around me live as women. We shape ourselves as much as others shape us, then we shape them in return.

And yet we understand that laws and systems that deny us agency over our own bodies and our identities are enacting a real, material violence. Autonomy is something we rely on and cling to even as we recognize its impossibility. To paraphrase Astra Taylor’s maxim about democracy, autonomy may not exist, but we’ll miss it when it’s gone.

This conflict is at the heart of Pluribus, Vince Gilligan’s sci-fi series about an extraterrestrial virus that silences the identities and egos of Earth’s 8 billion people and replaces them with one, united consciousness (which I’ll call the Hive). Under the spell of the virus, individuality is erased (and things like creativity and private property along with it), but all of humanity’s knowledge and experience is united such that each human body can give voice to the experience of all of humanity. What one “person” knows is what another “person” knows, what one body feels is what another body feels. The virus operates like the dogma at the heart of Ayn Rand’s dystopian novella Anthem, in which an authoritarian state has outlawed all individual expressions of creativity or identity—no “I” pronouns but simply “we.”

Pluribus follows Rhea Seehorne’s Carol Sturka, a recovering alcoholic, lesbian author of decidedly heterosexual romantasy, and one of just 13 humans on Earth immune to the alien virus. Most of Carol’s fellow survivors seem decidedly sanguine about the cheery and accommodating Utopia offered by the Hive, but Carol resists its every charm and searches desperately for a way to “cure” humanity of its newfound collective bliss and return them to their complicated, individualized selves.

It seems hardly incidental that Pluribus’s central character is a middle-aged lesbian with no children, one whose defiance of attempts to quash her sexual identity as a teenager, seemingly prepared her to strike out against a world demanding her submission, but who has already sacrificed her desires for the world. She reacts in horror when the Hive tells her its goal is to figure out “what makes you different so we can fix it. So that you can join us.” Carol quickly identifies Zosia, her “chaperone” from the Hive, as bearing a striking and gender-swapped resemblance to the swarthy male love interest of her best-selling fantasy novels. “My original version of him was a her,” she reveals. “But I talked myself out of it.” We see this suppression of her own desires—and likely resentment in her own role promoting heterosexual fantasies—turn into disdain for her readership in the show’s pilot.

In a conversation with the Hive (via Zosia), Carol describes the counselors at her conversion therapy camp—perversely called Freedom Falls—as “some of the worst people I have ever known, and they smiled all the time just like you.”

Queer people are decidedly sensitive to the ways our society, economy, and culture shape human desires to yield specific outcomes. There is very little in the world that rewards you for being queer and quite a lot that punishes you for it, particularly if your manifestation of queerness is visibly deviant, embodied, and divergent from the mandates we are given at birth towards specific gender regimes. We are asked to believe these restrictions are just the natural order of things when we experience them for what they are—collective choices disguised as inevitabilities, demands for conformity in fear of our nonconformity. All of our desires are shaped by the context in which we’re raised and socialized, but it is queerness that is often portrayed as itself a virus, a “social contagion.” As the queer author of heterosexual romance, Carol is herself a begrudging architect of desires she does not share. Her resistance to the Hive should be seen in this light, as someone intimately aware of how human will is suppressed by external pressures and, more alarmingly, how those pressures can be internalized into our own choices.

About halfway through the first season, the Hive responds to Carol’s efforts by abandoning her, leaving her to wander Albuquerque in isolation. Though the hospitality of the Hive is just a phone call away—meals and trash pickup on demand via quadrocopter—no human emissary of the Hive ever interacts with her. She takes advantage of Earth’s abandonment as much as she can, sitting for dinner entirely alone at four-star restaurants and replacing her framed print of a Georgia O’Keeffe with the real thing (snatched off the wall of the artist’s Santa Fe museum). But soon—blasting fireworks and 80s hard rock to herself—she succumbs to the pressure of this forced exile and paints a large “COME BACK” on the pavement of her cul-de-sac, eventually falling into the arms of Zosia upon her (it’s? their?) return. Carol’s isolation is thus revealed as a manipulation of her very human need for contact and companionship by a mass collective keen to “fix” her individuality.

Following their reunion, Carol and the Hive (via Zosia) enjoy a series of flirtatious “dates” wherein the Hive does its best to appeal to Carol—picking up her sardonic sense of humor, reconstructing a favorite teenage haunt, and fangirling over her fantasy series. As much as it wooed the other survivors, the Hive is keen to appear to Carol as benevolent as possible and, in fact, build an emotional relationship with her. This results in Carol and the Hive (via Zosia) ultimately having sex. While understandably celebrated by many viewers as a unique moment of prestige lesbian representation, the entire relationship between Carol and the Hive strikes me as unavoidably reactionary, simultaneously an act of representation and assimilation. Whereas the counselors at the conversion therapy camp wanted to suppress Carol’s queerness, the Hive sees her queerness as the key to suppressing her entire sense of self.

Pluribus often seems to present the Hive—with its eco-friendly veganism, egalitarian attitude, and abolition of private property—as a fable for the excesses of collectivist thought and action, the danger posed to individual desires and creativity by calls for mutual responsibility and shared resources. Like Rand’s Anthem, it’s easily interpreted as a right-wing celebration of what Rand called “the virtue of selfishness” and a dystopian warning about what today’s conservatives might call “toxic empathy.” One of Carol’s fellow survivors is Manoussos, a Paraguayan man who rejects every ounce of food or assistance the Hive tries to offer him and fights to survive only on what he can create or earn. “Nothing on this planet is yours,” he tells the Hive. “Nothing. You cannot give me anything because all that you have is stolen.” Interpreted by many as a shadow critique of plagiaristic AI chatbots (and it may still be that), it also struck me as decidedly capitalist, especially when contrasted with the Hive’s collective benevolence. Manoussos and the Hive live at two extremes of the paradox I started with, two poles representing the risks of complete independence and complete dependence.

Which is why it’s fascinating to me the Hive has sent as its emissary the embodiment of Carol’s lesbian desires. As far as we know, the Hive itself has no desires beyond suppressing the individuality of the few individuals left and sustaining its own life on Earth. And yet it is the Hive (via Zosia) that first kisses Carol and makes the most direct appeals to her as a person. Carol’s very human need for affection is also a vulnerability for it to exploit, a mechanism to ensure her own freedom falls. But this is also generally true of romantic love—in fact, all human needs and desires are open to exploitation. Plus, the Hive sees itself as benevolent (regardless of how Carol sees things). As Seehorn said in an interview, “It is both manipulative and kind at the same time.” Unlike the pressures of compulsive heterosexuality that attempted to restrict Carol across her life, the Hive is open to meeting Carol as a queer woman—if that is the best way to suppress her identity altogether.

One way to interpret this choice is as a meta-narrative warning to queer people—that we are being swayed by appeals to our identity by leftist puppeteers and our identities as queer people are dependent upon individualism. What the Hive’s act of manipulation most reminds me of, however, is the appeals to queer identity already used to exploit us by corporations and politicians who regard us as a localized special interest or demographic removed from any other coalition and, ideally, in need of no solidarity. This is often very (and maybe surprisingly) appealing to queer people—decades of LGBTQ rights activism were designed by libertarian and conservative gay men with an undying faith in the privatizing effects of marriage and domestication. It also has the flattening effect Pluribus seems to be warning us against, rendering us “virtually normal” (as Andrew Sullivan memorably put it) and indecipherable from the ways the straight world lives.

But what if we render the world something other than straight to begin with? Rather than let the world shape us to its liking, what if we let our experiences and subjectivity shape the world?

As Carol and the Hive (via Zosia) grow close, Carol urges it (and here, 'I’ll confess the pronouns may get a bit confusing) to embrace “I” pronouns when referring to its (her?) self. Zosia stumbles around the word, but slowly begins uncoiling a past memory of Zosia before the “joining.” She suddenly grows wistful, then her face drops into one of horror while the individual ego of the person called Zosia claws back her own awareness from the clutches of the Hive.

This self-discovery comes not only after Carol and Zosia have sex, but also after Carol shows Zosia a new first chapter of her fantasy series with its swashbuckling male love interest magically re-cast as a woman. Like any true fan, Zosia is overcome with awe and emotion at the story Carol weaves and her own representation in Carol’s story. If the Hive sees Carol’s queerness as a site of exploitation, Carol sees queerness (we might even more specifically say transness) as the key to unlocking Zosia from the cage the Hive has locked her in.

The most frequent criticism of Pluribus is its slow pace—the show delights in long shots of the New Mexico desert skyline or South American coastlines while it slowly unravels its philosophical tale. Each long (and beautiful) shot filled with not much happening is a chance for the viewer to sit with the show’s premise as it unfolds, grow comfortable in not knowing the resolution to its many contradictions. Writing this between the penultimate and final episodes of the show’s first season, I’d be surprised if the finale neatly tied them up together with a blunt-edged moral. But its explorations of queerness are already fabulously intricate and true to the contradictions many queers ourselves experience, living as the lonely truth that reveals the world’s popular lies.