Ope Pardon, No. 24: Strangers of Consequence

Poker Face is the type of show that laughs at critics that like to tell you what a show is really about.

Oh it’s about a superhero pretending to be a sitcom ‘50s housewife but it’s really about grief and/or trauma.

Oh it’s about zombies but it’s really about grief and/or trauma.

Oh it’s about [literally anything], but it’s really about grief and/or trauma.

No, the general vibe of Poker Face — and god bless Rian Johnson for it — is more of the “it’s really not that deep” variety.

So it is with great resignation that I say that I do believe that while, yes, Poker Face is a show about Natasha Lyonne solving murder mysteries and evading Benjamin Bratt, it is also, in my own personal opinion, a show about the meaningfulness of consequential strangers and proximal relationships.

Proximal relationship is a term usually reserved for the discussion of romantic or familial relationships, usually in contrast to “distal relationships,” which is a fancy way of saying long-distance relationship. Or at least that’s what the first page of Google results imply.

Here is a sexual health doctor on whom I have done no further research so I really hope she is not like a pro-life TERF or someone awful:

“Couples in a proximal relationship had to have reported seeing each other daily in a typical month and to have spent no more than 2 days per week separated by over 50 miles. Couples in a long-distance relationship had to have reported seeing their partner less than daily in a typical month and to have spent over three days a week over 50 miles apart.”

Taken more broadly and as the concept was presented to me, you could say a proximal relationship is a relationship with someone you see routinely due to your shared presence within the same physical proximity. It does not inherently require you to know that person’s name or have engaged in any meaningful conversation. Theoretically, your mailman, your barista, your neighbor, your dog sitter, etc. could all be proximal relationships if they are people you know and spend a not-insignificant amount of time with due to their proximity to you.

That said, the more accurate term/p-word for what I am talking about is probably peripheral relationship, which encompasses all personal relationships falling into the “broad spectrum between strangers and intimates.” These people are “consequential strangers,” and “associated with a particular part of one's life and daily activities, such as co-workers, neighbors, gym buddies, fellow volunteers and congregants, and providers of goods and services.”

Remember that.

Anyways: Back to Poker Face.

95% percent of Charlie’s relationships in Poker Face and 90% of the people whose murders she solves are proximal and/or peripheral relationships, some without even the weight of any significant amount of time spent in each other’s proximity.

The (theoretical and ultimately ironic) insignificance of Charlie’s presence in their life is written into the structure of the show!

As anyone who has watched the show can tell you, part of the delightful fun/Columbo homage of Poker Face is that each episode opens with the story of a murder told in full, before kicking back to the beginning and telling the same story again, this time carrying on after the murder all the way to the moment justice is served (whatever that means — a knotty question for this show in our hyper-vigilant copaganda era!) and this time from the point of view of Charlie.

Charlie, you see, is never, however, so much as spotted in the background of the story during its first telling, even though, as we come to learn and after the second or third episode, guess, she is very much there in the vicinity. She is then compelled, by gift, moral compass or circumstance, to solve the murder of someone she has only known in a proximal sense — sometimes for a very short time at that. She becomes a profoundly consequential stranger for them and them for her.

But more than that, in many of these episodes — “The Stall,” “Rest in Metal” and “The Orpheus Syndrome,” come first to mind — her bond with the deceased, such as it is, is still taken seriously. No one, least of all Charlie, is pretending they were deeply close, but they meant something to each other for a period of time and that’s not nothing.

The idea that a peripheral relationship like that can be meaningful without ever rising to the level of profound depth or lifelong importance has become extremely powerful to me as of late.

When I first moved to Paris, I struggled a lot with how to define the relationships in my life here. I am someone who takes interpersonal relationships and my responsibilities within them very seriously and calling someone a friend is not something I do lightly. In Chicago, I had friends and the consequential strangers in my life were, well, a little more inconsequential as a result. In Paris, it has been a different story.

At first, this was because it literally defied the rules of space and time for me or anyone who just moved continents to have “friends” as I want(ed) to define friends. It was at this moment that a therapist encouraged me to appreciate and enjoy the relationships in front of me for what they were. No, she admitted, this particular cohort would probably not still be in my life in a decade, but they could still be people that got me out and about in freshly post-curfew Paris. And she was right! With 1-3 exceptions, they were just that.

But that wasn’t quite enough. Even once I got past the logistical impossibilities of building a bond with someone in six months commensurate with 12-year friendships forged over the most personally formative time of my life, I struggled with feeling like I still hadn’t found “my people” here. I have a fairly well-developed, hard-earned sense of self: I know who I am, what I care about and what I like. While I can pal around as part of an odd-couple or hodge-podge group of classmates, I ultimately did find myself craving connection with people who were…well, more like me.

It was at this moment that a different therapist encouraged me to be patient (something an Aries loves to hear) and appreciate and enjoy what she (possibly mistakenly) called proximal (so let’s say peripheral) relationships in my life. And she was right!

The consequential strangers I have encountered here were, have been, are wonderful. It helps that I have a magnifique dog, thus rendering me marginally more memorable than the average person each time I walk by a bar or pick up a coffee or pass a neighbor in the hall, and in the days, weeks and months before I felt more secure in my other relationships and before I did find the community I was looking for, it was the warmth of these encounters that kept my spirits up.

I recently found a new apartment that checked every box on my wish list except the one about not moving so far as to lose contact with my consequential strangers. It’s close — close enough that I can still comfortably come by the coffee shops I like, but far enough that I will not be saying bonjour to my boys at the corner bar six times a day.

The evening after I signed my new lease, I passed two of my neighbors separately on the street — both gave me waves that were nothing short of jolly. I don’t know either of their names, I know little about their lives, but it always makes me happy to see them and happy to feel seen by them — to be seen with recognition, as part of the neighborhood, as someone who belongs here. As a stranger of consequence in their life, too, perhaps.

I like to think if I got murdered and they had the power to detect bullshit, they would do what they could to see justice was served.

Next week: Succession returns. Surely I will have thoughts.