Tina Bounces Up And Down

A few years ago, my esteemed colleague/husband David T. Cole and I vacated our apartment in New York for a couple of months, relocating to a furnished place in Toronto, so that we could get our kitchens and floors redone. Dave left before me so that he could go run his t-shirt business while my sister, who normally did it, took maternity leave, and on the day I was due to fly out -- the day before work was supposed to start -- I received an email from the contractor making sure I "remembered" to take everything out of all the kitchen cabinets, remove everything from all furniture surfaces, and unplug all our electronics. I guess I should have assumed I would need to do all those things, but no one had ever actually instructed me to do that. So with about four hours to go before I had to get in a cab and go to the airport, I started taking all the dishes and pots and pans and tchotchkes and everything else and just piling them up on the bed, because we lived in a sub-700-square-foot apartment in Manhattan and there was nowhere else for that stuff to go. In the last hour, I pulled the dresser we were using as a TV stand away from the wall and saw the snarl of cords that were attached to our TV, DVR, Playstation, Xbox, and Wii, and burst into tears. And I mean I started crying really hard, instantly, in a way that made me understand the expression "burst into tears" in a way I never had before.

I tell this rather long personal anecdote to say that Tina's struggle in "Party Time" is painfully resonant for me, and even though the decision she reaches by the end of the episode is clearly the wrong one, Amanda Peet has done such sharp work as Tina here and all season that it also makes a horrible kind of sense.

Since we've known her, Tina has been the kind of person who seems like she has a specific idea of how her life should look, and no real plan for how to make it happen. Moving from Houston to Los Angeles was obviously the first step of...something, but given that she's been sleeping on her sister's couch without any apparent urgency about getting her own apartment, it seems as though the move was the plan, and that she just figured things would fall into place from there. And you know what? They kind of have! What I described last week as Tina's privilege has actually really come through for her here: she's been able to use her personal magnetism to draw men into her orbit and put them to work for her -- Larry to share the spoils of his prestige with her; Alex to do the grunt work. But since her fight with Alex in "Ghost In Chains," she can't use him as her mule anymore, which means that with Michelle's event serving as Tina's informal showcase for her nascent L.A. party business, Tina has to prove to Alex how self-sufficient she is so he doesn't think she needs or misses him. Which is why it's particularly unfortunate that the bouncy castle she's brought over is full of spiders.

The bouncy castle soon becomes a metaphor for Tina's life, as she attacks the project of inflating it with confidence, followed by seething rage, all the while shaking off the well-meaning attempts of those around her to help her or persuade her to let it go. When she finally does give up, Alex has to tell her she's not even doing that right.

Tina's defeat is all over her face, and all over her clothes, and the men in her life are offering very different kinds of help. Alex is willing to forgive her for the audition débacle and solve her immediate problem, which is to dispose of this not-so-bouncy castle, probably illegally, someplace it won't get traced back to them, so that she can get past it and forget the random bad luck of this one crappy day. But Larry sees this one busted inflatable as the last pointless fight Tina should feel she needs to wage, and has already told her, "I do understand, you know. I get it. I was hustling my ass off in this town as a broke PA for eleven years before I made something of myself, and you know what? It doesn't mean a thing. You know what means something? [motions between them] This means something. You're making this harder than it has to be. So when you're ready, just call me. I'm here. I'm ready to take care of you."

As Tina stands in an alley watching Alex cram her castle into a dumpster, Larry's offer is weighing on her heavily enough that she actually tells Alex about it, even though the peace between the two of them is still so new.

Tina says that Larry's asked her to move in with them, and when Alex -- fairly neutrally, considering -- asks if she loves Larry, she defaults to bravado: "Well, let's consider the options. I can either continue to pursue my bouncy castle career? And sleep on my sister's couch, and be totally alone, or...!" "Do you love him?" Alex asks again. "You were right about me," she says after a moment. "I'm just not really-- I'm not really interesting, or cool, or deep. I'm not really good at anything. That's the bottom line. Really, I'm not good at anything. And I'm so fucking tired, I'm so tired of banging my head against the wall? I'm just so fucking tired." And Amanda Peet's face through these two speeches is a wonder -- first, there's the bravado we've come to know.

And then, when Tina says she's tired, Peet makes us see that exhaustion is bone-deep.

Today was supposed to be Tina's coming-out as an L.A. entrepreneur, presiding over all the fun in the castle, networking with Michelle's East Side parent friends, handing out the business cards she was so proud of before she opened up the house and spiders poured out. One bad day shouldn't be enough to sink an entire small business, unless its operator is so fragile and insecure that a hole in a piece of plastic can throw her into a spiral of self-doubt. Tina knows how she'd like her life to look, because she's seen it: Larry's living it. If Tina starts now, does she have eleven years to hustle her ass off as a broke...bouncy castle landlady? The way she looks today, she may not.

As Tina starts to cry, Alex steps forward to hug her; still clinging to him, she quietly says, "I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna move in with him." She still hasn't answered his question about whether she loves Larry -- which is, of course, an answer in itself. We may all know this is a bad decision -- Tina included -- but Peet has made me love Tina so much that I still empathize as she makes it. Larry may not fix all Tina's problems, but he can definitely take her to a spa in Palm Springs for a few days, and I hope he does, because she needs it.