Sarah, Ali and Maura arrive at Idyllwild, the last two almost beside themselves with excitement. The trio splinter off – Ali to Leslie’s poetry reading and Sarah to shaman Cryingbear’s “intention circle”. Maura is left alone to meander around the festival.
Outside the tent, Sarah is diverted by the sight of one woman spanking another on a leash. It’s a “consensual power exchange”, she’s told, and the opportunity Sarah has been waiting for to realise her fantasies.
Whilst browsing at a jewellery stall, Maura gets talking to a woman called Vicki, who tells her how brave she is for flouting the festival’s “womyn-born-womyn” policy (a plotline clearly inspired by the real controversy surrounding the Michigan Womyn’s music festival). Having been unaware of this, Maura flees the conversation, but cannot escape the paranoia she now feels, turning the festival-goers’s chant of “man on the land” (to mark the men coming to empty the toilets) into an insidious chorus.
Post-poetry reading, Leslie tells Ali about the policy and the pair decide to look for Maura. After hours frantically wandering the site, Maura finally finds Ali sitting around a campfire with Leslie and her friends. Persuaded to stay for a beer, the group discuss the policy, citing the fact that Maura has a penis as one tangible reason why she is violating the festival as a safe space.
But they also discuss the male privilege that has been lavished upon her for almost her entire life.
“I was in way too much pain to experience what you’re calling privilege,” protests Maura.
“Your pain and privilege are separate,” Leslie corrects her.
Maura storms off, infuriated by the perceived persecution. While in pursuit of her, Ali begins to hallucinate, seeing the “Jew shoes” on her feet and Rose and Gittel’s mother hurrying past her in the forest. It’s a gateway into another flashback to the Institute, as it’s invaded by a set of uniformly white-shirted men who burn the organisation’s books on a bonfire.
The scene switches between the fear and devastation at the Institute and Maura’s torment as she gathers her belongings. In Berlin, Gittel is dragged away by Nazis whilst Maura begins to flee the “feminist fuckhole” only to be stopped by Vicki, who offers her a lift out of there in her car.
Talking points
- Persecution. The end of this episode seems almost unfathomably complex, as parallels are drawn between the events of the present day and those of the 1930s. On the one hand, you have two “safe spaces” in the festival and the Institute, and two supposed violations of those spaces, with Maura (considered non-female) at the festival and the Nazis at the Institute. On the other, in Gittel and Maura, you have two people – both transgender women – cast out of a society by virtue of extremist doctrine. It’s not totally clear whether these connections are really worth unpacking (on top of everything you’ve also got Ali as the persecuted Jew wearing the bell shoes), but they do raise some questions. Can oppressed people be fascists? Is exclusion always persecution? And where do trans women fit into a patriarchal power structure?
- Music. Transparent has had a brilliant and always highly significant soundtrack, and Idyllwild sees music from throughout the series assemble in one place (with the notable exception of the genuinely great Fussypuss). At the end of the previous episode, we left Sarah, Ali and Maura in the car singing along to Closer To Fine by the Indigo Girls – at the festival, the band perform Hammer And A Nail to a rapturous audience. Both songs have their prescience: “The less I seek my source for some definitive, closer I am to fine,” goes the former, while the latter preaches that you’ve “gotta tend the earth if you want a rose”, later echoed by Leslie’s friend’s talk of clearing the land for the festival. Both Peaches and Sia cameo briefly, but one musician who becomes enveloped in the story is Alice Boman, a Swedish singer whose track Waiting played at the end of the season two opener, when Gittel materialised on Ali’s balcony. Here Boman appears as a singing camper, seemingly in pursuit of Ali – who seems haunted by the song.
