‘The Affair’: Back To School

The Affair tells the complicated saga of an extramarital affair and the havoc it causes by splitting the narrative into two points of view: HIS & HERS. To wit, Decider will be recapping the show’s second season in a similar way with Sean T. Collins covering the female POV and Meghan O’Keefe responding with her take on the male perspective. Today, we’re discussing the eighth episode of the show’s second season (“Episode 208”).

PART 1: HELEN

This week on The Affair, we’re presented with two views of Noah Solloway (Dominic West), one from his ex-wife (Maura Tierney) and one from the man himself. In one of these POVs, he’s a boorish egomaniac, prone to compulsive infidelity and taking violent umbrage at the slightest shortcoming or insult. In the other, he’s a kind-hearted, thoughtful student of human nature, gracious about his success, who’s earned forgiveness for his trespasses by owning up to them. And you won’t believe which version is which!

Helen’s half of the episode begins, and continues for quite some time, as a comedy of manners starring her as an enthusiastic alumna of Williams College trying to pass both her love of the place and admission thereto to her daughter, and Whitney as a badass goth farmer or something who wants to take time off to model.

There are jokes about Tinder, lecherous old photographers, “Uncle” Max, dorm life, and whether either one of these women is capable of taking care of themselves without their respective parents’ money. In short, it’s Whitney being Whitney, as cutting and impetuous as ever. “Do you understand her?” Noah asks when mother and daughter bump into him, in town for a book tour that happens to coincide with the college tour he completely forgot about. “Not really,” Helen sighs. That’s Whitney, alright!

But the portrait of Noah that Helen’s POV subsequently paints is surprisingly flattering. He sheepishly invites her to his book reading, an invitation she impulsively takes up when boredom sets in at the bar across the street, and she discovers that his take on the end of their marriage is nuanced, sensitive, and sad: “What had become of her, that bold unafraid girl? What became of him who had worshipped her?” She watches as he answers audience questions about the big issues of love and faith with aplomb and insight, largely by defining the former as a subset of the latter. “I believe love is a kind of faith, and when two people both believe, something powerful happens.” The metaphor he then employs—lovers are two sides of a triangle, leaning into each other to create something unbreakable; when one side leaves, the other collapses—is as strong a description of the power and weakness of love as I’ve ever heard. In no uncertain terms, he takes responsibility for losing faith in the love he shared with Helen.

Then, over drinks at their favorite college-age bar, he’s sincerely self-effacing about his success. He’s gently but firmly insistent on allowing Whitney the freedom Helen’s own parents never allowed her. He makes her see the light so clearly she’s gotta bang her head on the table from the glare.

And as a reward for all this good behavior, Helen apologizes for the choices she forced him to make, for her secret glee that his first book failed, and for her inability to see how important writing really was to him. “I never in a million years thought you would be this, this guy,” she tells him. “And now you’re here, and I’m very proud of you.” She means it. That this is coming from Helen’s perspective indicates she wants and needs to be seen as forgiving, supportive, and honest about her ex-husband’s character. But it also means she thinks he deserves it.

And on Noah’s side of the equation? He’s a drunken dickhead, ranting about how hard it is for white men to get ahead in literature (“It’s impossible to be a man in 2015!” he says, unleashing a laughing fit from his ex), picking fights with student-newspaper book critics, barely resisting the temptation to pick up admiring undergrads, and coming an unzipped fly away from cheating on his pregnant fiancée with his publicist. Yet even here Helen is affirming the better angels of his nature: “You’re not a dick! You’ve made some questionable choices, and you don’t like yourself very much for reasons I don’t understand, but you’re fundamentally a decent human being.” As we’ve been saying for a while, that’s the thesis statement for The Affair’s take on masculine martyrdom: Sure, we men make mistakes, we fuck up, but at heart we’re Good Guys—why can’t everyone see this? In Noah’s case, Helen can. He’s the one whose descent has blinded him. And based on the flash-forwards, in which Helen participates in his lawyer’s scheme to pin the death of Scotty Lockhart on Alison by secretly determining the paternity of her baby, he’s brought her stumbling into the dark along with him.

PART 2: NOAH

“Who the fuck do you think you are?!?”
This is what Noah, drunk on both booze and power, screams at a college kid who gave Descent a bad review and then crashed his wet dream of a reading with pointed questions about the literary merit of the work. The kid handles Noah’s bitterness with calm aplomb, though, which leads the older man to hurl a punch that never lands.

It’s also a question that Noah is asking himself throughout this entire episode. With the onslaught of fame and success, Noah is losing touch with who he is. Is he a decent family man finally seeing his literary dreams come true? Is he a lascivious asshole who can’t keep his lust and pride under wraps? Is he a bright new voice? Or is he just the second coming of “Bruce Butthole?”

We’ve seen him in both lights over the course of The Affair and last night these two personas almost crashed into each other.
It’s unclear at first whether or not Noah and Helen’s POVs happen on the same night because their reads on the night are so starkly different. Helen sees their night together as a moment where she finally gets to confront her girlhood failings and make peace with them. In parallel, Whitney and her modeling dreams constantly ripple to the surface and Helen is both worried for her daughter and proud of Noah’s success. Noah, on the other hand, is only concerned with Noah. Since Whitney doesn’t once even get a singular mention in his version, you have to ask if maybe she was right about his indifference to her last week after all.
Noah Solloway likes it when beautiful women like Noah Solloway, so you can only imagine how gleeful he was to have Eden at his side puffing up his pride through critical reviews and book readings. While Helen remembers the reading being a sober affair highlighting Noah’s intellect, he only sees the pretty adoring faces practically swooning for his genius. Thankfully, we get to see how this “fan club” makes Helen’s eyes roll.

Helen is delightfully drunk in Noah’s version and in vino veritas. While everyone around Noah is swirling with either false praise or cruel criticism, Helen is decidedly honest and hers is the only truth Noah will hear. She is his Jiminy Cricket of a conscience warning him to watch himself with Eden and snatching a co-ed’s number away from him. She even gets to call him out on white male privilege.

Is it impossible to be a white straight man in 2015? Well, it’s impossible for Noah Solloway to resist temptation in 2015. We’ve seen before how a little bit of freedom can set him off the rails. We watched him screw his way through an entire school’s faculty. Confronted with the temptation of sex, what does Noah do? Well, he does what he always does: succumbs.
The names sometimes tell us far more than they ought to. Noah is a man lost at sea, trying constantly to pair up with someone two-by-two, and his publicist Eden is a veritable woman from paradise. She’s almost nauseatingly beautiful and caters to his every need. When she visits his room at the end of the night, calling him “the bad boy of the literary world,” it seems though they really are going to get down and dirty — until she’s the one who stops.

She claims she doesn’t mix business with pleasure, but the metaphor couldn’t be more pronounced. Noah is cast out of Eden for his sins.
Where is Alison in all this? Even though on the surface it seems like she doesn’t comprehend the literary circus that Noah has flung himself into like a flying trapeze, she delivers the best summation of his character we’ve seen in perhaps the entire series.

He does. He wants the family and the fall, the poetry and the porn, Heaven and Hell. He wants to be the hero and the asshole. Too bad not even men can have it all.
[Watch The Affair on Showtime] or [Watch The Affair on Hulu]
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) is a freelance writer who lives with Diet Coke and his daughter, not necessarily in that order, on Long Island.
[Gifs by Jaclyn Kessel, copyright Showtime]