Poetry in Fleabag: the Priest was wrong
“It’s not a fact, it’s poetry” and how the Priest completely misinterpreted God’s plan for him in “Fleabag”.
It’s been two years since the second season of Fleabag aired and I still haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. The fact that I rewatch the show almost on a monthly basis doesn’t help the cause, but that’s okay, because it gives me the possibility to catch something new every time. There’s this one quote that the Priest says in episode three, when talking about symbolism in the Scriptures: “It’s not a fact, it’s poetry.” That immediately stuck with me, and my position is that it is actually the reading key of the whole show: everything that happens has a metaphorical meaning that the characters should crack in order to get the ending they deserve (“to help us interpret God’s plan for us”). The Priest should be specialised in this, given how he studied the Bible so well; that’s why for a long, long time I’ve been certain that he was actually right in choosing God, in the end. And yet, as I was going through one of those moments where I would just stop and re-think about the show, I got an epiphany: he got everything wrong. He (and I) thought we had correctly interpreted the main, visible signs, but we actually missed the bigger picture. Let me explain.
The first crucial moment is in episode two. Fleabag and the Priest are sharing a drink in the sacristy, he asks her what makes her a normal person and she says she doesn’t believe in God — crash, a painting of Jesus falls down from the wall. In the printed screenplay, Phoebe Waller-Bridge writes that she never wanted to make fun of the Priest’s religion and of his beliefs, and this moment is there to state God’s presence, regardless of the fact that one might believe or not. God exists for the Priest, therefore He has to exist in the story, and this is His grand entrance.
Then, in episode three, we are introduced to the biggest metaphor of the entire show: the foxes chasing the Priest. In a beautiful piece for the Vulture, Ellen O’Connell Whittet explains the fox theory: the animal, traditionally used in literature as a symbol of lust, appears every time the Priest’s thoughts stray from his celibacy vow and head towards a more carnal realm. “The fox is a stand-in for the Priest’s conflicted feelings about his celibacy and his budding love for Fleabag”: it’s not random that the poetry quote comes shortly before we find out about the fox.
Moving on to episode four, we meet again with the Big Guy Upstairs. There has been the breaking of the fourth wall, the two of them fought, Fleabag tried praying and then she ended up in the vestry and she saw the Priest quite drunk and unhinged (“Fuck you, calling me Father like it doesn’t turn you on just to say it” — I mean, the man is not wrong, but control yourself, damn it!). God manifests Himself in two moments. First off, the Priest can’t reach the bottle of whiskey on the top of a cupboard and says “God, help me”: the bottle falls down in the blink of an eye. And then, after the confession, as Fleabag and the Priest (finally) kiss each other on sacred ground — crash, another painting falls down. I’ll give the last element before coming back to this point.
After episode four, God doesn’t show Himself anymore, but the foxes come back. In episode six, when the Priest and Fleabag meet right before the wedding ceremony, he startles when he sees her, saying “I thought you were a fox”. And then at the very end, when he chooses God and leaves, a fox appears to chase him down. In the piece mentioned above, it is explained how this is another metaphor of the fact that they will eventually end up together: if the fox represents the Priest’s issue with celibacy, he will get rid of it only when he manages to be with the person he truly loves.
Now, I’m not sure that’s true, because during the speech he gives in the homily he clearly states he’s not strong enough to step into romanticism (“Celibacy is a lot less complicated than romantic relationships,” he’d said back in episode three, and now he reiterates, “It takes strength to know what’s right, and love isn’t something that weak people do”) while, at the same time, Fleabag walks away from the camera, which, to me, means that she finally found that true peace of mind she’s been so desperate for since the moment she admitted her feelings for him. But regardless of whether they will end up together or not, it is true that the fox chases the Priest. Why? If he willingly chose God, why doesn’t this bring him the peace he has always claimed to have found (back to episode one: “I’ve really found peace in it”; episode four: “Here’s to peace, and those who get in the way of it”)?
Let’s go back to the confessional scene. One thing that I noticed during one of my many re-watches is the parallel between Fleabag kneeling at the end of her confession and then Claire kneeling in episode six when she tells Martin to leave her. I’ve been thinking back on what the meaning of this parallel could be, and then I stumbled upon a tweet (which I have now lost) that pointed out a disconcerting fact: the Priest makes her kneel right after she completely opened herself to him, thus asserting his power over her.
To be honest, I immediately went “Nah” as soon as I read it, but then that idea kept tugging at my brain, and I had to admit that it made a valid point. The shot, too, highlights it. The Priest opens the curtain and towers over Fleabag, the music climaxes, he kneels down, too, but doesn’t reach her eye level (PWB is taller than Andrew Scott, and yet she was made smaller than him in that moment), and then they kiss. And, yes, she does initiate the kiss, but it’s only after this whole set up.
Isn’t this precisely reflected in Claire and Martin? Claire tells him to leave her and Martin, perfectly in character with his bad personality, tells her to get on his knees and beg. He’s sure she will never do it, but he also realises that it’s a way to assert his power over Claire’s life: he knows she’s stuck with him, therefore he clings to every last possibility to keep her with him, even daring her to let go of her need for control. But Claire kneels, thus re-claiming the gesture for herself, and in here there’s a flip of the symbolism, that clashes with Fleabag’s kneeling. Indeed, when Claire kneels, she gets what she wants. Fleabag doesn’t.
The second time Fleabag and the Priest kiss, it goes differently for a number of reasons (her house and fourth-wall being the most important ones), but the one I want to point out is a detail in the script. The writing goes, “She leans forward and kisses him gently. He suddenly goes for it. He’s a pro… he just needed permission (emphasis added)”. And then the main question hit me. Why doesn’t God intervene? Because they’re not on sacred ground, one could say — which makes sense, but takes away the double layer of poetry. What I think is that God doesn’t intervene because there’s nothing to be stopped.
During the first kiss, the painting falls not because God doesn’t want the two of them to be together or because something blasphemous has happened. The Priest swears constantly, and yet there aren’t paintings falling down at every hollow invocation of His name. As a matter of fact, we have already said that the first time He manifested His presence was just to make it clear to Fleabag that He was, actually, there, and that it was something relevant to the Priest’s life. Instead, in episode four, here we have our little pal God knocking bottles down to help the Priest get more drunk and then stopping him when he gets with Fleabag in the wrong way. When they do it right, when, to quote the priest, “it feels right”, God just watches, without intervening.
Where am I getting to with this? Here: the Priest said that the Bible is a moral code to help us understand God’s plan, but the thing with poetry and interpretation is that it could be tricky, and we could be missing the author’s true intentions. We could be focusing on the wrong things, and we could be missing on the bigger symbols, just like the Priest does. He makes a hard choice, a painful one when he chooses God: he’s said it before, he’s told Fleabag in episode five that he “sacrificed a lot for this life”, and in the final homily he tries to convince himself that he’s doing the right thing (“Take words from this book of love — be strong and take heart, all you who hope… in the Lord”). But, in truth, he’s making the conscious decision of running away from the frightening show of strength that it would be to give in to love. He got the interpretation wrong.
If he eventually understands this, we will never know. We will never know if they’ll end up together, if they’ll meet again, if he’ll leave the priesthood, if she’ll take him back. In truth, it doesn’t matter. After all, the second season of Fleabag “is a love story”, but that gives zero guarantees about the ending. Could be a comedy, could be a tragedy: what matters is the light that shines on doubt, fear, hope and love, on relationships and on the fright for the unknown. And that’s why I’ll keep coming back to it, to find something else that I missed the previous times. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll even change my mind about this whole theory.
After all, it’s not a fact.
It’s poetry.
