Happy Opening Night, Next To Normal!
In honor of it’s opening, I have decided to do an analysis of the show and try and organize all my thoughts about it.
One of the strongest parts of this show for me were the relationships between the characters. The one that broke my heart the most was the relationship between Dan and Gabriel. I feel like Dan really grieves his son, but doesn’t want to show it because of how torn up Diana is over Gabriel’s death, and he feels that if he shows how much he is hurting then neither of them will be able to cope. He feels like he is the one who has to hold the family together, so I feel he puts on a strong face and tries to pretend he doesn’t miss his son, and he is living in the present and not the past. I also feel he’s in denial: he doesn’t want to admit that he’s losing Diana, he keeps hoping that everything will go back to the way it was before. And he knows that it’s because of her grief of Gabe that he’s losing his wife, so he sort of hates the delusions of Gabriel because that’s the reason the family he built is crumbling. He won’t even say Gabriel’s name until the end of the show. And Gabriel really wants his dad to acknowledge him, and keeps getting frustrated that he won’t look at him or name him. He knows his dad hates him and wants him to disappear, but he’s so desperate to be known. During I Am The One (Reprise) when Gabriel won’t let go of Dan until he names him, I just wanted to burst into tears. I was so happy when Dan finally acknowledged Gabe’s existence and his name, and finally grieved over his dead son.
I also think Natalie, though she never knew her brother, feels him too. Not as directly as her parents, because she never knew her brother, but because everyone around her has been so affected by her brother’s death and the delusions her mother is having of him that she can’t help but feel the impact he’s left on her household. I feel like Gabriel’s always at the back of her mind, which is shown during Superboy and the Invisible Girl: she knows that Gabe is the main focus of her parents, and it makes her so bitter and angry because he isn’t even alive and she is, yet he is the one who gets all the attention because he is the cause of her mother’s hallucinations. I think she sort of looks at her brother’s memory with bitterness. She also knows that her parents gave birth to her because they wanted to replace their dead son, and yet they never gave her the attention she needed. She hates the fact that she was born to be a replacement, and probably feels like she isn’t even good enough to be a replacement because she didn’t fill the gap in her mother’s soul that misses her son so much.
As for Natalie’s relationship with Henry, I feel like she really does love him, but is afraid of what might happen in the future, which becomes apparent during the dance. She doesn’t want him to end up in a marriage like her dad did, where he married a woman he loved at a young age and then she went insane and Dan held onto their marriage because he hoped things would just go back to the way they were one day. Natalie probably sees a lot of her mother in herself, and is afraid that if she falls in love with Henry and gets into a serious relationship with him, that he might end up like her dad in a couple of years, where he has to take care of her because she might have a breakdown. She cares enough about him to not want to see that happen to him: she doesn’t think he deserves to be in a relationship with someone as fucked up as she believes herself to be.
I also believe that Diana really does love Natalie, but because of her own mental problems, she can’t bring herself to really connect with her daughter. I think it shows that she does care when she spies on Natalie with Henry and regrets the fact that she was never there for her daughter. She mentions that she couldn’t bring herself to hold Natalie as a baby in the hospital. I think part of Diana is afraid to connect with her child because she went through so much pain when she lost her first child that she couldn’t bring herself to really connect with Natalie because if she lost her, then she’d get even worse. Also she is just so focused on her grief for Gabriel that she doesn’t know how to parent Natalie properly.
And Natalie pretends that she hates her household and that she cannot wait to leave and go to college, but she actually deeply cares about her parent’s love. When her mother doesn’t show up to her recital is when she really breaks down and can’t pretend to be fine anymore. She really wants to know her mother and to win her love and to fill the hole left by Gabriel’s death, but she is just so bitter over her whole life and how she’s always been shunted to the side because of her mom’s mental state that she can’t bring herself to reach out to her parents anymore because she is so scared of rejection. And when Diana does finally reach out to Natalie, she can’t bring herself to actually believe that her mother is finally showing an interest in her because she doesn’t want to let herself hope just to be let down again.
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