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The Truth About Being "Too Much" | Trope, Explained
The Take Film TV Movie
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20 hours ago
She’s brash, emotional, inconsiderate, and a little intense – she just "too much." Or, at least, that’s what everyone else tells her. From Too Much's Jessica and Girls' Hannah to The...
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00:00
She's brash, emotional, inconsiderate, and a little intense.
00:04
She's just too much.
00:07
Or at least that's what everyone else tells her.
00:09
How come as soon as an intense woman meets a flame, people yell witch?
00:13
While characters that fall into related tropes
00:15
might have the opportunity to show off the good with the bad,
00:19
the too much woman finds it much harder to find the bright side,
00:23
or convince anyone else that she has one.
00:26
So what's really going on with the too much woman trope?
00:30
And why can't we stop watching her, even when she drives us a little crazy?
00:35
Do you have a question, Kelly?
00:36
Yeah, I have a lot of questions. Number one, how dare you?
00:39
So who is the too much woman?
00:42
Being labeled too much can be a way to cut down any woman just for having emotions.
00:47
But some creatives who have often themselves been labeled too much
00:51
have begun carving out a more truthful take on this trope on screen.
00:55
She could come across as quite immature.
00:59
She often gets flack from those around her because the things that she worries about
01:03
seem, at least on the surface, to be first world problems that she's blowing out of proportion.
01:09
She also tends to have a rather juvenile mindset when it comes to problem solving.
01:15
If I was you, I would just like freak out and get really drunk and then tell someone I was pregnant.
01:19
She's known for being myopic and self-centered.
01:22
How am I supposed to put food on my table if you keep upping my debt?
01:28
Get up and shop.
01:30
Because she's so laser-focused on her own feelings and problems,
01:34
she has a difficult time remembering to consider anyone else's.
01:38
No, you don't ruin my thing. I ruin your thing.
01:41
You are not the center of the universe, Jenna.
01:43
I am too. I'm the moon.
01:45
But she's also simultaneously wracked with insecurity.
01:50
Her attempts to paper over those insecurities so that she doesn't actually have to deal with them
01:54
only creates more problems for her.
01:57
This trope has a lot of overlap with the hot mess trope.
02:01
But while being a hot mess is generally framed as a stage of life that one grows out of,
02:06
being too much is much more often the result of more deeply ingrained issues
02:11
that take a lot more work to overcome.
02:14
She also has a lot in common with the so-called difficult women.
02:18
But the biggest divergence between these two tropes is that while the difficult woman is very driven
02:23
and goal-oriented, the too-much woman more often finds herself following her own whims
02:28
and feeling like she can never quite keep up with the consequences of her own choices.
02:34
And so now I'm like literally wracked with unspeakable terror.
02:38
I've basically like ruined my life, which is just now becoming tolerable.
02:42
The difficult woman, or at least the modern difficult woman,
02:45
is also more often given the opportunity to showcase other redeeming qualities
02:49
that help balance out the sharper sides of her personality.
02:53
The too-much woman, on the other hand,
02:55
can sometimes feel like she doesn't have any redeeming qualities at all.
02:59
The too-much woman is often told that she's overbearing or intense.
03:04
She isn't afraid to take up space physically or emotionally.
03:07
I feel like my energy is just like really intense.
03:10
It's just like a little bit off all the time.
03:13
Her at-once self-absorbed and insecure attitude gets her trapped into spirals of self-sabotage
03:19
that, no matter how hard she might feel like she's trying,
03:22
she can never quite seem to pull herself out of.
03:25
What am I doing?
03:27
I'm on a date with this guy?
03:29
Because he didn't remember me?
03:32
He's demented, listen to him.
03:34
At the heart of all of these characters is a deep desire to be loved,
03:39
combined with a belief that they don't deserve it.
03:42
Women who are labeled too much frequently receive criticism
03:45
from everyone in their orbit for their behavior,
03:48
even, and often especially when, they're just as bad as her,
03:53
just in different ways.
03:54
She's a lazy, entitled, manipulative, myopic narcissist
03:59
who does a f*** a lot less than she thinks she does.
04:01
And in real life too, viewers time and time again complain
04:04
that they find too much characters difficult to root for.
04:08
This is less so the case when it's a comedic portrayal
04:11
that's being turned up for laughs.
04:12
Oh, don't be so dramatic.
04:14
That's my thing.
04:15
And if you take it away from me, I will kill myself, and then you.
04:18
But when this trope is played straight in a drama or dramedy,
04:21
she has a much more difficult uphill battle.
04:24
Not only to make others like her, but to learn to like herself.
04:29
This character type has recently become a topic of conversation again
04:32
thanks to Lena Dunham's new Netflix show, aptly titled, Too Much.
04:37
The show follows Jessica, a successful producer
04:39
who has become obsessed with her ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend.
04:43
I understand that things might not be perfect right now for you,
04:47
but you just broke into our home, and it's giving crazy,
04:50
it's giving psychotic.
04:52
The show is unafraid to dig into all of the dark and messy parts of our lives,
04:56
from chaotic emotional states and bad decisions,
04:59
to everything else.
05:01
You know, very Lena Dunham.
05:04
Jessica comes from a very close and very open family.
05:09
You know, if you boost yourself up a little,
05:11
you could make it with him again.
05:12
Once you hook up with him, see if you can get him to...
05:15
Any day.
05:15
Ew!
05:17
This has led to her own tendency to overshare regardless of the occasion.
05:22
But having this tight family bond is also the only thing that keeps her tethered to earth.
05:26
All of her other relationships are fraught with pain and destruction,
05:31
constantly leaving her head spinning.
05:33
Her impulse to self-sabotage bubbles to the surface again and again,
05:37
leading to increasingly disastrous consequences.
05:40
Yeah, I guess I'd choose chaos.
05:43
Or actually, you know what?
05:44
Chaos chose me.
05:46
Because I'm fucking irresistible!
05:48
Dunham is, of course, best known for her 2010s hit Girls,
05:51
featuring another too-much-self-insert character in Hannah.
05:54
So, um, I guess I'm not what you would describe as, like, a chill girl.
05:57
I'm not, like, a cool, relaxed lady.
05:59
Though these characters are, on paper, quite similar,
06:02
both they and their reception have turned out to be quite different,
06:06
for reasons which we'll unpack in a second.
06:08
The Office's Kelly Kapoor is an iconic too-much-woman character.
06:12
Though, because hers is a comedic version,
06:15
she never has to wallow in the darkness for too long.
06:18
But that said, all of the too-much traits are still there.
06:22
She's intensely focused solely on herself and her own interests.
06:25
She's invested in forcing her relationships to be what she wants them to be.
06:30
She's emotionally stunted.
06:32
And she's the source of many of her biggest problems.
06:35
You lied about being pregnant.
06:37
Right? So?
06:37
You really don't understand why that might make me kind of angry.
06:40
No.
06:41
We're never getting back together.
06:42
Why not?
06:43
On the more dramatic end of things, there's Weed's Nancy Botwin.
06:47
While she might have begun the show as a pretty sympathetic character,
06:51
we were very quickly introduced to the much darker sides of her personality.
06:55
While Nancy's struggles and her desperate measures to keep things going were all initially justifiable
07:00
due to the tragic place she found herself and her family in,
07:04
her too-much personality quickly began causing problems for her and everyone around her.
07:09
You need to stop hanging out with bad people.
07:12
The man set a town on fire.
07:14
All for a reason not to piss him off.
07:16
But because she refused to come to terms with her own issues or take into account how much
07:21
she was affecting everyone's lives, everything only continued to spiral out of control.
07:27
While being too much is generally seen as a more ingrained characteristic,
07:31
there are times when we can see a character push to a point where her previously contained
07:36
too-muchness begins to break its way out.
07:39
Take Euphoria, for example.
07:41
Initially, it's Maddie who was the difficult girl because she's so outspoken and confident.
07:46
This is what leads to Nate beginning to imagine Cassie on the Madonna side of the Madonna-horse split,
07:52
even though one of her biggest traits is everyone putting her down all of the time for being easy.
07:57
Whether I like her or not is irrelevant.
08:00
The fact is, she's a f***er through and through, bro.
08:03
She might be seen as easy sexually,
08:05
but she has the easygoing, always agreeable personality of the Madonna that he desires.
08:12
She's willing to be at his beck and call,
08:14
do whatever he wants and change everything about herself to better align with his desires.
08:19
I think that's my biggest dream.
08:21
To be your girl.
08:23
I love you more than anything.
08:25
But then, when she begins to crack under the pressure
08:28
and can no longer contain her less agreeable emotions,
08:32
she too becomes too much.
08:34
No, what you don't understand Nate is I am crazier!
08:38
That's not something to be f***ing proud of, Cassie!
08:40
No, but it is something you should be scared of.
08:44
And like for all the others,
08:46
this too-much-nature specifically is seen as all-consuming.
08:50
While Maddie can be mean and sweet and determined all at once,
08:54
Cassie becomes so blinded by her own singular goal
08:57
that it blocks out everything else in her life,
09:01
to the point of sabotaging everything she cares about.
09:03
So, given all of this,
09:05
why do we still love to watch stories about characters that are supposedly too much?
09:11
Too much women might be obnoxious and sometimes even painful to watch
09:15
as they make terrible decisions and treat others around them poorly,
09:18
but because there is something so relatable about them at their core,
09:22
we can't stop watching because we can't help but hope that they're able to start turning things around.
09:27
No one could ever hate me as much as I hate myself, okay?
09:30
So any mean thing someone's gonna think of to say about me,
09:33
I've already said to me about me probably in the last half hour.
09:36
While they are often a bit over the top,
09:39
their openness with their emotions and the messier parts of life
09:42
can feel like a breath of fresh air.
09:44
We all make mistakes,
09:45
and sometimes they can feel devastatingly impossible to overcome.
09:50
So it can be cathartic to watch characters make major missteps over and over,
09:54
but then manage to not only keep going,
09:57
but also grow as people.
09:58
I just figured if I'm gonna be a mess,
10:00
that is'll be a hot mess, right?
10:02
And because their flaws feel like real deep flaws,
10:05
not just oops I'm so quirky and clumsy pseudo-flaws,
10:09
every little bit of growth really does feel like a win,
10:11
even if we know there's a chance they might just unravel things again.
10:16
Interestingly, they're often placed within friend groups of people
10:19
who are also terrible in their own way.
10:22
This makes sense since more quote-unquote normal people
10:25
tend to run the other way after being around them for too long,
10:28
but also because narratively,
10:29
it allows the ability to show different kinds of problematic behavior.
10:33
In this way, when it's done well,
10:35
the too-much-woman isn't framed as being the sole problem,
10:38
but instead just the result of someone trying to survive
10:41
in a much larger web of issues.
10:44
Here's to those who wish us well,
10:46
and those who don't can go to hell.
10:51
Though critics have, for the most part,
10:53
been raving about too much,
10:55
audience reactions have been a bit different.
10:58
There are, of course, just people who will never enjoy
11:00
watching too much character types on screen,
11:02
who didn't like Hannah then and don't like Jessica now.
11:05
But there are many people who were hyped for this show
11:07
specifically because they were excited
11:09
to finally have another too-much-woman back on their screens,
11:13
only to be disappointed.
11:15
I mean, I'm not upset, I just need to adjust my expectations.
11:18
I'm always, like, adjusting my expectations.
11:20
The biggest issue seems to be that
11:22
while Hannah felt like a very grating,
11:25
but very real person,
11:27
Jessica almost feels more like a caricature
11:29
of the type of person that Hannah was,
11:32
instead of feeling like she genuinely exists in our world.
11:35
Jessica's story absolutely has some moments
11:37
that feel very real and grounded,
11:40
but the show can't seem to keep that feeling overall.
11:43
Part of this could be due to Dunham
11:45
having full creative control over the entire show.
11:49
She did have more complete control over season one of Girls,
11:52
particularly the first half,
11:54
and it received similarly uneven reviews from viewers.
11:57
But after more creatives came on board for season two on,
12:01
we began to get a more fully fleshed out,
12:03
well-rounded view of her self-insert character Hannah.
12:06
I don't understand why you're yelling at me
12:08
when I'm in emotional pain.
12:10
Yeah, well, you know who else is in emotional pain?
12:12
Who?
12:13
Everyone.
12:14
With Too Much, on the other hand,
12:16
nearly every single episode is exclusively written
12:19
and directed by Dunham.
12:21
So there isn't that same degree of remove
12:23
or room for reflection.
12:25
While Girls worked well with HBO's more free, edgier vibe,
12:30
Too Much has found itself stuck
12:31
with Netflix's flat, cookie-cutter filmmaking style.
12:35
Cinematography and editing do affect how we interpret things.
12:38
Maybe if the show had been filmed in a more HBO style,
12:41
it would have felt more grounded in our own world and experience,
12:45
unless, why are all these people being so crazy
12:47
in this yogurt commercial?
12:48
But we've also only had one season with Jessica so far.
12:53
Well, we got six to watch Hannah's very up-and-down growth journey,
12:57
so maybe with a bit more time in fleshing out of the character,
13:01
Jessica will have her chance to become more multifaceted.
13:04
Many people already do find Jessica to be engaging and relatable,
13:08
so maybe with more time to get to know her,
13:11
even more people would hop on board.
13:12
She's a weirdo, but she's an iconic queen.
13:15
I mean, I guess we're all weirdos, aren't we?
13:17
While being too much can, of course, come with a number of downsides,
13:22
it can certainly be a good thing if she's willing to work on her issues
13:25
and harness the positive parts of her personality for good.
13:29
Her intense connection to her own emotions and desires
13:32
can not only help her understand what she wants out of life,
13:35
but also allow her to help others break down their own walls
13:38
and connect with their own feelings, too.
13:40
I'm gonna have fun, because there's nothing wrong with who I am.
13:44
And if you don't like that, then tough tater-touch, tutor.
13:47
Their willingness to stand up for what...
13:49
What?
13:50
Their willingness to stand up for themselves and what they want remains key,
13:54
even if it might be grating to others sometimes.
13:57
Well, I just want it the way I want it.
13:58
The biggest difference between being too much,
14:00
becoming an asset or a problem,
14:03
mainly lies in the too-much woman herself.
14:05
And if she's willing to put in the work to overcome her problems,
14:09
and above all, come to love all of herself.
14:14
Maybe I'm not too much.
14:15
Maybe you're just not enough.
14:16
No, I don't mean like, it's not an insult.
14:19
You know, you're too much.
14:20
Like, it's a good thing.
14:21
Like, just the right amount and then like a little bit more.
14:24
That's the take.
14:25
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14:27
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14:30
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