Why Are We Still Arguing About Stephen Merchant And Ricky Gervais?
If this year's not quite been tense enough for you, there's a small scale Twitter niggle that you might have missed. The film journalist James King asked what everyone's least favourite bit of movie shorthand was: a sudden cough meaning impending death, for instance. Stephen Merchant chipped in.
Watching old home movies of dead child/wife = inability to move on https://t.co/PuRcL4tgtN
— Stephen Merchant (@StephenMerchant) July 20, 2020
Of course, that could've applied to any former collaborator's underwhelming and maudlin Netflix comedy-drama, but a lot of people took it as a dig at Ricky Gervais' plodding After Life. Merchant and Gervais haven't worked together for nearly a decade, and tend not to mention each other in interviews. We don't know what the state of their friendship is. Really, it's nobody's business.
But this little dig set off a lot of chatter. Some said it was obviously a joke between mates; others read it as the final death knell of their partnership. And to a lot of people this matters. For a particular generation, The Office still defines what's funny. It's a shared comedy language that defines how groups of friends talk to each other. It matters so much to so many people that lining up behind Merchant or Gervais is an ideological marker. They're opposites: there's Gervais, the free speech blowhard; and there's Merchant, the polite nerd who's made it big in Hollywood with sensitive, uplifting comedy-drama Fighting With My Family. Gervais is bombast and conceit; Merchant is the virtue of plugging away quietly.
The dynamic between duos of all kinds are fascinating. It's a complicated swirl of constructive tussling, creative rivalry and mutual dependence between two people that can form intense bonds and burn them out just as quickly. Paul McCartney's said that he and John Lennon thought they were telepathic. Not just very, very close and attuned to each other's tics; literally telepathic. It sounds exhausting.
It's a drama most of us have had in our own lives too, and the Gervais-Merchant dynamic digs it all back up. You've probably had one best, best, best mate you saw every day, and then fell out with and drifted away from. You've even more probably had a partner who you thought was great and, maybe, who you could see yourself spending the rest of your life with, but you split up and now you don't know what they're up to. You move on, but it's not resolved, and it hurts sometimes. That's part of why it's hard to let these creative partnerships go.
What Gervais and Merchant are or aren't saying to each other doesn't really matter, obviously. This would struggle to crack the top 500 of this year's beefs, and we're only in July. (That's if it even is a beef – Gervais might have seen it and pissed himself.) But the abiding unease about where they're at is a reminder that the way we cling to these relationships says more about us than them.
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