How “The Undoing” Undid More Than Just My Belief in Happily Ever After

I thought every one had “their” side of the bed. Have I been wrong all this time?

HBO’s limited series “The Undoing”, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant and directed by award-winning Danish director Susanne Bier (“The Night Manager”, “Bird Box”) has been the big televisual hit of 2020. The grizzly who-dunnit was must see TV over its six-episode run, with audiences the world over tuning in each week to find out who bludgeoned young mother Elena Alves to death with her own sculpting hammer.

I, like many others was riveted, and in the interest of maintaining the enjoyment factor for anyone who hasn’t yet seen it, I will not be giving away the ending in this post.

However, I do want to reveal one of the resounding take-home messages that I took from the series. Aside from the fact that a monogamous marriage of happily ever after is an unattainable fantasy, that is. And that Hugh Grant can still make my knickers damp all these years after “Four Weddings and a Funeral”.

No, it was the fact that Grace (Kidman) and Jonathan (Grant) Fraser, a couple for 17 years and married for 15 of those years, seemed to have a very flexible approach to the issue of which side of the bed was “their” side. Early on in episode one, we saw Grace on the left side and Jonathan on the right (as is the only correct and proper arrangement in a M/F coupling. Just saying…), the two of them discussing Grace’s first encounter with Elena Alves the day before.

In the next episode, with Jonathan apparently out of town for an oncology conference, we see in the mirror’s reflection that Grace about to climb into bed on her husband’s side.

Why? Why would anyone do that? Even if you were besotted and in the exciting genesis of your love affair, missing your lover and wanting to inhale the residual scent of their body on the bedsheets, surely any normal person would climb into their own side of the bed, then roll over and bury their face in their beloved’s pillow. To actually sleep on the wrong side of the bed would surely 1) leave your astral body confused and disoriented when it returns to your slumbering form and 2) necessitate you getting out of the wrong side of the bed in the morning.

We all know that to get up on the wrong side of the bed is automatically a bad portent for the rest of the day. And when your seemingly perfect husband is cheating on you with a gorgeous younger woman, and is also suspected of murdering said woman, your day is already going to be pretty fucked up. You really don’t want to be tempting fate through your devil-may-care attitude to your sleeping arrangements.

In a later episode, we again see evidence of the Fraser’s haphazard approach to nighttime mattress/body orientation when we see Jonathan sleeping on the left side, i.e., his wife’s side of the bed. When Grace later climbs in behind him, thus taking his traditional position on the right hand side, well, frankly is it any wonder everything goes rapidly and spectacularly tits up from there on in?

Now, look, don’t get me wrong. I understand that the completely bonkers game of Musical Mattress that the Doctors Fraser are depicted as playing is all about the director wanting to get the best, most creative and artistic shots. But it has nonetheless continued to play on my mind long after the jaw-dropping final episode (those last 10 minutes? Bloody hell!!)

I always sleep on the same side of the bed. Always. Regardless of whether there is anyone else in the bed with me. I get into the bed, I sleep in the bed, and I exit the bed on the left. I once even called time on a relationship, in part because he had claimed “my side” early on when I wasn’t paying close enough attention, and no matter how many subtle and not-so subtle hints I dropped, I couldn’t manage to wrest it back. So I decided it was easier to just pull the plug. (Of course, the fact that he was a dick anyway did help to strengthen my resolve.)

I’ve always believed that everyone has “their” side of the bed, and that they stick to it resolutely throughout their lives, just as I have done. But “The Undoing”, with its flexible approach to mattress-geography left me wondering if maybe I’m some kind of outlier.

In the interests of maintaining my sense of my own normalcy, though, I am now electing to view the whole “wrong side of the bed” thing as an intentional directorial hint from Susanne Bier as to the Fraser’s dysfunction, and a major pointer towards how fucked up their lives were.

And, as a further attempt to reassure myself of my own sanity, I ask you, dear reader:

Are you like me, and sleep on the same side of the bed, no matter what?

Or are you a freak like those fictional Frasers?

Jupiter Grant is a self-published author, blogger, narrator and audiobook producer.

Enquiries and comments are always welcome. You can also find me on Twitter @GrantJupiter

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