Pluribus Is a Primal Cry Against Our Culture of Brain Rot

and a celebration of the angry female antihero

The poster image for Pluribus depicts its heroine mid-scream. She gazes towards the heavens, but we can’t see the sky, only a garish yellow background. There are clues she is in free fall as her blond tresses float upwards. She looks angry and afraid, forehead creased, eyes wide open.

In the world of Pluribus, this face of defiance is also the face of hope.

Pluribus feels zeitgeisty for a few reasons. For one, this is a post-pandemic story about the impact of a “virus” that changes the way human beings feel, believe, and interact with one another. For another, it’s a story about what it means to feel alone in a sea of zombies, both the actual hive minded humans, and the surviving few who share hardly anything at all in common.

This is a modern kind of zombie tale, born of the anger and isolation that have been the defining emotions of not just the post pandemic era, but our increasingly technology obsessed culture. AI’s constant summarization of our thoughts, feelings, and ideas may look to some like progress: a more streamlined world that allows for greater efficiency and leads to better optimization. I assume there are some people who, like the hive mind in Pluribus, feel confident that these shifts are making the world better. For the rest of us, the cultural landscape has been overwhelmingly defined by grief.

It’s a profound social shift that feels crushing because no one has particularly good ideas for how to change it. You can try to resist by curating your information spaces and editing out talking points that feel particularly pernicious. You can quit social media, another form of curation that also leaves you out of popular discourse altogether. When I started to watch Pluribus, I began to realize I’ve been attempting to resist the zombification of information by becoming a ghost. I hover around different social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram, observing but not participating, an act I think keeps me above the fray of toxic discourse, but that also ends up making me feel passive. I don’t want to just observe the world. I want to make it better.

Maybe that’s why I’ve been captivated by Carol and why I find her defiance to be exhilarating. She doesn’t care if the hive mind loves her or hates her as long as she can maintain a sense of self. Unlike many female characters who are predominantly shaped by personal traumas, Carol doesn’t give a shit about healing her private wounds. Her objective isn’t inner peace or escaping beauty standards or even dueling with the patriarchy. Her mission is to save the entire world.

I love that Carol’s scream is the iconic image of Pluribus. An angry female antihero is exactly what we need at a time when women’s emotional worlds are increasingly disregarded.

Just a few years ago, there was energy around the idea that women’s anger could be harnessed to create social change. Today, the discourse has shifted towards a different narrative: one that argues that women expressing sadness and anger are simply at the mercy of their biology. Social media is filled with video content poking fun of women crying and overeating in the luteal phase of their menstrual cycles, with many non-expert influencers offering women advice on how they can optimize their fitness and beauty regimens by taking into account their hormone levels.

To be clear, awareness about women’s cycles can be a good thing. Women are clearly eager for information about their bodies and how to feel healthy and happy at every age. The increased cultural attention given to perimenopause and menopause can be read as a necessary corrective to a culture that has historically demanded that women keep silent about our bodies.

But influencers obsessively telling women to check our hormone levels and attributing everything to our cycles end up selling women another idea: not just that the experience of being female is intrinsically fraught (that pain is “built in” as Fleabag’s famous menopause monologue argues) but that our emotional world isn’t really ours. Feeling sad or weepy or angry or anxious? It’s not that there is a lot to be upset about. It’s probably your hormones.

These talking points are sold as something new even though they aren’t. Tropes about how our biology dictates our abilities and desires have hindered our progress precisely because they argue (as Fleabag’s monologue does) that women’s biological reality renders us “machines with parts” rather than full people.

I think that shows like Fleabag and books like Miranda July’s All Fours ignite healthy conversation about the female experience. But I’m increasingly concerned about the ways that social media flattens these discussions, often misinterpreting or misrepresenting science in order to secure views and sell us products that will “fix” us.

We see this not just on the obsession with female hormones, but the resurgence of extremely thin bodies as the beauty standard and the normalization of surgically altered faces at younger and younger ages. These trends fit into the current moment of feminist backlash in that they argue that womanhood is something that needs to be maintained and curtailed—big appetite? Stop eating. Unwieldy emotions? These are not just presented as unfeminine, but entirely antisocial. It’s why Claire Danes’ expressive 46-year-old face is seen as a hot button topic: Should a woman express so much? Or is the ideal affect one of peaceful compliance?

And then there is Carol, a female character who doesn’t care about being nice. She couldn’t care less about whether her feelings of rage are merited. In a sea of happy zombified faces, she takes her anger as a mark of individuality.

In true antihero fashion, Carol convictions are often marred by catastrophically bad choices. At times, she is sharp and assertive. At others, she simply comes across as short-sighted and petulant. Unlike the hive mind, which can only speak in cheerful and carefully crafted platitudes, Carol is only able to speak from her messy grief-stricken heart.

Just as in the time of Breaking Bad, our culture has an extremely low tolerance for imperfect female behavior and Carol’s messiness is too much for some viewers who express frustration as to why she doesn’t just drink the Kool Aid already. Isn’t her anger just making her lonelier and more isolated? Shouldn’t she be more curious about the hive mind and whether they are actually good? It doesn’t matter that Carol’s wife is dead and the entire planet is under threat of losing what makes us human. Even at the end of the world, some people think the most important task for a woman is to perform happiness.