A Lover’s Discord: Angela’s Overanalyzing 

"But what above love?" asks Rita Felski in The Limits of Critique, as part of her attempt to reconsider the role that "passionate attachments" play in academic criticism.1 Such reconsideration is crucial, she argues, at a moment when the detachment supposedly characteristic of critical theory — especially in the form of paranoid, suspicious, or symptomatic reading — has eclipsed the reparative potential inherent in "our" encounters with art and literature. "What afflicts literary studies," Felski diagnoses, "is not interpretation as such but the kudzu-like proliferation of a hypercritical style of analysis that has crowded out alternative forms of intellectual life" (10). This "style of analysis," she elaborates, "highlights the sphere of agon (conflict and domination) at the expense of eros (love and connection)" (17). For Felski, as for the post-critique movement in general, love would appear to be a revivifying antidote to the deadening negativity of critique.  

But if love is also, in Lauren Berlant's phrase, "a queer feeling," often marked by incoherence, ambivalence, discord, and "epistemic frenzy," then how can it ever be stable enough to foster the redemptive and reparative projects that post-critique has deemed necessary?2 Can loving and passionate attachments, whether with art or with people, ever fully detach themselves from what Felski pathologizes as the "irrationalism, obsession, and monomania" (35) typical of the hermeneutics of suspicion? In posing these questions, I want to signal my agreement with Deidre Shauna Lynch's observation that "the phrase 'the love of literature' gets used as though its meaning were transparent and as if the structure of feeling that it designated were wholly healthy and happy. It is as though those on the side of the love of literature had forgotten what literary texts themselves say about love's edginess and complexities."3 This essay proposes that My So-Called Life, in its depiction of love's edginess and complexities, is a pertinent site for questioning — though not in any simple way — the anti-analytical, anti-critical positions that have risen to prominence in the humanities under the banner of love. Indeed, I will ultimately argue that the series challenges both the rejection and the romanticization of analysis and critique, suggesting that the social function of these modes of intellection depends as much on social-structural positioning as on individual disposition. 

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In addition to its "realistic" depiction of hot-button social issues of the 1990s — gun violence, homophobia, alcoholism, housing insecurity — MSCL is often lauded for its "authentic" portrayal of the "rich" inner life of its teenage protagonist, Angela Chase. Formally conveyed in the narrative voiceover for which MSCL became renowned — one retrospective reviewer dubs it the show's "most identifiable (and thus parody-able) trait" — Angela's introspection, we are frequently reminded, makes the emotional turbulence of adolescence feel relatable.4 "Angela's narrative voice," writes Caryn Murphy, for example, "provides a space for viewer identification, particularly among teenage girls [. . .] [T]he use of voiceover narration contributed to a level of 'emotional realism' that drew viewers into the universe of the series."5 In its multilayered engagement with the series, Cecilia Aldarondo's 2023 meta-documentary You Were My First Boyfriend exemplifies this claim. "Angela," Aldarondo says, "lived in her head — like me." With that two-word prepositional phrase, Aldarondo's voiceover concisely demonstrates how Angela's voiceovers underscore the depth of the character's subjectivity in ways that prompt in the show's fans the kinds of connection and identification that Felski would have us celebrate.6

When, however, Angela's introspection is raised — often by herself — as an explicit topic within the show, it is not always presented in so positive a light. Consider the opening sequence of the January 5, 1995, episode titled "Resolutions." While watching Dick Clark on television usher in the new year from Times Square, Angela reflects on her tendency toward reflection: "What I was thinking, as like a New Year's resolution, is to stop getting so caught up in my own thoughts, 'cause I'm like way too introspective . . . I think." The sequence proceeds to explore the other characters' inner monologues and resolutions, but while they each receive only a brief spotlight, the scene returns to Angela as she rethinks her rethinking of her overthinking: "But what if not thinking turns me into this really shallow person?" she asks herself. "I'd better rethink this becoming less introspective thing." After revealing some more characters' thoughts — including Angela's longstanding crush, Jordan Catalano, humorously remembering that it is New Year's Eve in the first place — the segment's use of voiceover culminates in one final declaration from Angela: "Okay, so I'll stay introspective. But I do resolve to stop doing Jordan Catalano's homework." However lightly played for laughs, this entire montage reveals the pitfalls of Angela's much-vaunted capacity for contemplation. Like Hamlet's "thinking too precisely on th' event" to the point of inaction, Angela's rumination spirals into an Escher-like labyrinth, as every resolution she reaches dissolves into a fresh uncertainty. In this way, the voiceover frames knowledge not as the emergence of an insight or arrival at a destination but as a recursive and incomplete process. That recursion isn't merely psychological, however; as we will see, MSCL implies that how one thinks and knows is shaped by who one is within broader frameworks of power and privilege. For now, we can say that Angela's tendency toward introspective complexity results in a lack of "resolve" in the traditional sense of determination or willpower and in the colloquially malapropistic sense of closure or conclusion; predictably, we later see Angela not only completing Jordan's homework but also meditating about how hard it is to remember resolutions around someone like him.  

While Angela, at this moment, frames these patterns under the general rubric of introspection, both the series and its reviewers gravitate more often toward the word analysis and its variants to designate her cogitation. A review in The New York Times, for example, referred to Angela as an "on-the-scene analyst" of her life, while the critic for the Chicago Sun-Times observed that "Angela's cruelest, most rigorous analysis is reserved for her parents."7 Whereas introspection can be more easily recuperated as "dreamy" and "lyrical" (as Michele Byers and Scott MacDonald have respectively described Angela's interior monologues), the connotations of analysis establish it as more damaging to feeling and love.8 "I don't analyze the way you do, dear; it just felt wrong," says Doris Mann to her daughter Suzanne in Mike Nichols's adaptation of Postcards from the Edge. With this remark, Doris articulates a key sociocultural opposition between detached, cerebral, overcomplicating analysis, on the one hand, and a mode of emotional intuition that is simple, straightforward, and self-evident, on the other: "It just felt wrong." Doris's "just" belongs to a long lineage of related sentiments that include the typical objection to Freudian phallus-hunting ("sometimes a cigar is just a cigar"), Sharon Marcus's postcritical "just reading,"9 and, perhaps most relevantly, the rejoinder that Jack Berger, one of many mansplainers that Carrie Bradshaw dates over the course of Sex and the City, gives to Miranda Hobbes when she is obsessively "deciphering" the "mixed messages" she has been receiving from a man she's dating: "He's just not that into you," Berger proclaims, a formulation that not only hits Miranda and the others with epiphanic force, but also is based in such strongly decisive authority — or better yet, entitlement — that it actually became the title of both a self-help book and a rom-com film. 

All of these cases present (over)analysis as antithetical to common sense, in the sense of both common meaning or understanding and common sensation or feeling. Just as post-critique deems a "hypercritical style of analysis" to hinder the unmediated "love of literature," so does pop-psychological discourse view overanalyzing as an obstacle to love tout court because it contrasts sharply with the cultural ideals of spontaneity, immediacy, emotional authenticity, and intuitive connection that are thought to underpin (hetero)romantic success. As Stella puts it to L. B. Jeffries in Rear Window (a film explicitly evoked in an episode of MSCL when Angela's neighbor Brian Krakow uses his camera's zoom lens to spy on her in her room), "When a man and a woman see each other and like each other, they ought to come together, wham, like a couple of taxis on Broadway, and not sit around analyzing each other like two specimens in a bottle."  

In the third episode of MSCL, as if channeling Hitchcock's Stella, Amber Vallon, the mother of Angela's friend Rayanne Graff, unwittingly informs Angela's oblivious mother, Patty, of the progress of Angela's relationship with Jordan: "She was so obsessed with him all that time, and now — wham! bam! — it's actually happening." Despite this optimistic (to Amber, at least) appraisal, very little is "happening" between Angela and Jordan, least of all the "it" with which the series euphemistically refers to sex. Because Angela's overanalyzing tends to focus on particulars, on minor or trivial details or fetishized part objects — the way Jordan leans, for example, or is always closing his eyes — it makes sense that, later in the episode, when Jordan attempts to persuade Angela to sleep with him, she begins to fixate, distractedly, on part of his shirt. "It's amazing the things you notice," she tells the audience, "like the corner of his collar that was coming undone, like he was from a poor family and couldn't afford new shirts. That's all I could see. The whole world was that unraveled piece of fabric." Ten episodes later, Jordan is still trying to convince her to have sex with him. "What do you want me to do?" she asks him as they sit in his car. "I mean, I know what you want me to do, but — " At this point she looks up at herself and Jordan in the rear-view mirror. "Do you ever get obsessed with the rear-view mirror, like, when you're driving?" she continues. Angela's diverted focus on the rear-view mirror figures her own obsessive overanalyzing as a retrospective introspection, a backward glancing, or a tendency to avoid confronting a subject head-on, that impedes any kind of forward progress or drive toward fulfilling her desire (at several points she makes clear that she does want to have sex with Jordan). "Look, can't we just — " Jordan begins to say, before Angela interrupts him: "Just what? Just . . . do it? Right here in a parking lot?" Through this brief exchange, MSCL enacts the ideological fantasy that opposes extreme introspection to the unremitting demand for simple action (sexual and otherwise) — the imperative, in the words of the iconic Nike slogan that Angela echoes, to "just do it."  

As early as the second episode, Angela literally questions the way the show pigeonholes her as the stereotypical overanalyzer. When Angela, Rayanne, and their friend Rickie Vasquez are hanging out, Rayanne declares that "part" of Jordan "is partly interested in" Angela but he has "other things on his mind." "But that's the part that's so unfair," Angela responds. "I have nothing else on my mind. How come I have to be the one sitting around analyzing him in, like, microscopic detail and he gets to be the one with other things on his mind?" A good question, one to which the self-help industry provides a simple, essentializing answer: because Angela is a woman. Although overanalyzing is often attributed to any desiring subject, the stigma attached to it often disproportionately falls on women, especially in the context of sex and romance. Self-help books frequently diagnose women as scrutinizing their relationships, presenting this obsession with their romantic partners' gestures, words, or actions as an inherent flaw. When the psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, in her book Women Who Think Too Much, writes that this "epidemic of morbid meditation is a disease that women suffer much more than men," it's worth noting that the word suffer can mean not only "to undergo or endure" but also, in an earlier sense, "to permit or allow," as though women are personally responsible for their addiction to overthinking.10 Nolen-Hoeksema proposes that women can "rise above this epidemic of emotional oversensitivity" by "becom[ing] the directors of [their] own emotional lives."11 The requirement for combatting overanalysis, it would seem, is adopting a neoliberal ethos of autonomy and agency.  

Against these widespread views, Angela's question could be taken as an implicit critique of the pattern by which "women are held responsible for excessive rumination about harms that befall them," in Mary Hawkesworth's words, "while little attention is paid to the underlying social practices that cause the harms."12 Mari Ruti makes a similar point regarding the stereotype that "women can get obsessive about interpreting men's every word": "If this is (sometimes) true, perhaps it is because women, for culturally specific reasons, find the enigmatic signifiers of our society more traumatizing than many (not all, but many) men do; perhaps it is because women have gotten accustomed to regularly having to watch their step."13 If Angela, according to Jordan, "makes everything too complicated," that might reflect not an individual weakness but an understandable response to the complex binds that women, especially young women, face.  

While MSCL briefly allows for a structural critique of these issues, however, it ultimately shifts focus, depicting Angela displacing the shame of her gratuitous introspection onto an easier target: the show's resident nerd, Brian, whom Jordan calls, in a dyslexic yet anagrammatically apt error, "Brain." In Episode 7 ("Why Jordan Can't Read"), Brian, upset over the fact that Angela's relationship with Jordan has progressed, dismisses his rival as an "idiot." Incensed, Angela rips into Brian: "Don't you dare call him that! You don't know. You don't understand. Not for one second. You think you understand, but you don't! You just analyze everything until it barely even exists." While this appraisal of Brian is hardly unfair—his "behavioral psychologist" mother and "Freudian psychiatrist" father practically doom him to a habit of overanalyzing—the long pause that follows Angela's cutting remark suggests that she may understand the projection involved in accusing him of "analyz[ing] everything until it barely even exists." Regardless of Angela's self-awareness, though, the heated exchange highlights some larger narrative and ideological dynamics. If women comprise one social category most often associated with pathological overanalyzing, intellectuals are another, though with an important variation: where the woman overthinker is viewed as excessively irrational — hyperemotional to the point of hysterical—the overthinking intellectual is cast as overly rational — cold, cerebral, unfeeling. In the overarching stereotype of the overanalyzer, rationality and irrationality constitute two sides of the same coin, revealing their indistinction in a social order that favors underthinking. 

With regard to MSCL, the conflict between Angela and Brian thus bespeaks not an absolute dichotomy but a narcissism of minor differences. As one of only two characters other than Angela who is granted the honor of narrating an episode of the series, Brian is presented as Angela's double when it comes to paralyzing obsession.14 "I still think about Angela constantly," he says in voiceover in that episode. "Why I am I like this? I truly sicken myself. I just have to stop being her little puppet. I vow to never again show up at Angela's door with some lame excuse." Cut to: Brian at Angela's door, with the lamest of excuses for seeing her (retrieving an atlas he had loaned her). Just as Angela fails to keep her resolution to stop doing Jordan's homework, so does Brian fail to follow through on his vow to stop being Angela's puppet.  

With this in mind, we can reframe the central question of the series' overarching love story as a choice between two men who allegorically embody different epistemo-hermeneutic modes: Brian the overanalyzer and Jordan the "rudimentary reader." In the final episode, Angela appears to choose Jordan. Tellingly, Brian responds to this development by remarking to Rickie that "if you analyze why certain people end up with certain other people, it'll make you want to kill yourself." However, the series' cancellation leaves this plot notoriously unresolved, with Angela perpetually suspended between these two options. And that irresolution thereby allows overanalyzing to triumph in relation to the show itself. Brian's formulation—"analyz[ing] why certain people end up with certain other people"—characterizes, after all, fans' endless speculations, for 30 years and counting, about which character Angela would have or should have selected. Far from analyzing the show "to death," such hermeneutic fervor has guaranteed MSCL its afterlife. 

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As foreign to love as analysis, critique, and interpretation are often thought to be, they are nonetheless central to relationality. Because "the amorous subject," as Roland Barthes writes in A Lover's Discourse, "has no system of sure signs at his disposal," love prompts a flurry of "interminabl[e]" hermeneutic activity: "lacking (as I well know) all reason, I would prefer, in order to decide on an interpretation, to trust myself to common sense, but common sense affords me no more than contradictory evidence."15 The only solution, Barthes suggests, would seem to be to "no longer believe in interpretation," to "receive every word from my other as a sign of truth," which is little consolation considering that Barthes has just pointed out that "[s]igns are not proofs, since anyone can produce false or ambiguous signs."16 The epistemological and affective uncertainty inherent in any romantic encounter prompts us to decipher its enigma, but every attempt to untangle the threads only tightens the knot, making the knowability of the other ever more elusive.  

And yet, these broad claims about the hermeneutics of love must be analyzed in turn—unraveled, broken down, particularized. While Barthes universalizes these dynamics, MSCL reminds us that only certain classes of people are conscripted to shoulder the stigma associated with overanalyzing. Intellectuals are frequently dismissed as excessively analytical or impractical, their critical methods caricatured, even by other intellectuals such as Felski, as a failure to connect with common sense. Similarly, women are often stereotyped as overly emotional or indecisive when engaging in detailed thought, their introspection figured as a flaw rather than a strength. Together, these biases reflect social discomfort with traits that contradict norms of action, connection, and common sense. 

In the face of the anti-intellectualism and sexism that underwrites anti-overanalyzing discourse, one might seek to reclaim the figure of the overanalyzer as a counter-epistemological force of resistance to social control. While I have no desire to foreclose this possibility, MSCL complicates such a move by framing overanalysis in the characters of Angela and Brian, who share not only similarly obsessive intellects, but also — and, I would suggest, relatedly — various forms of class, racial, and sexual privilege (while Jordan and Rayanne are, like Angela and Brian, white and heterosexual, they come from less stable, more working class households; Rickie, as a poor, unhoused, queer boy of color, is excluded from all these advantages). On rewatching MSCL, one is struck by how often Angela and Brian are presented as self-absorbed, as their navel-gazing often rides roughshod over other characters' — most often Rickie's — feelings. Indeed, many of the earliest reviews of the series disparaged a certain "whining" quality to Angela's introspection; though this criticism could be seen as unfair, even misogynistic, it also underscores how the series itself presents introspection in ambivalent, often negative terms. 

The fact, then, that the pathologization of overanalysis can be deployed for marginalizing purposes does not mean that excessive intellection cannot also signal entitlement, given that it requires time, space, and resources to which not everyone has access. Angela and Brian, well-positioned within structures of power, have the leisure to overthink without the demands of survival faced by characters like Rickie. At the height of the AIDS crisis, just seven years before MSCL premiered, Leo Bersani proposed that "analysis, while necessary, may also be an indefensible luxury."17 Bersani's hesitant phrasing ("may also") leaves room for analysis as a "necessary" intellectual or ethical practice, even (or especially) in moments of crisis. In any society that justifies violence through a "shoot first, think later" mentality, it is always worth defending a "hypercritical style of analysis" against the stereotypes with which post-critique, positive psychology, and popular culture dismiss it: as antithetical to feeling, love, and connection. The only defense of overanalysis worthy of the name, however, would be one that risks making "everything too complicated," as Jordan says of Angela—one that positions (over)analysis as not just a potential tool for intellectual or political liberation but also an activity contingent, to a large degree, on privilege.  

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Corey McEleney (@cmceleney.bsky.social) is Professor of English and affiliated faculty in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Fordham University. He is the author of Futile Pleasures: Early Modern Literature and the Limits of Utility (Fordham UP, 2017) as well as a number of essays on early modern culture, literary theory, and queer studies. He is currently working on a new book project tentatively titled The Art of Overanalyzing.

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