We Are Who We Are: Season 1, Episode 5 "Right Here Right Now V" Re-Cap & Review
While each episode of Guadagino’s HBO Series, “WAWWA,” has felt personally crafted to show and express a different storyline and perspective form each of the main characters, in Episode V, we are back to focusing on the collective cast as a whole, spending most of our time with Fraser and Caitlin and Sarah and Richard. The episode is mostly about control and how each of the characters feel it slipping through their fingers, fighting and crawling to find a way to reclaim it. There is a lot to unpack in the fifth episode, marking the longest so far in the series, a run time of 58 minutes.
Warning: Spoilers Ahead
After last week’s brief vacation from the more serious overtones that Guadagnino has laced throughout his HBO Drama, “WRWWR,” in Episode V, Right Here, Right Now V, we are back to business. In the opening scene we see Caitlin and Sarah leave early in the morning to practice range shooting on the base. As she leaves to enter Sarah’s car, Richard watches the two interact, mild disgust and annoyance evident on his face. This interaction lays down the groundwork of the foreshadowing we will see later in the show when Richard and Sarah’s power struggle becomes more evident.
Richard starts to feel the slipping of control over his job, his family, his wife. The tension between Richard and his wife, Jenny are evident as their fights in their household escalate. We find that as Caitlin has started spending more time with Sarah and Fraser’s family, Jenny has also begun sleeping with Maggie. The intertwining familial relations between the Poythress and the Wilson’s consumes the attention of the show as they fight for a balance between each.
The same frustration that we sense in Richard is mimicked in Fraser, as the time that Caitlin continues to spend with Sarah fuels his rage and resentment he has for his mother. When Caitlin sees Fraser at school and glows about the morning that she spent with Sarah for target practice, Fraser blasts back saying that his mother “is an alien sent from earth to destroy the human race” and warns her from spending so much time together. As the bell rings, Fraser types a seething text to Sarah, warning her to stay out of his life. Before we leave Fraser and Catilin at school, we see a love note stapled to the bulletin board from Giulia looking for Harper. For the first time since Episode 2, we re-visit the conversation that Harper is Caitlin’s masculine identity. Fraser urges her not to make contact, but Catilin bundles the note in her back pocket, seeming to re-visit it at a later date.
Sarah and Richard engage in an evident power struggle at the base.
The control elements are cleverly placed inside scenes and secondary characters. When Sarah calls Richard to attention in the cafeteria, we see one of the 2016 Presidential Debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. We hear the jagged words and insults tossed back at each other and feel the on-coming dread that we know will follow. The emotions are reciprocated between Richard and Sarah in their meeting. Sarah calls out Richard’s unacceptable behavior, citing new rules that will be upheld under her command. We know Richard well enough by now to understand that he resents Sarah’s position of command and will not go willingly against her words, although his command forces him to. Control slips again as they stare unflinchingly back at each other, the power struggle evident. The anger bubbling deep beneath the surface, threatening to burst.
We move back to a scene between Fraser and Caitlin hanging out after school. Caitlin once again mentions her distress over Giulia’s note, Fraser once again urges her to remain quiet. As they hang out, Caitlin begins cutting off strands of her hair, taping them to her upper lip to form a mustache. As Fraser tries to help, she becomes frustrated, saying that it’s not thick enough, it wasn’t good enough. Frustration surging through her, Fraser calls her out, citing the once again continually references gender line, what is it to be a man and what is it to be a woman. Fraser demands Caitlin to face the truth questioning her by asking “do you think being male means knowing how to shoot guns and pee standing up and have shitty facial hair?”
In the titular scene of the episode, the power and anger surging through Catilin, she demands finding clippers, she wants to cut her hair. At first, overwhelmed and un-prepared for the idea, Fraser disapproves. However, as they make their way over to Caitlin’s house, locating her father’s clippers, they begin to cut. The hair falls away in chunks and as it slips, Caitlin’s smile grows wider, thrilled to re-claim her identity, taking control of her outward appearance, as is the first step towards acceptance. Fraser holds tightly, as he shaves Caitlin’s head, the hair a distant reminder of the version, the socially acceptable version, of her old self. Fraser drops Caitlin off at the restaurant where she meets Giulia as Harper.
Slipping away briefly from Fraser and Caitlin, we re-visit the parental relationships and changing dynamics between Sarah and Maggie and Richard and Jenny. Both Sarah and Richard sense the subtle differences in their partners, the unknowing shift that Maggie and Jenny are having a secret affair. The tension between partners is palpable as both Sarah and Richard, obviously the more dominant partners in the relationship, seek to re-establish balance with Maggie and Jenny through sex.
Fraser and Catilin both go on dates in this episode, Catilin, enacting as Harper, meets up with Giulia. As they end their kissing, Giulia questions Harpers’ ability to grow a mustache, touching the glued-on hair that rests on Harper’s upper-lip. Giulia calls out Harper, throwing her off guard, when she mentions that she knows Harper is a girl. Confused and scared, Harper runs away immediately calling Fraser. We find Fraser at a movie with Jonathon, by chance the two were in the same movie and joined together. As they leave the theaters together, they discuss the future career aspirations, Jonathon cites why Sarah describes Fraser as not having many friends, as Fraser bites back “my mother doesn’t know a thing about me.”
In the final scene of the episode, Caitlin returns home and is immediately confronted by her father, Richard, demanding answers about her shaved head. What starts out as an even-tempered conversation quickly turns anger-filled as Richard demands to know whether or not it was Fraser’s idea to cut her hair off. Richard degrades Caitlin’s decision stating that she “is just a little girl, you don’t know a thing about what it’s like in the world for people like us.” Richard forbids Caitlin from seeing the Wilson’s and demand answers as to why she would do it. Before breaking down, Caitlin cries out and hugs her father as he hesitates for a few more seconds, before accepting the embrace.
As we are more than halfway through the season as this point, we are at the edge of a cliff with each of our characters. The idea of control is slipping through most of their fingers, each is trying to grasp at a different straw to hold onto the semblance of normalcy that they have come to know. As we head into the back half of the season, we are preparing ourselves for the inevitable fall out that is surely soon to come. One of the more heavy content episodes, the care and craft under the direction of Guadagnino sets our characters on a specific path, headed towards collision.