Is Russian Doll the First Post-Ayahuasca Television Show?
Is everybody drinking ayahuasca now? In Episode 6 of the Netflix series Russian Doll, Nadia, the character played by the show’s co-creator Natasha Lyonne, does make a passing reference to the dark psychedelic brew that’s sweeping — or not, hold tight on that front — through such cities as Portland, Brooklyn and Los Angeles.
Note: If you’re looking for a pop-culture read on the series, let me disabuse you now: I’m not your guy. A few years after Avatar had become the most (financially) successful movie in history, I knew so little about it that I could not communicate a single identifying detail about the film in a game of charades.
But even I can recognize a truly meaningful cultural phenomenon when I see one. And Russian Doll can be read as an eerily precise crystallization of the ayahuasca experience: A hallucinatory, extreme and often challenging perspective-taking on one’s life story, both lived and ancestral. Everyone’s experience of ayahuasca — or yagé, or aya, or la medicina — is different, of course, and as variable as is everyone’s personal experience. But there are common threads, and Russian Doll picks up several of them.
For starters, there’s the notion that our recurring experiences — what some call the spiral — is a subtle but deeply powerful form of spiritual teaching.
