Rachel Green, The Real Protagonist of Friends

"Friends" is a show with six main characters, but if you had to pick one
protagonist -- the one who really takes the biggest journey over the ten
seasons, you’d probably choose Rachel. The series starts with Rachel Green
making a choice that will define her entire life.
“Welcome to the real world! It sucks -- you’re gonna love it.”
She runs away from the wealthy but passionless existence she could have
had with her orthodontist fiancé, Barry. And she seeks out a life of
uncertainty. She embraces being a regular twenty-something.
"Oh, and wish me luck!"
"What for?"
“I’m gonna go get one of those job things.”
This down-on-your-luck, no-frills lifestyle is a given for the other friends, and
they’re sometimes disenchanted with it. They're starting to feel that longing
for marriage, children, having a bit more money and the end of this
unpredictable stage. Rachel certainly struggles with whether she could have
made a mistake.
“Everyone I know is either getting married or getting pregnant or getting
promoted, and I'm getting coffee! And it's not even for me.”
But she chooses this life because she doesn’t want to live some numb,
lukewarm life in the suburbs, even if that means she has to brave a lot of
new lows.
“It's like there's rock bottom, 50 feet of crap, then me.”
So more than any other character, Rachel embodies the value of
experimenting, failing, and striving in your twenties.
“Mom, I realize you and daddy were upset when I didn’t marry Barry and get
the big house in the suburbs with all the security and everything, but God,
this is just so much better for me.”
Slowly but surely, she finds her feet in her career, falls in and out of love --
mostly with Ross, and gains independence. Rachel proves that the choices
we make at this age can completely transform us. She changes from spoiled
princess to savvy executive and put-together mom. The person she’s
become is thanks to the many missteps and lessons learned, and even more
than that, thanks to the friends she found. So we can say that Rachel is the
true protagonist of Friends because she most demonstrates the message of
the show -- that we grow into our best selves by investing in our friends and
accepting the messiness of our young adult lives. Besides being the missing
piece of the friend group at the beginning, Rachel is also our proxy -- we
enter the world of the show through her. The pilot is framed around her
personal journey as she moves in with Monica, finds a job at Central Perk,
and cuts herself off from her family’s financial support. In fact the whole first
season is focused more on Rachel than any other individual, as she adjusts
to this new way of life.
"It was totally...not worth it. Who's FICA? Why is he getting all my money?"
So from the get-go, it is a story about Rachel finding herself and coming of
age.
"Gunther, I quit."
"Friends" can get criticized for offering a sugarcoated, lillywhite vision of
twenty-something life. But Rachel does face a lot of classic universal
problems, from financial strain –
"I will have the side salad."
"And what will that be on the side of?"
to dead-end jobs –
“Bloomingdale’s eliminated my department.”
to the trials of apartment hunting. And we see how invested the other
friends are in her progress.
"Wow."
The reason they -- and we -- care so much is that everything feels like a big
“first” in Rachel’s adult life.
“Look! I cleaned! I did the windows, I did the floors, I even used all those
attachments on the vacuum except for that little round one with the
bristles.”
She seems to see everything with new eyes. She’s earnest and enthusiastic
even as she experiences things like doing laundry for the first time.
"If I can actually do my own laundry, there isn't anything I can't do."
Even as the show goes on and Rachel becomes less of an ingenue, she
maintains this lovable, sometimes clueless streak. So we can relate to her
drive to try new things as well as her tendency to stumble.
"I wasn't supposed to put beef in the trifle!"
Rachel’s oblivious parents and vain sisters represent what she could have
become if she’d stayed in her bubble of privilege and security.
“You didn’t marry your Barry, honey, but I married mine.”
We also get the alternate reality where we see the bored, dissatisfied
housewife version of Rachel who did marry Barry. She’s an altogether
shallower and less interesting person.
“Hi, I love you on that show. I watch you every day. I mean when you took
out your own kidney to save your ex-wife even though she tried to kill
you…”
Sometimes we do see the aftereffects of Rachel’s upbringing sometimes,
when she acts entitled or self-involved. But ultimately she’s rejected that life
path. And we recognize that it takes guts to let go of everything you know
and face the judgement of your peers. While Rachel’s new life delights us, it
doesn’t always look great to outsiders.
“What that Rachel did to her life. We ran into her parents at the club. They
were not playing very well.”
“I’m not going to tell you what they spent on that wedding.”
Still, we see from her mother’s envy that Rachel escaped a deeply
unfulfilling life. In the long run, she dodged a bullet.
“You know, I never worked. I went straight from my father’s house to the
sorority house to my husband’s house. I am just so proud of you.”
So Rachel’s plots are a stand-in for us and the trials we experience, but
Rachel the character, played by Jennifer Aniston, is also the most
aspirational Friend. Her story is a classic upward arc: young woman comes to
the big city, works hard, and makes a name for herself. And then there’s her
wonderfully ‘90s fashion and “the Rachel” haircut which shaped a
generation. She’s beautiful, sweet, and sometimes scatterbrained --a lot like
the heroine of a romantic comedy. Her relationship with Ross is one of the
most hyped TV pairings ever.
“Ross and Rachel. Rachel and Ross. That’s been one heck of a seesaw, hasn’t
it?”
“What?”
"Friends" proved there’s something satisfying about the pairing of the stylish
girl next door with the good-hearted, nerdy guy. The long buildup starts with
Ross pining after Rachel, then her falling in love with him when he’s seeing
someone else. Rachel’s discovering her new attraction to Ross shows how
much she’s matured. In high school, she looked right through him. So being
able to see the value of Ross’ love is a sign that she’s become a deeper,
more genuine human being. But even after Ross finds out about her
feelings, they don’t get together because Ross makes a list of her bad
qualities to help him choose between her and Julie.
“Kind of ditzy? Too into her looks? spoiled –
"Now that's a little spoiled. He was supposed to type 'little,' the idiot."
"Just a waitress?”
At first we -- and Ross -- think that this is just a fight that she’ll get over. But
Rachel is dead serious because her whole new life is about the conscious
choice not to be the spoiled, shallow rich girl others see her as. She refuses
to be with someone who doesn’t see her true potential.
"How would you feel if the one person that you trusted the most in the
world not only thinks them too, but actually uses them as reasons not to be
with you?"
It’s only six episodes later -- which is long in "Friends" time -- that the prom
video gets Ross another chance because it helps her realizes how true his
love is.
“See? He’s her lobster.”
Briefly, in parts of Season 2 and 3 we actually get to see the couple happy
together, which is great for a bit.
"Do I look fat? No."
But at this point Rachel still doesn’t have the rest of her life together at all.
"Ross, you have planned out the next 20 years of our lives, we've been
dating for six weeks."
They break up after the infamous “We Were on a Break” fiasco –
"I thought we were broken up!"
"We were on a break."
And we’ll never all be able to agree on whether this counted as cheating or
not, but Rachel can’t forgive him.
“You're a totally different person to me now. I used to think of you as
somebody that would never, ever hurt me, ever.”
When you rewatch this season, though, it’s clear that this event is the
symptom and not the real cause of their separation. Just before this, Rachel
has finally started making a little progress in her fashion career, and Ross
really isn’t handling it well. His misguided jealousy drives them apart, and
we wonder if his jealousy is less about Mark and more an immature reaction
to the fact that she now has something substantive in her life besides him.
As much as we'd like Ross and Rachel to be together, at this moment they
are not in the same place. Their breakup is a defining moment for Rachel,
because up to this point it seemed like she was on track to having it all. So
this step backward is a reminder that her journey is more about learning to
assert herself rather than having her needs taken care of by someone else.
"You looked fat in an X-ray."
Over the following 7 seasons, the show teases us with false starts and
restarts and the constant will-they-or-won’t-they dynamic.
“I just don’t see why those two can’t work things out.”
The timing is always off.
“With us, it’s never off the table.”
"I'm still in love with you."
They can’t quit but they can’t commit.
"He's going in."
“I don’t know if anything is ever going to happen with us again ever. But I
don’t want to know that it never could.”
Ultimately it’s no accident that they need all of this time apart. Their years
as friends rather than lovers turn out to be crucial. Rachel needs to build a
truly independent identity and a great career. And Ross needs to see Rachel
in a more balanced Way that’s free from the obsessive, possessive feelings
that were left over from his high school crush.
“I can’t believe I’m in Rachel Green’s room.”
Both Ross and Rachel come into their own as individuals before they can
make it work as a couple. Rachel’s story is about doing the scary thing, and
letting go of the safety net.
"You need the fear!"
She strikes out on her own and pushes herself to take risks.
“I just don’t want to be 30 and still work here.”
“Yeah, that’d be much worse than being 28 and still working here.”
When she realizes her job at the coffee house is going nowhere, she decides
to quit, even though she has no backup plan and no other real work
experience.
“I just don’t care. The is not what I want to do. So I don't think I should do it
anymore.”
She goes after her career in fashion even though it seems like a long shot.
"Waitress at a coffee house and cheer squad co-captain only took up so
much room."
"You're funny Chandler! You're a funny guy!"
And we see her gradually climb, from her first dud of a job "You got the job."
to a better position at Bloomingdale’s and to major success at Ralph Lauren.
She’s gone from being lost and unsure to getting real joy out of her work.
“My work is for me, you know? I’m out there on my own and I’m doing it.
And it’s scary but I love it because it’s mine.”
We wouldn't have guessed that the Rachel we knew in season one had the
ambition and skill to reach this level. And that’s what makes her
achievement so fun to watch -- she surpasses all our expectations.
Rachel passed that first test of moving to the city with no husband, no
money and no job, so after that nothing can really be too scary again. And
this doing what scares her is what leads her to a fulfilling life. There's an
important lesson for all of us that if we commit to what we want and decide
that we're really more than others see in us, in the end, we can get there.
Rachel pushes herself to do scary things in her personal life, too.
“You know what, I’m gonna do that. I'm gonna call him up and I’m gonna ask
him out. I can do that.”
When Monica and Chandler move in together, She has to leave Monica’s
protective care and the only New York apartment she’s ever known -- but
she thrives in her new roommate situations. And when she gets pregnant
with Ross’ baby after a one-night stand, she rises to the occasion as a
mother, even though she thinks she can’t do it.
“You know, when you first came to the city you were this spoiled, helpless
little girl, who still used daddy’s credit cards, remember?”
“I hope you’re going somewhere with this.”
“Look at you. You’re this big executive. You are much more capable than you
give yourself credit for.”
As the show goes on Rachel still feels self-doubt and underestimates herself.
“From now on, you make all my decisions for me.”
But her strength is her ability to roll with the punches and stick with it. At
the end of the series, it’s a surprise when she chooses to restart her
relationship with Ross and not take an amazing job in Paris. It might seem
like a case of choosing love over career –
“I got off the plane.”
but it’s actually a perfect reversal of the pilot episode. The show started
with Rachel running away from a life she was supposed to want, but didn’t.
So it’s fitting that after all the ups and downs, she’s finally ready to claim the
loving relationship she does want. And she’s arrived at this place through
the hard work she’s put in to prove her worth and stand on her own two
feet.
"Well, what if I don't want to be a shoe? What if I wanna be a purse?"