“There is a deeper,
more serious undertone to the way
Frankie’s classmates pick on her.”

she believes to be an incredibly deep piece about irony and then it being thrown in her face.” But she also adds that there is a deeper, more serious undertone to the way Frankie’s classmates pick on her and call out her use of language. Just as Morissette’s critics undermined her status as a powerful woman in rock by questioning her grammatical decisions in the nineties, Gooding feels that Frankie’s classmates are doing the same to her as a black queer poet trying to be heard. “People don’t like when women speak

their truth and aren’t honest about things,” Gooding says. “And when you can find a little piece of something almost fractionally incorrect, it’s so easy to just say, “You’re wrong. You’re stupid. You don’t know what you’re talking about, girl.” And that’s not fair. Frankie is again looking out to this predominantly white space and being rejected yet again.” Gooding adds that Frankie is attracted to Phoenix’s decision to act as an ally to her in a vulnerable moment. “He’s this guy who didn’t have to stand up for her. He could have just let the tide wash over her and swallow her whole.”

By now, Morissette is at peace with “Ironic” and the decades of late-night dorm-room debates that it has sparked. Cody said that from the beginning, Morissette gave the show’s team her full blessing to poke gentle, yet loving, fun at the song. “Alanis was open to it,” she said. “She was like, ’I think sometimes the best thing in the world is to be really dumb and really smart at the same time.’”