“Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed. Not surprising, considering the sheer amount of traffic a woman’s body experiences. Tampons and speculums. Cocks, fingers, vibrators and more, between the legs, from behind, in the mouth. Men love to put things inside women, don’t they? Cucumbers and bananas and bottles, a string of pearls, a Magic Marker, a fist. Once a guy wanted to wedge a Walkie-Talkie inside of me. I declined.”
This passage, to me, perfectly sums up what is so exceptional about Sharp Objects, both the HBO limited series as well as the novel it’s based upon. The idea that women are conditioned, all-too-often violently, to fulfill the expectations and desires of a patriarchal society to such an extent that women become sick. They lash out. They behave in ways that are indecent, unbecoming, inappropriate. And if you’re familiar with Gillian Flynn’s work, this theme shouldn’t come as a surprise to you. This passage, from the novel of Sharp Objects, echoes a similar sentiment to that of the now-infamous “cool girl” monologue from her 2012 novel and 2014 film adaptation, Gone Girl.
- Insert snippet of Gone Girl monologue
These themes of gendered societal expectations and cycles of violence are clearly important to Flynn, but more important to her is the effect they have on women, on her characters. Flynn isn’t afraid of having her characters make bad choices, do things that are unlikeable, and initially when trying to sell Sharp Objects, publishers were put off by Camille
- Interview where Flynn talks about characters being ‘likeable’
And it’s true: women in media, well, women everywhere, are subjected to a vastly different set of expectations. They need to be likeable. In Breaking Bad, as Flynn mentioned, no one wondered if Walter White wasn’t likeable enough. I mean, that was kind of like the entire point of Breaking Bad. The person who did get a lot of hate online, however, was Walt’s wife, Skylar (and the actress who played her, Anna Gunn). It takes a special flavor of misogyny to look at a man dealing crystal meth and murdering people and putting his entire family at severe risk and say “you know? I just didn’t like the wife.” The pressure on Flynn to make Camille a more likeable character is ironically, depressingly, funny; it proves the points of the novel itself, in a way: that women need to conform otherwise they won’t be successful.
The other creative heads of the series, creator/executive producer Marti Noxon and director/executive producer Jean-Marc Vallee, are also clearly invested in exploring these questions of sexism and violence. Noxon’s UnReal on Lifetime touched on many similar themes, and Vallee’s previous miniseries was the wildly successful first season of Big Little Lies.
Big Little Lies and Sharp Objects, to me, are almost sister series. Both deal with trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, familial dysfunction, domestic abuse, and a central murder-mystery driving the plot. Vallee’s almost voyeuristic filmmaking style lent itself beautifully to Big Little Lies, as it does here, in Sharp Objects.
The feeling that someone’s watching you, that you’re seeing something you shouldn’t be, that nowhere, not even your own thoughts, are safe from an outside observer. This feeling permeates Sharp Objects, creating a suffocating atmosphere of paranoia and distrust. This video is going to explore how Sharp Objects shows the ways a cyclical culture built on gendered social roles can be destructively violent, internally building a woman’s rage like a pressure cooker until, finally, she explodes.
1. Society
So, let’s talk about how Sharp Objects depicts society. First, Wind Gap’s economy runs on hog butchering, which, as Flynn says, was a way for her to explore how a cycle of violence can affect a community
- Clip of Flynn talking from “creating wind gap” featurette
The social dynamics of Wind Gap aren’t all that different from hog butchering either
- Amy Adams from same featurette saying that the town is stuck
The town, as explored in episode 5, “closer,” was born from a deeply violent event: the rape and murder of Millie Calhoun back during the civil war:
- Camille telling Richard about it
The celebration of Calhoun Day is, on first glance, kind of played for the audience to look at it from Richard and Camille’s point-of-view of, “what the fuck?” They, the show’s writers, are making fun of how backwards this small southern town is, a town where girls wear confederate flag tank tops to parties and looking for people of color is like playing Where’s Waldo?
And that humor holds true the deeper you look into Calhoun day and its function in the story, but a darker implication surfaces as well. It’s not just a funny aside to give a framework for the whole town to come together and heighten the tension, it’s actually an incredibly insightful point in understanding our three leads: Adora, Camille, and Amma, and the generational differences between them. Millie Calhoun is referred to by Camille as her “great-great-great-grand-victim.” The line is subtle, not much attention is payed to it, but it implies a pattern of generational trauma being passed down from Millie Calhoun all the way to Adora, Camille, and Amma. Calhoun Day is a celebration (supposedly) of the founding of the town, but the town’s inception is rooted in this incredibly violent, traumatic event, and that gendered violence isn’t scrutinized. Millie Calhoun isn’t mourned; she’s celebrated for being raped and murdered rather than give up her confederate husband. And the cartoonish way it’s depicted by having young teens perform it show how the town doesn’t take violence against women seri0usly: it’s a joke, it’s a performance for us to laugh at. Even Camille doesn’t seem to take it too seriously.
- “Did things to her. Violations.”
The town doesn’t feel complicit in this violence, they’re celebrating Millie Calhoun and her bravery, not the horrible thing that happened to her! Right? Right.
Millie Calhoun being raped and burned alive at this tree parallels what happened to Camille as a young teenager. I’ll get more into the specifics later, but for now, it is interesting to look at the similarities between these women, separated by a hundred and fifty years. It seems the women in Camille’s family come from a long line of violence.
Wind Gap is a town where information is the currency and gossip is their bartering.
- Ep 4: that is so Wind Gap of you. Learn someone’s secrets and use it against them later
That gossip is as deadly as any poison. In episode four, Camille gives Richard a tour of crime scenes in the forest surrounding Wind Gap. One spot is the site of a supposed murder/suicide of two young women who were lovers. The implication, however, is that they were killed in a homophobic attack.
- Ep 4, Camille: they never found a knife, so… murder, suicide.
One of the girls left behind a child that Camille went to school with.
- Ep 4, Camille: Her name was Faith Murray but everybody called her “fag” Murray, like it was hereditary or something.
“Like it was hereditary or something.” This line is so genius because it encapsulates so much about what Sharp Objects says about not only society, but about Camille as well. That generational trauma manifests in ways one can’t predict. The town judged Faith based on her mother, a mother she never even met, but it didn’t matter. Faith went from homophobic taunts to being labelled a “slut.”
- Camille: in wind gap, every woman gets a nasty label if they don’t conform to the rules of engagement
The murdered girls, Anne and Natalie, are always talked about as “perfect,” as if any mention of their flaws is the deepest sin possible. The town immediately goes out of its way to paint them in a more angelic, feminine light. Even changing Natalie’s favorite color from black to purple.
- Receptionist at police station: we thought it’d be too grim
The truth is that Natalie and Anne weren’t “perfect little girls,” they had serious anger issues. The entire reason the Keene family moved to Wind Gap in the first place was because Natalie stabbed a girl in the eye with a pencil back in Philadelphia. Anne had a biting issue, which neither Ashley nor Adora want to mention. Camille’s bullshit radar goes off while interviewing Ashley.
- They were darling little things
Instead of being honest about the difficult realities regarding Natalie and Anne, the town sweeps it under the rug, preferring to immortalize the girls as “angels.” The only ones who seem to realize this are John and Camille, people who recognize that their siblings’ deaths don’t have any bearing on how “good” their sisters were.
In an article written for medium.com, author Gillian Flynn says about Natalie and Anne, “As for the murdered little girls, I didn’t want these doomed girls to be just flashes of dimples and hair ribbons. That would be too easy. (Poe said, “The death of a beautiful woman is a poetic thing,” and the death of a pretty girl is apparently more so — considering the current media madness surrounding JonBenet and other lost girls.) The murdered girls of Sharp Objects aren’t doll-like victims; they have vicious streaks themselves; they were fighters.”
Sharp Objects seems to play with the audience’s desire, along with the town, to memorialize these girls as flashes of dimples and hair ribbons, instead showing their rougher edges. This creates a kind of guilt for the viewer: it shouldn’t matter if they were perfect or not; they didn’t deserve to be brutally murdered.
- John: the only girls in Wind Gap with a mind of their own.
In episode 6, Camille hangs out with some old high school cheerleading friends (friends out of obligation rather than any real desire). The women automatically assume that since Camille doesn’t have children, she isn’t able to properly empathize with how tragic the murders of Anne Nash and Natalie Keene are.
- You aren’t fully a woman until you’ve had kids
These women believe that their sole purpose in life is to reproduce, and any woman who doesn’t, like Camille, is going against her God-given duty to do so.
- Girl power
These are the same women that shamed Camille back in the day when they thought she had her period.
Ultimately, the writers paint a messy picture of how societal pressures whittle women down into Sharp Objects.
- Shiny and luscious on the outside, with this dark pit heart at the center
II. Trauma
So, what does the trauma that manifest in Camille actually look like? Well, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, or SAMHSA, there are three E’s of trauma: the event, the experience, and the effect. “The Event” refers to the threat or actual experience of harm which may occur once or multiple times to the victim.
- M&C rollerblading down the street
- Marian coughing/choking
- Adora biting baby Amma
- Voice over of Marian “what if after you die, part of you goes to heaven and part of you stays here”
“The Experience” refers to the victim’s unique perception of the event.
- Funeral
- Camille watching Adora cry
- Adora neglecting Camille @ funeral
And “The effect” is the impact the event and experience has upon the victim
- Camille cutting herself on the fan
- Camille drinking
- Cutting
- In rehab
I think anyone watching or reading Sharp Objects would be able to tell you that Camille is suffering from PTSD throughout the series; and the symptoms of PTSD are perfectly in line with the way Camille is portrayed.
The first symptom is intrusion or re-experiencing; where the victim has recurrent recollections of the traumatic event.
- Marian haunting the house
- Camille’s flashbacks
- Camille + Amma walking in the house after the party
- Camille dying on the floor, Marian there with her
Jean-Marc Vallee plants Marian in the present in haunting, startling ways. She watches over the house like a specter, seeming to guide Camille while simultaneously being an unshakable guilt from her past. The series is built on flashbacks which are intertwined with the present, living in the moment with a pressing urgency, events collapse onto each other with overwhelming emotional weight. Because that’s what PTSD is, a constant recurrence of your past onto your present.
The second symptom of PTSD is avoidance.
- Camille telling curry she doesn’t want to go to Wind Gap
The victim goes out of her way to avoid any potential trigger, fearing the re-experiencing of her trauma.
- Trying to sneak by Adora
She’ll have nightmares, her subconscious breaking through her defenses and reminding her what happened… what is going to happen.
- Nightmares
o Chasing after the girls in the forest
o The dollhouse
And she avoids talking with Kirk Lacey when he tries to apologize for what happened when they were teenagers.
- Show flashback
- “I guess we both got fucked”
The last symptom I’ll mention is changes in mood and cognition, negative alterations in in emotions or thoughts… which like… I may as well not even get into because Camille is just a bundle of negative emotions and thoughts.
- Camille drinking
- Cutting
- Sex w Richard
- W john
- “Every time I’m here I feel like a bad person”
III. Adora
- “she walked me into the forest”
In that same Medium article, Flynn describes Adora as “a lovely, regal woman filled with needles. She’s a consumer of others’ pain. If Camille’s violence is self-contained, her mother’s is the definition of self-centered.” In a way, Adora was doomed to become the mother she despised; she cared for Camille the only way she knew how: simultaneously over-mother and entirely neglect Camille. Adora’s mother, Joya, also had Munchausen’s by proxy. It’s more subtle in the show, but the novel goes out of its way to explain why Adora is the way she is in the final scene between Camille and Jackie, who explains that, “Adora was…overly mothered. Never saw your grandma Joya smile at her or touch her in a loving way, but she couldn’t keep her hands off her. Always fixing the hair, tugging at clothes, and…oh, she did this thing. Instead of licking her thumb and rubbing at a smudge, she’d lick Adora. Just grab her head and lick it. When Adora peeled from a sunburn—we all did back then, not as smart about SPF as your generation—Joya would sit next to your momma, strip off her shirt, and peel the skin off in long strips. Joya loved that… Having to watch your friend stripped naked in front of you, and…groomed. Needless to say, your momma was sick all the time. She was always having tubes and needles and such stuck in her.”
Camille asks, “What was she sick with?”
“Little bit of everything.”
If you had read me that passage and told me it was about Adora and Marian or Amma or even Camille, I would’ve believed you. Flynn does an exceptional job threading the needle between all the women in this family, tying them together in violent and manipulative ways. Adora had a mother who left her in the middle of the forest in the dead of night, who stripped off her sunburnt skin in front of her friends, and, as Alan tells Camille, would wake her in the middle of the night just to pinch her.
- Alan: I think she just liked to hurt people
Ironic that Alan is comparing Camille to Joya here, since the clear comparison is between Joya and her daughter.
Adora failed to completely trap Camille in her web but succeeded with Marian (and later, Amma). She almost blames Camille for Marian’s death, as if Camille had just let Adora “take care of her,” none of this would’ve happened.
- I never let her solve me. Maybe I should’ve
As we stay within Camille’s perspective for the vast majority of the series, we never see Adora take responsibility or even acknowledge her role in Marian’s death. Even in her diary, which is found by police in the novel, Adora describes the problem perfectly while not understanding that she is the problem. Her need to be seen as a perfect mother greatly overshadows her wanting to be a perfect mother. She uses her daughters as social pawns in a game they never consented to play. Adora wants to be seen as the queen of Wind Gap, in her castle on the hill. She wants people to love her, but not get close to her. She invites the entire town to her home for Calhoun Day, but hardly anyone is allowed inside.
- Jackie: welcome to my home, you’re not allowed in my home
Even her own husband is like… a trophy husband? Alan just sits there doing nothing like a sedated Vineyard Vines model. He sleeps on a pullout couch. He and Adora don’t have sex. He just plays his vinyl records and drinks. Which… ok?
- Adora ignoring Camille at the funeral
IV. Camille
“There are no good women in Sharp Objects. Camille, my narrator of whom I’m obsessively fond — she’s witty, self-aware, and buoyant — is the closest to good. And she uses booze, sex, and scissors to get through the day. As I wrote about Camille, I was pondering how a girl who’s been raised to please — in an unpleasable, poisonous home — would grow up. How she’d react to a mother who was at once both physically insidious — a constantly poking, prodding woman — and utterly unnurturing. What kind of violence that might foster in this girl. A looping one, I realized. Camille has a craving to carve herself up. The cutter is both victimizer and victim — the bully and the sufferer. But the act includes healing: One has to cleanse and bandage the wounds afterward. Hurt, suffer, heal, hurt, suffer, heal. It’s a trinity of violence, all bound up in one person. It’s the loneliest act in the world. Camille is an inherently lonely human being.”
Flynn describes the violence Camille inflicts on herself as a “looping” one. A cycle of hurting, suffering, healing, repeat. And Jean-Marc Vallee tells this story in such a way that the audience feels like we’re living in that loop. Camille’s past, present, and future all seem to fold in on each other in a suffocating, humid hell.
Camille and Adora’s relationship is like a spider and a fly; Camille is stuck in Adora’s web, she helplessly watched her mother consume Marian, and now Amma. Once it became clear to Adora that Camille wouldn’t submit to her will, she treated Camille like a parasite she was obligated to care for. Camille never experienced parental love, not until she met Curry, and at that point it’s effectively too late. The damage is done, literally.
The only love Camille had in her formative years (besides arguably Jackie) was from Marian, and Adora took that from her, too. One of the most striking sequences of the whole show is when Camille and Amma return from a party, each on a high of oxycontin and ecstasy. The two of them hold hands and run in a circle on the lawn. It creates a dizzying, almost nauseating effect. A literal endless loop. And as Amma talks about moving up to St. Louis, she turns into Amma, then Alice, Anne Nash, and Natalie Keene. All these dead girls wrapped into one person. Camille sees Marian in Alice, Anne, Natalie, and Amma, and that’s where her motivation comes from, from the need to save Marian. Throughout the show, Marian appears to Camille, warning her and displaying her l0ve, transcending time and death. But Marian isn’t actually there, it’s Camille externalizing her own subconscious red flags. It’s also Camille who’s loving herself, but she’s so damaged that she’s unable to think of herself as a loving person, to others and herself.
- Every time I’m here I feel like a bad person
From the moment we first meet Adora, she treats Camille, and by extension us, as an outsider, a visitor.
- “the house is not up to par for visitors”
This single line explains their entire relationship in just nine words. Camille isn’t family, this isn’t her house, she’s a visitor who should be grateful to Adora and Alan for allowing her to stay there. Less than twelve hours later, Adora and Camille are back in their old pattern, their same loop.
- “you slept in your car?”
Adora cares about what Camille does, what she says, how she acts, who she speaks with, but doesn’t care about Camille. As Flynn said, Adora is constantly intruding on Camille, mentally and physically, and simultaneously neglecting her entirely.
- “Like a plump cherry”
Possibly the most shocking part of Camille and Adora’s dynamic is that Adora doesn’t even deny her disdain for her daughter. But, like all of Adora’s faults, it’s not her fault.
- I never loved you
It’s Camille’s father’s fault. Camille was just genetically predisposed to her “cold nature”, and there was nothing Adora could do besides watch her daughter grow into a damaged person. This is, of course, bullshit. Camille’s traumas are the result of Adora’s treatment the same way Adora’s traumas are the result of her treatment by Joya. Adora isn’t able to recognize this cycle, instead perpetuating it perfectly. And Camille is the victim – not to say that she’s innocent; as Flynn says, “there are no good women in Sharp Objects.” And it’s true, Camille isn’t good. But what differs her from Adora, and Joya, and Amma, is that Camille wants to be good. Immediately after Adora tells her that she’s incapable of getting close to another person, Camille goes to have sex with Richard, to prove to herself that Adora’s wrong, that she can be good, that she can get close. Camille recognizes the century-long generational trauma that has plagued the women in her family and is fighting tooth and nail to not be another victim. No matter how much Adora tries to blame Camille’s absent father (go to clip) it’s Adora who’s at fault.
- Scene at dress shop
A recurring image in the series is Camille running away from a group of boys when she was a teenager. It’s not shown on screen, but before it’s explicitly stated, we know what this means. Or, at least, we think we do.
- Camille telling Richard about the “in zone”
Sharp Objects never outright calls this experience “sexual assault” or “rape,” and after thinking about it, I realize that this is because Camille is our narrator. For the vast majority of the series, and the entirety of the novel, we are seeing what she sees, hearing what she hears, even thinking her thoughts. The closest Camille comes to calling it assault is saying the football players “had their way with her” and that she “got fucked.” Besides that, she goes out of her way to not make a big deal out of it, telling Richard (use clip “some people call that consensual, you know?”) and even dismissing one of the boy’s, Kirk Lacey’s attempted apology.
- I guess we both got fucked
No one besides Kirk who remembers the event seems to actively hold negative memories associated with it. The other boys who were there make numerous sexual jokes with Camille
- Let’s get reacquainted
- Scene in the bar
And when watching the Calhoun Day play, they joke with each other during the rape scene
- Them covering each other’s eyes
The way Jean-Marc Vallee shoots and edits the sequences where Camille remembers her assault are so well done, because we never actually see any act of violence, only the threat of violence. Camille seems resigned, even, to what’s happening. She prods a spider with a stick, and that’s as much as we see. This implies that Camille has completely suppressed the actual assault from her memory beyond these quick flashes. This is in line with how we understand post-traumatic stress disorder works: victims hide the traumatic memories in their minds as a safety precaution. A study from Northwestern University says that, “Some stressful experiences – such as chronic childhood abuse – are so overwhelming and traumatic, the memories hide like a shadow in the brain.” So, without Camille ever calling it sexual assault, we understand that the experience was deeply traumatic by the omission of Camille’s ability to fully remember it. This isn’t the first time Vallee has shot this type of scene this way. In the first season of Big Little Lies (minor spoilers ahead, go watch the show please it’s amazing), Jane was raped in a hotel room, and the first time she tells the story to Madeline, we only see quick bursts of her memory. The thing Jane seems to remember the most is her assaulter’s shoes; she focuses in on a seemingly mundane detail in order to block out the violence she’s experiencing. The most explicit view we get of the assault is Jane remembering herself on the toilet, looking through a mirror, having an out-of-body memory. Film allows us to depict complex psychological concepts in deceivingly simple ways: Jane has dissociated from herself and the experience, she remembers watching it happen to herself in third person. Jane remembers the shoes, and Camille remembers the spider.
A phenomenal article written by Vulture’s senior TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz on Sharp Objects’ treatment of memory and use of editing says, “the way we’ve been conditioned to believe that stories ought to be told — A leads to B leads to C and finally to Z, with maybe a couple of flashbacks — is itself unnatural, at least in relation to the workings of the mind. The kind of storytelling practiced on Sharp Objects gets us closer to what it’s like to inhabit a body powered by a consciousness that roams where emotions take it.”
The first time we see Camille is as a teenager rollerblading through Wind Gap with Marian. The music, “Come Down” by Sylvan Esso, echoes like it’s being played off an iPhone in an empty cathedral. Camille looks over at a train car and sees Alice, her rehab roommate who we won’t meet in proper until episode 3. We’re inside Camille’s mind, rollerblading through, looking at artifacts as if it’s a museum. Younger Camille beginning to pierce her older self isn’t just a creepy hook to start the series, it foreshadows the horror to come; the past is assaulting the present, Camille’s own mind is trying to stop her from falling into the spider’s web again.
Adora’s attempted poisoning of Camille in the name of “mothering” can be seen as a microcosm of how gendered expectations create rage in the most vulnerable people. We show girls violent, hypersexual, sexist media from a young age, enforce degrading gender roles, subject them to impossible standards and are then surprised when they lash out. And then those girls grow up and perpetuate the cycle all over again. Camille seems to be the only character really aware of this cycle, both in-universe and in a more meta sense. She spends the entire series trying to not be another ‘blade in the fan,’ to not perpetuate the cycle once more. And just when Camille, and we, think she’s succeeded, the series pulls the rug out from under us one last time.
- Don’t tell mama
V. Amma
If Camille internalizes her rage, Amma externalizes it, forcing it on anyone except herself. She glides through Wind Gap, transforming from Lolita to Captain Willard to a siren, playing with everyone until she gets bored, then throws them away. The ending of the series, where it’s revealed that Amma, not Adora, was the one who killed Anne Nash and Natalie Keene, is shot and edited for maximum shock. The series is built on Camille’s reaction shots, but we don’t get one final reaction after “Don’t tell mama.” It just cuts to black. This is emotionally unsatisfying; we don’t get a release from the buildup, it just sits with us, and we’re left blindsided, unsure where to go, how to feel, or what to think. A few critics were unsatisfied with the finale, saying that the show either didn’t do the proper amount of work for the twist to feel justified, or that ending the series without any explanation was a cop-out on the writers’ part. I disagree.
Sharp Objects does such an excellent job having the audience view the world from Camille’s perspective that we almost forget it – it becomes second nature to how you experience the show. Ending the series like that is the ultimate expression of Camille’s point-of-view, in that moment when it cuts to black and the credits roll, we feel exactly how Camille does. Undone. The emotional resolution and relief we felt watching Adora arrested and convicted is taken from us in an instant, and we’re left feeling not only shocked, but guilty. Thrillers and whodunnits tend to have a meta-element to them, where they invite the audience to join in on the detective work to try and solve the mystery. When Adora’s arrested, we think the mystery’s over, and we let our guard down. The look on Camille’s face is so haunting because it feels like a mirror. It’s the unfiltered pain after realizing she failed to save Amma from the cycle, and Camille feels complicit in the murders. But, when you go back through the show and watch, really watch, you see that the signs were there all along. Maybe we just didn’t want to see them.
Throughout the eight episodes, Amma fluctuates between two personalities; a doll-like little girl at home, and an overtly sexual young woman who taunts the police, the victim’s family, and her own friends. Amma has learned how to play the game, and she plays it better than anyone:
- When you’re letting them do things to you, you’re really doing it to them
On the surface, this is about the boys Amma hangs around with and her “letting” them do things to her. On a second viewing, you realize it’s also about her relationship with Adora. Amma lets Adora poison her and in turn Amma gets the leverage she needs to do what she wants. She can party, stay out late, drink, as long as Adora can “take care” of her the next day. But no one else is allowed to get close to Adora. It’s more explicit in the novel, but it’s there in the show, too, albeit subtly. Amma was jealous of the attention Natalie and Anne got from Adora (I knew those girls) and she was jealous of Mae having any attention from Camille. I think this stems from the shadow Marian casts over the Crellin home.
- You can never be as good as someone who’s dead (or something lol)
Amma’s insecurity over Adora’s affections, and subsequent possessiveness, is the equal but opposite reaction to Adora’s mothering from that of Camille’s. Where Camille coped by getting as far away as fast as possible, both emotionally and physically, Amma did the opposite. She fed into Adora’s abuse, twisting it to her benefit, creating a sick sort of unspoken deal with her mother. You poison me, and in return I get your unconditional love, split with no one else. This is the price Amma, and everyone, pays for Marian’s ghost haunting Wind Gap. As Camille and Amma get closer throughout the show, Amma begins transferring that dysfunctional dynamic onto her relationship with Camille, viewing her as a maternal figure. Watch this scene from episode five “closer.”
During the performance, Amma keeps looking at Camille, and every time we go to the reverse shot, Camille isn’t watching, but rather talking to Richard. Jackie notices it too. We go to a closeup on Amma, the reverse POV shot, and back to Amma three different times, each time Amma becoming more and more upset that Camille isn’t watching. Then, when the violence between Bob Nash and John Keene breaks out, it seems to trigger Amma, and she leaves.
On subsequent viewings of the series, you can’t imagine it ending another way. Amma is so diabolical, so manipulative, it’s almost irritating how clear it is. Natalie’s body is found right where Amma and her friends are taunting John Keene. When Camille warns them that someone is going around killing little girls, their response is:
- Not the cool ones
We know that Anne and Natalie didn’t fall into Wind Gap’s typical type of girl, they were hotheaded, violent, and spoke their mind. They didn’t fit in; and combined with the attention they got from Adora, it was only a matter of time. Amma has been fed the narrative of what a girl “should” be: sexy but modest, smart but dumb, mature but innocent, all these contradictions comprise Amma, and seeing those stereotypes wrapped into a single person amplifies just how ridiculous they are.
Towards the end of the novel, Amma asks Camille, “You know how people sometimes say they have to hurt because if they don’t, they’re so numb they won’t feel anything?… What if it’s the opposite? What if you hurt because it feels so good? Like you have a tingling, like someone left a switch on in your body. And nothing can turn the switch off except hurting? What does that mean?” We first think it’s about self-harm, as does Camille. Amma’s rage at the boxes her mother and Wind Gap forces her into is so deep seated and unaddressed that when she finally expresses it, through the violence she inflicts on Natalie and Anne, it feels good. It’s possible Amma thought, in some fucked-up way, that she was helping Natalie and Anne by removing them from such an untenable situation; you either conform, or you die. The best line of the book illustrates this paradox, “A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.”
VI. Conclusion
Sharp Objects is a violent, humid, nauseating experience that puts us directly in the mind of a deeply damaged person. It doesn’t offer any easy answers, and it’s more interested with how characters move through Wind Gap than moving the plot forward; episode five barely advances the main plot forward but is a goldmine of information and insight into who these people are. In a golden age of television where the amount of “good” TV can feel overwhelming (532 scripted series were produced in 2019, compared to just 216 in 2010), it’s important to recognize when a series takes genuine risks. Not for the sake of it, not gimmicks, but risks that enhance and deepen our understanding of what the show is saying about its characters, its story, and us.
Sharp Objects shows us the power a story can have when it takes its time (adapting a 250ish page novel into an eight-hour miniseries isn’t the most obvious choice), and how television is uniquely tailored to tackling long-form storytelling most resembling that of a novel in a way that film just isn’t. The looping nature of the story, being able to reference a shot in episode one eight weeks later in the finale, giving the original shot a new meaning, even the theme song plays into television’s unique structure; each episode has a different artist compose a new arrangement on the song “Dance and Angela” from the film A Place in the Sun. Subconsciously, for the audience, it tells us that everything in Camille’s past is happening again, even if it looks and sounds different. It’s the same song, played over and over and over. Will Camille be able to escape that loop?
“Was I good at caring for Amma because of kindness? Or did I like caring for Amma because I have Adora’s sickness? I waver between the two, especially at night, when my skin begins to pulse.
Lately, I’ve been leaning toward kindness.”
- Show curry speaking lines
Citation
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Flynn, Gillian. Sharp Objects. Broadway Books, 2006.
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Patterson, Troy. “How the ‘Sharp Objects’ Finale Sums Up the Show's Excellent Feel-Badness.” The New Yorker, 27 Aug. 2018.
Poniewozik, James. “‘Sharp Objects,’ a Mesmerizing Southern Thriller, Cuts Slow but Deep.” The New York Times, 5 July 2018.
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Seitz, Matt Zoller. “What Sharp Objects Understands About Memory.” Vulture, 5 July 2018.
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Tracey, Janey. “Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects and the Repression of Women’s Anger.” Ploughshares at Emerson College, Emerson College, 30 July 2018, blog.pshares.org/gillian-flynns-sharp-objects-and-the-repression-of-womens-anger/.
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