In new limited series Sharp Objects, based on the 2006 novel by Gillian Flynn, everything smolders. Dilapidated buildings are covered in old graffiti and fraying posters. The green leaves on plants and trees sit lush and heavy in the hot air. Women and men fan themselves as they sit on the grass or park benches. There are cracks on walls and ceilings that slowly seem to expand in front of the viewer’s eyes. Everything is a slow ache except for the girls we keep seeing on rollerskates, youthful and daring. They dart about an otherwise monotonous backdrop. They infuse a world that seems to be decaying with potential vitality, but they also seem dangerous, perhaps a little too young to be calling such attention to themselves, to be so free. After all, Sharp Objects, at least on its surface, is a mystery about two dead little girls and determining who killed them. In the world of prestige TV, the introduction of these pretty young things floating around on their roller skates is basically Chekov’s gun: they are objects ready to be acted upon.
Sharp Objects’ success hinges on the show’s insistence on interrogating our assumptions about who gets to be the subject in a story. Is a teenage girl on skates a thing to be acted upon, or does she have agency? Do the words that Camille Preaker, our brave female antihero, played by an exceptional Amy Adams, carves into her own skin make her the object of pain? Or is Camille more than the sum of her scars? While any number of TV’s most famous male antiheroes grapple with alcohol abuse and repressed trauma, honest and nuanced portraits of female antiheroes are often more challenging to execute, especially onscreen. After all, in many of the most popular shows on television female bodies are routinely victimized, often in a fetishistic way. Think of the highly ritualized murders on the first season of True Detective, for example, or the strange otherworldly beauty of Laura Palmer’s dead body in Twin Peaks. Even shows that don’t necessarily linger on damaged bodies, like Law and Order: SVU, for example, often present the experience of being a woman as constantly being acted upon by outside forces.
In contrast, Sharp Objects insists that in order to understand female suffering the viewer first needs to see women as agents, rather than objects. This means presenting female characters with a range of complicated desires, some of which they themselves may even be confused about. Throughout the first three episodes of the series, Camille is both competent journalist and wayward, easily overwhelmed daughter. She packs a giant paper bag filled with tiny airport size bottles of booze, Butterfingers, cigarettes and Listerine in preparation for the coming days of investigative reporting, and drives around drinking vodka from an Evian bottle and listening to music on an iPhone with a completely cracked screen. Numbing, through drinking and smoking and cutting and driving and listening to music on blast, is Camille’s primary strategy for dealing with flashbacks, which come at odd intervals and lack coherent linear structure.
In this way, Camille’s quest to discover what happened to the two little girls is the tip of the iceberg of a much larger mystery of what happened to Camille, who is clearly barely grasping at straws to survive. Unlike the classic male antihero story, Sharp Objects doesn’t seduce the viewer into thinking it’s an escapist fantasy before throwing the overwhelming trauma at us. Right from the start, Camille is awkward and introspective. She takes constant baths. She runs away from even the most minimal conflict in order to drink. She lovingly strokes pins and needles, the pointy ends of paper clips. When she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror where she can see the scars from her cutting, she looks away, haunted and ashamed.
A large part of Sharp Objects’ success lies in its incredible acting. It’s hard to imagine another actor pulling off Camille’s subtle shame and longing. Likewise, Camille’s mother, Adora, played by a fantastic Patricia Clarkson, and her half-sister, Amma, expertly played by newcomer Eliza Scanlen, are subtly sinister, each embodying a different type of feminine darkness underneath layers of feminine artifice: pink dresses, long flowing hair, layers of ribbons and bows. Adora’s iciness runs in stark contrast to her love of these overwrought feminine details. When Camille shows up unexpected at her home, a gigantic Victorian mansion, she hesitates to invite her inside, making an excuse about the house not being ready for company. Adora’s wields her brand of white southern womanhood violently, as she uses her supposed frailty and insistence on propriety as a way to dominate everyone around her. Meanwhile, Amma, who speaks often about being on the cusp of womanhood despite only being 13, struggles to navigate two worlds: the innocent girlhood that her mother is obsessed with, complete with a gigantic dollhouse replica of the actual home she grew up in, and the free-spirited, adventurous one, she covets with her group of fellow teen girl skaters, who clearly pride themselves on being tough, sexy and mean.
While Sharp Objects interrogates stereotypes of white womanhood, similar explorations of black womanhood are pushed to the side. When we do see black women onscreen, they are often relegated to roles as maids, nurses and wives, none of whom seem to be developed in particularly rich ways. It’s a frustratingly tone deaf decision for an otherwise nuanced series, and one that I’m sure that some viewers will choose to ignore or excuse, in the same way that sexism is often ignored or excused in otherwise powerful pieces of art.
The main question that Sharp Objects is invested in exploring is whether female darkness is any different from male darkness. Our culture certainly positions it that way. In any number of TV shows and films and books, female pain is painted as insidious, self-destructive, lacking power and purpose. In many explorations of female pain, women are acted upon first – they are kidnapped, abused, mistreated, and their journey is one of digging through trauma and getting back to the person they were before violence was enacted on them.
But what if women were drawn to drugs and sex and power for the same reasons that men were? What if the women who do bad things were just bored or horny or mean, instead of off-balanced or suffering? In one its most compelling scenes, Camille remembers stumbling into a decaying shed in the woods filled with recently killed animals, slabs of meats drying in the hot air, surrounded by flies. On the walls are images of naked women and men, many of which are S&M scenes of female submission and male dominance. When adult Camille thinks back on this shocking moment from her youth, where she is clearly both frightened and intrigued, she begins to masturbate.
Sharp Objects insists that when women navigate a violent world, they are just as likely as men to crave power and pleasure, rather than goodness and resolution. In the series, Camille’s pain isn’t fetishized – the camera refuses to linger over the violence she has done to her own body. Instead, the focus is on Camille’s fascination with self-injury both as a form of escape and as a kind of dark indulgence, which is portrayed as both oddly erotic as well as comforting. In many episodes we see moments where Camille lovingly runs her fingers on the edge of pointed things. In one case, she takes a needle and lightly runs it along her denim jeans, a gentler kind of marking that takes the edge off, but also seems like a pale substitute for a frantic urge, an itch she is constantly on the brink of scratching.
- Sharp Objects starts on HBO in the US on 8 July and in the UK on Sky Atlantic on 9 July
