Coffee & TV: Sharp Objects, a tincture of rage and bile
discussed: Sharp Objects, a tincture of rage and bile
Spoilers everywhere for Sharp Objects (book and miniseries), and content warnings for everything.
I think it was Justin who first mentioned in his newsletter how the intro sequences of HBO prestige dramas all have the same vibe, and it was definitely Justin I immediately shared this with after I saw it on Twitter:
missing: hilariously seedy roadside motel
Here's my completed card for Sharp Objects:
I probably got some wrong but still: bingo, two ways.
I read Sharp Objects in 2014-ish at my family's summer cabin in Ontario. I think that's right because Gone Girl the movie had just come out, or was going to very soon, and I found Sharp Objects with its freshly redesigned cover ("by the bestselling author of Gone Girl!!") on the bookshelves amongst the Danielle Steele paperbacks and Readers Digest Condensed Books and formerly-zeitgeist-y personal finance titles that line the bookshelves of shared vacation spaces everywhere. Our bookshelves are unique in that they also contains a lot of Christian devotionals as well as act as a second storage location -- against Marie Kondo's express instructions-- for the books I don't want to keep at home yet can't bring myself to throw away. So there's also Moby Dick, Bleak House (which I have READ thank you VERY MUCH), 2666, etc. Next year I'll probably leave Underworld up there. You get the idea. It's where I bury my dead white* men.
(*and Bolano)
I had just finished something long and intense and wanted a palate cleanser to read while falling asleep, so Sharp Objects, a short trashy-looking thriller, seemed perfect.
Sharp Objects is not a good book but it is a very effective thriller. I started it around midnight by (literally) the light of a flickering oil lamp and read the last page a few hours later, just as the sun was starting to come up. The sun rises early that far north. I actively did not want to finish reading it but I also could not stop. Sharp Objects exploits the desire of a good-faith reader to find out what happens and implicates that desire in a train wreck conclusion of almost-pathological trauma porn. Look, you wanted to know this. This is how bad it got!! How are you feeling now??
The only other book that's made me feel that way is A Little Life, which I will never forgive for making me cry, a feat that belongs more appropriately to low stakes interpersonal drama, insurance commercials where a dad teaches his teenager to drive, and gymnastics event final competitions.
I started watching Sharp Objects over the long Labor Day weekend after a summer of some trauma, I would say of my own, but at this point I think we can agree we are all, as a people, traumatized by the 'geopolitical situation.' However in addition to this I had experienced the worst thing a person on brain drugs can experience, I think, which is that they stop working, and then you have to try to figure out why that happened and fix it, hopefully not from scratch.
In my case it was obvious, my insurance wouldn't cover my Wellbutrin unless I tried the generic for a month instead to "prove" I needed Wellbutrin, so I did "try" the generic, with the outcome I was 100% sure of the entire time, which is that I do need non-generic Wellbutrin and without it I will become catatonically depressed. It is terrifying how much of psychiatry is throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks vs. what slides down a little after a while or what is OK but turns the wall a slightly different color or makes the wall not interested in having sex anymore. The professionals really do not know why some drugs work for some people and others do not or why certain drugs just stop working or why you can go off a drug and return to it only to have it affect you completely differently. Or why generics sometimes don't act the same way as the original formulary. Just chance really! Hope you're lucky!
PROFESSIONALS! In MENTAL HEALTH! with MULTIPLE DEGREES! do not know.
I came out of it eventually but I would say only at 80-85% where I was, pre-April. I've done stuff to address the gap, like exercise more, and drink less, and try to stick to a more regular sleep schedule, but nothing really made up the missing 15-20%, at least, not yet. Until I figure that out I've had the standard "reduced interest in activities once enjoyed", including reading, writing, cooking, going out, watching movies, and watching TV. When I saw Sharp Objects was airing during a listless scroll down the Roku home screen, I texted Emily that I wanted to "watch something where I knew what happened. Kinda like reruns, but not."
"Kinda like reruns, but not: A Mood"
Some random early reactions:
Wow, Amy Adams is 44 IRL
Wow, Amy Adams with a few pounds of alcoholic bloat looks a lot like Amy Schumer
Wow, this soundtrack is great
Wow, I miss driving alone at night
Wow, I miss driving and listening to Led Zeppelin
Wow, I miss home
In Sharp Objects St. Louis reporter Amy Adams/Camille Preaker returns to her home town of Wind Gap, MO to investigate the murder of a teenage girl, a murder her boss thinks might be connected to another recent disappearance in the area. Camille's estranged from her family --her mother Adora, her stepfather, and her half-sister Amma -- probably because she's a completely (dys) functional alcoholic; that she's able to remember anything ever strains credulity; she also never throws up, gets a DUI, gets in an accident, etc. Where is my realism, HBO!! Anyway, more believable: the fictional Wind Gap feels Southern, not Midwestern; it's located in the 'bootheel' of Missouri, almost completely surrounded by Kentucky and Arkansas. There are confederate T-shirts and local grudges and kids horsing around in factories and fields at night and lots of soda. This is not my culture but it's not not my culture; David Foster Wallace wrote somewhere that Illinois is more properly three states: Chicago and its suburbs, the wide middle belt where rich farmers live and work (which is where I, but not my parents or their families, grew up), and Southern Illinois, which begins south of I-50 and extends down to Kentucky, where there's a history (but not much of a present or future) of forestry and mining jobs, a huge national forest, and an Air Force base. My parents' closest friends when I was young were pig farmers that went to our church. I remember how the road to their house smelled, and how the smell permeated everything inside the house, too. The most seismic shift in my identity as an adult is probably that I can't reliably poll as a Midwesterner anymore, and watching Amy Adams drive a crappy car on unlit country roads through shitty failing farming towns at night, both wanting to be there and really not wanting to be there ever again, made me feel a certain way.
I enjoyed how Sharp Objects used a sort of nostalgic, foggy, tipsy-seeming camera work -- lots of closeups of languidly rotating fan blades, girls roller skating in slow motion down empty roads, the ribbons on memorials catching the wind -- to establish that Wind Gap is Not Okay. I liked how Camille's memories of her dead sister Marian are filmed with just as much verismilitude as the rest of the show; Camille still feels Marian's presence all the time, and the way her image appears in focus for just for a brief moment or shimmers in the background or corner of a shot (Marian's always in white, it seems), makes her physicality to Camille believable and also really spooky. When Camille asks about her sister's strange medical history and Jackie, the town gossip, tells her she should be looking for information about "not Marian. The other one," I was genuinely nauseous and surprised, even though the plot points of the story were still available in my brain somewhere.
In one scene Camille takes fellow outsider detective Richard Willis through the scrubby forests and abandoned hunting blinds and creeks surrounding Wind Gap, the location of high school shenanigans past and present. They stop at a clearing near a conveniently large and flat tree stump. Camille tells him this is the 'end zone,' where the high school football players would "have their way" with that week's lucky fresh new ninth-grade cheerleader.
Richard: Some people would call that rape, you know?
Camille: Some people would call that consensual, you know?
Richard: Wait, the hell are you talking about? Were you one of the girls?
Camille: If I say yes, you'll think less of me or you'll feel sorry for me.
(this episode aired July 29)
(Camille was one of the girls)
Ninth graders are 14 or 15.
I read Sharp Objects in 2014 but I was just thinking about this other 2014-ish thing, Steubenville. Do you remember the pictures? This was back when the media still would show stuff like that, or before teenagers figured out how to keep adults off the teenager internet. I just checked, it was 2012; sentencing and a second round of indictments happened in 2013. Do you remember the pictures? There were hundreds, apparently. Two perpetrators, at least four witnesses, six hours, and hundreds of photos. One photo of her, passed out cold, two boys carrying her by her wrists and ankles. She was doxxed but she didn't kill herself. Two other girls, one in Nova Scotia, and one in California, did take their own lives after very similar incidents, in 2011 and 2012.
The young woman in Steubenville was 16. Reteah Scott was 17 and Audrie Pott was 15. A CNN reporter covering the Steubenville trial said it was "Incredibly difficult, even for an outsider like me, to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believed their lives fell apart...when that sentence came down, [one young man] collapsed in the arms of his attorney...He said to him, 'My life is over. No one is going to want me now."
Those boys, those men, are out of prison now. All of them. The men that assaulted Reteah Scott and Audrie Pott are too.
Do you remember the pictures?
I can't forget them. They feel cut inside of me.
I can't think of a word to describe how hard it is to write or believe anything you do matters when there are hundreds of pictures and so many boys like that -- or sort of like that, Georgetown Prep, not Steubenville High -- who get to do whatever they want, and get to tell us, also, that we have to do whatever they want. That they can be chosen specifically to do that, to make laws and rules for everyone else.
I try to think about how some of my favorite books were written in 1938, 1939, 1940, and it doesn't really help.
I looked back at my first newsletter, from April 2016 (The Americans!) and some of the ones in between, and thought about the rest of this project or whatever it is. Looking at this, looking at that. Picking up certain pieces and putting them back down. Trying to make an arrangement out of them, finding a pattern or at least the holes. Sometimes I think the only thing to do is to capture what happens, document it, even in messy lowercase type.
In the final scene of Sharp Objects Camille has moved back to St. Louis with her remaining sister Amma. She's kneeling in front of Amma's dollhouse, a perfect replica of their creepy family mansion. Looking at this, looking at that. Picking up certain pieces and putting them back down.
Something catches her eye. A human tooth, embedded in the floor of the dollhouse that's meant to look like ivory. A closer look: there are many teeth. It's important to know that each of the dead girls found in Wind Gap ("dead girls, dead girls," you will get so sick of that phrase, watching Sharp Objects), was missing several teeth. Amma pops into the frame, her beautiful blonde hair swinging. Amma, who made everything in the dollhouse with her own hands.
The credits roll and pretty far in, like, key grip far, there's a buried scene and here are a few stills. Here's how HBO got their icky exploitative TWIST ending, in my opinion.
So there's Amma, captured in the act, murder #3. Because she thought Camille liked new neighbor Mae more than Amma, just like Amma thought her mother Adora liked Natalie and Ann more than her. In the novel Flynn writes: "Ann and Natalie died because Adora paid attention to them. Amma could only view it as a raw deal. Amma, who had allowed my mother to sicken her for so long. Sometimes when you let people to things to you, you’re really doing it to them. Amma controlled Adora by letting Adora sicken her. In return she demanded uncontested love and loyalty. No other little girls allowed."
I think this explanation sucks. I think that, in the book and in the movie --- in life --- there are plenty -- PLENTY-- of reasons for women to be very very angry, and not very many places for that anger to go. (As the book makes excruciatingly clear, you eventually run out of space to cut on your body.) It's not just the end zone, it's the pictures of the end zone, and the stories about it later, the ones that are told to more and more people. It's the boys who hang out at the end zone and take the photos, and the boys who do the things in the photos, and the boys who watch and don't stop it. Some of them apologize (this happens to Camille) and some of them end up on the Supreme Court. God I'm angry about it. I know a lot of women are. I hope that when we are angry enough we'll know the right place for it to go.
Are you angry enough? I think I am.
xx Ruth
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Myriam Gurba and Eileen Myles will be appearing together at The Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever on September 25th (TONIGHT, sponsored by PEN, talking about what art means in a time of crisis. I wish I could go so you better go for me.
Pre-order Things to Make and Break! See May-Lan in person in Brooklyn (October 2!!), Boston, Chicago, Newton, or Philadelphia! (Elle: “Enjoyed the short fiction of Carmen Maria Machado and Miranda July—writers who engage with the oddness of being a person who craves the tension, otherness, and oddness of other people? Then the unexpected, highly examined collisions in Tan's stories will hit your sweet spot.”)
PPS: If you end up getting this twice I’m very sorry; Tinyletter flagged my original for “abuse” (?) and held it for questioning.