4. Sep, 2018

Deep Heat

Sharp Objects, from the start, had a surreal quality.  This successfully continued through the narrative and relationships.

Camille - 'La dame aux camélias' , a fatal name for her - was the surviving daughter so far, but haunted and self inscribed (or was that on her back mother's doing) by self harm scarification.  She is a journalist sent back to the home town deep south to do a killer article on dead girls, newly murdered ones.  She has one constantly in her life, her sister, Marion,  who died on the cusp of  the menarche, apparently from natural causes.  The implication, from the start, was that there was something she could have done. 

In this series, everyone was flawed, destructive, self destructive, mendacious, narcissistic, small town inbred, mad and murderous.  What more could you want behind that li'l ol' picket fence?

Camille's parents floated like slightly crazed aliens on a sea of cocktails and recreationally haunting music, dancing like seaweed in the tides of the undercurrent of their assumed emotions in the big house outside of town.  The father was not her father.  We never knew who he was.  My guess, the gnarly old police chief.  

There were two sisters, one dead, one gliding with her confederates on rollerblades through town, undeterred by death, undettered by curfew, sweet as poison, indiscriminate outlaws, unseen and undetected.

Everything was hogtied, literally, by convention; pretend surface righteousness, the pig farm, and the vile nature of creating female stereotypes which end in murder.  It turns out, really, almost everyone knew, maybe...... 

The Categories:

1.  Dead Innocence

2. Survivor Guilt

3. Psychotic Narcissist Mother (Munchausen's by Proxy)

4. Self Harming Daughter (Camille)

5. Buying into it all Sociopathic/Psycopathic daughter (Amma)

6. Jackie the 'old family friend' (who always knew but never told and just drank her Bloodies)

7. The ex Cheerleaders, now Mommas, who breathe babies like prayer bombs to drop on the unwarily childless free girl, Camille.

8.  The Woman in White

9.  Amma is still at it - Camille, you blunderer!  She's doing for the new one she has befriended.

9.  Make of the clues what you will and they all stand out - Dolls House, Girls dressed like Dolls swooping through Town, Dead Girls with  their teeth pulled by Pig Killer Plyers, Dead Sister, Alkie Sister, Young Wierd Sister being a Good Girl, Bonkers Passive Stepfather, Lunatic Gently Spoken Momma killing the girls - only one emollient allowed it all :

10. Collusion 

It was filmed like an ongoing nightmare where occasionally you trusted the wrong ones. Brilliant.