Vox - Sharp Objects on HBO: episode reviews, recaps, and newshttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52517/voxv.png2018-08-27T17:24:51-04:00http://www.vox.com/rss/stream/173717372018-08-27T17:24:51-04:002018-08-27T17:24:51-04:00Sharp Objects’ shocking credits scenes — and what they reveal about the killer — explained
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<p>Witness the goddess of death in her element.</p> <p id="50GRzM"><a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/7/24/17607696/sharp-objects-hbo-review-recap-episodes-miniseries"><em>Sharp Objects</em></a> <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/8/26/17773188/sharp-objects-finale-review-who-did-it">went out with a bang</a> — and if you were reeling as the credits began to roll, it’s understandable if you didn’t stick around to watch them. </p>
<p id="VEB1RH">But if you stopped too soon, you likely missed the show’s final surprise: a shocking mid-credits scene that revealed much more about the show’s central mystery than you might have suspected. Not only does the scene go into detail about <em>how</em> Natalie and Ann were killed, it undoes a few layers of mystery about how those murders were committed — and who actually did it. Turns out that if you thought everyone in Wind Gap was harboring some sort of secret, you were more right than you knew. </p>
<p id="wrG12p">Want to know more? Read on for details, but beware — spoilers abound, including screencaps from the credits scenes that may be disturbing to some, especially if you’re just checking out the show for the first time (it gets violent!).</p>
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<p id="4hFAiO">As anyone who’s watched all of <em>Sharp Objects</em> will understand, the town of Wind Gap is full of killers — or at least a few killers and a whole lot of people in the know. The season finale, “Milk,” positions two of them as the two main suspects in the murders at the center of the show — Camille’s mother Adora, who poisoned Camille’s younger sister years ago, and Camille’s half-sister Amma, who’s revealed in the final scene to have killed her former two best friends, Ann and Natalie — and who has very probably just killed again.</p>
<p id="uTAWiN">As the finale concludes, Adora has been convicted for the two murders her daughter committed. We don’t know if Adora suspected her daughter and thus took the rap, but one thing we know about Amma is that she’s incredibly manipulative. Over the course of the series, we’ve seen how easily she manipulates Adora and Camille, as well as her fellow students at Wind Gap’s high school.</p>
<aside id="zvilOq"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Sharp Objects shows its teeth in a killer season finale","url":"https://www.vox.com/2018/8/26/17773188/sharp-objects-finale-review-who-did-it"}]}'></div></aside><p id="yhqDuk">But we don’t fully understand just <em>how</em> manipulative she is until the finale’s rolling credits abruptly shiver into a chilling montage. In a last nod to the show’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/7/6/17539160/sharp-objects-review-hbo-amy-adams">psychedelic editing</a>, we get a brutally quick sequence of Amma murdering Ann, Natalie, and one other woman — her new friend Mae. </p>
<p id="KVUIuC">But that’s not all. If you look close, you’ll see that Amma wasn’t working alone; she had help the whole time. </p>
<h3 id="IdUzeC">It takes a village to murder a child</h3>
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<figcaption>Letting Amma paint your nails is akin to letting Michael Corleone give you a kiss.</figcaption>
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<p id="0BBkS9">Right from this first shot of Amma’s new friend Mae, we know that this poor girl’s in trouble. Look at those painted nails. Remember: John Keene, Natalie’s brother, told Camille that when Natalie was found dead, her nails had been painted — something she would never do herself.</p>
<p id="LgJcNv">But we know who would.</p>
<p id="B7J2jx">The next couple of cuts show Ann, who we know was found dead in a local Wind Gap pond, being strangled by a gleeful Amma as other hands hold her down. </p>
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<p id="Ixva1g">A couple of other shots let us see who her assistants are: </p>
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<p id="H9xsp3">Yep — it’s Amma’s two enigmatic rollerblading buddies, Kelsey and Jodes (played by <a href="https://www.ibtimes.com/sharp-objects-sisters-april-violet-brinson-reveal-how-they-were-cast-ammas-friends-2710691">real-life sisters Violet and April Brinson</a>). They’ve been a constant background presence throughout the show, but though they’re slightly creepy in their own way, they’ve never stood out as particularly suspicious compared to Amma. There’s no doubt who our ringleader is.</p>
<p id="cfLjvF">The next few shots intercut images of Ann and Natalie — including this straight-out-of-a-horror-film shot of Natalie being murdered on the floor of the Wheeler’s carriage house. (Remember, the Wheelers are closely linked to the murders: older sister Ashley is Natalie’s brother John’s girlfriend; younger sister Kelsey is Amma’s accomplice.)</p>
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<p id="J9H2PP">Significantly, though it’s clear Amma <em>must</em> have needed help to drag Natalie’s body all the way from the carriage house to the alley in the middle of town where Natalie was found — especially since she apparently left no blood trail — we don’t see whether Amma needed anyone else to help her commit the actual murder. Given that we know she’s most likely going solo when she kills Mae, it’s not a stretch to imagine her murdering Natalie by herself and then engaging her friends to help her clean up after the fact.</p>
<p id="O07qpi">And we can see that escalation clearly in her face, as we get a first glimpse of Amma in full-on bloodlust mode while she’s strangling Ann:</p>
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<figcaption>Is this a primal scream of rage, pain, lust, or all of the above?</figcaption>
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<p id="q8z4hc">This shot is followed by one last image of the doomed Mae — and then another shudder-inducing shot of Amma as she relishes her work:</p>
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<figcaption>Who says girls can’t induce nightmares?</figcaption>
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<p id="ypDur4">This is the final image we see of the mid-credits scene. But at the <em>very</em> end, after the credits roll once again, we get one last coda: a quick shot of Amma as the Woman in White, summoning her friends to the woods — and to their deaths.</p>
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<h3 id="yOYlwu">Amma, goddess of death</h3>
<p id="6NxKpW">It’s clear from all of this that Amma loves murder. However, we also know that Amma’s been unknowingly ingesting regular doses of rat poison her whole life, so we’re not sure how much of her sociopathy is nature, nurture, or neurochemical.</p>
<p id="UVMgWQ">What’s obvious, though, is that she’s fully committed to the path she’s on. If you were paying close attention to the opening scene of the finale, when Camille arrived home and walked in on her family’s demented dinner table ritual, you’ll have noticed that Amma was cosplaying as Persephone, the virginal woman who, according to Greek mythology, was abducted by Hades, the king of the underworld — a.k.a. the god of death. </p>
<p id="pjUk70">As Amma noted, Persephone ended up happily married to Hades and was tasked with overseeing “punishment” for the denizens of hell. But she was also shunned by humans when she tried to return to earth. This seems to be where Amma, who throughout the season spoke repeatedly of how her friends didn’t really love her, has ended up — addicted to power and to death, but secretly craving real love and affection she doesn’t believe are hers.</p>
<p id="nx4ysQ">The one exception? Her big sister Camille, with whom she’s already developed a creepy, occasionally psychosexual bond. After saving Amma from their mother’s attempts to slowly kill her, Camille notes that Amma can’t sleep most nights unless she’s sleeping next to Camille, who seems to be her one true source of love and companionship. </p>
<p id="0vrQm2">But the game is up: Now Camille knows what her little sister truly is.</p>
<p id="GoADIV">Good luck sleeping next to that, Camille! </p>
<p id="vm7XFs">In fact, good luck sleeping ever again.</p>
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<figcaption>Sweet dreams.</figcaption>
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https://www.vox.com/2018/8/26/17780592/sharp-objects-mid-credits-scene-killerAja Romano2018-08-26T22:05:02-04:002018-08-26T22:05:02-04:00Sharp Objects shows its teeth in a killer season finale
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<p>The family that preys together stays together.</p> <p id="UUez9E"><a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/7/24/17607696/sharp-objects-hbo-review-recap-episodes-miniseries"><em>Sharp Objects</em></a> might be the slow-burn thriller of the year, but in the series finale, it showed us just how fast it could shift from zero to unhinged, off-the-rails madness.</p>
<p id="0MWRLd">Viewers who’ve been along for this ride have probably known for a while that this series about family secrets and inherited violence — the calling card of every true Southern gothic — wasn’t going to go down easy. Episode 8, “Milk,” was less about wrapping up loose plot points regarding its murder mystery and more about finally plunging our protagonist, Camille, into a full awareness of the past trauma and collective insanity she’s spent years blocking out. </p>
<p id="1XciA5">The result was almost a visceral experience at points, one in which the jagged editing and unreliable narration we’ve come to expect from this show finally converged to trap us in Camille’s head just as she entered a kind of nightmare fugue state. But to say more, we have to issue a huge spoiler warning for the events of tonight’s finale — including <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/8/26/17780592/sharp-objects-mid-credits-scene-killer">a shocking mid-credits scene you might have missed</a>.</p>
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<p id="mdzh80">In the last episode, we learned without much preamble that Adora, Camille’s mother — played with sinister perfection by Patricia Clarkson down to the ruthless finish — has Munchausen’s by Proxy, and that years ago, she killed Camille’s younger sister by making her progressively sicker and (most likely) ultimately poisoning her. </p>
<p id="tdmw1w">This giant reveal, however, was just a setup for the finale, in which Camille, returning home intending to confront her mother with the truth, instead seems to be psychologically overwhelmed by the horror and the implied complicity of the entire family — indeed, the entire community — in going along with Adora’s behavior. </p>
<p id="fWYxfO">Adora promptly immobilizes Camille by giving her a hefty dose of rat poison, and a nightmare cycle begins: Camille, traumatized and ill, regresses emotionally and allows Adora to finally “mother” her the way she’s always wanted, or threatened, to do. It’s <em>Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?</em> by way of Tennessee Williams, with Adora doling out a Grand Guignol of drama and faux sympathy as her daughter slurps down more poison. Meanwhile, Amma, whom Camille is in part trying to rescue by allowing herself to distract Adora, essentially refuses to leave — effectively dooming Camille.</p>
<p id="NiN7Wj">Luckily, Camille gets an 11th-hour rescue, and justice finally comes for Adora — but the moment you realize there’s still a good 15 minutes left in the episode, you know that <em>Sharp Objects</em>’ secrets haven’t all been revealed. And let’s face it: This show has only ever had two main suspects, so the moment you twig to the timestamp, you know what’s coming.</p>
<p id="8nsGD3">There is, however, one last twist this show has to deliver, and it comes in the form of a mid-credits scene. In a last nod to the show’s psychedelic editing, we get a brutally quick montage of Amma murdering Ann, Natalie, and sadly her new friend. But not only that — if you look close, you’ll see that Amma wasn’t working alone; she had help from her two rollerblading buddies the whole time. </p>
<aside id="JKrEc4"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Sharp Objects’ shocking credits scenes — and what they reveal about the killer — explained","url":"https://www.vox.com/2018/8/26/17780592/sharp-objects-mid-credits-scene-killer"}]}'></div></aside><p id="tRHBa3">So, did it all hang together? Was the final verdict on whodunnit a thrilling stunner or an anticlimax? Did Camille really come out of this as healthy as she seemed? </p>
<p id="7jRn0g">And did all those teeth <em>really</em> come from just two girls? </p>
<p id="K4darg">Vox’s <em>Sharp Objects</em> correspondents, Aja Romano and Alex Abad-Santos, weigh in.</p>
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<p id="WGv0GP"><strong>Aja: </strong>The intriguing part of this episode for me is that it kept reminding me that it had hidden all the elements of its plot reveals in plain sight from start to finish, and banked on my overlooking them, almost <em>because</em> they were so obvious. That’s the classic Southern gothic trope of a community enabling its horrors through sheer selective perception; but despite that, I kept being unwilling to accept what was right in front of me. </p>
<p id="cqVfts">For example, Adora’s treatment of Amma has reminded me throughout of <a href="https://www.vox.com/2017/5/15/11435792/hbo-mommy-dead-and-dearest-review-southern-gothic"><em>Mommy Dead and Dearest</em></a> — another real-life story of a fateful Munchausen’s-by-Proxy murder, one that also unfolded in a small Missouri town. Yet despite making this comparison in my head multiple times, I still needed to be told how Marian died. Likewise, it was so obvious from the beginning that Amma was the killer that <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/8/12/17675586/sharp-objects-episode-6-cherry-recap-review-amma">I was dubious she was the killer</a>. And then, of course, there’s that ivory floor.</p>
<p id="3Pl0dQ">I think all of this is meant to make us as viewers (or at least this viewer!) somewhat complicit in the malaise that’s afflicting the town, the malaise that causes everyone to just kick back and let Adora murder whoever she wants, lol. There’s that great, no-shit-Sherlock moment where Detective Willis (Chris Messina) announces that they’ve been looking “at the wrong half” of the town after weeks of nothing but nods to the fact that the killer’s a woman. </p>
<p id="JmD3Pp">And of course there’s Camille herself. Her entire fragmented psyche hinges on her denial of everything happening right in front of her. When she confronts that, she almost doesn’t survive it. And I think that we can read her conscious decisions in the finale — her walking into that house, willingly ingesting poison after she’s realized her mother is trying to kill her — as an allegorical act of atonement. It’s a nod to the messy, painful, gut-churning upheaval that true change requires of us — especially when we’re looking at change in a place like the small-town South.</p>
<p id="jHGU3v">Alex, what did you think? Was it all too obvious, or not obvious enough? Certainly there were lots of narrative gaps and ambiguities, but I was fine with them. I don’t know that everyone will be, though!</p>
<p id="jXlDPj"><strong>Alex:</strong> I’ve had Amma pegged as the killer from the very beginning (full disclosure: I never read the book or synopsis). And even though the last episode tried its best to throw me off, one of the things that didn’t make sense was the missing teeth. That was the killer’s M.O., and Adora is just too busy gliding around her gigantic house, twirling all kinds of poison, to be concerned with performing intensive dental work of her victims. Pulling out teeth would hurt her already-cut hand. </p>
<p id="T7PE5t">Where it started to click for me was the ongoing narrative that Camille is Adora’s daughter and has some piece of Adora in her. It’s the essential nature vs. nurture argument: Is Camille so fucked up because of the way Adora raised her, or is she fucked up because she inherited Adora’s traits?</p>
<p id="9Qpmjt">And the idea of Camille and Adora sharing that bond may change the way one would look at Camille’s reaction to sex and pain, or her self-harm and suicidal streak, or the way she wants to take care of Amma but doesn’t know how. </p>
<p id="8pa3IX">I kept waiting for the show to explicitly say that Camille isn’t Adora’s only offspring, and that Amma has that in her, too. There were hints of it that whole time: the way she befriended both girls, the way she turns her personas on and off, the way she plays up and off of her image as either the town’s mean girl or the town’s (and Adora’s) angelic heroine who needs to be protected. And of course she’s Adora’s kid because, guess what, she loves murder. </p>
<p id="PjrLKw">And about that: How did you feel about the ending?</p>
<p id="bloh8a"><strong>Aja:</strong> Aesthetically, I loved the ending, though of course it was visible a mile off. Eliza Scanlen has done such an incredible job throughout the series of balancing Amma’s appearance as that vulnerable little girl, held ostensibly in thrall to her mother’s will, against all the glimpses of her budding sociopathy. I loved her last line, too, because it’s such a great encapsulation of that balance: I believed that she really did want to stay her mother’s little girl forever, in a certain state of innocence and deniability. </p>
<p id="d0lJ8u">However, since we saw her and Adora face off over her dollhouse last episode, when we see Adora remove the roof (where we later find all the teeth), I’m also curious about whether Adora knew all along that her daughter was the killer. “Don’t tell Mama” what Mama already knows is par for the course in Wind Gap, I’d imagine.</p>
<p id="piQ9ob">What held less plausibility for me were Camille’s actions from the moment she reentered her house after realizing that Adora killed her sister. For starters, why didn’t she go to Detective Willis before she went back home, much less before she drank rat poison? I can get that she was in such shock and denial that she didn’t realize how much danger she was in; but this series’ very well-embedded themes of women’s agency, and how women gain autonomy over their restrictive environments, broke down for me to a large degree in the finale. I’m still processing Camille’s psychology.</p>
<p id="LXyoMk">Actually, <em>Sharp Objects</em>’ last few episodes have all reminded me hugely of <a href="https://www.vox.com/summer-movies/2018/6/1/17408988/hereditary-review-toni-collette-milly-shapiro"><em>Hereditary</em></a>, which has a lot of the same ambience and themes: unhinged family dynamics layered over giant secrets and mental illness, and a lead character who’s drawn into their family’s spiraling madness and continual reliving of trauma. And both narratives leave us asking, just as you were, Alex, whether your genes determine your fate, or if perhaps part of what we are inheriting is a more systemic disease. </p>
<p id="495O0T">But what about Amma? How many more victims does she have? And just how many people in Wind Gap knew Adora killed her daughter and said nothing?</p>
<p id="GgmmgR"><strong>Alex: </strong>Well, it looks like Amma has some new, loose teeth for her dollhouse floor, so I would guess that her new friend in the apartment building is gone. The only question now is if Camille will turn her in to the authorities or let her slide because she’s family. If Camille acts like the residents of Wind Gap, then Amma will have to get a bigger dollhouse. </p>
<p id="cE7JoA">As for the residents of Wind Gap, admitting that Adora killed Marian and poisoned her would mean admitting that their town is as heinous as they all know it to be. It’s like Calhoun Day: a lavish day of antebellum cosplay and barbecue that, at its heart, is a strange, horny mythologizing of rape. Admitting that Calhoun Day and Adora are disgusting and warped means coming to the realization that they, the residents of Wind Gap, are themselves disgusting and warped as well. That they all need to look in themselves and be honest about the depravity they might find. And it’s much easier to ignore that, or drink it away (like Jackie O’Neill), than face it. </p>
<p id="KbvF6j">Any final thoughts on the series and the finale? We don’t need a second season, do we? </p>
<p id="oroQJC"><strong>Aja:</strong> Regarding the “ignore/drink it away” model for surviving a Southern gothic, I want to note that my <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/7/15/17563868/sharp-objects-episode-2-dirt-recap">initial observation</a> that “towns like Wind Gap doom girls like Camille” has proven true: Ultimately, the only way through the repressive social system is to silently internalize its violence — which might mean you don’t survive — or visit it upon someone else. </p>
<p id="ML4Noh">We don’t <em>need</em> a second season to drive that point home any further; but are you honestly telling me you <em>don’t</em> want at least eight more episodes of rollerblading, serial-killing, ring-leading, incestuous Eliza Scanlen? Just avert your eyes from the moral schematics and focus on the aesthetic appeal instead. Nothing could be more in keeping with <em>Sharp Objects</em> than that.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2018/8/26/17773188/sharp-objects-finale-review-who-did-itAja RomanoAlex Abad-Santos2018-08-19T22:05:02-04:002018-08-19T22:05:02-04:00In Sharp Objects’ “Falling,” we get one step closer to the killer
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<figcaption>Patricia Clarkson as Adora in Sharp Objects. | Anne Marie Fox/HBO</figcaption>
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<p>The men of Wind Gap are still in denial about what the town’s women are capable of.</p> <p id="HbSE7y">If you’ve been watching <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/7/24/17607696/sharp-objects-hbo-review-recap-episodes-miniseries"><em>Sharp Objects</em></a><em>,</em> you know that solving the murder mystery isn’t really part of the story the show seems most concerned with telling. For the past six episodes, we’ve been examining the underpinnings of the Wind Gap murders, mostly through the lens of Camille’s (<a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0010736/?ref_=tt_cl_t1">Amy Adams</a>) deranged family life and her inescapable past. </p>
<p id="XYxHlA">It’s been a slow burn, while the show has focused on stories and themes centered on female sexuality, the idea of who gets to tell women’s stories, and society’s expectations of women. (It also interrogated a <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/8/5/17648858/sharp-objects-episode-5-recap-amma-killer">creepy, horny version</a> of a Civil War heroine myth.)</p>
<p id="3orcsT">But because it has spent so much time showing us the local color of Wind Gap, when <em>Sharp Objects</em> finally sinks its teeth into the murder mystery at its core, as it does in “Falling,” the result is something a little more satisfying — due to all the personal stakes involved — than the typical quest to figure out whodunnit. </p>
<h3 id="DbFyfp">
<em>Sharp Objects</em> is almost certainly serving a red herring in Vickery’s suspicion of John Keene</h3>
<p id="15hx8t">A major development in “Falling” is that Wind Gap’s police chief, Vickery (<a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0002023/?ref_=tt_cl_t5">Matt Craven</a>), has settled on who he believes is the murderer: John Keene (<a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4973896/?ref_=tt_cl_t11">Taylor John Smith</a>). There's just one problem: <em>Sharp Objects</em> has telegraphed, in a number of ways, that Keene didn’t do it. </p>
<p id="7VLMGz">One reason I don’t believe Keene killed both girls is that Vickery is so very sure he did. Vickery, if you’ve been paying attention, has been one of <em>Sharp Objects</em>’ most inept and dishonorable characters since the show began. He’s been particularly cruel to Camille. And the way he used the promise of fame to coerce a dirty confession from Keene’s girlfriend is clearly supposed to leave a sour taste in our mouths. </p>
<p id="SJrvsW">While talking to Camille about how he’s dealt with his sister’s murder, Keene reveals something striking that regarding the mentality of Wind Gap’s men. He tells her that men are supposed to keep their emotions in check; otherwise they’re looked down upon, and it’s this mentality that’s deeply affecting him. </p>
<p id="ehDBw2">“People think I did it because I cry about it,” he tells her. “[They say] denial is good for men.” </p>
<p id="pLYKgl">John’s comment seems to indicate that a more typical reaction would be for him to mire himself in denial: denial of his emotions, denial of his pain, and denial of the situation at hand. Men are supposed to be strong, or at least appear strong and firm. And because he’s not acting the way men of Wind Gap are supposed to, he’s Vickery’s prime suspect. </p>
<p id="QZ6dVN">Perhaps John’s comment is also <em>Sharp Objects</em> hinting at how we should interpret the chief’s behavior. Vickery is in denial that there could be other suspects in the murders. He’s in denial of how much he’s in over his head in the investigation, how little evidence he has against Keene, and how much he’s written off other suspects — he just wants to get these cases solved. We’re privy to how slapdash he’s handled the case and how desperate he is to close this mystery. And he’s made a grave mistake in thinking Keene is the killer. </p>
<h3 id="uAIFtc">The show is now pointing us toward Adora being the killer, but I don’t believe it</h3>
<p id="T3lakN"><strong>“</strong>Falling” contains a major revelation: Adora killed Camille’s sister<strong> </strong>Marian when she was a child because she suffers from <a href="https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/9834-factitious-disorder-imposed-on-another-fdia">Munchausen syndrome by proxy</a>. It’s explained rather bluntly in the episode, through an interview Willis conducts with Marian’s former nurse: The disease involves making your child sick to receive attention, and in Adora’s case it was Marian. We also see that Adora is having a relapse and is slowly poisoning Amma.</p>
<p id="C12mJu">The major problem for Amma is that no one but Camille (and Willis to some extent) know about Adora’s true nature and her possible connection to the murders. (It’s unclear if Willis has made this connection yet.) </p>
<p id="x0uncu">Willis gives Camille Jackie O’Neil’s requests for Marian’s autopsy results and medical records, signaling she knew something was fishy about the way Marian died. And we also find out that the nurse’s diagnosis has largely been swept under the rug — after she went to the police, she was fired from her job (Vickery and Adora are friends). Further, the nurse’s reputation has been ruined (by accusations of drug abuse) so no one wants to believe her.</p>
<p id="qcxKvj">It all comes back to a central idea of this story: There’s a benevolent stripe of sexism in Wind Gap such that no one believes, or wants to believe, that the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/22/17590172/sharp-objects-episode-3-recap-fix">women of Wind Gap</a> could be capable of terrible things. And the only people attuned to the idea of what Wind Gap’s women are capable of are Wind Gap’s other women. </p>
<p id="Atye9D">That idea extends to Camille being the only person who believes her mother should be the prime suspect in the murders of the other two girls, even though previous episodes of <em>Sharp Objects</em> have shown that Adora had relationships or friendships with the girls. It also could explain how and why Jackie knows about how Adora hurt Marian (another revelation), but no one will believe her. </p>
<p id="DZ8ozE">The men of the town are conditioned to believe that though Wind Gap’s women gossip and stab each other in the back in petty ways, they’re not really capable of deranged, twisted, violence. </p>
<p id="sThEcB">It’s crystallized neatly in a small scene at the end of “Falling.” Chief Vickery tells Amma’s two friends to be careful and watch out because a drunk driver could come careening down the highway and accidentally hurt or kill them. Vickery automatically refers to the hypothetical driver as a man, and is quickly corrected by the girls. </p>
<p id="9lG6iE">“Word of advice, keep your eyes open. Some drunk comes flying down this road, he’ll hit ya before he sees ya,” he tells them. </p>
<p id="0GpKdm">“Or she, don’t be sexist, chief,” one of Amma’s friends responds. </p>
<p id="AIlbo7">The irony is that Vickery watched Camille drive past the girls in her car just seconds earlier. Perhaps he didn’t realize it was her. And I suppose you could make the argument that Camille had sobered up since drinking earlier in the episode (with John Keene and that Bloody Mary). But all season long, she has been chugging vodka and then driving without the chief noticing, even if he has his eye on her. </p>
<p id="Lsdk9h">That’s why, while the Adora revelation provides quite the shock, I don’t think she is the actual killer. The murders, we’ve been told, are of the violent and passionate variety. Adora slowly poisoned Marian and was, as <em>Sharp Objects</em> explains, more concerned with being seen as a healer or savior. That doesn’t match up with the nature of murders. I still fully believe <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/8/5/17648858/sharp-objects-episode-5-recap-amma-killer">Amma is the killer</a>, so I’m wondering if the show will make good on my theory and give us a final twist. </p>
https://www.vox.com/2018/8/19/17704822/sharp-objects-episode-7-recap-adora-killerAlex Abad-Santos2018-08-12T22:05:02-04:002018-08-12T22:05:02-04:00Sharp Objects’ most obvious suspect may not be the murderer, but she’s still dangerous
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<figcaption>Amma (Eliza Scanlen) in <em>Sharp Objects</em>. | HBO</figcaption>
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<p>Amma is a would-be Machiavelli. But is she a sociopath?</p> <p id="JxleI4">One reason you can be sure <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/7/24/17607696/sharp-objects-hbo-review-recap-episodes-miniseries">HBO’s <em>Sharp Objects</em></a> is a true Southern Gothic is that when its debutante gloves finally unpeel, you don’t <em>just</em> get an effusion of secrets and darkness and a lot of deep-buried social dysfunction. In episode six, “Cherry,” once the passive-aggressive politeness starts to give away to truth-telling, you also get some unhinged wildness: ear-biting, some light incest, some heavy sociopathy, and a literal shit pit.</p>
<p id="Dc4D93">Yes, the intensity and the memories are ramping up for Camille as she revisits her hometown of Wind Gap, Missouri. But in “Cherry,” there are also some significant developments in the case, in case you were so distracted by all the sociopathy and incest you forgot there were murders to solve.</p>
<p id="Fk92Cn">Granted, we don’t learn <em>much</em> about the murders. But what we do learn is weighty.</p>
<h3 id="TUP19a">The tangled family ties between Amma and Camille get even knottier </h3>
<p id="VSRwD3">Like every episode before it, “Cherry” stints on procedural case-file crime-solving and delivers juicy drama, reams of gossip, and subtext thicker than summer heat in a tent revival. In this go-round, director Jean-Marc Vallée puts the focus back on Amma’s relationship with Camille, as our favorite teen fatale lures her older sister through a typical suburban house party, where Amma gets into a brief fight with John Keene (the brother of murder victim No. 2, Natalie) and his girlfriend Ashley over their mutual suspicions of each other. </p>
<p id="XvzsdT">We get a brief sis-on-sis kiss, then a rare moment of sisterly bonding that <em>doesn’t</em> feel entirely manipulative on Amma’s part — at least until she asks Camille to take her back to St. Louis with her. </p>
<p id="Y1cH83">It’s a revealing moment for both sisters. Amma, who admits openly that none of her friends like her, but she knows how to control them, calls Camille her “soulmate,” then laughs, saying that maybe this is what a bond of sisterhood feels like. Camille, drugged out and feeling pretty great about it, keeps having flashbacks to all the dead girls she’s loved before — her dead younger sister, Marianne, and her dead hospital roommate — but she lets herself give in to Amma anyway. </p>
<p id="WbQhWJ">Meanwhile, Camille’s threadbare relationship with her mother is almost worn through; after last week’s ice-cold declaration from Adora that she never loved her daughter, this week mom wants daughter out of the house. Camille is dragging her feet, though, in part because new facts about the crime are emerging, and in part because of her developing feelings for Detective Willis, who’s doing a little investigation into Camille’s ill-fated stint in the hospital where her roommate died by suicide. And probably there’s plenty of reluctant love there for Amma, too.</p>
<p id="OuteHg">And we also get some major murder clues! Camille notices that someone appears to have <em>bitten off a huge chunk of Ashley’s ear</em>, which is about as disturbing to look at in the episode as it is to write out. When Camille confronts her about this, asking if Natalie might have done it when she was being murdered, Ashley hisses that if Camille wants to know about Natalie, she should ask the girl’s mother.</p>
<p id="CabIfN">And speaking of another dead girl, we still don’t know how Camille’s sister Marianne died, though in this episode someone <em>finally</em> asks if anyone ever conducted an autopsy. “Of course not,” Adora’s best friend Jackie tells Detective Willis; Adora wouldn’t allow her to be “carved up.” (At this point I think we can probably go ahead and put “best friend” in irony quotes, yikes, Jacks.)</p>
<p id="f4Mwec">Finally, the biggest clue: workers at Adora’s pig farm pull the bike of Ann Nash, the first victim — which she was riding when she disappeared — out of a sludge pond. Later, one of the workers claims he saw John Keene bury it there. Naturally, this doesn’t look good for John. For one thing, there’s Bob Nash’s cut-off assertion from an earlier episode that he saw John up to suspicious behavior while working at the pig farm; and there’s Adora’s quick-firing of him from the farm for unknown reasons. </p>
<p id="5CiQrv">But we also know one other suspect who’s fond of hanging around the slaughterhouse: Amma. And given that <em>Sharp Objects</em> has leaned very hard into signaling that <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/29/17622534/sharp-objects-episode-4-ripe-recap-theories">the murderer is a woman</a>, it’s probably high time we look at the evidence for and against our favorite burgeoning Machiavellian.</p>
<h3 id="ms2iL5">It’s probably not Amma!</h3>
<p id="chEJJ1">I’m going to split with <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/8/5/17648858/sharp-objects-episode-5-recap-amma-killer">my colleague Alex Abad-Santos</a> here and say that I <em>don’t</em> think it’s Amma — though I agree it’s <em>highly</em> telling that no one has suspected her (except John Keene, who clearly thinks she’s a criminal). </p>
<p id="uJTvQ2">For one thing, since she’s the only current suspect we know who was super-friendly with the murder victims, she’s the too-obvious frontrunner. But more importantly, I don’t believe that the tools in Amma’s toolbox — weaponized femininity, emotional manipulation, and secret knowledge — are really joined with sociopathy. </p>
<p id="8chCXH">True, we’ve seen her manipulate and cajole Camille and her friends throughout the series, and we’ve seen her manipulate and lie to her mother while effectively creating a double life for herself. And she does apparently read Machiavelli, which, okay, Amma, you do you, girl.</p>
<p id="Gndnq7">But her manipulation of her mother has, so far, been about creating that double life, and gaining some unhealthy recreational escapism, all because she’s bored. That’s pretty typical teenage fare. </p>
<p id="0Xe3nZ">And while her ugliest moments — the lollipop in Camille’s hair, her forcing Camille to reveal her body <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/8/5/17648858/sharp-objects-episode-5-recap-amma-killer">in the previous episode</a>, and her choice to create a giant drama by running into the woods on Calhoun Day — have all been very ugly, indeed, they’ve also revolved around her need for love and attention from Camille. She puts the used lollipop in Camille’s hair after seeing her with Detective Willis and reacting out of jealousy; she runs into the woods after realizing that Camille’s not paying any attention to her performance because she’s chatting with Willis instead of watching her. She steals Camille’s clothes in the dressing room out of anger that Camille didn’t share her article with her before she published it for the whole town.</p>
<p id="3L1HiR">Though we have zero reason to believe Amma’s actually sexually attracted to her older sister (except that it wouldn’t be Gothic without a <em>little</em> incest), she’s clearly gotten possessive of her, fast. This makes sense, because up until now she’s been living a doll’s life for a terrifying mother, among shallow friends who don’t understand her. She clearly wants Camille to idolize her as much as she idolizes Camille. But is that sociopathy or just loneliness? My money’s on loneliness.</p>
<h3 id="5ANdpV">But that doesn’t mean Amma’s not dangerous</h3>
<p id="glscBF">I also think that <em>Sharp Objects</em> has been trying to present a clear distinction between the kinds of weapons that give a woman power in a town like Wind Gap and the kind that don’t. Amma’s weapons (her femininity, a growing cache of secrets) give her power over the people around her, and they render her dangerous — as well as vulnerable to anyone who might know more than she does. </p>
<p id="GZvClR">But we’ve also seen the kind of weapons that don’t work. Ashley’s attempt to manipulate the narrative of the murders on John’s behalf fails because she doesn’t know enough; she tells Camille they won’t be “outcasts” but ends up getting jeered out of the house party by teens. And Camille’s internalization of the trauma and abuse she’s suffered is literally written all over her, but her turning inward and retreating from Wind Gap has only made her a target for gossip and judgment upon her return home. Trying to make a power move too early in the game of secrets won’t help you win — but concealing what you know forever only leaves you vulnerable.</p>
<p id="WlEwGc">It’s significant, then, that <em>Sharp Objects</em> jettisons the completely linear, bird’s-eye-view viewpoint we saw last episode on Calhoun Day to put us deeper than ever into Camille’s masterfully edited, jittery, deteriorating mental state. As Camille’s relationships unravel, so does her memory; when Amma’s history teacher — who’s also one of the football players who gang-raped Camille years earlier — tries to apologize to her, she reacts, to his horror, as though she barely remembers what he’s talking about. </p>
<p id="kkfzqE">When she hangs out with her old cheerleading friends, now all mainly settled conservative suburbanites, she tries to apologize to the team’s sole black cheerleader for how they all treated her, only to be blown off in turn. Memory is another deceptive weapon that Camille is still learning to wield; without it, she can’t control her narrative. And it’s clear at this point that Camille’s narrative is tied to Ann and Natalie’s murders — and to Marianne’s.</p>
<p id="LpeyMT">Is Camille repressing knowledge of her sister’s murder? Does Adora want her to scram because she’s digging too deep and getting too close? Does Amma want to be more than just sisters? </p>
<p id="2RuWVk">I’m guessing (hoping?) the answer to all these questions is yes, and with just two episodes to go, I can’t wait to see how<em> Sharp Objects</em> delivers.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2018/8/12/17675586/sharp-objects-episode-6-cherry-recap-review-ammaAja Romano2018-08-05T22:05:01-04:002018-08-05T22:05:01-04:00In Sharp Objects’ “Closer,” women’s stories don’t belong to them
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<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/XkkQVo5S8AkyX5EZAMSIAPX0aTw=/53x0:3253x2400/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/60729233/fcff03ed82e9d3cbd5e085049a6b0e043f9e69651f084529f7172cabd31d7a98a325c883c8230a6dbcf12d7c7924846b.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Sharp Objects/Amy Adams | Anne Marie Fox/HBO</figcaption>
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<p>Camille’s article about the murders is finally being read by the citizens of Wind Gap. They aren’t happy.</p> <p id="u5RUyd"><a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/7/24/17607696/sharp-objects-hbo-review-recap-episodes-miniseries"><em>Sharp Objects</em></a>’ fifth episode, “Closer,” followed the plot slowdown of “<a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/29/17622534/sharp-objects-episode-4-ripe-recap-theories">Ripe</a>” by revving its engine and dropping some major hints about the killer. </p>
<p id="mAGLYw">It makes sense that this installment feels like the show is shrugging off its lull — we’re now more than halfway through its eight-episode season. And “Closer” is possibly the soapiest chapter yet.</p>
<p id="L0XRUR">Every character, it seems, is ready to have sex with someone, kill someone, or both.</p>
<p id="MWKQli">The town of Wind Gap is celebrating Calhoun Day, which appears to be some sort of Confederate Comic-Con. People are dressed in Civil War garb, which seems to make Adora (<a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0010736/?ref_=tt_cl_t1">Patricia Clarkson</a>) very happy and possibly horny. </p>
<p id="MeaW8k">At the center of Calhoun Day is a play about Millie Calhoun, a woman who was raped by Union soldiers but still refused to give up her husband’s whereabouts and betray him. Amma (<a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm7340546/?ref_=tt_cl_t4">Eliza Scanlen</a>) is playing that character with a too-enthusiastic vigor, considering this is the same role that spurred her creepy, sexual interaction with her teacher in “Ripe.” It’s not just Amma who relishes the character; the townspeople do too — whether or not they realize that part of the fantasy is sexual. </p>
<p id="SIM5FF">“It’s how she resists that everyone in this town just loves,” Camille (<a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0010736/?ref_=tt_cl_t1">Amy Adams</a>) tells Detective Willis (<a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0582149/?ref_=tt_cl_t3">Chris Messina</a>). “They tied her to a tree. They did horrible things to her. Violations. But Millie never said a word.”</p>
<p id="IDAsMi">While the Calhoun Day festivities are happening, Camille’s story about the murders is finally being read by the citizens of Wind Gap. They aren’t happy. The Veranda Women led by Jackie O’Neill can’t stop gossiping about Adora’s girls.<strong> </strong>The town’s mean girls want to invite Camille over for a girls’ night and talk about the murders (she declines).<strong> </strong>And people can’t stop gossiping about how they think Camille is sleeping with Willis to get more information. </p>
<p id="vDendz">But if you ask me, Camille doesn’t need to be talking to Willis about the murders. It seems like <em>Sharp Objects</em>, especially in this episode, is signaling that Camille is closer to the murderer than Willis’s investigation is — Camille just doesn’t know it yet. </p>
<h3 id="Ebdzyy">Why Amma should be the biggest suspect, but isn’t</h3>
<p id="Ayydef">Throughout the season, the townspeople and sheriff of Wind Gap have just assumed that the person who killed Natalie and Ann is a man. <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/22/17590172/sharp-objects-episode-3-recap-fix">In episode three</a>, we saw how no one in Wind Gap can seem to fathom the notion of a dangerous woman. </p>
<p id="L2rnuR">That echoes again in “Closer” when Willis and Bob Nash (<a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0153855/?ref_=tt_cl_t12">Will Chase</a>) have a confrontation at Calhoun Day. They talk about finding Nash’s daughter’s killer and, without thinking, automatically assume it’s a man. </p>
<p id="zG2EPW">“I’m telling you, we’re gonna get this guy,” Willis tells Nash. </p>
<p id="pAk75L">“You gonna strangle him and rip out his teeth?” Nash asks in response. </p>
<p id="PLW5ZC">The rest of the townspeople, who have now read Camille’s article, obviously believe the killer is a man too. But they think it’s either Nash or John Keene. Camille never specified that those two men are suspects in the murders. But everyone, including people in her own family, seems to assume that the police taking a closer look in town means they’re looking at Nash and Keene. </p>
<p id="vcLO28">What people are missing is the sociopath in a babydoll dress standing right in front of them. And in “Closer,” she displays flashes of real menace and manipulation. </p>
<p id="AJrcdx">In one of the opening scenes, Amma shares an intimate conversation with Camille. She says something that angers Adora, to which the latter responds by skittering out of the room in anger. Then Amma pulls out a phone from underneath her top and tells Camille that she has a secret phone their mother doesn’t know about. Camille uses the opportunity to ask Amma about her friendships with Natalie and Ann. </p>
<p id="0Ko3eb">“I don’t like to think about them. It scares me,” Amma tells her. “I feel bad because we weren’t friends anymore when it happened.” </p>
<p id="zfcC3L">I doubt we’re supposed to fully believe Amma at this point. After all, she does like to hang out at the slaughterhouse; I’d assume she would have at least a <em>slight</em> fascination with these murders. </p>
<p id="EGPzNw">Then Amma continues to talk wistfully about building forts, and how she didn’t get to do that with her ex-best friends who are now also ex-alive. </p>
<p id="fSoD8c">That’s when she flips a switch. </p>
<p id="aMN2oj">Hurt that she didn’t get to see Camille’s article before it was published, Amma finds retribution on a shopping excursion with Camille and Adora. While Camille waits in a dressing room to try on clothes, her original clothes disappear (Amma is the culprit), and she’s left in her underwear while Adora and Amma wait outside. She doesn’t want anyone to see her scars, has a complete meltdown, and yells at both Amma and Adora. Her sister and her mother see her scars.</p>
<p id="LBuv2t">Amma apologizes, and then uses the moment to get closer to Camille. She asks if the cutting hurts. She says she knows a girl who cuts too. She then gives Camille a dress to wear to Calhoun Day, and tells Camille that they’re really two kindred spirits, stuck in Wind Gap — that Camille can’t leave her. </p>
<p id="JWc4kY">“If I can [survive in Wind Gap], you can,” Amma says, begging her to stay. </p>
<p id="JTiOXn">This isn’t the first time Amma has swung from cruelty to caring. We saw it when she talked about how she gets her best friends to do everything. That was followed by remorse. We saw it when she and her friends harassed Camille and she stuck a lollipop in Camille’s hair. That too was followed by an apology. And now we’ve seen her flip this switch again. </p>
<p id="YdLCzI">Amma strikes me as someone who is very good at being emotionally manipulative. She knows how to terrorize someone and play them for fools at the same time. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if she did the same to her two ex-best friends — and possibly killed them too. </p>
<h3 id="p1scrN">
<em>Sharp Objects</em> want to show how women aren’t in control of their own stories</h3>
<p id="KEeUea">Beneath the costumes and Confederate role play of Calhoun Day, Wind Gap’s citizens are all upset with Camille’s story about the murders. Adora is mad because she basically gets upset when Camille breathes, let alone writes a newspaper article. Chief Vickery (<a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0002023/?ref_=tt_cl_t5">Matt Craven</a>) is angry because he thinks Willis is spilling secrets. The Wind Gap mean girls (Camille’s high school peers) and Veranda Women are upset because they seem to want to offer their insight, but don’t feel like they were given the chance to. </p>
<p id="5Q3kCW">While the town is reeling over Camille’s account of what happened, it’s also ironically celebrating another story: the story of Millie Calhoun, the heroine who endured rape and abuse at the hands of Union soldiers. </p>
<p id="Rg7LPj">As Camille points out, it’s a completely creepy fascination. Millie isn’t given any agency in her own story, other than to serve the purpose of glorifying the South. And Camille mentions that Millie is also a child bride who originally came from a Union family, a detail that isn’t explored. </p>
<p id="d46QJn">Camille isn’t the only one who feels weird about celebrating Calhoun Day the way Wind Gap does.</p>
<p id="H4kXes">“[Adora] said it’s that way only because it’s written by men,” Amma says. </p>
<p id="lrBkEj">Wind Gap’s animosity over Camille’s account of the murder investigation juxtaposed with the town’s adoration of the Calhoun rape fantasy is striking. Both are telling the story of girls or young women who were victims of heinous crimes. The one striving for truth was written by a woman. The other that glorifies this rape was written by men. </p>
<p id="pD8Ezv">We know which one Wind Gap likes better, and the symbolism of how the town values the words of its women is notable. If Camille or a woman had written the tale of Millie Calhoun, it probably would have been a lot different. I’d imagine Millie would have more agency, for one thing. </p>
<p id="PUOvaG">With “Closer,” <em>Sharp Objects</em> wants to show, again, that Wind Gap underestimates its women. They’re used as figureheads to feel pride, they’re victims to feel pity for, they’re angels to be avenged, but, as the show emphasizes, they don’t have autonomy even in their own stories. That’s the difference between myth and reality, and between the women of Wind Gap and how society sees them. </p>
https://www.vox.com/2018/8/5/17648858/sharp-objects-episode-5-recap-amma-killerAlex Abad-Santos2018-07-29T22:05:01-04:002018-07-29T22:05:01-04:00In Sharp Objects, secrets are the sharpest weapons of all
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<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ymskBEfObyAksk3zedB-w2M_SzU=/0x0:1333x1000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/60601869/MV5BODViODExM2UtNTQ3NS00ZTdlLTkxNjctYWIyMjJkMDFjMmZkXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNzg5MzIyOA__._V1_SY1000_SX1500_AL_.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>HBO</figcaption>
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<p>In “Ripe,” the line between endangered and dangerous is written in secrets.</p> <p id="iKh5tj">So far, HBO’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/7/24/17607696/sharp-objects-hbo-review-recap-episodes-miniseries"><em>Sharp Objects</em></a> has meandered through its small-town murder mystery at a deceptively slow pace. On its face, this gives us time to pause and look around and enjoy the scenery: the bucolic locations, the flawless acting, the gorgeous imagery.</p>
<p id="uS8BK4">But as we’ve <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/7/15/17563868/sharp-objects-episode-2-dirt-recap">observed before</a>, <em>Sharp Objects</em> is also giving us a much deeper interrogation below the surface into small-town politics, gender dynamics, and power structures. And while episode four, “Ripe,” may have seemed to be giving us very little by way of plot, it was actually imparting a parade float-load of information — just not in conventional ways.</p>
<h3 id="T8CA2b">
<em>Sharp Objects</em> is slowly revealing its true methods of detection</h3>
<p id="YzdmJE">At this point in our story, Amy Adams’s boozy journalist Camille is done with the initial pretense that took her back to her hometown. Her story on Wind Gap’s two young murder victims, Natalie and Ann, has been filed. Now, still on orders from her editor, she’s just hanging around looking for follow-ups — but for the time being, she’s doing very little writing and a lot of listening.</p>
<p id="QfLTSN">The amount of intense listening Camille does in <em>Sharp Objects</em> is overshadowed by the amount of blurry, disorienting remembering she does, which is again overshadowed by the amount of talking other people do. </p>
<p id="FeYpcN">But all these things should tell you something very important about how this show is unfolding not only its plot but its underlying agenda, which is to explore how women in repressive cultures like the small-town South learn to manipulate gender expectations and systems of power. <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/22/17590172/sharp-objects-episode-3-recap-fix">As we saw in episode three</a>, the men of Wind Gap are constantly underestimating the town’s women, but as episode four steadily unwinds, we start to understand that the women are using their own separate language to stay far ahead of the men. </p>
<p id="XIlJc6">The show itself gives viewers a huge tip-off. As Camille shows Detective Willis around town — exchanging information for information — she tells him that the way of Wind Gap is to “find out all your secrets and then use them against you later.” This sounds like a cliché, but much of the truth about what’s happening in Wind Gap is masquerading behind platitudes — like the idea that the women are all talk, too gentle and passive for murder. </p>
<p id="QB2KGa">In “Ripe,” what we start to see clearly, if we pay close attention, is that the passivity is a huge tool. When Camille listens to everything the other characters are saying, she’s stockpiling information, because she knows well that in Wind Gap, information is power — specifically, information about the past, and secrets.</p>
<p id="KPQEUG">And while <em>Sharp Objects</em> started out being full of literal sharp objects, in the forms of knives, pins, needles, and possibly even the venom of one prominent spider, as the series has gone on, we’ve seen less of those and more of the kinds of weapons that wound in different ways. In this episode, listening to what characters were saying and doing, I began to piece together that the <em>real</em> sharp objects of Wind Gap are all about knowledge and who controls it.</p>
<p id="AbVWcH">Camille’s ahead of me. She’s already figured out that if you want to know who killed Natalie and Ann, you have to start by figuring out who’s weaponizing what against whom.</p>
<h3 id="87SFo3">Weaponized objects in Wind Gap boil down to two things: sex and secrets</h3>
<p id="cPji2n">Here’s a rough rundown of all the “clues” we know so far pertaining to the actual murders:</p>
<ul>
<li id="q0SO77">The murderer removed the teeth of both victims but staged the bodies in very different ways in different locations.</li>
<li id="vtxQ88">The local police chief is investigating out-of-town truckers and local migrants, but Willis believes the killer knew the victims and is someone local.</li>
<li id="qrkZFf">A local boy reported seeing a “woman in white” dragging Natalie into the woods.</li>
<li id="rUkQBK">Ann’s father, Bob Nash, is a suspect but suspects Natalie’s brother, John Keene, in part because of something suspicious he knows about what John was doing at the plant Camille’s mother owns.</li>
<li id="fVvKZn">There’s a probability Camille’s mother knows about this too, since she abruptly fired John shortly after she likely overheard this conversation between Bob and Camille.</li>
<li id="1XuKd8">John’s girlfriend, Ashley, noticed a blood spot under the couch at John’s house (where his mother had recently been seen reclining) and cleaned it up, presumably to protect him. </li>
<li id="GouM7Q">Natalie and Ann were frenemies — and as John tells Camille in this episode, her sister Amma was close to them and often kept them from fighting.</li>
<li id="dTtDTV">Natalie, Ann, and Amma have a connection to the creepy hunting shed in the middle of the woods that recurs in Camille’s memory. Though we’re not sure what this is all about yet, it’s clear this is bad news.</li>
</ul>
<p id="4er7ix">When you add all this up, it’s really not a lot. But when you add up everything <em>else</em> that’s happening, through either cryptic conversations or implied suggestions about the past, things that don’t ostensibly seem connected to the murders start to seem ominous.</p>
<p id="36f8K7">The most blatant example we see of this in “Ripe” is a conversation between Adora and Chief Vickery. In the middle of what seems like a heavy flirtation, he suggests canceling “Calhoun Day,” a festival day Adora personally oversees, because the murders haven’t been solved yet. Adora politely reminds him that she could have him removed from office. In response, Vickery replies, “We need to talk about your girls.” Later, he goes to Adora’s best friend Jackie and tries unsuccessfully to get her to talk to him about “the Preaker girl” — which could be a reference to either Camille, Amma, or Camille’s other deceased sister, about whom we (so far) know very little. </p>
<p id="KcEBZ7">Though these exchanges may not seem substantial, they illustrate vividly how power works in Wind Gap. Sex is a tool to gain access to information — because true power depends on knowing secrets, and knowing how to deploy them. Vickery’s no fool; when Adora threatens his power, he threatens hers right back, by implying that there’s something about her girls to be uncovered.</p>
<p id="8Jhh3h">And though he describes Amma and Camille as being alternately “dangerous and in danger,” he doesn’t specify which is which. Adora has already told Amma that Camille’s the dangerous one, and Amma seems young and vulnerable. If we look at who’s deploying more “sharp objects” to gain power and control over the people around her, however, Amma seems to be the winner. She knows how to manipulate her friends, she’s working on deploying her sexuality as a weapon, and she seems to be a vast repository of secrets. How much of this makes her vulnerable rather than empowered is difficult to say, but what’s clear is that she’s using the tools and speaking the language that all the women of Wind Gap use: sex and secrets.</p>
<h3 id="8cFI4G">In the game of weaponization, the women all have the advantage — and Camille might have the biggest one of all</h3>
<p id="n3QmUT"><em>Sharp Objects</em> makes it clear that the women of Wind Gap all have a huge advantage because their weapons are passive-aggressive rather than actively aggressive. The narrative of the murders as being acts of random aggression obscures the reality of the crime and the reality of the two male suspects. The narrative around Bob Nash is that he’s violent and troubled, but he’s also a homemaker who’s perpetually shown doing domestic chores as he raises his three remaining children. The narrative around John Keene is a homophobic one that paints him as too sensitive and “unnatural,” but this punishes him for going through the natural process of grieving his dead sister. </p>
<p id="WT98RU">Meanwhile, all the women either have something to hide or know a secret that someone else is hiding. John’s girlfriend, Ashley, seems to have all kinds of intel on John and his family dynamics<strong> </strong>that she’s keeping to herself, which puts her in a powerful position. Jackie’s in a safe position for now because she’s not giving up whatever she knows about Camille’s family. Adora’s physical and economic power is enhanced by the fact that we have no idea what she knows and doesn’t know, but we suspect it’s a lot; and Adora’s lifelong housemaid may wind up having more power than anyone in town because she’s been absorbing information about the Preakers for decades. </p>
<p id="oTOolc">This longevity is also crucial to the game, because as Camille notes, the trick is to save what you know and use it “later.” The past is never dormant in Wind Gap; it’s a turbulent hotbed beneath a calm surface, and the more access you have to the past, the more power you have over the present. In one scene in “Ripe” where Amma tries to seduce one of her teachers, the two have a strange conversation about history: He reminds her that you can’t change it, and she seems to reject the idea. Like her mother, she understands that whoever’s in charge of the narrative controls history. </p>
<p id="RDq8C1">Camille understands this as well; while giving Willis a guided tour through Wind Gap’s wooded criminal hot spots, she keeps vague on details and vague on her own traumatic sexual history, to maintain both her nebulous control over it and her growing control over him. Though most of Camille’s actions in Wind Gap are designed to appear passive, when she has to, she can deploy both sexuality and information to gain power. </p>
<p id="fS1P4l">In essence, <em>Sharp Objects</em> is putting its crime-solving methods directly in front of us — listen to what people are saying, notice who knows what and who’s weaponizing sex and knowledge of the past against whom. We’re expected to discount the entire apparatus as just gossip, exactly as Vickery and Willis are currently doing. The only one who’s not, so far, is Camille. </p>
<p id="4p5nig">And so when Adora flings this week’s jaw-droppingly abusive insult at her, telling her she “smells ripe,” it’s a layered moment. Her mother just called her a trashy, alcoholic slut, yes. But the moment also suggests that just like all the women in Wind Gap, the things about Camille that cause everyone to overlook her will be the things that allow her to gain the most power and information in the end. </p>
<p id="FEKnLb">That said, Camille’s past is also a weapon, a sharp object of its own. <em>Sharp Objects</em>’<em> </em>director, Jean-Marc Vallée, loves to play with color symbolism, so it’s no coincidence that the entire color scheme of this episode is a notoriously tricky <a href="https://filmschoolrejects.com/vertigo-color-and-identity-32a2f013616c/">red/green palette most famously used in <em>Vertigo</em></a>. This is a time-honored color code for jealousy, obsession, and, as in Hitchcock’s masterpiece, a nebulous past/present overlay presented by an unreliable narrator. Camille may be in the position to do some murder-solving, but first, she’s going to have to regain control over her own narrative. </p>
<p id="Tut4TC">Otherwise, recalling Vickery’s words about the endangered and dangerous, she might find herself in plenty of danger of her own.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2018/7/29/17622534/sharp-objects-episode-4-ripe-recap-theoriesAja Romano2018-07-22T22:05:02-04:002018-07-22T22:05:02-04:00Sharp Objects shows that men can’t comprehend a dangerous woman in “Fix”
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<img alt="Sharp Objects episode 3" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ft6mx-EgS4Pn-nZAnLcVgpO8CTY=/400x0:3600x2400/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/60435191/d1444a4c56f5845374f3646fedc326179d347bf939af64a79024f4e6d16b881ef06cf131b6c7fe6b2dfbb0ca09e41fc1.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Amy Adams in <em>Sharp Objects.</em> | Anne Marie Fox/HBO</figcaption>
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<p>The men of Sharp Objects believe women just talk and gossip. They’re so wrong. </p> <p id="4CbsiU">Before it debuted, <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/7/6/17539160/sharp-objects-review-hbo-amy-adams"><em>Sharp Objects</em></a> was <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/04/sharp-objecs-hbo-teaser">frequently compared</a> to last summer’s <em>Big Little Lies</em>, due to both shows being splashy HBO miniseries with big-name casts. But <em>Big Little Lies</em>, among other things, told a story about its female characters’ struggle to prove their innocence in a town that knew better. And <em>Sharp Objects</em>’ third episode, “Fix,” is the inverse of that. It’s all about women who are fully capable of murder, and a town that doesn’t want to believe it. </p>
<p id="FUevWI">“Women around here, they don’t kill with their hands,” Bob Nash (<a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0153855/?ref_=tt_cl_t15">Will Chase</a>) — the father of one of two girls that’ve been murdered in the small Southern town of Wind Gap, Missouri — tells Camille (<a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0010736/?ref_=tt_cl_t1">Amy Adams</a>), when she visits him. “They talk.” </p>
<p id="J5QCDo">In the aftermath of two ritualistic and grisly murders that happened less than a year apart, Wind Gap’s citizens don’t seem to be terribly concerned about their lives being in danger. The parental warnings being issued to the town’s children are weak (and several of the kids are sneaking out on a nightly basis), and life, for the most part, seems abnormally normal. </p>
<p id="9Uunmi">What Wind Gap’s residents are <em>more</em> concerned about is playing a game of whodunit and speculating why each of the victims was targeted. They seem more entranced by the spectacle of it all, and in some ways, Camille — who’s now finished with her initial story — does too. People’s interest in the murders is rooted more in morbid curiosity than in personal safety. Finding the killer is more about closing the loop on the story than it is justice. </p>
<p id="RJTsTz"><em>Sharp Objects</em> has focused heavily on this sentiment in its past two episodes by unpacking Wind Gap residents’ opinions on who the murderer might be — and heavily hinting that it won’t be anyone they expect, specifically because few folks in town seem to believe the killer could be a woman. </p>
<h3 id="iGJs0y">“Fix” is all about how Wind Gap views its women</h3>
<p id="KxuLiE">In “Fix,” getting away from how the town of Wind Gap thinks about and treats women is as impossible as Camille getting away from a bottle of vodka. It seems like every interaction between two characters contains at least a slip of a remark about the women of Wind Gap, or rather, how the women of Wind Gap are viewed and treated in the town. </p>
<p id="CeogPG">Many residents of Wind Gap clearly believe that women are only good for one thing: gossiping. </p>
<p id="QsvUQI">“That boy from Kansas City talks like a woman from Wind Gap,” Sheriff Vickery (<a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0002023/?ref_=tt_cl_t5">Matt Craven</a>) tells Camille in reference to Detective Willis (<a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0582149/?ref_=tt_cl_t3">Chris Messina</a>), reinforcing what Nash told her. </p>
<p id="2RiQjW">This sentiment builds on what we’ve seen in previous episodes: Adora worrying about Camille sullying her reputation around town; Camille having to deal with her own Wind Gap legacy; and Wind Gap’s mean girls whispering away at Natalie’s funeral. </p>
<p id="TeMhJZ">The implication seems to be that a woman from Wind Gap could never be capable of anything more than mindless talk, let alone murder. But we’re not really meant to trust this characterization. </p>
<p id="NkRyLD">The people spreading the “all women are gossips” generalization are all men who have been doing their fair share of talking too. The sheriff, for example, hasn’t been particularly successful at his job — keeping the town of Wind Gap safe — so his remark about how women in the town keep talking and how men like Willis should know better than to act like them feels more like frustration coming from an incompetent character than an objective observation. </p>
<aside id="GYHhED"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"What makes HBO’s Sharp Objects so good is hiding in plain sight","url":"https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/7/6/17539160/sharp-objects-review-hbo-amy-adams"}]}'></div></aside><p id="S1AeI6">It’s also obvious that the women of Wind Gap know how to take advantage of what others think and expect of them. </p>
<p id="Q0OfIM">Take Camille’s sister, Amma (<a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm7340546/?ref_=tt_cl_t4">Eliza Scanlen</a>), who shares a drunken chat with Camille in the first scene of “Fix.” She’s figured out how to alter her behavior in front of the girls’ mother, to her benefit. Amma knows how she’s expected to behave, and that she can wriggle out all kinds of freedoms as long as she maintains a certain image — that’s why we see her wearing different outfits and putting on a different demeanor when she’s at home. No one, including Adora, suspects her of being capable of more. </p>
<p id="5ttGAR">But as Amma reveals to Camille during their chat, she’s nowhere near as innocent as she seems. </p>
<p id="KjaCtU">“They do anything for me,” she says of her friends, flashing a sly hint that she might be capable of more nefarious things than she appears to be. “I just ask, and they’re my besties.” </p>
<h3 id="eutxiO">No one knows what Wind Gap’s women are capable of </h3>
<p id="tMkGUO">Full disclosure: Although I’ve seen (and loved) the movie adaptation of <em>Gone Girl</em>, I’ve never read Gillian Flynn’s books. I don’t know how <em>Sharp Objects</em> ends. With that said, I fully believe the Wind Gap killer is a woman, by virtue of the fact that the show’s male characters are outright saying women aren’t capable of murder. </p>
<p id="R90gDG">I keep coming back to what Nash said: “Women around here, they don’t kill with their hands.” Granted, a sullied reputation in such a small town can probably feel like a punishment worse than death. And we don’t know how much Nash is exaggerating or how much he fully believes his statement. </p>
<p id="mX6SBq">But in <em>Sharp Objects</em>’ first three episodes, we’ve seen various male characters get asked about their alibis, have their possible motives explained and explored, and have their pasts delved into. Meanwhile, no one has been asking where Amma or Adora was on the nights of the murders, even though Adora tells the Sheriff in “Fix” that she personally knew both of the dead girls. We also don’t know exactly why John Keene’s suspicious, clingy “Jackie O” girlfriend Ashley is suddenly in the picture, but no one except Camille seems to care. </p>
<p id="vOrUIB">These women all seem like potential suspects, but they’re being dismissed because the general thought in Wind Gap is that women are harmless. Yes, they talk, but they aren’t seen as “strong” enough (to pull the victims’ teeth with pliers) or heinous enough to commit violence of the type that killed the girls.</p>
<p id="FYUHFo">And “harmless” doesn’t just refer to the harm they might pose other people but also the harm they’re capable of inflicting on themselves, as we see in a flashback to Camille checking into a psych ward and befriending her cellmate Alice. Camille and Alice both engage in self-harm, but Camille seems to be the only person who can sense how troubled Alice is or notices the extent of her cutting. The scenes feel safe. Alice shares a playful relationship with the nurse. And that all comes crashing down in the final sequence when we find out how Alice died.</p>
<p id="Q4Smfv">There’s something deeper beneath the surface of each one of Wind Gap’s women, something that possibly belies the person they’re presenting as in public. Writing off the town’s women as harmless gossips fails to recognize what kind of people, perhaps monsters, some of them might be. Which makes it no surprise that the sheriff hasn’t found the murderer yet — he’s underestimating half the population. </p>
https://www.vox.com/2018/7/22/17590172/sharp-objects-episode-3-recap-fixAlex Abad-Santos2018-07-15T22:05:02-04:002018-07-15T22:05:02-04:00Sharp Objects is reclaiming Southern gothic tropes for rebellious girls
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<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/T3Gf1OE3g5UJj5wUGWErCcfJSAg=/84x0:1417x1000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/60364385/MV5BNjZhMTI1MzctMGYwMy00ZjI1LWI5MmUtYTRmNDM0M2IxNDczXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNzg5MzIyOA__._V1_SY1000_SX1500_AL_.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>HBO</figcaption>
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<p>Sharp Objects’ second episode, “Dirt,” uses its Southern gothic malaise to mask a brutal feminist lesson.</p> <p id="Xr6fAr">On its surface, HBO’s <em>Sharp Objects</em> may seem like it’s terribly uninterested in solving its central mystery. That’s partly because, as we’re regularly informed, Amy Adams’s protagonist is not there to solve a mystery.</p>
<p id="6LvSwG">“Remember, you’re not there to solve a mystery!” editor (Miguel Sandoval) reminds reporter Camille Preaker early in the second episode, “Dirt.” Camille's return home to the small Missouri town of Wind Gap isn’t to play Nancy Drew; she’s been sent there to contend with the demons of her past — a ritual every small-town Southerner knows well.</p>
<p id="7GLFWX">The other characters don’t seem particularly interested in figuring out who killed two teenage girls in Wind Gap, either. The first, a working-class girl named Ann, turned up dead in a pond a year prior to Camille’s return, and her father may or may not be a suspect; the other, a middle-class girl named Natalie, was gruesomely murdered and left in the center of town. </p>
<p id="x8Q1jF">Natalie’s funeral is the main event of this episode — but if you thought the occasion might provide more plot fodder than a rote list of people to suspect, you were likely disappointed. That's because <em>Sharp Objects</em> isn’t a true crime show: It’s not a whodunnit, but a classic Southern gothic fable about crumbling towns, disintegrating relationships, obsolete legacy families, and an ugly past that must be continually confronted. </p>
<p id="HUGmiJ">This is a Southern trope that’s as familiar as butter and molasses on a Sunday morning, but because <em>Sharp Objects</em> is so far wrapped in its complacent, slow-moving facade, the viewer might find it difficult to know what we’re supposed to care about at this particular point in the story. The cops don’t seem to care very much who killed Ann and Natalie, so why should we? After all, the show’s other mysteries are bigger and vaguer: What happened to Camille in the shed that time? Did her mother punish her for something by carving words of shame all over her? Why does her mother hate her, and does it have anything to do with how her sister died?</p>
<p id="OEzWqR">It may be a little frustrating if you came to <em>Sharp Objects</em> expecting <em>Gone Girl</em> — this is a Gillian Flynn tale, after all — and are wondering why you’re getting <em>Cat On a Hot Tin Roof</em>. </p>
<p id="a9WupR">But don’t underestimate what director Jean-Marc Vallée is doing with <em>Sharp Objects</em>’ mix of heady repression and sleazy secrets. This early episode is a good moment to talk about how <em>Sharp Objects</em> is using its tropes to remind us how the souls of young women wind up dying — whether or not they get murdered.</p>
<h3 id="SpkcMK">
<em>Sharp Objects</em> carefully primes us to feel apathetic about its plot and then uses that apathy against us</h3>
<p id="G3BYuY">Southern gothic stories depend on a sense of apathy, a tacit complicity with the status quo that gradually turns into a rigid desperation as things start to deteriorate and crumble. It’s a deceptive malaise, a sense of slow complacency that steadily subsumes every town and just as steadily erodes over the course of the narrative. </p>
<p id="7nCsea">Usually in Southern gothic stories, the malaise is a blend of geographic and sociopolitical elements: It’s always hot, windless, airless, and suffocating, and the sweltering environment serves as a <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/pathetic-fallacy">pathetic fallacy</a> for the deeper unease over whatever awful thing is at its core. (The something awful is usually some explicit secret shame, but we’ll come back to that in a moment.)</p>
<p id="HRdlSB">In <em>Sharp Objects</em>, it seems that the only character who’s heated up about her crumbling world is Camille’s mother Adora (Patricia Clarkson), who, as royal heir to the town’s fading patriarchy, is desperate to hold on to everything and everyone around her. There’s an absolutely brilliant, terrifying moment early on in “Dirt” where she does that literally, clutching her daughter Amma’s arms in what’s meant to be a motherly gesture of protectiveness but instead is vice-like and sinister.</p>
<p id="5pkNmX">But the last thing Adora wants to do is solve murders, and nobody else is really acting out of urgency; instead, we get scenes of apathy and even active resistance to murder-solving. The big-city detective, Willis, (Chris Messina), and the small-town police chief, Vickery (Matt Craven), clash over Willis’s wish to observe funeral attendees and their potentially suspicious behavior. </p>
<p id="tI3Fxn">Vickery ignores an eyewitness report that indicates the killer could be a woman. Camille meanders her way to hint that Natalie’s brother could be another suspect. Camille and her mother clash over her attempts to take discreet reporter notes during the funeral — and I’m fully on Adora’s side here: Girl, you’re in the front of the church, show some respect or else move to the back pew. </p>
<p id="j7ZFl7">As with so many Southern funerals, the mourners come not to bury but to gossip; Camille attending the gathering at Natalie's family’s house after the funeral is the Southern equivalent of chumming the water for sharks. It’s there, while horrifying her mother’s sense of propriety by nosing around Natalie’s bedroom — and making an ethical transgression that may come back to haunt her later — that Camille recognizes a familiar figure in Natalie. Like Camille, she was the kind of girl who let her mother decorate her bedroom in shades of pink and pastels while she played outside with the boys, explored the woods, and brought home giant spiders as pets.</p>
<p id="oXom6I">Later in the episode, Camille looks into a different pink-clad bedroom — that of her younger sister, Amma, another teen girl who uses her mother’s image of her to mask a rebellious adolescence. For Natalie, it was spiders; for Amma, it’s shoplifting vodka and disguising it in Sprite bottles, just like Camille before her.</p>
<p id="qKxNSu">This parallelism not only jars us ever further out of the story's sense of complacency but lays the groundwork for what will certainly be <em>Sharp Objects’ </em>sharpest trick in the episodes to come: framing the South’s deteriorating patriarchy around the women who’ve both held it in place and been destroyed by it.</p>
<h3 id="NMyQPX">
<em>Sharp Objects</em> pierces its malaise with needle-sharp precision</h3>
<p id="ipRTD8">Every true Southern gothic story understands that the malaise of Southern life is a self-induced denialism over the causes, effects, and permanent fractures of the Civil War; that Southern hospitality is always a rigid mask for Southern atrocity. </p>
<p id="y3phEu">In an early scene in this episode, Willis wonders if someone may be leaving flowers at the site where Natalie was murdered out of a guilty conscience. “Around here, we just call that being nice,” his barber answers. The barber also tells Willis that the townsfolk attempted to remove all the rocks from the lake where Ann Nash’s body was found. </p>
<p id="ZdAO90">It’s a symbolic attempt to ward off evil, but in the language of the Southern gothic, it’s an attempt to purge and destroy what can never be purged and destroyed. In the South, sins don’t get washed away; they can only be buried and unearthed again and again.</p>
<p id="9w4VYA">If these early episodes of <em>Sharp Objects</em> feel ominous, it’s because the thicker the malaise, the sharper and darker the object that’s needed to pierce it. There are plenty of moments in this episode where we see the puncture marks — Natalie’s giant spider, Adora’s sinister physicality, the truant kid who’s left to casually play with a gun by his meth-addict mother. These moments all play out over the recurring backdrop of Camille’s memories — quick cuts to disturbing glimpses of the past, which hint at sexual assault, abuse, and ongoing trauma — that perpetually discombobulate us about where and when we are. </p>
<p id="iodao1">The result is that intrusions of darkness, violence, and death pierce the worldview of everyone who comes to Wind Gap, including our apathy as viewers about what we should be invested in. </p>
<p id="0CCO3h">To ask yourself what question <em>Sharp Objects</em> is most interested in answering is to mistake the show's point: <em>Sharp Objects</em> is telling you that all of its questions are the same question. To ask who killed Ann and Natalie is to ask why the delicately vicious Adora hates her own daughter, and why both Camille and Adora are cultivating their drinking habits like practiced veterans. Camille is constantly drinking herself into a well-timed fucklessness, but <em>Sharp Objects</em> is perpetually reminding us that her malaise is a self-induced reaction born out of real trauma. </p>
<p id="UFcQGi">Regardless of what actual events have shaped her life, her failure to cope is the inevitable result of living in a society that perpetually expects its members to repress emotion and whitewash history for the sake of preserving a polite veneer. It’s a society that expects girls to abide by the Madonna complex for the entirety of their lives, and also expects them to quietly, politely, bear the scars if they fail. </p>
<p id="L7Csnc">The townsfolk of Wind Gap may be eager to ward off more calamitous forms of evil, like serial murders, but there are other ways to kill — and towns like Wind Gap doom girls like Camille and Natalie long before they’ve ever taken their first scandalous step into the woods.</p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/7/15/17563868/sharp-objects-episode-2-dirt-recapAja Romano