Just a couple of things, before we get started, girls! I am dying to see the HBO miniseries; I have, in fact, seen the first episode, which was enough to convince me I needed to read the book again. I t reaffirmed my conviction that all the attention Gillian Flynn received for "Gone Girl" was overrated and undeserved, because "Sharp Objects" is so much more interesting. "Gone Girl" fit the mainstream, in its exploration of a heterosexual marriage, so, duh, of course it caught on.
"Sharp Objects" explores female violence through a cycle of family abuse in the Deep South, that would make Tennessee Williams turn in his grave, in shame that he did not write this himself. Or Carson McCullers, though even this might be too Gothic for her.
What is important now is, if you have not read the book, then stop reading right now, as I am going to discuss this on here, as those among us who have read the book. And if you are watching the series, carefully observe how each section follows the story. And share those comments on here!
Now, we are off and running on a wonderful tale of sickness!
Amy Adams is perfectly cast as Camille Preaker. She hates her hometown, Wind Gap, Missouri, and the only thing she hates more than this town, is her mother, played, as only she can, in that understated, Mother From Hell way, by Patricia Clarkson. Adora Crellin is married to a taciturn, passive man, named Alan Crellin. They have a thirteen-year-old daughter, named Amma.
Camille has fled to Chicago, where she works for a second tier newspaper. Nevertheless, when two little girls, Ann Norris and Natalie Keene, go missing, several months apart, and are eventually found dead, strangled, stabbed and beaten horribly, with--get this--their teeth pulled out--Camille's editor knows a story when he sees one, and, knowing she hails from this burg, sends her there. Wind Gap, Missouri, is the kind of place that would make my hometown--Highland Park, New Jersey--seem classy--though, like Camille, I could not wait to get out of there. Thankfully, not for Camille's reasons.
Adora Crellin turns out to be a typical Southern woman, a contradiction in terms. She dresses, drinks, and speaks softly, like Blanche Du Bois, but has the control freak instincts of Amanda Wingfield. Even if she did get knocked up at seventeen, with Camille, she managed to become the wealthiest woman in town, owning a hog farm! And when Preaker took off, after giving her another daughter, Marian, well, then Adora found her milquetoast lackey, Alan.
But the one to keep your eyes on, darlings, is Amma Crellin, played by Eliza Scanlen, whom, I hear, is walking off with the entire show. Amma is written that way, so, good as Scanlen surely is, I am not surprised, as Amma is that kind of part! I wish I had been seen for it!!!!!!!!!!
Imagine Rhoda Penmark on hormones. That is Amma. At home she is all dresses, knee socks, and ribbons down her hair. She plays with this replicated dollhouse of her home, where she controls all residents inside, because control is something Amma desperately needs. There is a tragic side to her, too, but boy, when she gets out of the house, she is mean! Getting off on watching hogs slaughtered, laughing at the town with her Mean Girls friends, drugging her own half sister at a party, and acting one stop short of the town slut. I got the impression Amma has not had sex yet, though she makes no secret of wanting to. Give her time, and she will be the town tramp! A 21st Century update of Ginny Stamper in "Splendor In The Grass."
Amma hates the town, and her mother, as much as Camille. but, at thirteen, there is little she can do about it, Which is why she plays the hellion outside, because, inside Adora's house, she has to play the role she is expected.
That role happens to be a sickly, fragile child, whom Adora dotes her attention on, showing herself and the town what a good mother she is, in spite of older daughter Marian's death, by nurturing Amma. And here is where we get into technicalities.
If "The Bad Seed," in struggling with the nature vs. nurture concept, chose "nature," it is decidedly "nurture" here, in "Sharp Objects." Amma may be a monster, but she is one made by her mother, Adora. Camille comes to discover that her mother, in raising she, Marian, and Amma, is an attention addict, using Munchhausen By Proxy--making them sick, so she can lavishly attend to them until they get healthy enough till they get sick again. Camille was subjected to this twisted regimen by her mother, whose own mother, Joya, showed Adora no maternal love, and this was the only way Adora learned to express it! Sick, right? And passed down, generation from generation.
So, on one level, it is no wonder Amma is the way she is. But no one realizes how far gone she is. Through her own observations, and talks with her mother's friend, or ex-friend, Jackie (wonderfully played by Elizabeth Perkins), Camille comes to the realization that Adora, out of love, killed her own daughter, Marian, by carrying the sickness thing too far. Camille, as she is constantly told throughout, was willful, and could not be controlled, so she was not loved, like Marian. Or Amma. Lucky Camille. Apparently, Marian never acted out, but Camille does--she drinks, and she is a cutter, scratching the surface of her skin, writing words on there, because the physical pain makes the emotional feel manageable. That is what Adora has done to Camille.
Camille is convinced not only that Adora killed Marian, but that, in turn, she also killed Ann and Natalie. A boy witness, James Corliss, says he saw Natalie being abducted by a woman. But how, or why, would she get to them? It seems Adora, the community activist, was tutoring the girls in a student aide program, and became very fond of them, inviting them over for tea and such, lavishing on them loving attention they lacked in their less than classy homes, but before the attention turned lethal. For it is not Adora who killed the girls, although she deservedly gets arrested, and put away for murdering her own daughter. Natalie and Ann's killings remain unsolved.
Until.
Now, this is the novel's twist ending. Whether the mini series has this, I am not sure, but they have to do something key to revealing the truth about Amma.
With Adora in prison, and Alan packing up the house, moving nearer to her, where he can visit her, like the dog he is, never mind his own psychologically disturbed daughter, Camille takes Amma to Chicago, to live with her. Amma is enrolled in school, fits in, and becomes just what she was in Wind Gap. Especially when she befriends a lesser popular classmate, named Lily Burke. Before long, Lily and Amma are spending time together, and that is fine, until Camille takes a liking to Lily, which Amma dislikes. You guessed it! Lily goes missing, and is found dead, with teeth extracted. That is when Camille, going through Amma's pink school knapsack, and finding weaponry as well as textbooks in there, realizes Amma killed not only Lily, but Natalie and Ann, back in Wind Gap. Amma is a piece of work. She did not like the attention her mother was directing on those girls, so, she and her Mean Girls friends, cornered the victims, and held them down, while Amma strangled them, and then used a plier to pull out the teeth. The teeth, by the way, were used as tiles in Amma's doll house, where everything had to be controlled and perfect. Amma was some piece of work. She was on her way to being the next Ed Gein!!!!!!!
Notice the slight resemblance, as I stated earlier, to the 'SVU' episode , "Totem." Camille seems as broken as June Frye (Elizabeth Mitchell) in that episode, having lost an entire family. But, face it, these were not families worth cultivating. My sense is that Camille moves on; Amy plays her a bit hard edged, which is inevitable, having been raised in a horror house like she was.
Re-reading "Sharp Objects" was as fun as at first. I had forgotten how Camille discovered Amma killed the girls, and I hope it is faithfully rendered in the series. Which I probably won't get to, till long after it has ended.
If you have yet to read or see "Gone Girl," forget it! This is the REAL thing, and Gillian Flynn's best!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
She has a tough act to follow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We just LOVE Amma!!!!!!!!
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