Am I a Sharp Object?
The other day the air temperature dropped below zero. I threw birdseed out through the garage door because I couldn’t bear to spend enough time out in the raw weather to fill up the bird feeders. The little things with feathers didn’t seem to mind the cold as they dipped into divots of the deepening snow, crunching up seeds to stay alive.
I say all the time I’m in hibernation mode. All I want is my heated blanket and unlimited tea and candles and a stack of books. But my mind is fully awake. Ready for so much that is happening this year. I wake up sometimes in the middle of the night and type out words on my phone because they always seem to come at the strangest times. Words that would dissolve just as easily if I didn’t write them down right away.
Nights are cold and dark here, and after days of reading (and editing) for work, I like to stream shows and sit with visual stories before I head to bed. I just rewatched the limited series Sharp Objects, starring Amy Adams and based on the novel by Gillian Flynn.
The summer this show came out on HBO, I was obsessed with it, absorbed in the Southern Gothicness of the story about a journalist named Camille, who goes back to her hometown to report on the recent murders of two little girls. It’s dark, of course. But beautiful, also. The storytelling pulls you in and confuses you as an outsider trying to understand what is going on in the protagonist’s mind as she deals with present stress and past trauma.
The camera captures the details perfectly—how anxiety plays out in people trying to maintain a calm exterior. The pulling out of eyelashes. The tracing scars on thighs. The screaming into fists.
The scenes where Camille is triggered to remember the past shows how traumatic memories feel. They come in fragments and flashes. The murmuring movement of a window fan. The cracks in a ceiling. Blood dripping on the floor. When you have traumatic memories, the smallest things in the present can pull you back to them, like smells and someone saying a particular word out loud, so that you feel haunted by your past, with your mind out of your control.
Sharp Objects falls in the thriller category, I suppose, but the way it engages with family dysfunction, loss, mental illness, trauma, self-harm, and the objectification of women is dramatic, literary, powerful. Camille must grapple with her past, when the past is the last thing she wants to remember. She is a survivor. A force. While some might see her as a victim, or as a misfit who fled town, she shows up as her messy self, revealing her loving heart and the strength she never lost.
It was ironic that after finishing this rewatch, I ended up holding my own sharp object last night. It was heavier than I expected.
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