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Sharp Objects

I’m three episodes into the HBO series SHARP OBJECTS at the moment. It’s a fascinating mystery with complex characters and a slow burn that keeps you intrigued. There’s one stand out element it really nails though: Someone who left a small town and returns. Small Midwestern towns are peculiar places. Twin peaks, while exaggerated in some ways, nails the the fish out of water feeling that comes with returning to a city that you never really fit in with in the first place.

Small towns can be isolating places growing up in them. You either never truly fit in with the tight knit population or you become so involved with the town that you never escape. They have a hold. I see this in many of the kids my age. They either can’t wait to leave or never want to. That has a strong impact on the way you’re brought up as a child. Small towns tend to have focused beliefs and interests and if your’s don’t line up with that of the population you can begin to feel alienated. Making it so that for those who do leave, they feel the need to radically change who they are. Just like a person who deals with depression, you can feel the need to reinvent yourself rather than learn from those hardships and grow. You internalize and double down. Small towns do the same, the incorporate that pain into their culture. It makes them who they are.

This isn’t an effort to vilify small towns, quite the opposite. It’s to acknowledge the problems of internalizing past pain and projecting it onto yourself, rendering yourself unable to move on.

Amy Adams plays Camille, a reporter from St. Louis who’s returned her hometown of Wind Gap to investigate the murder of a teenage girl. Upon return she's immediately hit with memories that trigger a tremendous amount of anxiety within her. She’s the daughter of the town Matriarch who’s heavily involved in the inner workings of the town. The mother and daughter have a tense relationship as Camille has all but turned her back on the town and her family following the death of her sister. This is where we get our first look at how people internalize pain. Adora, Camille's mother has withdrawn herself. Becoming obsessively protective and closed off to the outside world. She’s had another daughter since the death of her daughter, Marian. She’s not just involved herself in the town, she’s become the town. A trap for pain that doesn’t let it escape, but still lives in fear of it. Camille has processed her pain by leaving and trying to forget the past.

Camille left Wind Gap, turned to alcoholism in an attempt to blind herself from the past. She’s trying to numb herself, but there’s a difference between numbing and coping. As a crime reporter, she’s taken others pain upon herself as a way to be able to feel that pain for herself but to have the focus elsewhere, but coming back to Wind Gap, that isn’t an option anymore. She must face herself and her mother.

The two immediately clash. Adora hates Camille digging into the case of these murders. It’s unfair to those grieving and in poor taste, but this is how small towns work. It’s fear of emotional progress, because that kind of growth means change. Small towns don’t want to change, they want to stick to their idealized golden time. This ideal prevents self understanding. It doesn’t allow you to see the good times and the bad times as equally important, formative experiences, but rather it puts the blinders on. You either stick in the town and try to shut out anything that disagrees with you, or leave and try to numb yourself to the past.

Sharp Object has been a good, but pretty difficult to watch. As a person who grew up in a tiny Midwestern town and is back over the summer break from college, I feel a lot of the claustrophobia and anxiety of coming back to a place and not having a particularly good past experience in, but it’s also a growing experience. I’m excited to watch more, and since I’ve never read the book it’s got me hooked.