As the saying goes, HBO produced, must be a boutique. After "True Detective", this "Huang Baoshen Drama Stage" has launched the female version of "True Detective" - "Sharp Objects".
The production team of "Sharp Tool" is extraordinary, and it is another kind of stress compared with big productions such as "Game of Thrones" and "Westworld". "Dallas Buyers Club" is directed by Jean-Marc Vallée and written and written by "Gone Girl" author Gillian Flynn.
Amy Adams has a southern beauty face. She should be known to most people because she played a Disney princess in 2007-Princess Giselle who strayed from the fairy tale world into the real world in "Enchanted", and earlier in "Cat and Mouse" The silly white sweet nurse who was tricked into marriage by Leonardo DiCaprio, and then played Superman's girlfriend in a row of superhero movies. However, she knew she was more than that. In 2008, she starred in "Doubt of Child Abuse", "On the Road" in 2012, and "Nocturnal Animals" in 2016. Just like her character in "Sharp Objects": she was expected to be a small-town southern beauty like a doll, but she was a far cry from that.
"Sharp Tool" poster
In the official poster, the heroine sits with her mother and sister in front of the exquisite flower and bird paintings. Everyone has cracks on their faces, like a wall that is collapsing, but the wall behind them is intact. It's as if people are taking the place of the pretty wall and crumbling.
The setting of the story is like this: the heroine Camille is a journalist who specializes in social and crime news, and was born in a decent family in a small southern town. But she herself is very mourning and punk, drinking alcohol every day, wearing loose and dark clothes, it seems that she has been in a mental hospital, and has the habit of using small sharp tools to self-harm, and her body is covered with scars.
Her boss thinks she has some talent, but she's messed up by herself, and reporting on the "window town" case may be a breakthrough in the heroine's career.
"Fukou Town" is the hometown of the heroine Camille, but she rejects that place very much in her heart. After a girl was killed and a girl disappeared in "Fengkou Town", she was sent to interview by her boss to try to make big news. So she went back to the town and lived at home. Her mother, who had always been estranged from her, reluctantly let her stay. The mother and stepfather also gave birth to a younger sister, who is in her teens and plays the role of a doll-like girl at home, but is a typical social person among her peers. The heroine has been away from home for many years, and the half-sisters didn't even know each other before this meeting. Soon, the missing girl was also confirmed to have been killed, that is to say, there was a serial killer hiding in the town. In order to get more details to write the report, the heroine walks around her hometown, trying to get more information from the police and old friends. One of the policemen is a foreigner and is ostracized by other policemen and residents; and although the heroine was born here, she is also a foreigner in spirit, and both of them are investigating the same case, so they are getting closer...
The drama actually has two clues. The bright line is who the criminal is and why did they do those things; the dark line is what happened to the heroine and why did she become what she is now?
Whether it is a crime or a heroine, they are all products of that stagnant town.
In the heroine's words, there are only two kinds of people in this town: the rich and the poor who have been passed down from generation to generation.
The heroine's family represents the wealthy family in the town, and the show also shows what a poor family is like. The last witness the heroine found who saw the victim girl was a child from a poor family. Living with a single mother in a dark and dilapidated house, the mother is drinking and taking drugs, and the child is less than ten years old, with a dirty face and a gloomy expression, playing guns alone in the dark room. The police knew that he was the last witness who saw the victim, and he saw the victim "following a woman in white", but he took this witness as air because of the situation at his home.
Small towns in the American South are still quite conservative, with an emphasis on "traditional" places. Until recent years, there are still cases of girls being raped, and their parents simply let her marry the rapist for her "reputation". The father of one of the victims in the show makes it clear that he would rather his daughter be killed than raped.
The so-called adherence to tradition is to use hypocrisy to maintain the original social structure or interest structure, even if it has become rusty, dilapidated and suffocating like this small town. And such a place is bound to be stagnant and closed. This scarred heroine may be the weapon to pierce all this.
It is known from the local population that in the past, the heroine was the "Princess of Fengkou Town". But now she is out of tune with the small town. Her childhood playmate is pregnant with her fifth child, but she doesn't even have a boyfriend and is investigating a crime by herself.
In the heroine's flashback memories, the ones that appear the most are her dead sister (suddenly died in front of her, the reason is not stated), and the bloody pieces of meat and some hardcore that she saw in the wooden house in the woods when she was a teenager BDSM images (she seems to be excited by these images).
There are also fragments of flashing dreams and memories that should be explained in later episodes:
In Camille's dream, her teenage self poked her hand with the tip of a paper clip;
And the scar on her arm reads "Vanish";
The dust on the back of the car reads: DIRTY (dirty, dirty)
...
It would be immoral to spoil such a suspense drama, so let me introduce the screenwriter and original author Gillian Flynn and her usual style:
Flynn, like the heroine in this play, was born in Missouri in the southern United States, but she grew up in a big southern city, while the heroine in the play was born in a small town and grew up in a nearby big city. "Sharp Objects" is Gillian Flynn's debut novel, and may be more closely related to her personal experience. The novel was a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award, won the Newcomer of the Year award, and won the Dagger Award from the Society of British Reasoning Writers (an award that fits the work too well).
Flynn has said she wanted to write a dark, negative, troubled heroine, "and it's important that we see more diverse female characters in the story".
For a long time, women have been artificially cultivated into a second-class gender and regarded as the "other", so the image of women is also very poor and thin, just as a symbol, the object of male lust. The 19th century was the heyday of the novel. And 99% of the women in 19th-century novels created by men are pretty stupid. Either it is the Virgin Virgin White Lotus, or it is completely demonized and becomes the opposite of the Virgin Virgin White Lotus, which is also thin and superficial. With the progress of the times, the female image has become plump and three-dimensional. However, in terms of depth and breadth, it is still incomparable with the male images in literary and artistic works.
From time to time, male writers create complex and interesting male anti-hero images, such as Wilde, Joyce, Kafka, Camus... But for a long time, there has not been a sufficiently three-dimensional female anti-hero image. Even if a charming female villain appears occasionally, it can only be a supporting role. And the heroine is still youthful, enthusiastic and generous, left-handed career, right-handed family of the contemporary Virgin White Lotus. As long as the heroine is a little special, the audience will already scream with satisfaction. And Gillian Flynn's women don't follow that routine at all. The heroine in "Gone Girl" is cold-blooded and crazy, and she is the villain and heroine alone. The heroine of Sharp Objects is a true female antihero. She's down, she's indulgent, she's self-harm, she's broken, she's living with scars...and none of this is for men or children.
I look forward to seeing more women like this in literature and public discourse: they can be complex and evil, or they can be broken and depressed. They can be good or bad, or both good and bad. They can become addicted to things other than love, or do evil for reasons other than men or children...at least in these things women and men are no different.
Don't try to use Meitu Xiuxiu on them, don't sacrifice the human depth of field in them in the name of "beautification".
This article is original by myself, first published on The Paper Youxi
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