Reading the Feminist Dead Girl Show: HBO’s Sharp Objects

by: Carli Cutchin , June 14, 2021

A soiled hand, a ringed finger; the hint of a shoulder. An exposed breast. A lock of hair emerging from the dirt. Eyes closed in rest, or possibly open, bearing knowledge of the one who did this, knowledge that, for now, eludes we who look. Few figures titillate like the fictional corpse, whose body parts often come to us in bits and pieces. From Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) to the contemporary Dead Girl Show (Bolin 2018), crime narratives tend to display what G.S. Close calls a ‘necropornographic’ (2018) impulse. [1] In crime television today, the series’ inaugural dead body, so often female, acts as both ‘attention grabber and holder,’ both ‘hook and bond’. (Klinger 2018: 521) Her body is the enigma, the riddle, which the detective will go on to solve. That which we first see—breast, shoulder, leg—may never again appear on screen, but the memory of her flesh keeps us engaged, keeps us watching. Who could have done this?

In Female Corpses in Crime Fiction (2018), Close argues that the female corpse not only intrigues the (typically) male detective with her (former) beauty: she unsettles him, too, with the threat of all she embodies—death, disintegration, finitude. Drawing on the work of Julia Kristeva, Close contends that the corpse relates inexorably back to the subject’s originary experience of ‘abjection’—that is, to one’s dependence on and subsequent expulsion from the maternal body. As a female figure who blurs lines between subjecthood and nothingness, between the me and the not-me, the corpse conjures the ‘disavowed knowledge’ of one’s origin in the female body. (Close 2018: 17) The male detective works hard to banish such knowledge; he does this by converting the corpse into a set of clues to be solved. Once the body is firmly reinscribed in the Symbolic, in the world of signs/clues in which the detective feels at home—that is, once he is on his way to identifying the killer and closing the case—he can reclaim the fantasy of unshakable, autonomous subjecthood.

Close’s emphasis on the male detective-female corpse relationship raises the question of how to read the feminist Dead Girl Show, a genre which is seemingly just beginning to reach its peak. English-language series including The Killing (2011-2014), Broadchurch (2013-2017), The Fall (2013-2016), Top of the Lake (2013-2017), Unbelievable (2019), Lost Girls (2020), and Mare of Easttown (2021), along with Scandinavian shows like Forbrydelsen (2007-2012), feature female detectives working to solve the rape, murder, and/or disappearance of women and girls. If, following Close and Kristeva, the female corpse represents the abject maternal, recalling what Elizabeth Gross calls the subject’s ‘“unpayable debt”’ (qtd. in Close 2018:17) to the maternal body, what happens when the female investigator is confronted by a corpse? Does she assert her kinship with the dead? Or is she, like the male detective, at once ‘attracted and repelled by the abyss of nonidentity’ (Close 2018: 18)?

In this essay, I examine a recent feminist Dead Girl Show, the HBO series Sharp Objects (2018). I contend that the series stands out for its direct, and at times excruciatingly literal, portrayal of abjection. Written by two women—Marti Noxon and Gillian Flynn, who penned the novel on which the show is based—the series is set in the small town of Wind Gap, Missouri. Camille Preaker (Amy Adams), a crime reporter, returns to Wind Gap, her home town, to investigate the murders of two young teens, Ann Nash (Kaegan Baron) and Natalie Keene (Jessica Treska). By the narrative’s end, what began with a dead body—Natalie’s—leads us back to a literal mother: Camille’s mother, Adora Crellin (Patricia Clarkson), a wealthy woman who lives in Wind Gap with her taciturn husband, Alan(Henry Czerny), and teenage daughter, Amma (Eliza Scanlen)—Camille’s half-sister.

A possessive, jealous mother, Adora is, we discover, largely to blame for Ann and Natalie’s deaths. Yet at the heart of the series is less a ‘Who done it?’ than an exploration of the forces that lead one back to the abject maternal. Among feminist Dead Girl Shows, which often follow a fairly classic trajectory toward narrative resolution (see especially The Killing and Broadchurch Season 3), Sharp Objects pries open a fear which elsewhere lurks in the background: the fear of the female body as a source both of creative power and of the dissolution of boundaries. Camille must face this threat head-on. Eventually, she finds herself physically at the mercy of her mother, compelled to drink her poison. In psychological terms, Adora represents a force more than a person, the ‘less-than-fully-suppressed abject’. (Close 2018: 15) Rather than setting Camille the task of solving the crime before the mother/abyss can put her in peril, Sharp Objects lingers with feelings of horror, disgust, rejection, and desire as they relate to the female body. Consequently, Sharp Objects, I contend, can be read as a different kind of feminist Dead Girl Show. Instead of offering us a stoic, unshakable female protagonist, the series explores what happens when one fails to overcome abjection. Camille emerges as a heroic female investigator not because she solves a crime or remains resilient in the face of danger; she is heroic because she does not shy away from the ‘negating void’ (Close 2018: 15) first evoked by the female corpse.

This essay grew out of my own ambivalent feelings toward the feminist Dead Girl Show. Watching, for example, The Killing, which draws its tropes from what is arguably the first prestige Dead Girl Show, Twin Peaks (1990-1991), I found that the series, which centres on a female investigator, Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos), falls prey to the same necropornographic impulses as its male-helmed counterparts; in fact, missing from its ‘parent’ show was Twin Peaks’ sense of irony around the Dead Girl trope. Turning to Sharp Objects, it struck me intitallly that here, the necropornographic impulse is on overdrive, with images of beautiful (white) dead girls—not just Natalie but also Ann, Marian, and another young friend of Camille’s whom we see in flashbacks, Alice (Sydney Sweeney)—confronting us at almost every turn. I wondered, too, about the role of the spectator. As Melanie McFarland (2018) suggests, the audience is strongly ‘joined’ with Camille, ‘feeling and seeing’ through her perspective. Do we not also ‘join’ her in her questionable captivation with dead girls? Do we, via Camille, slip unwittingly into a misogynistic gaze?

Only when I began reading Close and Kristeva did I see a possible way through my own ambivalence. While I continue to find certain elements of the show troubling, such as its casting of beautiful, almost invariably blonde, actresses to play girls who are dead or in peril [2], Kristeva’s notion of the abject gave me a way to theorise Camille, whose strength as a character lies, paradoxically, in her striking (and strikingly rare) emotional and physical vulnerability. In recent years, TV female detectives, from Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) in The Fall to Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet) in Mare of Easttown, have tended to exhibit what Lindsay Steenberg calls ‘taciturn professionalism’ (2017: 69)—a form of stoic reserve that, again to quote Steenberg, functions ‘as a kind of aspirational inoculation’ (2017: 69) against the horrors of violence against women. Kristeva’s work allowed me to see Camille’s vulnerability as a form of critique, a rebuttal to what Close calls the ‘fantasy of the monolithic subject’ (2018: 15) who would solve the murder and banish the sense of bodily precariousness the corpse implies. While not without its problems, Sharp Objects is an important work, for its excavates the sense of terror, the yawning abyss, that crime narrative typically tries to bury within its ostensibly forensic mysteries. In this sense, Sharp Objects is indeed a new kind of feminist Dead Girl Show.

Camille: A Detective who ‘Sickens’

When we first meet Camille, she is lying in bed asleep, dreaming of a scene from her youth. In the dream, she and another blonde girl, her sister Marian (Lulu Wilson), roller-skate down an old-fashioned Main Street toward the family house, a Victorian mansion surrounded by a lush green lawn and verdant trees. A swelling soundtrack, which layers cricket chirps with buzzing electronica, lends urgency to the scene. In the home, they open a bedroom door, but as soon as they do so, the setting changes; past and present coexist as young Camille (Sophia Lillis) and Marian walk into adult Camille’s bedroom, where Camille lies asleep. Young Camille takes out a paper clip, which she uses to pierce adult Camille’s skin. Adult Camille startles awake; young Camille and Marian disappear; the buzzing electronica melds with the sound of a ringing phone—adult Camille’s boss is calling.

Lush and haunting, the opening scene establishes the tone of the series. It also establishes its protagonist’s sense of bodily and psychic vulnerability. The long dream sequence; the blurring of space between dreamed self and dreaming self: Camille is seen to possess an intense inner life in which troubling memories play a key role. (We later learn Marian died when she and Camille were young teens.) Moreover, the prick of the paper clip foreshadows the revelation that comes at the pilot’s close. Camille’s body is covered in scars in the form of words—vanish, dirty, milk—she has carved into her skin.

Climbing into her beater car, Camille heads to work at a St. Louis newspaper, where her editor, the avuncular, tough-love Curry (Miguel Sandoval), gives her an assignment. She is to cover the murder of an adolescent, Ann Nash, and the recent disappearance of a second girl, Natalie Keene, in her hometown of Wind Gap. Camille is less than thrilled about the assignment—’We have murders here, Curry’—but Curry insists she is the person for the job. ‘It might be good . . . get you back on your feet . . . could be a damn good story if you do it right’. She sets off on the road, swigging hard alcohol and blasting Led Zeppelin along the way.

Camille’s encounter with the series’ inaugural corpse occurs not long after she arrives in Wind Gap. Near the town square, she hears a woman screaming. She runs into an alley where an older woman is down on the ground, overcome with emotion, while an older man is gesturing for help. Across from them, propped in a windowsill in the alley, is the body of a young girl. The camera follows Camille from behind as she walks toward a pair of dirty legs which dangle toward the ground. The skinniness of the legs, as well as the converse lace-up sneakers, tell us that the victim is very young, but we cannot yet see her face. Just before we round on the face, the scene cuts to Camille, whose mouth slowly opens, in shock or horror; she brings a forearm to her face, as if to hold back sick. Only then do we see the girl: her mouth is bloody—later, in the autopsy room, we learn her teeth have been pulled out—her body is filthy, and her legs are covered in scratches.

Camille does not handle the sight well. She turns away, visibly shaken. Changes in the soundtrack underscore her agitation. During Camille’s short time in the alley, the older woman who first spotted the body has been moaning and mumbling. Now, as Camille turns away from the corpse toward the older woman, the diegetic sounds, including the woman’s voice, become distant-seeming, as if heard echoing off the walls in a cavernous train station. The eerie, manipulated quality of the sound tells us that Camille is disconnecting psychologically from the here and now, no longer able to take in data in a normal way. She shuts her eyes tightly, then opens them again, her eyeballs rolling upward, almost as if she will pass out. Now, the magnified sound of a woman’s heavy, erratic breath, presumably Camille’s, dominants the soundtrack. We are watching a woman in shock.

One of the predictable tropes of crime narrative is the investigator’s remarkable cool upon encountering the inaugural dead body. There are exceptions, of course, but these are mostly tongue in cheek, as when Deputy Andy (Harry Goaz) weeps over Laura Palmer’s (Sheryl Lee) body in Twin Peaks while his fellow officers groan in annoyance. In his analysis of corpses in crime fiction, David Trotter argues that for the detective, the corpse typically ‘provokes interpretation rather than nausea’. (2000: 21) The crime-scene body may appear bloody, bloated, or mutilated but, thanks to the detective’s ability to see the corpse as a set of clues to be deciphered, it soon becomes reinscribed in what Trotter calls an ‘empire of signs’. (2000: 21) From the very beginning, the corpse is made to mean.

Yet, behind the detective’s ‘hermeneutic zeal’ lurks what Trotter calls the ‘moral and material horror’ (1991: 68) which the corpse evokes. ‘The sublimination which converts a dead body into a set of clues significantly prefigures the detective’s long and arduous sublimination of his or her own body: of desire and rage, of fear and loathing’. (Trotter 2000: 27) Suppressing his bodily sensations, the detective works to neutralise the corpse’s unsettling materiality, which reminds him of his or her own fragile body. [3] Above all, the detective ‘never sickens’. (Trotter 1991: 72)

Here, gender matters. In Female Corpses in Crime Fiction, G. S. Close draws on both Trotter and Julia Kristeva to theorise the detective’s relationship to the female corpse. Following Kristeva, Close contends that the dead body is an ‘abject’ body, in the sense that it ‘suspends signification and subjectivity’ and ‘cancels identity and differentiation’. (2018: 13) The corpse, in Kristeva’s phrase, ‘“disturbs identity, system, order”’; it makes us ‘acutely aware of the precarious borders of our own existence as bodies and subjects’. (Close 2018: 14)

Significantly, for the male detectives of crime fiction and television, from hard-boiled novels to CSI (2000-2015), the female corpse conjures above all the originary experience of abjection, namely, that which involves the mother and child.

Kristeva relates abjection to the ‘immemorial violence’ (10) with which the body of a child must separate from the maternal body and to the child’s struggle ‘to release the hold of the maternal entity’ (13, italics in original) as a precondition for subjectivation and accession to the symbolic order, whereupon what had been the mother will ‘turn into an abject’ (13) for a subject pretending to autonomous identity yet never secure in it. (Close 2018: 16-17)

Evoking the border between being and non-being, between me and not-me, the corpse recalls the subject to the initial experience of dependence on and expulsion from the maternal body. For the male detective, such a reminder is terrifying; he must disavow abjection by reinscribing the corpse in the ‘empire of signs’. (Trotter 2000: 21) By converting the unsettling, messy corpse into a set of clues to be solved, the detective seemingly banishes the abject. In reality, however, the abject can never be fully banished; hence the need to repeat the conversion of corpse into clue again and again. The result is series after series, novel after novel, featuring variations on the same plot.

Close focuses his discussion almost exclusively on the male detective. Yet in numerous crime shows of the past two decades, women investigators are the ones tracking down killers of young women. One might expect the female detective to exhibit a different kind of relationship to the female corpse. After all, she is not likely to fear the feminine body in the same way as the male investigator. To an extent, women detectives do relate differently to female corpses. Series such as The Killing and Top of the Lake feature female protagonists whose identities and stories in some sense mirror that of the victim. [4] Nonetheless, we almost never see a female investigator demonstrate a strong physical or emotional response to the corpse itself. In series including Prime Suspect (1991-2006), The Killing, The Fall, and most recently, Mare of Easttown, female detectives maintain their cool when coming onto crime scenes. These in-control female protagonists would seem to reflect a feminist effort in crime television to dispel notions of women’s emotionality. Like the male detective, the female investigator can handle gruesome sights. Put otherwise, she never sickens.

Not so with Camille. In Sharp Objects, Camille emerges as the rare investigator who displays a strong affective stance toward the corpse. Moved by the sight of Natalie’s filthy, mutilated body, Camille becomes overwhelmed. Arm to mouth, eyes rolled up, a look of disorientation on her face: the sight of the corpse hits her viscerally. Moreover, in the coming days, she will return to Natalie’s corpse in dreams and memories, particularly to the image of her bloody, toothless mouth. Only at the series’ end do we understand where Natalie has, as it were, been leading Camille the whole time: Natalie takes Camille, via a strange, circuitous route, back to an actual mother’s body, Adora’s.

As the narrative unfolds, a sinister element in the plotline emerges. Adora is in a sense responsible for Natalie’s death. In the penultimate episode it is revealed that Adora suffers from Munchausen’s by Proxy, a disease in which a caretaker makes a charge sick in order to be able to lavish care and attention on them—and, in Adora’s case, to receive admiration from the community for her caretaking skills. Two decades earlier, Adora made Marian, Camille’s younger sister, sick by feeding her poison; the poison eventually killed Marian. Adora has also been poisoning Camille’s teenage half-sister, Amma. Amma, it is clear, is desperate for her mother’s love, and accepts this ‘medicine’, even after she realises it makes her sick.

In the final moments of the series, we discover Amma killed both Ann and Natalie. However, the series implies that Adora is chiefly to blame. As the girls’ tutor, Adora had been lavishing attention on Natalie and Ann, and Amma became jealous. In Flynn’s novel, Adora’s culpability is spelled out explicitly: ‘Ann and Natalie died because Adora paid attention to them. Amma could only view it as a raw deal. Amma, who had allowed my mother to sicken her for so long. . . . A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort’. (2006: 250-251) Natalie’s death relates back to a literal maternal entity, a figure who, in this case, threatens literal obliteration of self. The beautiful female corpse—Natalie’s—leads us inexorably back to this to this stifling power—Adora.

Uncovering the Abject

By the series’ end, Camille herself becomes trapped in the maternal space, her mother’s Victorian home, drinking her ‘medicine’. When at last Camille discovers that Adora slowly poisoned Marian, and, entering her home, finds Adora in the process of doing the same to Amma, she does what she has never done before: she allows Adora to ‘take care of her’. We learn from flashbacks that as a teen, Camille was the one daughter who refused Adora’s ministrations, a refusal which saved her life, but also kept her from receiving Adora’s love. Adora does not know how to love someone she cannot control. Now, however, in an effort to save Amma by distracting Adora, Camille permits her mother to undress her, tuck her into bed, and spoon out syrupy red medicine, even though she knows it will harm her. While, typically speaking, the threat of abjection remains abstract, here the peril is real, literal: the maternal body can obliterate you.

In her work on abjection, Kristeva does not of course have in mind murdering mothers. She does however emphasise an experience of oblivion. For her, maternity is a powerful experience, marked by an extraordinary in-folding of the other within the self. In her essay ‘Stabat Mater’, Kristeva embeds within philosophical discourse a poetic meditation on maternity. In the main portions of the essay, she offers an account of the Christian vision of the Virgin Mary; in the more poetic passages running along the margins of the main text, Kristeva reflects on her personal experience of pregnancy and mothering. Taken together, the two texts enact the division between the Symbolic realm and the semiotic. The former, the Symbolic, is associated with standard language; the latter, the semiotic, is associated with the primary libidinal drives and the subversive poetic language which expresses these drives. Just as her poetic passages erupt within the philosophical text, the child destabilises the self from within. As Kristeva writes:

A night of vigil, fitful sleep, the child’s gentleness, hot mercury in my arms, caress, tenderness, defenceless body, his or mine, sheltered, protected. . . . The lover gone: now comes oblivion, but the pleasure of the sexes remains, and nothing is missing. No representation, sensation, memory. The brazier of vice. Later, forgetfulness returns, but now as a fall—of lead-grey, pale, opaque. Oblivion: a blinding, choking, yet tender mist. Like the fog that devours the park, swallowing its branches, wiping out the rusty new sun and clouding my eyes. (1985: 141; 143)

Kristeva points to a blurring of identity between mother and child: ‘defenceless body, his or mine’; to a paradoxical experience that is a form of ‘oblivion’, and yet filled with ‘pleasure’—’nothing is missing’. Oblivion is ‘blinding, choking’, yet also beautiful, a ‘tender mist’. The maternal space: a place of utmost paradox.

Here, a critical question arises. How can this oneness, this beautiful experience of in-folding, elicit the fear that Close identifies among fictional and television detectives? Would not the memory of the maternal embrace provoke in the subject nostalgia and/or adoration? Not, it would seem, if one begins from the point of view of the Symbolic order, an order that wishes to maintain itself, its totalizing integrity, at all costs. In Lacanian terms, the child is born into language at the moment the father lays down the ‘law’: the father’s no/name—le Nom du Père—prohibits the pre-verbal bliss of the mother-child union, enacting within the child a profound psychic splitting. Now, the child lives in the Symbolic order, an order made possible by this initial paternal prohibition. As a ‘man’s world’ (Jones 1984: 58), the Symbolic is ordered around the repression of the primary drives, around the repression of the chora (Greek for place, locality), the originary maternal space. Within the patriarchal domain, reminders of the maternal body are threatening, signalling dissolution of identity, rather than the plenitude of maternal in-folding. [5]

Crime narratives tend to approach abjection from the perspective of the Symbolic. Abjection, the force or power connected to the (potentially) engulfing female body, is terrifying, and must be banished. Insofar as it literalises the threat posed by the abject maternal, while declining to celebrate maternity in the manner Kristeva does, Sharp Objects could be seen as problematic. Does the series not play into, and indeed play up, male fears around maternal engulfment? Does it not reinforce the link posited elsewhere in crime fiction and television between femininity and death?

Adora’s villainy is not without its problems. For Kristeva, the maternal body represents, at its most frightening, ‘a blinding, choking, yet tender mist’ (emphasis added). True, Adora may want to love her children; clearly, she relishes the opportunity to lavish ‘care’ upon them. But there is no getting around the fact that she is a deadly villain. She is that which the male detective most fears, the abject maternal, brought to life.

Nonetheless, I would suggest that in taking abjection to its outer limit, the series enables the broadening of understanding around the detective’s journey toward the ‘negating void’ (Close 2018: 15) first evoked by the corpse. Typically, the threat of abjection lurks in the background in crime narratives; here, it is brought to the fore. In the process, we are better able to see and to name the ‘persistent and recurring threat’ (Close 2018: 18) the detective typically attempts to disavow. Moreover, Sharp Objects suggests that the terror and horror first elicited by the female corpse cannot in fact be banished. The detective must confront abjection head-on, if he or she is to understand—and perhaps come to terms with—its power. In Sharp Objects, Camille embarks on a journey most detectives eschew. In the process, we are allowed to see her as fully human, fully vulnerable, and fully embodied. [6]

Terrifying Knowledge

Camille’s confrontation with abjection climaxes in the series’ final two episodes. Until now, the prime suspects in the murders of Ann and Natalie have been Ann’s father, Bob (Will Chase), and Natalie’s brother, John (Taylor John Smith), a sensitive teen whose tears are viewed with suspicion by the community. Camille alone seems open to the possibility that the killer is female, especially after a local boy tells her he saw the Woman in White, a town folk legend, take Natalie. ‘Maybe somebody doesn’t believe it’s folklore’, Camille tells Chief Vickery (Matt Craven), the local law enforcement officer, after Vickery dismisses the boy’s account. ‘Maybe they want to make it real’. (At the series’ end, after the credits roll, we see, for a split second, an image of Amma in white on the edge of the woods.) Camille does not yet suspect her family—not consciously, anyway—but her suspicion that the killer may be female nudges us closer to the truth. Meanwhile, Willis (Chris Messina), the Kansas City detective who has been called onto the case, and with whom Camille is engaged in an intense flirtation, believes Camille is hiding something. (Willis is right, though not in the way he thinks he is. Camille is working hard to hide from him the scars that cover her body.) After the two have a sexual encounter in Episode 5, Willis begins to look into Camille’s family history, eventually speaking with a nurse who treated Marian. The nurse suspects Marian was poisoned by Adora. Given Adora’s wealth and strong ties within the community, it was not, it seems, difficult to get medical staff to look the other way; the nurse who originally spoke out about her suspicions about Adora lost her job.

By this point, Willis has a strong hunch that Adora killed Ann and Natalie. Chief Vickery disagrees; he thinks John Keene, Natalie’s brother, is responsible. (Police found Ann’s bike at the hog farm where John works—and which Adora owns.) In a tense, tightly packed series of scenes in Episode 7, Vickery obtains an arrest warrant for John; at the hospital, Willis views Marian and Amma’s medical records, which point toward their poisonings; and Camille locates John in a bar outside town.

Camille locates John with the intention to interview him before his arrest. But what begins as an interview quickly turns into something more emotional. John, who has been drinking, begins to cry; he says he misses his sister. Camille briefly takes his hand; she tells him she knows he did not kill Natalie. John tells Camille she is beautiful. Insisting he cannot go into a police interrogation as drunk as he is, Camille drives John to a motel and tells him to sleep it off. But John sees the scars on Camille’s wrists, and asks to see more. In a tender, moving exchange, John softly reads the words she has carved on her body: laid, drained, cherry, sick, gone. Close to tears, Camille murmurs, ‘You’re readin’ me’. John, who has much in common with Camille—the loss of a beloved sister, a sensitive disposition—is the first man whom she has allowed to see her scars.

After they make love, John and Camille talk about Adora, whom John says is the only person in Wind Gap who cared about Natalie. ‘She [Adora] never gave up. She was gonna solve [Natalie and Ann]’. In a brief flashback set in young Camille’s bedroom, we see Adora attempting to give young Camille medicine, and Camille turning away, refusing, her arms crossed protectively across her chest. The scene cuts back to adult Camille, who tells John, ‘I never let her solve me’. Another brief flashback: we see young Camille violently smack Adora’s spoon away. Adora, a look of displeasure on her face, turns away as if to leave the room. Cut to a close-up of adult Camille: her eyes have a faraway look. ‘Maybe I should have’, she murmurs to John. Another brief flashback shows young Camille lying on her stomach, as adult Camille is now. In the flashback, young Camille’s shoulder is clenched up against her cheek; her hand is underneath the pillow, a stance that suggests both guardedness and loneliness. At the corner of the screen, we see that Adora has not left the room: her hand, with its, long pink nails, rests on Camille’s back. But Camille will not budge.

 

 

 

Moments later, police burst into the motel room and arrest John. When Camille returns to her car, she finds Willis has left Marian’s medical record on the seat. As she thumbs through the file, awareness dawns. Adora poisoned Marian. This is what being ‘solved’ by Adora means: obliteration, dissolution. (At this point, we, and Camille, can only assume Adora killed Ann and Natalie as well.)

This sequence—the pain of abandonment we glimpse on young Camille’s face in the flashback, adult Camille’s admission that she half-regrets resisting Adora, and then, finally, the discovery of Marian’s medical record—represents an epistemological climax. Although Camille may have known the truth unconsciously, she has never faced it directly, never had proof. It is a moment which, as Close’s work indicates, the detective fears most. The beautiful female corpse has led one back to the ultimate ‘negating void’ (Close 2018: 15) associated with the mother’s body. This is knowledge of a different, deeper, more frightening order than that which could solve the question ‘Who did it?’. It is knowledge of one’s precariousness; it is knowledge of the ‘power as securing as it is stifling’ (Kristeva 1982: 130), that is, of the maternal body.

And indeed, the revelation of Adora’s deeds has an overwhelming effect on Camille. After visiting her mother’s friend Jackie (Elizabeth Perkins), who implicitly confirms what the medical records suggest—that Adora killed Marian—Camille returns to her car, where she breaks down emotionally. She calls Curry, but can barely talk; sobbing, hands shaking, she manages to say, ‘My mother did it’, an assertion which, significantly, Curry does not at first believe. ‘Listen, Cubby, you’re under a lot of stress . . .’, Curry says soothingly, using his affectionate name for Camille. Her editor’s disbelief can be seen as an instance of denial or repression. The male subject, even one as kindly as Curry, cannot face knowledge of the abject maternal.

A Detective who Confronts Oblivion

In the finale, after the revelation of Adora’s crimes, Camille returns to her mother’s home. She finds Adora, Amma, and Alan in the candlelit dining room. Soft music plays. (A taciturn, passive husband, Alan defers to Adora throughout the narrative. ‘This is your area’, he intones later in the episode as he watches Adora brew up more medicine.) Adora announces they are celebrating the capture of Natalie and Ann’s killer—‘Now that the Keene boy’s arrested, our little girl is finally safe’—but Amma hardly looks safe. She is flushed and slurs her words. Adora has been feeding Amma poison. When Adora tries to force Amma, who wants to linger downstairs and have cake, upstairs, presumably to give her more ‘medicine’, Camille too rises from the table and stumbles toward her mother. ‘Ma’, she calls, moaning. ‘Mama’. Camille is pretending to be sick in an attempt to divert Adora’s attention away from Amma. The strategy works. Adora quickly returns to Camille and helps her up. ‘I got you’, she coos. Upstairs, Adora does something she has never done: she allows Camille into her prized, ivory-floored bedroom. Camille, in turn, does something she has never done: she permits Adora to undress her and tuck her into bed. ‘Do you see how nice it is, not to have to worry or fight?’, Adora soothes. She caresses Camille’s cheek. ‘Such a good girl’.

As is the case with all the series’ episodes, the finale takes its title, ‘Milk’, from a word on Camille’s skin. Milk: the liquid that comes from the mother. Normally life sustaining, here the mother’s fluid—Adora doles out a syrupy red liquid—is poisoned. Yet Camille, knowing she must continue to distract Adora, accepts it. By the next day’s end, Camille will be too sick to walk or talk.

 

 

 

Camille’s decision to return to Adora’s home is occasioned by a double need. First, Camille understands that Amma’s life depends on her sacrifice. With Adora a danger to Amma, Camille steps into the maternal role, putting her own life in peril to save younger kin. This would seem to be a key element of Camille’s journey: she must prove to herself her own goodness, a goodness which Adora could never see in her. She must prove to herself that she has the capacity to sacrifice herself for another, despite the absence of a caring maternal role model in her life.

Second, drinking Adora’s poison is a means of obtaining proof. Eventually, the police arrive and search Adora’s home. In her kitchen, they find the pliers used to extract Ann and Natalie’s teeth. Adora is arrested for the murders of Ann and Natalie. Meanwhile, paramedics bring Camille and Amma to the hospital. As Willis explains to Camille, the poison in their system will serve as evidence, helping to convict Adora of Marian’s murder. In exposing her poisoned body to the law—the criminal justice system, but also, by extension, the Law that governs the Symbolic—Camille achieves a (more) complete break from the maternal body. As Linda M. G. Zerilli states, the abject confronts us with the ‘incompleteness of and thus the need to reenact primal separation from the mother’. (1992: 127) In the finale, Camille completes a journey that began with Natalie’s corpse, emblem of the abject. Once again in her mother’s home, Camille returns to absolute dependency, faces the threat of obliteration, and, ultimately, accomplishes what she could not accomplish as a child: abject the mother with the full knowledge of why such separation must occur. (However, the neatness of this resolution is complicated in the final moments of the series, a point I shall turn to shortly.)

Resisting Closure

Sharp Objects casts in sharp relief questions that have traditionally lurked in the background in crime shows: What happens when the detective faces head-on the negation implied by the female corpse? Can the detective survive such a confrontation? In way of answer, the series reinforces a link between death and femininity, positing the maternal body as a key site of disintegration. At the same time, in what is arguably a strongly feminist gesture, the series portrays Camille as the rare investigative subject who is willing and able to encounter the abject maternal, and, in the process, to enact a decisive break from the mother.

However, the finality of this separation comes into question in the final moments of the series. After Adora is sent to prison, Camille returns to St. Louis with Amma; the two will live there together. Camille, it seems, will get to develop her own nurturing instincts, be the female role model neither she nor Amma has had. In St. Louis, Amma makes friends with a neighbor girl, Mae (Iyana Halley). Although there is a moment of tension when Mae announces she might want to become a journalist like Camille—’Kiss-ass’, mutters Amma—all seems well. Then, one morning, Mae goes missing. Waiting for Amma to come home, Camille peers into Amma’s dollhouse, an exact replica of Adora’s Victorian home. The floor of one upstairs room—the bedroom that represents Adora’s ivory-floored bedroom—is covered with teeth: presumably, Ann and Natalie’s teeth. At this moment, Amma walks into the room. Her face changes when she sees Camille holding a tooth. ‘Don’t tell Mama’, she begs. The credits roll, leaving the audience puzzled as to what the teeth mean. Did Amma take the teeth from Adora? Did Amma kill alongside Adora? (When I taught the series to college freshmen, I had to clear up the killer’s identity at the beginning of class, for those who missed it or were uncertain.) However, halfway through the closing credits, in a series of (very) swift flashbacks, we see Amma strangle Ann and Natalie, as well as Mae, to the jittery strains of Led Zeppelin’s ‘In the Evening’. If one were to turn the television off before the credits rolled, one would likely be left confused.

By contrast, in the novel Sharp Objects, Amma’s villainy is spelled out. Moreover, an epilogue provides a sense of retrospective reflection on what Amma has done. Amma is sent away to a juvenile correctional facility. Visiting her there, Camille gains insight into Amma’s murderous tendencies: ‘A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort’. (Flynn 2006: 251) She reflects, too, on her role as a caretaker: ‘Was I good at caring for Amma because of kindness? Or did I like caring for Amma because I have Adora’s sickness? . . . Lately, I’ve been leaning toward kindness’. (2006: 252) But in the series, the future—the aftermath of Camille’s discovery of the dollhouse teeth—is unknown. We are left with an unsettling openness. For example, if Camille does not have the heart to turn Amma in, will she kill again? Will Camille once again start cutting her body? Will Camille, no stranger to psychic distress, survive the knowledge of Amma’s deeds?

From a Kristevan point of view, this openness is, I would argue, one of the series’ strengths. It suggests that one can never fully overcome abjection. As we saw above, crime narratives tend to focus on banishing the abject—tying up the ‘Who done it?’ in a neat bow that seemingly cannot be untied. In fact, the abject is not so easily dispelled. ‘The Kristevan abject . . . the abyss of nonidentity. . . is ultimately impossible to close’. (Close 2018: 18, emphasis added) In identifying a new killer, and delivering a new female corpse, Mae’s, after the series has already technically ended, Sharp Objects signals that the abyss is indeed impossible to close.

As a feminist Dead Girl Show, Sharp Objects prompts a questioning of the limits and opportunities presented by the crime genre. Drawing on Close’s work, I have argued that, beginning with its intensive focus on the female corpse, Sharp Objects teases out the threat of abjection, setting its female heroine the task of confronting the literal embodiment of this threat—Adora. Along the way, the series invites us to reflect on the genre’s paranoia around both death and femininity. Ultimately, the series suggests that the abject cannot be banished; the subject will forever remain ‘attracted and repelled by the abyss of nonidentity’. (Close 2018: 18) Sharp Objects eschews the narrative of the in-control female detective, portraying two generations of women who exist at the edge of abjection.

 

Notes

[1] Following Bolin, I use the term ‘Dead Girl Show’ here. For discussion of the female body in crime narrative, see also Bronfen (1992); Wanzo (2008) on the ‘Lost (White) Girl Event’, Foltyn (2008) on ‘dead body porn’ and Klinger (2018) on the ‘gateway body’ and the ‘WFV’ (white female victim).

[2] Although the series’ final victim, Mae, is Black, all other victims are not only white, but almost interchangeable in their blonde beauty. For further discussion of the show’s racial politics, see McFarland (2018); for broader analysis of the white dead girl body, see Klinger (2018); Bolin (2018, esp. pp. 22-23); Wanzo (2008); and Nelson (2007, esp. p. 68).

[3] Trotter points to one narrative, the film The Silence of the Lambs, which complicates the sublimination of the detective’s body. Here, Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), as the ‘bad’ father figure, poses a question to which the (female) detective, Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), has no answer: ‘“[H]ow do you manage your rage?”’ (qtd. in Trotter 2000: 27). In Trotter’s analysis, Clarice Starling’s complicity in a ‘dialectic of fascination and nausea . . . forms (or deforms) the protagonist more comprehensibly than involvement in the hermeneutic process’. (2000: 30) In a sense, Starling could be seen as a precursor of Camille, although in this case it is a ‘father’ figure, Hannibal, rather than the mother, who leads her toward abjection. However, in Camille’s case, the journey toward abjection is more pronounced, more fully developed, and, arguably, rendered in a comparatively ‘positive’ light.

[4] The opening scene of The Killing, for example, alternates between shots of Detective Sarah Linden jogging in the forest and flashbacks to the young victim, Rosie Larsen (Katie Findlay), running for her life through the same woods the previous night, a scene which establishes parallel vulnerability between investigator and victim.

[5] As Mary Caputi puts it, ‘According to Kristeva, there is always something primal, maternal, and “abject” which threatens the Law of the Father: the semiotic exists as a creative force, but is also disruptive, overwhelming, even terrifying in its ability to recall the archaic and unmediated in the face of cultural law and order’. (1993) For Kristeva’s discussion of the child’s entrance into the Symbolic, see About Chinese Women (1977: 31); for a lucid summary of Kristeva’s thought as it relates to Lacan, see Jones (1984, esp. 57-58).

[6] It seems important to note that Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic rests on a sexual binary that is, most certainly, open to criticism. As Ewa Ziarek writes, Kristeva’s apparent placing of the maternal outside the Symbolic order has been seen by some as a ‘crude version of essentialism, if not mute biologism’. (1992: 92) However, in recent years scholars have sought to broaden the definition of the Kristevan ‘abject’ body, pushing Kristeva’s work toward new frontiers in, for example, transgender studies. See Phillips (2014).