[SPOILERS AHEAD]
The femme fatale is a long-standing character type in crime fiction, a prominent and popular fixture of the mid-twentieth-century hard-boiled detective novel. Her overt sexuality is her chief weapon, greed is her underlying desire, and her fate is bleak, without redemption. It’s also a misogynist archetype, a product of the male crime writer’s anxiety about his diminished standing in Depression Era America and later his fraught reintegration into civilian life after World War II.
Historically women crime writers, such as the great Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Jackson, have told sympathetic stories about women who commit crimes, subverting this problematic archetype. Patricia Highsmith in The Price of Salt (1952) and Shirley Jackson in We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), in different narrative modes, from lesbian romance to small-town gothic, examine female criminality with great empathy. In Highsmith’s novel, women fall in love and break the rigid social mores of the late early 50’s. In Jackson’s novel, a young girl poisons her family, but the story treats her crime as an act of rebellion, and the true antagonists are the small-minded townspeople who bully and invade their home. In all of these stories—as well as many others—creative, non-comforting women are viewed by their societies as corrupt or crazy, and the patriarchal structures in place attempt to force them to conform or cast them out.
Similarly, contemporary crime writers, including Petra Hammesfahr and Gillian Flynn, have used crime fiction to complicate and deepen our understanding of violent female crime. In the past two years, Hammesfahr’s The Sinner (1999) and Flynn’s Sharp Objects (2006), have been adapted into popular and critically acclaimed limited television series. Last year, Jessica Biel received a lead actress Emmy nomination for The Sinner, and this year, Sharp Objects has accrued five Emmy nominations, including a nod for best limited series. Interest in women’s stories is on the rise, and because of their acclaim, these novels were already strong candidates for adaptation. It’s difficult to draw a direct line from the advent of the #metoo movement and the heightened visibility of women’s rights to prestige television’s decision to adapt these stories—they were being developed prior to the movement’s beginnings—but they feel unshakably connected to the current social and political zeitgeist. A new type of story is being told about the femme fatale, a story that explores why she commits violent crime and exposes the source of her anger that often fuels her crime.
In both of the novels and, to an even greater degree, each series—which will be my focus—women and girls commit acts of devastating violence to themselves and others, and are quickly deemed corrupt or crazy or both, and dismissed by their communities, families, and even the authorities. When their motivations are traced to their origins, we discover that a domino effect has occurred: their actions are a direct result of oppressive patriarchal violence done to them, the true culprit being a misogynist culture and not intrinsic evil or madness. Their “crazy” behavior—that feminine rage—is a response to the reality of traumas in their past.
In the first few minutes of season one, episode one of The Sinner (dir. Antonio Campos), we know something is off with our main character Cora Tannetti (Jessica Biel). She’s distant during sex with her husband Mason (Christopher Abbott), and she’s experiencing brief flashes of an ominous patterned wallpaper, an important clue and a clear reference to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) about the relationship between patriarchal oppression and madness. When Cora and Mason take their child to the beach, she swims out into the lake and forces herself under the water for a moment, a symbolic suicide, referencing another feminist classic, Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening (1899), which concludes with a woman drowning herself as an act of defiant individualism.
None of that prepares us for what follows: A young man, Frankie Belmont, and his girlfriend are playing music and making out near Cora on the beach. The girlfriend turns up a song (“Huggin & Kissin” by Big Black Delta), which we learn is Frankie’s creation that he wrote during his med school days. When Cora hears it, she flies into a rage and stabs him to death. When questioned about her motive, she makes no attempt to defend her actions. The novel enters Cora’s consciousness, and we learn that, after the crime, she feels, “satisfaction, boundless relief and pride.”
Detective Harry Ambrose (Bill Pullman) isn’t satisfied with her confession or her culpability, despite the pressure he’s receiving from his superiors to close the case. Harry, whose marriage is falling apart and who finds solace in BDSM practices with a local waitress, recognizes something familiar in Cora: a self-destructive impulse. He also knows there’s a story behind that impulse—she’s not blood-thirsty or hysterical, and therefore dismissible; her actions have meaning.
In Hammesfahr’s book—although not in the series—Cora’s mother (Enid Graham) had a child before Cora, an unwanted pregnancy that she aborted with a knitting needle. The trauma from the botched abortion transformed her into a fanatic narcissist. In the series, she wields her oppressive Christianity on Cora and her sickly younger sister Phoebe (Nadia Alexander), controlling them with guilt and fear of damnation. Phoebe, who has a weak heart, becomes her chief form of leverage. In the first episode, she tells young Cora:
When you were a baby inside of me, you took up all my strength, enough for three children, so when Phoebe came, there wasn’t enough left for her. That’s why she’s so sick. But I prayed … and it worked. He was testing me. It was all a test. Every single thing he expects of us, we have to do. It’s the only way she’ll live.”
The mother pits her against her sister, but as the girls reach adolescence and develop sexual urges, they grow close in their desire to experience the world and be free from their mother’s grip. On Phoebe’s 18th birthday, Cora sneaks her sister out of the house to go to a party. Phoebe meets Frankie Belmont at a party, and in a blur of hormones and drug use, they fall for each other and have sex. During sex, her heart fails, and she dies. In the same room, Cora—now plied with booze and drugs—is having sex with her lothario of a boyfriend and his drug-dealing partner. When she realizes what happened to her sister, she attacks Frankie, hitting him in the same pattern she would later repeat when stabbing him, a futile attempt to protect her sister. To subdue her, her boyfriend brains her with an ashtray. The men call in Frankie’s father, a “respectable” doctor, and they rush to cover up the death. They bury Phoebe, and Dr. Belmont kidnaps Cora, holds her captive in a room of his house, the source of the ominous wallpaper flashbacks, and wipes clean her memory of the events with a four month-long drug-induced stupor.
Cora and her sister are victimized twice: First, by the patriarchal religious credo their mother spews—who is herself a victim of a culture that stigmatizes abortion—and then, by men who are more interested in the appearance of respectability than doing what’s right. As Detective Ambrose senses, Cora’s murderous actions aren’t base or insane, but rather the product of systemic, misogynistic abuse. If anything, her actions carry out a kind of cosmic justice: she takes Frankie away from his father, just as his father attempted to erase her memory.
Although this show went into production well before Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee about Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual assault, the question about what gets remembered and the validity of a specific memory has eerie resonance. When Dr. Ford was asked by Sen. Patrick Leahy to describe her “strongest memory,” she responded, “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter, the laugh—the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense” In both cases, a woman’s memory is the battleground; it’s validation, her only stay against erasure.
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In the HBO adaption of Sharp Objects (dir. Jean-Marc Vallée), a St. Louis crime reporter, Camille Preaker (Amy Adams) has been sent to report on crimes in her hometown of Wind Gap, Missouri. A young girl has been killed, her teeth savagely extracted, and another girl is missing, soon to be found murdered. By the end of the first episode, we know that Camille’s an alcoholic and a cutter, and that her emotional instability is linked to her childhood, particularly the death of her half-sister Marian (Lulu Wilson). The chief aim of the series—and the novel, for that matter—isn’t to solve serial murders, but to uncover the cause of Camille’s anger and strife. What is it about her childhood that brought her to her current state?
From the outset, the murders seem connected to Camille, if not by evidence then by the dreamy haunted atmosphere Vallée creates through careful editing and sound design. While Camille navigates her manipulative and overbearing mother, the town matriarch Adora Crellin (Patricia Clarkson), her spiteful yet vulnerable teenage half-sister Amma (Eliza Scanlan), and the other provincial denizens of Wind Gap, Vallée repeatedly intercuts flashes of her past. This blend of past and present is unified by moody diegetic music, from the buzz of crickets to a playlist on Camille’s iPhone to the crooning from her stepfather’s expensive sound system. At times, the natural sounds and the music are indiscernible from one another, especially in The Acid’s electronic song “Tumbling Lights,” which is repeated several times. Unlike the pop song that breaks into Cora’s subconscious, Camille uses her music to distract from her pain, to fill the silences. The Crellins use the crooning like a sentimental blanket to muffle their ugly truths. All this suggests that the Crellins—and even Camille—are concealing something. Is it grief? Or something more sinister?
The Calhoun Day sequence in episode five—which is not in the novel—brings the town together to commemorate a sordid tale from its Civil War past, specifically the rape of Millie Calhoun who wouldn’t give up her husband’s location to Union soldiers. Essentially, they are celebrating the rape and silencing of a woman for her husband’s sake, for the town’s sake. It’s clear that the Crellin household is the center of the town’s social web, and that web is made with extra-strength patriarchal silk. In episode seven, John Keene, the brother of the second victim and also an outsider whose family recently moved to town, says, “It’s like they took the two girls in Wind Gap with minds of their own, and they just killed them all.” From his outsider’s perspective, the town is the murderer, the silencer of feminine individuality. If Wind Gap is a web, then with her veneer of Southern gentility, Adora is the spider at its center; she is the town and its history made flesh. It’s no mistake that Vallée has filled the show with spiders—spiders are known to eat their young.
The mystery soon unfurls, and we learn Adora poisoned and killed Marian and has been poisoning Amma; both daughters are causalities of a serious case of Munchausen by proxy. Camille’s suppressed childhood knowledge of the abuse is verified, and the audience learns that her cutting was her attempt to write that story on her body. Through her pain and self-loathing, it had become encoded, its meaning obscured. In one of the most powerful scenes of the series, she allows John Keene—who she feels drawn to in mutual grief—to see all the words she’s written into her flesh. As he kisses her, he speaks them aloud. She is finally being seen, being read, by someone who understands her language. John—like Harry Ambrose in The Sinner—doesn’t dismiss her. He perceives her not as corrupt or crazy, but as someone trying to tell her story.
With a final turn of the screw, we learn that it wasn’t Adora who killed and mutilated the young girls, but Amma, the ultimate manifestation of the rage that her mother sublimated into a mental disorder. In the novel, Camille tells us that, once discovered, Amma shrieked at her: “I like violence … I blame my mother. A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.” That simmering rage—the anger that drove Camille to self-harm, the anger that Adora perverted into abuse—has surfaced as full-bodied and blood-thirsty, the product of generations of internalized misogyny, misogyny with deep historical roots. Amma rips the teeth out of her victims to render them defenseless, to silence them, to symbolically force them to conform to patriarchal modes of behavior, and then uses their teeth to decorate her prized dollhouse, a reproduction of the family homestead, idealized domesticity. Like Wind Gap itself, Amma attempts to transform her horrific past into something quaint, precious, and tamed. John Keene is right: the town did want to kill girls with minds of their own.
These types of stories are more relevant than ever, which is why major TV production companies like the USA Network and HBO are developing them. The #metoo movement, as well as the heightened visibility of the women’s rights platform, has gathered energy and demanded a space in our culture where women’s stories about sexual assault and rape can be heard and taken seriously. Of course, one could view The Sinner and Sharp Objects as problematic: Both Camille and Cora have their stories validated by men, not by women, and vicious matriarchs are the direct source of much of the injustice. So, are these stories simply dark fairytale retellings? Is the prince in shining armor who saves the day now a sensitive man who’s willing to listen? Perhaps, but it’s only through such sensitivity, a man’s awareness of his own wounded nature, his own culpability, that he becomes open to the possibility that underlying patriarchal misogyny may be the true culprit destabilizing our social and political worlds.
