Chris Gethard: Career Suicide.

The links seem to only link to the American version of HBO - so I don't know if this will be available in Canada. Womp womp.

Watch Big Little Lies.

Illustration by Keith Negley

I very much enjoyed Big Little Lies. As the series unfolded I had my suspicions and theories, and eventually grew worried it would let me down, but it did not.

It represented friendships and women in a very honest way and did not fall into any misogynist tropes about whether or not women can be truly supportive of one another.



Spoiler alert on these linked articles!

In Its Final Moments, Big Little Lies Transcends Its White Feminism

From THE SURPRISING GENEROSITY OF “BIG LITTLE LIES”:

In one lovely scene, Jane tells her new friends how detached she feels, as if she were peering at them from far away rather than sitting with the two of them. As Madeline chatters, Celeste stays quiet, locking eyes with Jane. The camera holds on the two of them, capturing the early alchemy of a friendship—and the suggestion that, even in mean-girl world, women might choose to be allies instead of enemies.

That's my main takeaway. I was adamant that the ending feature a show of solidarity, which seemed imminent. These women were able to talk to each other properly after really intense confrontations. Smart, empathetic women can see when they've been wrong and can see what's going on. Even if I disliked someone, I wouldn't stand for them being assaulted in my presence. Women stand up for one another much more than is represented in media and film. 

The praise Nicole Kidman is getting is deserved. And there are times Reese Witherspoon stopped me in my tracks. I wish they could each get an Emmy. They both deserve it. The entire cast was exquisite.

Highly recommended. If you can, watch it in tandem with a friend so you can talk about it.

UPDATE (April 6th), adding this:

Big Little Lies’ most riveting moments are the silent ones between womenThe HBO drama is a stunning study in the unspoken language women use to survive.

YES YES. This this this:

In seconds, and with the threatening man in question standing mere feet away, these women trust each other completely. It’s an unflinching instant of wordless recognition, an understanding so deep that speaking its underlying fear aloud is unnecessary. It’s a feeling of awful, vital solidarity — one that I, and countless other women, know all too well.

Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.

Lidia Yuknavitch's The Small Backs of Children.

Where are the borders of art? 

Where are the borders of a woman's body?
How unimaginable is one without the other?
When we think of violence, are we not aware, as women, of our place within the world of men?
The borders of our body, of our safe spaces, of hostile spaces?

I just finished reading The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch and I am re-committed to my impression of her as a fluid, visceral representation of what it is to write of art, trauma, violence and living a woman's experience.

I was floored when I read her memoir, The Chronology of Water. It's lead me here, to her novel, which kept me as enamored.

It's a novel, yes, but I feel as though the narrative of people and places is secondary to the passages that describe life so astutely. This book features a group of friends, all artists and creators, juxtaposed to a young girl in eastern Europe, orphaned by war and surviving through art, grit, and the persistence of young blood.

There are segments of her book that discuss art and experience, art as expression, as language, as reference point, as both anchor and catalyst. These sections created in me more questions. An infinite amount. Sometimes they fuse with and of the body, and gender and sexuality pour into her writing. Violence as commonplace, as a masculine language and threat. She has a similar juncture in violence, trauma, and women's bodies. One intrinsically stomped onto the other.

Our blood is all over this world.

Our greatest threat is so linked to us.

And of trauma, of death and loss and surviving the horrific, does our tongue split, now able to speak two languages? As if at different frequencies, two languages in parallel.

Yes I understand your desire for me to print this document, to do this grocery shopping, to celebrate this holiday, but do you understand that feeling, the deep rumble that comes from prolonged, wretched pain, where you become diluted by the incessancy of it, and become convinced your threshold makes you the undead, untouchable. Have you known that pain? No? Then we do not speak the same language. But yes, I do enjoy coffee. And yes, the weather has improved.

From page 69:

Who are we in moments of crisis or despair? Do we become deeper, truer selves, or life up and away from self, untethered from regular meanings like moths suddenly drawn toward heat or light? Are we better people when someone might  be dying, and if so, why? Are we weaker, or stronger? Are we beautiful, or abject? Serious, or cartoon? Do we secretly long for death to remind us we are alive?

This actually heavily links to the conversations I've been having with my best friend S regarding HBO's Westworld. There is an awful lot to unpack regarding the nature of trauma. If you have not watched Westworld - do not read anything about it! I went in blind and was able to discover and discuss things as I went and it's been very interesting!

Are our trauma's our cornerstones? 

I'd read something recently about the way in which trauma can root certain pathways in the brain, making it more difficult to adapt or change habits. Isn't this a scientific explanation for what we already know? How our wounds remind us, how old habits die hard? Aren't we creatures of narrative, of story? Isn't the story we hear most often our own?

Yuknavitch also has these really bodied moments, that represent those abstract experiences of being alive and sentient but not fully present in our culture and context. Detached. From page 93:

Then he thinks: love is an abstract word coming from a face hole.

I guess the only alienating bit to Lidia's novel is how it's populated by successful artists. Confident in their art. Monied. That's my alien experience. My unknown. Where art is a work, a calling, and not a form of communication and a way of being, of purging that is necessary.