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Apr. 11th, 2017 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionBig Little Lies
The matter of staggered ages was definitely about the generations, or maybe even decades. American Horror Story season 3 was based around thst conceit, but was completely terrible so we can rule stealing it fair game.
Kidman: gives up career, directly dominated; lies about abuse, whether she's happy.
Dern: keeps her career at cost of being toxically masculine like her peers (hence her husband being so much like her even when they're fighting); was dominated via bullying when young, learned to dominate right back; did she lie at all? - maybe being oversure of herself in the earlier episodes was a kind of lie.
Witherspoon: keeps part of her career but has to strain like hell to keep that balanced; divorces more toxic male for an updated model but is still attracted to the earlier sort; lies primarily to make others think all this is easy?
Woodley: abandons men entirely when she finds out, right out of the gate, how bad they can be; dominated by rapist but only briefly, then by the memory of that till she finally tells someone; attains work-family balance, like with Witherspoon, except right away and not riding any male coattails money-wise; lies about who her son's father is, and lies by omission about the rape I guess?
Kravitz: only thing we get about her backstory is in the scene with Scott where he's defending Witherspoon, where she says something like "she's not the only person in the world who's been through things," which, combined with her main action in the finale, suggests she, too, has been burnt by some male; she doesn't lie at all, except presumably about the murder, as hers is the final stage of female empowerment (unless Witherspoon's daughter is that, with her hilarious plan) - she trains men, and the older "generations" of women they've malformed, to be peaceful and rational and cooperative. With toxicity as pure as Skarsgaard's no training is possible, though, so...
The gossip chorus is wrong about what these women are lying about, which is how bad men were/are and how much of a life that could have been mostly happy needs to instead be derailed to accommodate said badness. As damaging as the chorus, though, is the fact that the people who do believe the lies are those looking up to the teller - younger women, children - who are thus denied a chance to hear accounts (passages of the secret history of patriarchy) that would help them in their own struggles. There's several scenes were younger women tell an older woman how perfect she or her life is, making the older woman wince. So the breakthroughs here are where women let someone see the cracks behind that veneer of perfection, the result of endless efforts which the show's arguing are pretty much diluted versions of Kidman's abuse denial - since the younger women are dealing with diluted/abstracted versions of her assailant. The lameness of the twist is itself diluted a bit by how the two assailants really are one: different manifestations of something that hadn't yet been pushed off a cliff.
So... Kidman = 1950s/pre-Boomers, Dern = 60s/70s/Boomers, Witherspoon = 80s/90s/Gen X, Woodley = 00s/Millenials, Kravitz = 10s/Z? Might be more pat than what they're after, but at the very least they represent five stages that the culture's "eye" has passed through in the last five or six decades.
And the men: Skarsgaard = pure poison, Dern's = arrogant/belligerent but finally bark, Witherspoon's first = "a real shit," second = someone who can't let go of the notion that he too should maybe be a real shit, Woodley's = 1) none at all, unless the rapist counts, then 2) someone who's so nice an older woman talked her into thinking he therefore had to be gay, with Kravitz' = the ex-shit, whose recidivist tendencies are kept in check by her rationality. Not sure if the contrast between the waiter guy and Kravitz' husband (if they were even married?) is supposed to suggest there was some overcorrection happening c. 2000, and that we're all presently working on un-desexing men in a way where they're no longer assholes? We got a lot less info about the guys, except the one case where we were TMIed into near-trauma ourselves, so it's a little hard to tell if the show had any eggs at all in that basket.
You know, I think it actually might. Ziggy hits a home run on his first day but is cleared by the psychologist of any genetic tendencies toward violence, suggesting maybe there's an essential male force and/or function after all, but one that in itself isn't horrible. So that's part of what was being done with him.
Presumably the point of one of Kidman's sons being innocent is to reassure that not everyone who's abused or witnesses abuse goes on to repeat it. Makes them a bit like the two kids at the end of No Country, curiously - wonder if that book kicked off the present "generational parable" fad (certainly influenced Fargo 2, which was up to the same thing - e.g. Dunst there is sort of an aspirational version of Witherspoon here).
The matter of staggered ages was definitely about the generations, or maybe even decades. American Horror Story season 3 was based around thst conceit, but was completely terrible so we can rule stealing it fair game.
Kidman: gives up career, directly dominated; lies about abuse, whether she's happy.
Dern: keeps her career at cost of being toxically masculine like her peers (hence her husband being so much like her even when they're fighting); was dominated via bullying when young, learned to dominate right back; did she lie at all? - maybe being oversure of herself in the earlier episodes was a kind of lie.
Witherspoon: keeps part of her career but has to strain like hell to keep that balanced; divorces more toxic male for an updated model but is still attracted to the earlier sort; lies primarily to make others think all this is easy?
Woodley: abandons men entirely when she finds out, right out of the gate, how bad they can be; dominated by rapist but only briefly, then by the memory of that till she finally tells someone; attains work-family balance, like with Witherspoon, except right away and not riding any male coattails money-wise; lies about who her son's father is, and lies by omission about the rape I guess?
Kravitz: only thing we get about her backstory is in the scene with Scott where he's defending Witherspoon, where she says something like "she's not the only person in the world who's been through things," which, combined with her main action in the finale, suggests she, too, has been burnt by some male; she doesn't lie at all, except presumably about the murder, as hers is the final stage of female empowerment (unless Witherspoon's daughter is that, with her hilarious plan) - she trains men, and the older "generations" of women they've malformed, to be peaceful and rational and cooperative. With toxicity as pure as Skarsgaard's no training is possible, though, so...
The gossip chorus is wrong about what these women are lying about, which is how bad men were/are and how much of a life that could have been mostly happy needs to instead be derailed to accommodate said badness. As damaging as the chorus, though, is the fact that the people who do believe the lies are those looking up to the teller - younger women, children - who are thus denied a chance to hear accounts (passages of the secret history of patriarchy) that would help them in their own struggles. There's several scenes were younger women tell an older woman how perfect she or her life is, making the older woman wince. So the breakthroughs here are where women let someone see the cracks behind that veneer of perfection, the result of endless efforts which the show's arguing are pretty much diluted versions of Kidman's abuse denial - since the younger women are dealing with diluted/abstracted versions of her assailant. The lameness of the twist is itself diluted a bit by how the two assailants really are one: different manifestations of something that hadn't yet been pushed off a cliff.
So... Kidman = 1950s/pre-Boomers, Dern = 60s/70s/Boomers, Witherspoon = 80s/90s/Gen X, Woodley = 00s/Millenials, Kravitz = 10s/Z? Might be more pat than what they're after, but at the very least they represent five stages that the culture's "eye" has passed through in the last five or six decades.
And the men: Skarsgaard = pure poison, Dern's = arrogant/belligerent but finally bark, Witherspoon's first = "a real shit," second = someone who can't let go of the notion that he too should maybe be a real shit, Woodley's = 1) none at all, unless the rapist counts, then 2) someone who's so nice an older woman talked her into thinking he therefore had to be gay, with Kravitz' = the ex-shit, whose recidivist tendencies are kept in check by her rationality. Not sure if the contrast between the waiter guy and Kravitz' husband (if they were even married?) is supposed to suggest there was some overcorrection happening c. 2000, and that we're all presently working on un-desexing men in a way where they're no longer assholes? We got a lot less info about the guys, except the one case where we were TMIed into near-trauma ourselves, so it's a little hard to tell if the show had any eggs at all in that basket.
You know, I think it actually might. Ziggy hits a home run on his first day but is cleared by the psychologist of any genetic tendencies toward violence, suggesting maybe there's an essential male force and/or function after all, but one that in itself isn't horrible. So that's part of what was being done with him.
Presumably the point of one of Kidman's sons being innocent is to reassure that not everyone who's abused or witnesses abuse goes on to repeat it. Makes them a bit like the two kids at the end of No Country, curiously - wonder if that book kicked off the present "generational parable" fad (certainly influenced Fargo 2, which was up to the same thing - e.g. Dunst there is sort of an aspirational version of Witherspoon here).
