What Sharp Objects Gets Right About Trauma

Vanessa Steck
Aug 31, 2018 · 3 min read

I first read Sharp Objects because of the razor blade on its cover.

When it came out in 2006 I was still cutting, and deeply interested in books about the subject. It thrilled me and remains my favorite of Gillian Flynn’s novels (she herself has said it’s the one people react most strongly to; spoilers at the link). I was eager for the adaption of Sharp Objects. I expected, and got, terrific acting from Amy Adams, Patricia Clarkson, and breakout Eliza Scanlen, and I expected and got interesting camerawork, music choices, and a heady, deeply felt sense of atmosphere. Knowing the answer beforehand did not preclude me from being fascinated by how damaged women survive. The strange alchemy of stength, courage, victimhood, cruelty, and violence turned either inward or outward that could make us hero or villain. Maybe both.

What came as a surprise is how sharply it understands trauma. I watched the first episode and saw immediately the uncanny echoes in to my own daily experience. I don’t have a history like protagonist Camille Preaker, a journalist who returns to her hometown of Wind Gap on assignment to write about two murdered girls — and maybe to confront her own past. My mother’s milk was nothing like what Camille’s mother, Adora, dishes out; there are no dead sisters, or their ghosts, in my life. I am reluctant even to call it trauma, but that is certainly how I experience it. And maybe the answer is that there is no answer, that as Cheryl Strayed put it “there was nothing the fuck up with that and there never will be.”

Of course for Camille there is something the fuck up, because it is on the surface a mystery. But I don’t think that’s the point. The point is how trauma infects your life like a cancer, metastasizing, always ready to take over. How you never know what will finally kill you, but it is certainly possible some outgrowth of this will.

Camille’s first drive into Wind Gap begins the study of what it is like to be followed by memory. People far more patient than I have chronicled the words Camille sees (Camille’s cutting, by the way, takes the form of slicing words into her skin, which is striking both metaphorically and visually but seems dexterously impossible). Every one of them is a reminder, like the ones etched into her skin, that she has not escaped and she may never.

Trauma makes itself a haunting. In Sharp Objects, this haunting takes a visual and sometimes auditory form. The memories are everywhere Camille turns. Here a glimpse of her sister, there a look at her mother, over in that corner a whisper and in this one a murmur of something she can’t quite catch. These are what I think of as in-between flashbacks. They aren’t the think-you’re-back-in-the-war flashbacks many PTSD sufferers experience. And they aren’t hallucinations. They happen inside our heads, but as Dumbledore said, “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” (Wise wizard, old Albus). They are real, to us, these shadows just at the edge of our vision. Always ready.

I’ve never seen such a slippery look at how memory can dance around you, how everything you thought you had pushed aside is just waiting to burst forth again. That’s what it is like.

The final shots, of a secret violence hidden inside a child’s toy and, during the credits, a shocking explosion of female cruelty, are a stark reminder that, with trauma, the knockout blow is the one you never see coming.

Vanessa Steck

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