What “Big Little Lies” Reveals About America
Like America, the women in “Big Little Lies” are dripping in wealth, but cannot abate an overwhelming sense of frustration.
**SPOILERS BELOW**
When I began watching HBO’s “Big Little Lies,” I wasn’t expecting the drama to subvert assumptions on what it means to be “free.” By drawing back the curtain (an episode literally starts this way) on four upper-class American women, the show highlights a remarkable paradox. These Monterey magnates possess limitless choice and opportunity, yet they feel boxed-in by personal or systemic pressures.
Director Jean-Marc Valleample does a fabulous job of animating the characters’ conflict between reality and perception by shooting an uncanny amount of scenes in the tight confines of either leather-laden SUVs or fenced-off California mansions.
Objectively, all the characters are free, but their mindsets make them feel shackled. As one of the women bluntly puts it: “We don’t see the way the world as it is, we see it as we are.”
That insight got me thinking about what freedom means to different people. It’s an abstract question, but one that has started quite a few philosophical debates. Perhaps the most famous definition comes from Isaiah Berlin and his concept of negative freedom. Negative freedom asserts that someone is free only when no one or no thing is interfering with their free will. It defines liberty in a strictly non-interventionist fashion.
I bring all of this up because the character of Celeste (played by Nicole Kidman) illustrates the shortcomings of defining freedom in that way.
Celeste is a lawyer turned stay-at-home mom who has a passionate relationship with a physically abusive husband, Perry. After one particularly fierce physical assault, Celeste tells him “You touch me like that again and I will fucking leave you.” Even with this “dirty secret,” as she calls it, Celeste tentatively decides to stay in her marriage.
Now according to negative freedom, Perry has not explicitly forced Celeste to stay with him. Therefore, Celeste can be considered a free woman.
That way of envisioning freedom is problematic though. Just because someone does not directly interfere in your life does not necessarily mean that you are free from control being exerted upon you.
This is, in fact, the argument of philosopher Philip Petit, who has spent a lifetime critiquing Berlin’s definition. For Petit, someone “is free if others are not in a position to subject him or her to their will.” While this may sound like a pedantic turn, Petit’s theory is very different to Berlin’s. Instead of making non-interference the salient point of freedom, he instead focuses on domination. He calls this theory “freedom as non-domination.”
Petit would claim that Celeste’s “free” decision was made with some serious, hidden coercion coming from her neck-wringing husband. His regular physical assaults spoil the notion that she is making this choice in a vacuum.
It’s easy to understand why some would find this entire conversation annoyingly pedantic and lacking any sort of real world application.
How we define concepts, however, not only has a direct impact on how individual’s think about their life, it also influences how we perceive our society.
Take the example of government intervention.
Freedom as non-domination would claim government intervention isn’t a problem. As long as Americans who were subjected to these interventions had control over the government, these actions could be deemed perfectly just.
However, for those who conceive of freedom as non-interventionism, government intervention is a big no-no. To these folks, these actions represent a a direct violation of liberty, as someone is arbitrarily interfering in one’s life. You see this sort of thinking promoted ad nauseam by the Republican Party and Fox News. They prioritize negative freedom above all else and therefore believe that the best government is always that which governs the least.
The reactions to government intervention, like an individual’s life choices, differ simply because of how you see the world around you. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, the limits of our concepts are the limits of our world.
Like “The Great Gatsby” before it, “Big Little Lies” reminds its viewers to always question the assumptions of life. The show does a wonderful job of using the internal conflicts of the individual to shine a light on the shortcomings of society. It is reassuring to see modern television succeeding in refining how we think about the world around us in subtle, yet profound ways.
