Camille's Character Development in Sharp Objects (2018)

It's hard to write about a limited series as compelling as Sharp Objects, a hazy, alcoholic odyssey though rural trauma and familial emotional abuse. It hosts so many characters to steep in, so many plot points to unravel, so many twists to untwist... I don’t quite know what to write about. For this reason, I think I want to approach this show by simply addressing the main character Camille (portrayed by the amazing Amy Adams) and how the show characterizes her fascinating and heartbreaking character. I do this mostly because careful character development is the main thing that sets sequential TV media apart from films, and thus I think I ought assess a TV show for its strength. Additionally, I do this because the show develops characters so well, yet I have seen people comment on how the character development feels weak in the show, with a conclusion that does little to further Camille’s arc. So, a breakdown of the show’s character development might provide a way to see through what might be perceived as a style-over-substance haze that makes this show click.

The initial moments of Sharp Objects are compelling not by way of establishing some intrinsically interesting mystery, but rather through Camille's unwillingness to fully engage in the standard mystery that pulls her back to her childhood town. Camille, our main character-detective, feels like a sort of subversion of the traditional excited, ready-to-solve-the-mystery (Dale Cooper-esque) detective character. She, form her first moments on the screen, clearly does not want to go back home (where a traumatic past lies). The conflict established in this character is one of writing: she ultimately goes partly to please her boss, but also seemingly because she sees the potential success of the story itself. Writing from her perspective, as an ex-member of the town, would clearly be a compelling story. As the story progresses and we learn more about Camille’s embodied trauma, it becomes clear how important the written word truly is to her character and only compels the action more as she begins to write about her experiences in the town. The writing — both the writing on Camille’s body and her two stories about the town — that the show describes to us is intimately linked to her presence: the writing on her body depicts the physical and emotional harm that her experiences created; similarly, the writing she creates for the newspaper is writing directly tied to her connection with the town; it’s only importance being that a member of the town is writing, telling a story from the point of view from their experiences within the community. Her reluctance is justifiable. The trauma she experienced at the hands of her mother and the culture within the town (a culture of rape, hyper-feminine stereotypes and roles, and slow mental decay at the hands of alcohol and meaningless gossiping social games). In the end, Camille’s main character conflict feels less about the challenge of solving the mystery but rather about the challenge she reluctantly takes on, the challenging return to a traumatic world, and the challenge of peeling away the social landscape and personal histories to get to the facts of the case. Furthermore, we might see her conflict as a sort of inability to accept ones place within a story and a history.

I think the editing communicates this best. Memory — the way in which experiences from the past haunt the present — has never been better depicted than with the editing choices made here. The cuts, that frequently maintain the present auditory soundscape, managed to connect Camille's flashes of recall with the place of Wind Gap — the place of “the end-zone” — connecting past violence done against her body to the present memory of those violences in a truly artful, cinematic way. In the way the quick edits develop history, memory and place, the editing allows the show to take on a more human, more feminine approach to experience. It’s such a simple technique (jarring cuts and flashes of symbols) but it always felt uniquely and importantly grounded in Camille's trauma. It’s editing that exists to hint and develop, and depict emotional states and to subtly connect the audience to a heartbreaking past that many will never have the misfortune of experiencing.  

And it is through her traumatic memories (and the writing of their present effects) that Camille ultimately manages to come to terms with her trauma. By the end of the series, in the moment when Camille tells her boss that she will stay in Wind Gap after finding out that her mother may be behind the murders, she comes to terms with the necessity of her engagement with the town’s story. In some ways, she is the only one that really can "solve the mystery", the only one with the visceral memory — the archive of embodied trauma scrawled across her skin — to fully understand the implications of both Amma and Adora's actions. Her unwillingness to engage with the story on-going around her feels somewhat resolved when her boss reads her article aloud (and maybe even before, during her interactions with John Keene): instead of hiding the horrors of her life away from the world, she manages to tell — or more accurately, write — her story, manages to find a way to communicate her emotional response to her own families actions to the world. There is a profound difference between the slashes inflicted upon her own skin — the single words which contain meaning only to her and her flashing memory — and the final piece that she writes for the world to read — the eloquent summary of the events in Wind Gap and her own take on the trial of her abusive mother. This difference indicates a sort of partial overcoming of emotional trauma. It’s not gone — the death of sibling is never really gone from ones memory — but we might feel as if she has come to terms with it, in her own way.

Yet, in the end, nothing is ever complete. The trauma lives on, in the actions of Amma, who seems incapable of suppressing the way her mother Adora (and her mother before her) acted towards others. The pain and suffering of others seems to be the predicate for the lives of both Adora and Amma, as both of their houses ultimately becomes constructed out of the unethical actions of those around them, tusks in the older case, human teeth in the younger. The violence is a part of their structure, their way of living. Even, it seems, a part of their being women. Camille fears that she will love Amma only with the same damaging love that Adora bestowed upon her children; that she is too much like her mother. At the end, I think Camille has adequately assessed the floorboards of her own home; while not being free, she is certainly aware of the psychological damage that she could cause to another, in acting, subconsciously, like her mother. But Amma carries the violence on. 

The shows strength seems to come from not only this strong sense of character — I believe firmly that Camille’s arc is not only a stunning example of good character writing, but also excellent visual language. It also comes from how the show ends without simply resolving the characters. Obviously, Amma is not going to be the mentally healthiest person after the experience of being fed rat-poison by her mother, just like Camille is never going to be able escape the scars of her past. The show utilizes her character, at the very end, to how these violences never end: she finds the teeth, she keeps unraveling the mystery of how inter-generational violence will continue. In other words, she is not only the only person that can solve the mystery of the two dead girls, but also the only one that can unwrap her own family's histories. It is for this reason that I see Sharp Objects as a truly human show: it clearly knows that these violence are not wrapped up cleanly as we might hope they can be (as viewers who have never had anything nearly this traumatic occur in their lives might expect). It recognizes the unique trauma of women’s lives in a highly gendered world created in parts of the US and portrays this in a very realistic way. It’s down to earth in a way many shows fail to manage. It’s a show about character, about family drama, and about psychology first, and then a mystery second. And it’s all the better for it.