‘Sharp Objects’ Episode 3 Recap: The Familial Perversion of the Preakers
There’s something rotten in Wind Gap, and it’s not just those two little dead girls. As we saw in last night’s episode of Sharp Objects, the scariest thing about Camille Preaker, our mentally unwell protagonist, is that she just might be the sanest person in her family.
“I just want to know you sister,” Amma coos at Camille earlier that night, as the two form a perfect tableau of pink and black in the bedroom; like something out of a Tennessee Williams’ play. In this moment, we see maybe the true depths of Amma’s own sickness as she talks about her “friends” in the town. “They love me. They do, you know, love me. They’d do anything for me. I’d just ask and…they’re my besties.”
There’s something almost sexual in Amma’s dotage of her newly-acquainted (but still remote) older half-sister Camille. It’s a type of familial perversion that we’re seeing a lot off in the Preaker-Crellin house that is so rarely depicted in media that at first, it’s hard to even name: we’re used to narratives about fathers or stepfathers becoming too intimate with their blossoming daughters, that’s a story as old as time and Law & Order: SVU. But if anything, the one man in the house, Amma’s father Alan is too distracted, to pliable to Adora’s orders that he literally tune out what’s going on under their roof.
No, what we’re discussing here is the lack of boundaries between the roles of the women in the house. Sure, Adora is the cool, aloof mother…unless Amma is willing to play baby, such as when she falls ill later in the episode. (Which surely must be sending alarm bells of in Camille’s head, considering the death of her younger sister Marian after a prolonged, mysterious illness.) But Amma is more than willing to bask in Adora’s affections, so rarely given.
“Last night I threw up three times,” Amma boasts, almost proudly, herself a heap on their living room floor.
Adora frits and frets over her while Alan tries to impotently mitigate the hysteria by saying it’s probably just the chills. Adora, meanwhile crumbles next to her youngest and cradles Amma’s body with her own, cooing, “I love you, love you, love you.” There’s something that borders on the obscene in this moment, and we can see Camille recognize it without truly understanding what it is. It’s almost as if Adora had her way, she would keep Amma in a pink bonnet and crib, arresting her at infancy so she’d always have her own real-life babydoll that wouldn’t leave her.
We also see that Amma’s behavior can flip on a dime; in dangerous and unpredictable ways. At only 13, Amma is proving herself so adept at manipulation and cruelty that she’s become more brazen than any tween has the right to be when not in her mother’s presence. Outside of perhaps the characters in Heathers, what child would dare sneak out past curfew during a search for a serial killer, only to taunt the detective working a murder case with sexual innuendo?
How does this relate to the larger Wind Gap mystery of the two dead girls and their killer? Are the Preaker-Cullins just symptomatic of the obsession this town has for “dead little girls,” or somehow related to that central mystery? We get a little more clarification this episode when we learn that Adora, despite Camille’s original cynicism about what she regarded to be her mother’s over-personalization of the case, actually did know Ann Nash very well. She had tutored Ann personally and has a vested interest in a girl who the rest of the town wrote off as being too “other.” Unfortunately, that means Adora can and will continue to thwart her actual daughter’s investigation into the murders by showing up at the Nash house and cutting Camille’s interview with Bob short, hissing about the inappropriateness. And while you could argue that the archetype of someone like Adora, who only likes to think and look and talk about “proper” subjects, would obviously be rankled by her eldest going out and turning over the town’s dirtiest secrets, the mother’s increasingly hysterical tactics hint at something more akin to a cover-up. Or maybe that’s just part of Adora’s own sickness: when Camille tries to apologize to her mother while she’s pruning roses, Adora’s cool, collected facade finally drops as she cuts herself on a thorn. “Look what you’ve done!” She shrieks, referring not just to the cut (as if Camille’s self-harm was transferable), but to the “badness” she sees in Camille, and whom she conveniently blames for Amma’s recent spate of bad behavior.
“I didn’t make Amma crash the golf cart into the garden, mama,” Camille says in her own defense, to which Adora practically spits “Nothing is ever your fault, is it?!” Later, Adora confides to Alan, “Camille makes me feel as if I’ve done something wrong. As if I’m a bad mother.”
“You do everything you can for your children,” Alan says, which is both overly-true in regards to Amma and hilariously false when it comes to Camille.
In the final bit of puzzle-piecing this week, we learn that Camille’s issues with sisterhood go beyond relations of blood (no pun intended). We get flashbacks of an earlier Camille–though it does seem as if this event has happened in a more recent past than Camille’s other memories–of voluntarily committing herself to a psych ward after a cutting incident. Through brief glimpses, we see her bond with her roommate, another cutter named Alice, including the world’s most perfect character description ever, via Camille: when asked what kind of music she listens to, our heroine tells us “Music isn’t my thing.” Perfect. That is truly both a hilarious line in its deadpan delivery, but also such a perfect summation of what it feels like to live with a certain kind of depression and helplessness. Another telling moment is when the girls show each other their scars, and Alice mentions that she thought she’d have grown out of the habit by now, to which Camille replies: “I’m the Peter Pan of cutting: I won’t grow up, not me.” Perhaps this was Camille’s way of trying to remain in the childlike state Adora seems to prefer in her children. Marian, forever young in that coffin; Amma, who is willing to be treated like a newborn calf after a night of cruelty that includes sticking a lollipop in her 30-something half-sister’s hair.
Unfortunately, despite the bond between Alice and Camille, the latter isn’t able to save her surrogate sister any more than she was able to save Marian, or herself. After Camille tells Alice that the issues with their families won’t get better, and all they can do is survive, Alice decides against it, polishing off a bottle of Draino she got from the supply cart.
No wonder Camille is so wary of Amma; besides the fact that her half-sister is terrifying in her vacillations between inappropriately infantile and inappropriately adult behavior, Camille must believe, at some level, that her mother is correct: she is a bad influence. And the curse of Wind Gap is that her legacy is that of the town’s “cool, older sister” someone that people are clearly drawn to–just look at the way Ashley, John Keane’s girlfriend, fawns over her perception of what Camille was like in high school–not knowing what to get close to Camille Preaker carries its own death sentence.