& # 39; Sharp Objects & # 39; It's not a true story, but the HBO mini-series was inspired by a troubling reality

Sharp Objects HBO's adaptation of Gillian Flynn's detective novel and her first novel, may remind you of the real criminal sagas on your Netflix or podcast stream with its swampy and investigative terrain. But Sharp Objects is it based on a true story? The twists are, in reality, too good to be true – although the fictional tale was inspired by real life in a few different and perhaps unexpected ways.

The official HBO press release states that Sharp Objects, premiered on July 8, speaks of "reporter Camille Preaker, who returns to his small town to cover the murder of a pre-teen and the disappearance of another .. Trying to piece together a psychological puzzle of her past, she identifies a little too much with the young victims. "

Although the series is not torn from a particular title , Flynn was rather inspired by seeing stories again and again about men who face rabies, and conversely women who deal with men – or worse, women who are dealing with something else. less important like shoes or cocktails. Flynn wanted to explore with Sharp Objects just "how women handled their anger, and their violence, and what it looked like" according to Entertainment Weekly That sounds so simple, and yet it's The disparity in narration is totally unfair.

Anne Marie Fox / HBO

The inspiration of Flynn was therefore more of an internal desire aroused by the reality that female rabies is not often represented in the narrative. the writer discovered while trying to sell his novel, these angry female protagonists are criticized as being "unlikeable." It's just for white women, too: women of color face a host of other negative stereotypes when they dare to feel or show anger. The raging male protagonists like Don Draper, Tony Soprano, Dr. Gregory House and Walter White have dominated the media for decades, female anti-heroes are harder to find.

Recently, however, these scales have begun to balance. It's not about price that the team working on this show includes the director of Big Little Lies, Jean-Marc Vallée, and the showrunner Marti Noxon, the creator of Unreal . These are two artists perfectly suited to offer the audience the bold and unapologically feminine female protagonist that Flynn envisioned – with the representation of Amy Adams.

The city of Wind Gap, Missouri is not a real city, either. The HBO series was filmed in Barnesville, Georgia, about an hour south of Atlanta. Flynn herself was born and raised in Missouri and went to school in Kansas. So she knows the area pretty well – it's just a fictional tale.

Also, Sharp Objects plays more on genre tropes of a particular form than on a true story. This is a southern gothic tale, simple and clear. It's like The Beguiled, or a work by Tennessee Williams or Flannery O 'Connor. The tropes include family secrets, slow pace, a feeling of terror that weighs as heavily and threateningly as the summer's humidity, and big dark houses with big dark stories. Not only Sharp Objects is fictional, it is a specific and well-known type of fiction.

The stories about writers returning to their small town houses are familiar and as old as time. It is the parable of the prodigal son over and over again, or the idea that you can not go home anymore. In fact, Adams' breakthrough was in a film entitled Junebug which (although it was not a mystery) was playing with these same ideas. It's just that these anxious writers or artists returning to their roots are usually men. The difference in Sharp Objects is Camille.

Because Sharp Objects uses these Southern Gothic tropes to explore an aspect of femininity that does not often appear on the screen or in the literature, it is worth better than the story is fictional and not real. events. We should not have to check a story about a newspaper clipping to believe that people like this, especially women, exist in the world.