1x02 Dirt

[7.7/10] My freshman English teacher told our class to always look for repetition. The things an author wants you to pay attention to will come up again and again, he’d say. Those little echoes were our cues to try to figure out what was important and what had extra meaning.

Sharp Objects may or may not be fertile ground for such symbol hunting. In the early going, the show is still full of mysteries. Some of them are of the whodunnit variety, having both Camille and Det. Willis trying to ferret out who killed the two girls who died in Windgap over the past year. But some of them are more personal, about the rough-grooved relationship between Camille and her mother in the past and present, who they used to be and who they are now.

“Dirt” offers no end of repeated images. They may be clues toward the identity of the murderer or murderers, hints about the core of Camille and Adora’s histories, or just random nonsense to keep nudniks like me guessing. Either way, may as well start guessing.

Let’s start with the most obvious and uncomfortable piece of the episode -- the self-harm. Beyond her drinking, we see Camille returning to what seems like an old habit. She buys a sewing kit and runs the needle across her skin, digging it under her fingernails, or piercing her stomach with it. On a network, and an episode, that offers no shortage of more gruesome images, it’s tough to watch at times.

The letters carved into her arms suggest this isn’t a new or recent phenomenon, but rather a longstanding coping mechanism she’d managed to avoid at some point, and now finds herself seeking refuge in once again. So much of Sharp Objects so far has seen bits and pieces of Camille’s old life coming back to her: the gossiping former cheerleader friends, the wolf-whistling used-to-be young men she once hung around with, the scoldings from her mother. “Dirt puts a particular focus on what seems to be her old way of dealing with all of that pressure and pain, by trying to put herself in control of her own pain, and maybe even like it.

But in an odd way, it seems to be a connection with her mother. Once again, we see images of Adora pulling out her own eyelashes in both the past and the present. That too, is a form of self-harm, one that suggests that while their methods and perspectives ostensibly differ, Adora and her daughter have similar compulsions to harm themselves in already painful situations.

Still, Adora isn’t the only one pulling things out in this episode. Richard runs down a lead about the latest victim, and tries to pull out the teeth off a pig’s head to try to decide whether or not it would take a man’s upper body strength to do it. Who knows if it’s a deliberate thematic connection to Adora’s eyelid tugs, or just a coincidence, or even an important hint that Adora may have more to do with those girls’ deaths than we might think. But there’s something there, and my freshman English teacher would hate for us to ignore it.

There’s also repeated images of Camille being denied affection by her mother. Camille remembers coming home from outside, only to see her sister embraced while she’s ignored. In the scene set at her sister’s funeral in the past, Camille goes to her mother for comfort, and Adora ignores her to go weep over the other daughter’s grave. These are clues to the bad blood between mother and daughter here, Camille’s sense that her mom didn’t love her, or at least not as much.

“Dirt” seems to draw an even firmer line between that supposition and Camille’s self harm. At the funeral home, Camille not only witnesses her mother pulling her eyelashes out -- Adora’s seeming self-harm method of choice -- but she picks one up and rubs it across her skin. That too is an echo, one of the needle running across her skin in the present, tying together both the learned behavior and the emotional hurt that motivates Camille’s compulsion to cause herself physical pain in the here and now.

But the repetitive motifs aren’t just about Camille’s personal relationships and destructive habits. They’re also clues to the pattern, if any, of the young women who are being killed. There’s talk in the town of Natalie Keene having been a tomboy, one who didn’t conform to the expectations of young women in Windgap, in the same way that Camille herself didn’t at that age (or at least stopped after some unspecified trauma). And Amma and her friends declare that the little girls being slaughtered “aren’t the cool ones.”

Natalie’s father talks about how the family “keeps to themselves” in the same way that Bob Nash described his family. There are parallels between not only the girls who were killed, but between the families who raised them, even if those families don’t get along. And there’s parallels between these young women today and Camille’s when she was a girl, nodding toward some contours of what changed Camille from the cheerleader who once felt at home with the gossiping magpies at the funeral and now feels like a very different, more broken person.

There’s also visual motifs that come up again and again in the episode. Over and over, “Dirt” punctuates a scene with a split-second image that it seems to want the audience to have to work to catch. The image of Anne Nash’s dead body, a word scratched into a car door that switches from “scared” to “sacred”, a ghostly woman’s presence that quickly dissipates, all suggest that there’s something haunting Windgap, that Camille is losing her grip on reality and herself, or possibly both.

Then there’s those fans, the softly whirring devices that are omnipresent in the episode. Camille stairs vacantly at one in her bedroom, possibly hinting toward a similarly numb affect she had to inhabit while suffering something terrible in that state. Her stepfather does the same just a floor below later in the episode, and Det. Willis has one in the background as he’s going over Anne’s case.

Could this all be coincidence or intentional obfuscation? Without a doubt. Each bit of repetition here could be an echoing message about the cyclical nature of such things, or a clue as to the nature of these murders, or just some window-dressing to help set the mood and keep the audience guessing. Whatever the case, everytime Sharp Objects doubles up these moments and phrases and images, it’s asking us to pay attention, in a way that should warm the hearts of ninth grade English teachers everywhere.