Fran Magazine: Issue #80
Phil reviews season one of Big Little Lies
📝 Thanks for reading Fran Magazine, a biweekly blog by Fran Hoepfner (me). Wednesday issues are free to everyone and Sunday issues are for paid subscribers only. Consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription for access to more Fran Magazine.
A note from Fran (Magazine)
I am swamped with New York Film Fest and my newfound desire to start getting more than six hours a sleep a night, so this week we have a guest post from Phil about Big Little Lies, a show that aired more than six years ago. I’d seen it before (duh) and he doesn’t watch TV. I’ll be back next week…
…
…….
with a review…
…
…….
OF MAESTRO
Moving on…
Phil Magazine
Note: This was written under the assumption that you’ve all seen Big Little Lies. I am told it was very popular upon its release, especially among the Fran Magazine readership demographics.
It is important to tell you something before you read the rest of this article: I hate television shows. This is hyperbole of course. I have a great fondness for game shows, The Simpsons, Columbo, The X-Files, King Of The Hill. I quite like How It’s Made too, and Brass Eye and those Bruce Campbell adventure sitcoms from the mid-90s. I like TV shows with self-contained episodes and clearly defined goals. What I loathe is television, shows with complex dramatic narratives that carry from episode to episode, season to season. In the 90s this was called “water cooler programming,” because last night’s can’t-miss episode would be the only topic of discussion around the office water cooler the next morning. Today, it would be more accurate to call it “Slack Channel TV.” These shows almost always suck — they’re like movies, only longer, uglier to look at. The plots are ham-fisted and nonsensical; a good first season uniformly devolves into self-parody as the writers claw and scrabble at the cliff they are sliding down, debasing their own characters and premises in increasingly stupid ways to fill up six seasons. Few stories have any reason to be eight, twenty, sixty hours long, the longest of good (narrative) pictures clocks in at around 7 hours and, at the risk of courting controversy, Laszlo Krasznahorkai and Bela Tárr are a better writer-director pair than, say, the Duffer brothers. Even “good” shows fall victim to this, but the floor isn’t as low by virtue of the talent on board. Almost every major TV show I’ve seen or attempted to finish would be better as a two-to-three hour movie. I simply do not have the patience to keep up with the Successions and Stranger Things of the world. I have long felt like an outsider, a curmudgeon who has to bite his tongue (or put his foot in his mouth) whenever the show-du-jour comes up in conversation.
The last show I finished was Peaky Blinders, a show that starts off stupid and stays true to its stupid roots, getting better and better as they add more and more retconning plot twists and bottom of the A-list celebrities to play guys with ridiculous gimmicks and accents. I marathoned all six seasons across two edible-dense weeks two years ago, repeating “Darby Day Fo Th’ Bloindah Boys” back to my computer screen in a blem stupor. It’s good because it knows it’s bad, and doesn’t aspire to greatness, I thought, considering why Peaky Blinders had held my attention where so many other, supposedly better shows had failed.
At any rate, that was two years ago. Though I’ve started a whole host of shows in that time, few are able to stick for a whole season — let alone the series end. So who would’ve expected, on a cool fall evening when my girlfriend was drunk1 and we couldn’t decide on what to watch, that I would become rapt with Big Little Lies, a 2017 HBO series adapted from a bestselling Australian novel of the same name by Liane Moriarty. Ostensibly a self-serious drama, the show comes roaring in already feeling like the sixth season of a once-good show. It is not good but it is rich text, never dull, at once a total failure of writing and tone and a wildly successful, compulsively watchable piece of neo-camp.
It tells the story of Bigs (husbands: Adam Scott, a Skarsgård, some other guys), Littles (children: Young Sheldon and others) and most crucially, Lies (wives: big ticket stars Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Shailene Woodley, and Zoë Kravitz), whose fates in the small, wealthy California town of Monterey are drawn together by love, ambition, greed, and secrets, until they reach a fatal conclusion. It’s framed as a murder mystery of sorts, though we don’t know who the killer or the victim are, told in flashbacks through fun but pointless interstitial police interviews with the show’s C cast2. Every single character with the exception of one or two small children is completely insane, in ways the show both does and doesn’t realize. It’s difficult to even call the show a melodrama because none of these people even resemble tropes and archetypes they’re meant to represent, let alone real human beings. Everyone in Big Little Lies feels like a stock character (subservient computer programmer husband, rebellious daughter, domestic abuser, single mom, woman CEO) generated with completely random stat blocks with little regard for a successful build. The result is a frequently bewildering show, one that manages to catch you off-guard despite its rote tone and setting.
By way of example, consider Reese Witherspoon’s youngest daughter Chloe, who is meant to read as a smart, precocious, and quirky first grader. She does read that way, kind of, but her big quirk (an invention for the show) is an affinity for deep cut rock, soul, and indie folk, a trait that is never expanded on in a meaningful sense. What you’re left with is a seven year old child pressing play on Babe Ruth’s “King Kong,” an instrumental psychedelic rock song from their 1972 album First Base — music her parents have no interest in and clearly didn’t show her. Where did she get into this stuff? Unsupervised internet access?? She’s seven years old! You know where I first found out about the band Babe Ruth? The 4chan music board! No seven year old is listening to Babe Ruth, or CAN, or any of the other entry level RYM-core stuff she’s bumping in that show! Where would they find it? It’s insane!
The whole cast, but especially the Lies, are making the wildest choice they can while keeping everything just on-the-rails enough that it never feels farcical, only confusing. At one point, Nicole Kidman decides to get back into being a lawyer, a career she gave up to be a full-time mom to the demonic little Aryan twins (and speaking of her twins, every time they eat breakfast — several times throughout the series — they have between four and six different boxes of sugary cereal on the table, and it just goes completely unremarked upon. Nuts!) that she raises with her abusive Skarsgård husband. In order to be taken seriously as legal counsel, she dons a pale pink two-piece suit with an INSANE frilly lace-collared blouse with a matching chiffon ascot. We are asked to believe that this is a normal “business”-type outfit. Reese Witherspoon will, at least once per episode, say something completely deranged, even by the standards of the shows elevated tone, and it is looked upon as completely normal. I love when she throws up. Laura Dern is not a person, but a series of sigma-female money mindset quotable and incredible (read: insane) outfits. At one point she wears this sweater, and not a day has gone by since where I haven’t thought of it. Zoë Kravitz, a one-note hippie stereotype who teaches yoga and eats organic, gets her moment in the “insanity” spotlight. The only remotely normal Lie on the show is Shailene (❤️), and maybe that’s just because she owns a gun. At the end of the show, after the Lies have ganged up to killed the abusive rapist Big and covered it up, they are shown all hanging out on the beach together in one of the most tonally bizarre codas I’ve ever seen in narrative media. Bound by blood, this dark secret fixes the myriad of unresolved interpersonal issues present between all the Lies throughout the show. It doesn’t feel like dramatic irony. It barely feels like drama. But it is also extremely funny.
Above all else, the show is a fascinating cultural document, a time capsule from the height of what has come to be known as the ‘Golden Age of Streaming.’ Watching for the first time something that was clearly made to be consumed in-the-moment just six years on from its original air date, I was struck by how dated it felt — in little things like Skype on iPhone, MacBook with disc drive, the outfits and decor, the cool-toned color grade, and in big things like its very existence. Big Little Lies came out in a liminal period, post-#woke and pre-#metoo, just seven months before the first allegations were made against Harvey Weinstein, forever shifting the way popular media depicts sexual assault. The show (sort of) raises broad questions about these things, violence against women, believing women, et cetera, but it provides few answers. Big Little Lies is content to “sit with its contradictions,” not in an intelligent, thorny way, but because, like everything else about the show, the questions raised are completely bonkers and wholly detached from reality. In a post-#metoo world, TV and film of this caliber (mid, self-serious, based on a popular but bad novel, full of stars, overwritten, full of twists and dense plotting and side-quests that never get completed), tend toward the didactic. Big Little Lies is a cypher, the decryption key for which was long ago lost in the warm Pacific ocean.
A lot of what I find so fascinating and hard to parse about Big Little Lies could be chalked up to bad writing (for example, the police inquiries that dot each episode make absolutely no sense if reflected upon knowing the details of the crime), but every one of Big Little Lies’s faults are also its greatest assets. On a formal level, the direction is too strong, the cinematography is too dialed in, the performances are too good (sort of) for it to be “so bad, it’s good.” It’s extremely stupid, perhaps, but it’s great television, and that’s not the same thing as great filmmaking. Big Little Lies is real camp, tightly wrapped up in austere, refined aesthetic packaging and grave subject matter, allows it to touch the same place in my heart and soul occupied by 1981’s Mommy Dearest. It has awakened in me a greater understanding and appreciation for TV on a whole and was some of the most fun I’ve had staring at a screen all year.
Quick Big, Little, and Lie breakdown
BIGS
Adam Scott — best scene is him going tough guy in the little Tour de France outfit. It’s meant to be funny, sure, but it’s much funnier when you consider that this side of his personality is never really reckoned with again.
Reese’s Ex — great TV doofus, wish he was a celeb. Funniest scene is also when Adam Scott threatens him.
Laura Dern’s husband — Best Big By Far. Funniest scene is when he comes into the coffee shop to threaten Shailene.
Skarsgård — Cartoonish bad guy, funniest scene is the entire finale sequence where he’s dressed like Elvis threatening Nicole Kidman and, like some kind of compulsive method actor, keeps talking like Elvis.
Coffee Shop Guy — Total nonentity.
LITTLES
Young Sheldon — based, kind. Hope he sticks with baseball.
Chloe — just gotta reiterate how funny it is for a seven year old girl to have the same taste in music as a 38 year old man who wears a straw hat and owns a brownstone.
Skye — The only normal person besides Shailene
Reese’s Other Daughter — The virginity thing lasts two episodes. What was the deal with that, why was it in the show?
Amabella — AMabella
The twins — Ghouls, but I was also really into Ray Harryhausen movies at that age.
LIES
Reese Witherspoon — So good! I love seeing her have fun :)
Nicole Kidman — sort of iconic the degree to which she phoned this in… horrible wig, insanely bad wig, you wouldn’t believe, without seeing it, how bad this wig is! She’s going so crazy in this! Six episodes of having totally forgotten how to do an American accent takes its toll, and by the finale, she’s in the car with Skarsgård going full-on Aussie.
Shailene Woodley — crazy she was a dead eye with that revolver! No small feat! Named her kid after Ziggy Stardust and yet no Bowie needle drop? Curious. Maybe the reason Chloe is into all that obscure shit is licensing costs…..
Zoë Kravitz — I feel bad for Zoë in this. I like her, but she’s given so little to work with besides her totally horny Elvis cover in the last episode.
Laura Dern — Best Lie and it’s not even close! Come on now! Don’t make me bring that sweater out again! We only got one episode into season two but it’s my house and I live here :)
Phil is a filmmaker and boyfriend.
Fran here… listen: I asked how boozy the frozen mango lassi drink was at my local spot, and they said “pretty boozy,” and I tried it and I said "not really” (tale as old as time) and soon realized it was, in fact, pretty boozy, but then I also thought it would be rude (?) not to finish it. So here we are.
Fran again… we both said, “Wait, is that Hong Chau?” (It was.)
100% correct on all points
10 stars thanks