Damaged Mothers Everywhere
Nothing says 2020 more than Reese Witherspoon running around her house at midnight screaming, “I am completely ravelled!” to her concerned husband. I’m almost certain it’s been immortalized as a meme in a BuzzFeed article.
This scene occurs in the fifth episode of Hulu’s mini-series Little Fires Everywhere, the most recent in a line of novel adaptations to hit streaming and cable. Taken from Celeste Ng’s 2017 best-seller, Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington star as Elena Richardson and Mia Warren, two mothers who come into each other’s lives in Shaker, Ohio, after Witherspoon’s Elena rents out a property to Mia, who starts working for the Richardson household.
Shaker, Ohio, is filled with mothers who appear to have a lot of baggage. The novel and the show use complex female characters to tell a story about motherhood and the sacrifices parents make for their children. Take a hard look at pop culture today; you see damaged mothers everywhere. These women are compelling, even as they behave in a way society would find problematic. On television, they are met with high ratings and Emmy awards. There’s a complete disconnect between what we expect from mothers in real life and what we love on cable.
TV shows like Little Fires Everywhere, Big Little Lies and Sharp Objects share similarities in their DNA. They all feature mothers with barely-concealed traumas living in what appears to be blissful suburbia, in picturesque homes with their picturesque families, before a series of events completely upend their world. These story tropes are the foundation of the domestic noir genre that has been massively successful, a “female-driven” counterpoint to gritty male anti-hero dramas, such as True Detective.
Elena Richardson is the sort of person who obsessively projects helicopter-mom perfectionism on her children, resents her youngest for grinding her journalism career to a halt, and believes she and she alone is tasked with maintaining the status quo. From the first episode, it becomes apparent she represents a specific type of woman, with a fractured sense of motherhood that comes with being wealthy, white and privileged.
It’s hard to talk about Elena without discussing Madeline Mackenzie, Witherspoon’s other mom role, just like discussing Little Fires Everywhere inevitably leads to Big Little Lies. Both characters are essentially interchangeable in their approach to motherhood, their in-your-face personality as a defence mechanism and their witty one-liners written to go viral on Twitter. Between marital affairs and covering up a murder, it’s hard to imagine a woman like Madeline being celebrated. Last summer, however, when the second season of Big Little Lies premiered, the internet was practically begging to see the mother-to-mother-to-mother showdown between Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep. Look no further than all the episode recaps, analyses and podcasts that took apart every detail of Big Little Lies to see that damaged mothers can be just as popular as Daenerys and her dragons.
Witherspoon looked to replicate the appeal of Big Little Lies’ picture-perfect war of the worlds with Little Fires Everywhere. When Hollywood talks about women’s stories, they have historically talked about melodramatic, soap opera-esque representations of women; you can see this in work ranging from Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (and other “women’s pictures” of the ’50s) to ABC’s Desperate Housewives. Domestic noir is the most recent iteration of these stories, involving women who engage in crime and morally ambiguous deception. In both Witherspoon-led dramas, these mothers let their demons take hold.
When a mother doesn’t act as she is expected to, we want to know why this person failed to live up to the social expectations placed on her. On television, this is taken to the extreme. The Sinner’s Cora Tennatti (Jessica Biel) isn’t a “bad” parent because she neglects her toddler but because she stabs a man in broad daylight. Mothers are mythologized to be society’s ultimate nurturers, and when they reject this expectation so violently, we are repulsed and curious at the same time.
The debate on how mothers act takes centre stage when Kerry Washington’s Mia gets involved in an effort to reunite an immigrant mother, Bebe (Huang Lu), with the child she was forced to give up. Add Elena’s friend Linda (Rosemarie DeWitt), who took the baby in, and suddenly Little Fires Everywhere becomes a suburban battlefield of women attacking each other’s sense of motherhood, scarred by experiences ranging from extreme poverty to miscarriages. We haven’t even gotten to the question of who burned down Elena’s house. It might not have even mattered by the end of the season; Elena’s meltdown is fire unto itself, a mother come undone.
From the moment Elena calls the police after seeing Mia living in her car with her daughter during the first episode, we are made to understand that their relationship will be defined by class. When we’re talking about class dynamics between a married white mother and a single Black mother, it very quickly becomes about race; they do not exist in silos. As audiences consume these glossy, juicy, domestic dramas, we must consider who we even allow being damaged in the first place. Elena may join the long line of damaged (white) mothers, but Mia is characterized not only by the trauma she projects while raising Pearl (Lexi Underwood) but in her unapologetic Blackness. Her experiences as a Black woman in America damaged her, which is reflected in her role as a mother. We see her reluctance to form interpersonal relationships, her determination to control Pearl and the nightmares she gets from her past — nightmares that chase her as she moves from town to town, unable to give her daughter stability.
“Deviant” is a word that brings a negative connotation, but it just means refusing to follow social standards. The mothers of Little Fires Everywhere act impulsively and selfishly, going against the nature of how we expect our mothers to act. Society has been trained to shun and shame people who don’t follow the rules, but at the same time, we are fascinated by the people who dare to step outside the box and show themselves as imperfect. It might not be a stretch to say that damaged people tend to be the most captivating, reflecting a version of ourselves we’d instead push to the back of our minds. After all, without damaged mothers, Little Fires Everywhere would be hours of watching a perfect family do perfect family activities; it only becomes interesting once everything starts to burn down.
