tell me lies tell me big little lies

in spite of my greatest attempts at tearing down myself and the people around me, my life has never been like a soap opera. this is, possibly, the grand allure of HBO smash hit limited tv series BIG LITTLE LIES. the moms of monterey, ca (though with kids always conveniently off-screen and jobs that are on hiatus or part-time as in at an aquarium for 45 minutes a week) always seem to have each foot expertly planted in a different bad situation and all of these big...little...LIES about whether they're ok or how they can afford living in a beach bungalow on an underemployed accountant's salary JUST KEEP ADDING UP.

it's hard to share your truth in a town where almost everyone is a hot actress i had a confusing crush on in middle school, but things aren't as peachy as the power suits and pastel peacoats would lead us to believe. everyone carries their own secret trauma and all this experience concealing their pasts & presents has convinced our protagonists that one more lie won't do much. that's, of course, the kind of wishful thinking that helps someone with deep trauma limp along. one day this big little lie is going to catch up with us, warns Madeleine, mostly talking about an actual murder, though her recent tryst with the theater director has taught her about beefy tiny fibs, too.

BLL is an instagram-filtered romp through lives that we'll never have and mostly don't want. where you wear a $10k suit to your custody hearing or drive a $200k car off the road in an ambien fueled fugue state. we've seen at least a handful of these situations play out with less glamour in our ordinary lives, devoid of the HBO-sheen that seems desperate even to make the show's most horrific moments a bit sexy. while season one carries the premise of "escape," season two works through the hazards of "concealment." one can't escape in place & the resulting drama leaves our ladies lying in a mess exponentially fed by even the most benign efforts towards cleaning-up and repairing the past.

each episode of BLL starts with crashing waves and a song which asks of a viewer who has likely just settled onto her couch with a glass of wine the size of her migraine, "did you ever want it? / want it bad?" the answer is--as with every HBO show--no, not really. this is followed--if one chooses not to frantically hunt for the remote--by a very sensual overview of what's to come--well dressed ladies, saltine cracker husbands, unaware frolicking children, Chekhov's gun (never to be fired literally but metaphorically going off like a semi-automatic). the most reoccurring scene in the show is a tracking shot of someone driving over the same bridge between what seemed to be their own BIG LITTLE LIES and the rest of the world.

i hate that i am the target audience for this show but it's true & here i am front and center. i might even call myself a devoted fan. i love when women do just about anything. my dream tv would be a talk show where a bunch of mild mannered ladies talk about what they got in the mail that day. the truth is, even though i will complain to anyone that this season was chaotically boring--one bad last episode spread out over seven hours--i was still riveted. i loved the school drama, petty fighting between husbands, watching renata klein arrive in her husband's train lair like a vulture in the desert.  even though watchers had already seen some of the Monterey Five at their lowest, the allure of this season--seeing the characters truly unravel--was perhaps some kind of perverse vindication. the rest of the world looks on from its rummage sale living room and target comfort wear but tv's about voyeurism, baby. windows not mirrors. we don't want to see the violence & drama but we do want to know that it can happen to anyone--regardless of beachfront mansions or how many close friends they have.

i don't know if i have anything tremendously unique to say about BLL. i still think about that scene with Mary-Louise a lot, where she puts the cross to her lips. it's hot sacrilege. her primal scream, too. the death of a tyrant unleashes the wrath of the demon who spawned him. but here's what we learn--trauma begets trauma. we are creatures of our own upbringings--even Mary-Louise's vampyric psychobully ass. Bonnie's pointless storyline allows us to mash together a parallel. two abused children, one of whom learns to break the cycle but never fully reconciles the parts of her that have come from her mother. another who allows that part of him to take control of his life. Bonnie's still convinced violence lurks within, but we can't trust Bonnie's interior monologue, the show says, giving us heavy-handed avant-garde imagery & fractured "what if's" anytime she appears. the gift the other women give to Bonnie is the clarity she denied herself--if she didn't push Perry, someone else would have. the women were all guilty all along, not just for lying, but for wanting the death. how's that for a BLL? the women all walk together into the police station. as we've just learned from all the courtroom drama, guilt & innocence aren't always clear-cut.

Madeline gets more Madeline, while Celeste is both fucking one thousand dudes off-screen (s/o to Mary-Louise's selfless tho sometimes terrifying childcare) and able to deliver a cross-ex that can't even be countered by the state of California's best child services attorney. she contains multitudes. there's something about Nicole Kidman's frail onscreen presence that always makes her feel like a background character even when she's giving an EMMY AWARD WINNING performance. ethereal but on the brink of being blown away by a fan. a few tender moments between Madeline and Celeste remind us that even annoying people like Madeline can use their obnoxious & meddling behaviors for good. she wishes she would have known--could have stopped this all from happening. we don't we LOVE THIS TV SHOW!!!

the showstopper of season 2 has of course been Laura Dern's PERFECT Renata Klein who went from season one terror mom to season two alpha bitch husband destroyer. Renata's stable home life that allowed her to be such a go-getter in the first season is ripped away though it only seems to give her MORE STRENGTH. compared to our other protagonists, she only loosely leans on the other Monterey moms, she seems to thrive off pure rage. perhaps the greatest failure of season two was not enough onscreen sparring between Renata and Mary-Louise, two women who truly operate from the most heinous depths of the soul.  somewhere there's a season 3 of BLL where we see Renata take up a new career as a hired assassin to get back her money. or maybe a season 3 where she eviscerates her husband like it's Midsommar. i'd really watch a reality show where laura dern is hired by angry wives to destroy their husbands' toy collections.

i don't know if one can truly make much out of this world full of eyes bleary with sunsets and bodies sculpted by weekday surfing hobbies. i apparently don't even have anything to say about Jane, whose fourteen year old narc boyfriend and aquarium job had my blood pressure rising every time they came onscreen. everyone learns their lesson & things mostly work out as they need to. we get the sweet ending, cut off before the realities of the judicial system can steamroll any happy life that we fantasize these characters might get to lead. maybe now is the time for all of us to let our big little lies free.