Similarly, their suppressed rage goes either inward or outward, as Adams herself told IndieWire: “You’re either somebody who explodes or implodes… Are you an exploder or an imploder?”Ĭamille is a classic imploder. These paths are embodied by its three main characters: Camille (Amy Adams), an embittered, alcoholic journalist on a quest to solve the murder of two little girls her mother Adora (Patricia Clarkson), a honey-voiced, icy-veined Midwestern socialite and Adora’s teenage daughter Amma (Eliza Scanlan), a small-town beauty whose rebellious nature masks sociopathic tendencies.Īll three grew up in a small Midwestern town where women are expected to do little but gossip, breed, and nurse minor painkiller addictions all three are strong, willful, and hyper-competent women who have been denied any semblance of power and all three resort to hurting either themselves or others to obtain it. No matter how hard a person tries to dam, divert, or deny it, it will find a way, usually along the path of least resistance.” Sharp Objects is a topography of female rage: showing both where it can come from, and what paths it can take when it inevitably bursts through the dam. In her forthcoming book Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, Soraya Chemaly writes that anger “is like water. I was constantly reminded of my own rage, and female rage in general, while watching Sharp Objects, the HBO limited series that aired its final episode on Sunday. To borrow a much-used phrase, if you don’t know why women are angry, then you haven't been paying attention. The reasons for our anger are so wide-ranging and multitudinous that listing them would border on mundane. It's also no secret that we have a lot to be angry about. But the real question was: How could I not be? Not just at him, and not just at that specific situation, but at everything. He was chewing a piece of gum, and he snapped it as he responded. I had received no prior warning of this, and it would significantly impact work flow, so I asked him why this decision had been made-in a tone that was more curt than average, yes, but not at any higher volume than usual. One day, an old supervisor called me in for a meeting to tell me that one of my best employees was being taken off my desk.

But did that mean I was angry? I wasn’t sure, but I’d spend hours studying my Resting Bitch Face in the mirror nonetheless, practicing a smile that I’d hoped would made me look friendly but instead made me look like a bank teller being taken hostage. Yes, I’m more direct than the average person, and sure, I can get emotional when discussing something that I’m passionate about. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to playĪt first, this observation was incredibly hurtful-especially because a lot of the time, I didn’t think I felt angry at all.

Rage becomes her review