zanopticon:
Pretty Little Liars doesn’t make any sense. I mean, from a certain vantage point and if...
Pretty Little Liars doesn’t make any sense. I mean, from a certain vantage point and if you squint the plot holds together, or at least forms a recognizable kind of shape, but week to week it strings you along, loses its way, gets lost in a subplot. This doesn’t matter. It is compulsively consumable, candy-sweet, candy easy to suck on and suck on ‘til your whole mouth is sugar and your tastebuds are wrecked.
It helps that its four female leads are startlingly, almost inhumanly pretty, uncanny valley pretty: ageless, poreless, overwhelmingly lush. Their neon prettiness is an invitation to looking. Their stories are about all of the things that prettiness can’t save them from. Awful things happen to these girls.
When they show starts they have common, adolescent secrets– eating disorders, closeted queerness, parents who are liars, who are faithless, who are struggling not to go broke. As it progresses, the stakes change: someone is trying to kill these girls, but also, at the same time, to shame and reveal them.
The genius of the show is that it treats both kinds of threat as equally devastating.
The point of melodrama is that it blows things out of proportion, but in the case of Pretty Little Liars that telescoping, Alice in Wonderland bigsmallbig effect serves to collapse the distinctions between major and minor traumas, which is, as far as I remember, accurate to what it felt like to be a teenage girl. You are watched, you are threatened, you are always trying to decide if someone’s invasions or incursions are harmless, or well-intentioned, or malevolent, and you never figure it out until it’s pretty much too late.
In the early seasons, A. targets each girl specifically, in turn. The arc of these episodes is mostly expository– there’s no larger plot being pressed into motion, just the show introducing us to its characters by having us watch someone slowly, methodically take them apart.
In particular, A. goes after athlete Emily by needling her relationship to her body: when she goes in for work on an injured shoulder, A. stands in for the masseuse. The scene is deeply unsettling to watch, in part because A. doesn’t hurt her. A. actually does give her a massage. When she realizes what’s happened, it’s too late to do anything about it. She lay there and let A. put her hands on her skin.
More recently, A. trapped all four of the girls in an underground bunker and sequestered them in exact replicas of their bedrooms. For a month she tortured them, and forced them to torture each other. That’s major, major trauma. But the show almost entirely elides that. Instead, in the episode after the girls escape, it focuses on the lasting impact, the thing that seems minor but is, in fact, the point: their own rooms are ruined for them, now.
A. takes their sense of home and safety as surely as she took Emily’s home in her own body, seasons and seasons ago. A. is in some sense the threat that all girls live under: that as long as you are pretty– as long as you are breathing– someone will always be trying to make a home inside of your head.
Anyway, my favorite parts of the show are the ugly or unsympathetic ways that the Liars respond to this particular kind of trauma. When A. tricks Spencer into believing her boyfriend is dead, she checks herself into a mental institution. She’s been the show’s type-A genius and resident good girl, and the show has been good about revealing the toll that takes on her, but we’ve all seen the valedictorian on pills before. PLL actually lets Spencer fall all the way to pieces. It gives her an unbearable truth and lets us see what happens as she fails to bear it.
In an episode a few weeks ago, in the aftermath of the bunker, Emily took her father’s gun to a shooting range. Her mother found out and screamed at her, and told her never to do it again, and she went back anyway. She knows and we know that target practice won’t save her from A., but response to trauma is not linear, or useful. Sometimes it’s just squeezing the trigger until you’ve dissolved enough of what’s inside of you to keep going another day.
Hanna was the only one who actually destroyed something. She peeled the wallpaper off her walls and took her room apart. She sat on the floor at the empty center of the place she used to live, which she’d made as ugly and uncomfortable as she needed it to be. She didn’t run away from it. They’ve all learned, by now, that there’s nowhere to run. There’s only how you live with it, what you make of it, how bearable it seems, on any given day.
This isn’t David Lynch’s all-American surrealism, in which the suburban sits like a mask over the poisonous and strange. In Pretty Little Liars, beauty is a fact in the world just like everything else is. It never considers that it’s strange that beautiful girls should suffer, because it knows that temptation– bright desire, ugly need– is the law of this and every land.
I’m a lucky bitch bc I get this kind of shit in my inbox, and you’re all lucky that Zan puts it on her blog sometimes.
As A would say to the Liars: ACT NORMAL BITCHES
