What is With This Plot in Books Lately?
At first glance, this looks a helluva lot like that Pretty Little Liars show on HBO that my wife watched.
Based on Celeste Ng’s 2017 bestseller, Little Fires Everywhere follows the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and an enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives. The story explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, the ferocious pull of motherhood – and the danger in believing that following the rules can avert disaster.
Two things about this trailer right off the bat:
- Reese Witherspoon is channeling a grown-up version of Tracy Flick, her magnum opus role from the largely forgotten, genius film about voting and electoral participation, Election.
- Clearly, Tracy Flick is going to have a monumental bunch of problems in a post-modern, “woke” world.
When Did Cleaning Become a Bad Thing?
Apparently, gainful employment that could lead to advancement and getting a good reference is frowned upon in a world where movies like The Help exist.
Wait, it’s all about the racial elements.
Ok.
Well, then Witherspoon deserves whatever she gets from allowing this woman to be in her house.
Including, it looks like, this woman questioning the entire makeup of her life from her marriage to her social standing.
Because, you know, in modern America, when a female who happens to be a minority is hired to perform a set of menial tasks, we’re also signing up for that same minority to question my personal life choices.
Except that only happens on Hollywood miniseries, and never in real life in the palatial households of Hollywood executives where the female minority is usually an illegal Latina.
What Are We To Make of All of This?
This is more “eat the rich” pablum served up to a small, female, activist audience on Hulu, similar to The Stranger on Netflix.
Which, in an election year where it looks like, at least in the United States, we will finally have unalloyed socialism and socialist politicians getting to run for President and make insane economic and social justice arguments at the top of their lungs, this series is probably going along with the current zeitgeist.
Little Fires Everywhere drops on Hulu on March 18, 2020.
