Camille Preaker - Tumblr Posts
Feelings on Amma and how desperate she is for affection? She occupies my brain constantly but I’m not smart enough to talk about her.
*Rubs hands together like an uggo little housefly* I have sooo many thoughts okay so Amma is an abused child whose choice of coping mechanism for said abuse is to try and make believe some sense of control over her situation by pretending that she is in a symbiotic rather than abusive relationship with her mother, that she and her mother have a mutual understanding whereby Adora gets to uhh umm straight up poison her, but in exchange must shower her with the love that Amma knows, deep down, isn’t really there. Amma wants this compensation for her suffering, and the only currency of any value to her is her mother’s love, and the only consolation she has is that she might someday get to be a beautiful, perfect ghost, like Marian. That maybe someday, Adora will kill her, and she will have secured herself the best case scenario for a women in Wind Gap, which is to be perceived forever as the feminine ideal without the possibility of disgrace always looming overhead (similar ideas of The Dead Girl being society’s underlying feminine ideal, the inevitable outcome of the expectations placed on women and girls, were also explored in Gone Girl). We see Amma’s relationship with both her mother and Alan reflected in her relationships with sex and boys, in that she lets older boys sexually abuse her and tells herself she’s the one using them, and that these transactions are just that, transactional, the only kind of love she knows, and the boys largely inconsequential. And her dollhouse, her fancy, needs to be an exact replica of her mother’s house because it allows her to exercise control over an environment she otherwise has no real control over. Adora striking up friendships with Ann and Natalie was a breach of contract that had to be rectified, and so when murdering Ann and Natalie only ends up elevating them to the lauded status of Dead Girl, and they receive more attention than ever, Amma is beyond furious, and receives Camille with some measure of warmth because she is primed to find a new mother if the old one can’t keep up her end of the bargain, though she can’t rule Camille out as competition. And while she most certainly felt antipathy toward her victims, her romanticization of death is what really enables her to kill without remorse. After all, what she wouldn’t have given to be Marian, loved by her mother, loved by everyone, forever, without ever having to bleed for it again. Because nobody in her life loved Amma enough to help her until Camille, and by then it was already too late. And she doesn’t stop killing even after she knows it won’t get her the outcome she wants, because she needs to feel it again, that power over another person, another child, another girl. Amma has never felt less like a helpless victim, less like those murdered girls, in her whole life. Which just makes the whole thing that much easier.
Ah yes... my favorite genre : thriller involving a female protagonist with a questionable mental health navigating throught her fucked up life-
In honor of finishing Dark Places I decided to draw a little thing with Gillian Flynn's main characters because I love all of them so much !
I finally understood - nearly twenty years too late.
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects
Go ahead, Camille. Prove you’re not dead.
Sharp Objects (2018) dir. Jean-Marc Vallée
Watching sharp objects and going crazy