Mare Of Easttown, My View Of It

Mare Of Easttown has gotten high reviews, the enthusiasm for it centred on Kate Winslett’s apparent career-topping performance as she transforms herself into a thick bodied, deeply troubled, dour small town Pennsylvania cop with wrenching issues up to her ears.

I beg to differ and by that join a minority of nay sayers so slender that if we turn sideways we disappear.

The whole thing is so relentlessly dark that everyone’s complexes have complexes. Unremitting dispiritedness may be the watchword for this series: depression, depression everywhere, not a drop of uplift to drink.

Generally, the totality of peoples’ lives in this Pennsylvanian small town is so immiserate as not even to let in a trace of smile, a ray of some light, a slice of some humour. The series projects a world so steeped in misery that a joke told is like a misdemeanour, or at a minimum a bylaw infraction.

Easttown is not Charles Murray’s Fishtown. People are gainfully employed. Many are educated. Families, while riven with problems, are somewhat in tact. People are church going. People know each other and are widely socially connected. Law and order is a norm such that the series’ crimes are unprecedented crises. 

So it’s not that terrible conditions blight people’s lives. Rather, a psychological pall, a pervasive inner torment, afflicts near to everyone. No one really is happy, let alone Mare, whose suffering over her son’s suicide is virtually uncontainable. 

He was of course a junkie, drug addicted to the point of beating the shit out of her in his desperation to get money to feed his habit. Anything less would have violated Easttown’s contract with itself that suffering and misery must predominate on pain of dramatic contradiction, a rending of the series’ seamless dark ethos. 

And how people speak to each other: nearly every conversation, and there are so many of them, is so lugubrious, so freighted and heavy, as though the worst result of a biopsy is being revealed. Stretches of frustrating tedium are the result.

One person I know put it:

“I hated it. Your review hit all the right notes. I stopped after two miserable episodes. My soul can only take so much benighted white trash.

Thanks for confirming that I am not the only one!”

“White trash” is overstated but this comment gets at something, something in this series is like the spirit of condescension informing Obama’s “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant.” It’s precisely people like this series’ small town Pennsylvanians whom Obama had in mind.

The unremitting dispiritedness overwhelms what artistic goods, Winslett’s acting, the underlying whodunit, the nods at the end to some resolution, Mare Of Easttown has on offer. 

It dramatizes to a fault the five As: anomie, agony, angst, anxiety and alienation.