In Mare of Easttown, a plaintive look at women’s trauma as caregivers, and their constant quest for adequacy-Art-and-culture News , Firstpost
With every ‘mother-figure’ that we encounter in Easttown, we are continuously made aware of the insidious and blatant ways in which patriarchy functions to make every woman feel perpetually inadequate as a caregiver, not just to her own children and family, but to other’s as well.
Something about incestuous small-town America — where everyone knows and is related to everyone else — automatically lends itself to riveting storytelling, rife with deviance and debauchery that its glitzier urban counterparts can only hope to match. These spaces know how to bury secrets and traumas deep in their tissues, almost as if their existence loses meaning and purpose without a generous helping of such moral depravity.
And maybe it is so, especially when women stand at the centre of these intensely troubled suburbs lying in the shadows of the big cities, letting their aspirations and trepidations collide and uncomfortably spill over their margins. The rot travels through the pipelines, streams and canals snaking past the homes and backyards of these women, seeping quietly into their lives through everything they touch and taste. It colours the hearts and the apron pockets of the grandmothers, mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters, who spend a lifetime building these nondescript settlements, as their primary caregivers. They then toil through another, trying to keep these settlements from falling apart. As a result, the pain is not only tactile, but omnipresent too.
HBO’s newest whodunit Mare of Easttown, starring Kate Winslet in the titular role, is founded on one such graveyard of traumas in the fictional Philadelphia suburb of Easttown, where Marianne ‘Mare’ Sheehan is a police detective who moonlights as a grandmother to her deceased son’s child, Andrew. There are echoes of another HBO whodunit — Big Little Lies (2017-2019) — that also put suburban women’s sufferings at its centre, but this time, the woods are far less lovely, and a whole lot deeper and darker.
To get the basics out of the way, through the course of the show’s seven episodes, Mare is on the trail of two missing women — Katie Bailey and Missy Sager — with a history of substance abuse and prostitution. While Katie had disappeared over a year ago since the time we enter Easttown, Missy goes missing in front of our eyes. Almost simultaneously, Mare investigates the mysterious, gory death of a third woman named Erin McMenamin, whose corpse is found at a creek one fine morning. What unravels between these three tragedies is what forms the common thread — of unbridled trauma, shame, and guilt of never being good enough for anyone, not even themselves — tying the women of Easttown together.
Despite being a whodunit, Mare of Easttown, at its heart, is the story of mothers saving their children from falling prey to the pathologically violent devices of a hyper-masculine, cold and cruel world. It emerges as an unnerving pattern through the duration of the show, where male characters repeatedly, almost by design, inflict horror and pain on the ones they perceive as vulnerable in order to cope with their own brokenness.
From Mare, her daughter Siobhan, her son Kevin and Andrew, to Helen (actress Jean Smart, playing Mare’s mother) and Mare, to Dawn and Katie Bailey; Erin and DJ; Carrie and Andrew, Lori and Ryan (and later DJ), to Beth and her brother Freddie, or even Katie and Missy in captivity — the show’s focus never wavers from the burden that women carry all their lives as willing or unwilling caregivers, cutting across age groups, ethnicities and classes.
Everyone in Easttown has a secret laced with guilt, especially the men, who, despite their mostly reprehensible intents, seem to carry their falsehoods a little too lightly. The women, on the other hand, are visibly weighed down by what they perceive as their failure of raising lawless sons, brothers and partners, who go about ripping their social and familial fabric to shreds, often quite literally (think Freddie). The responsibility of nursing the ailing Easttown back to health, therefore, falls squarely on its mothers and daughters who rise to the occasion, but not without enduring a crippling amount of self doubt.
Amidst it all, Winslet’s Mare emerges as a byronic heroine, clinically incapable of mourning her son Kevin’s untimely death by suicide, essentially because she feels responsible for it. Rather perversely, she tries to address this guilt and redeem herself by fighting for her grandson’s custody, in a bid to prove to herself, more than anyone else, that she is capable of nurturing life.
We soon learn that Mare inherits this trauma from her mother Helen, whose tumultuous relationship with her husband and his subsequent death, led her to act unkindly towards her daughter. She, however, has forgiven herself and beseeches Mare to do the same.
Evidently, with every ‘mother-figure’ that we encounter in Easttown, we are continuously made aware of the insidious and blatant ways in which patriarchy functions to make every woman feel perpetually inadequate as a caregiver, not just to their own children and family, but to other’s as well — including ones born of incestuous ties forged by their partners. Consequently, the ignominy and pity only keep piling up, gnawing away at their insides.
Read on Firstpost: How Mare of Easttown is an examination of the love and loss embedded in motherhood
Everyone in Easttown — especially Mare Sheehan — is deeply flawed, besides being afflicted with an extraordinary amount of grief, which they confront (or don’t) with varying degrees of denial. While in the process of dealing with her son’s death and fighting to retain her grandson’s custody, Mare further disenfranchises Kevin’s girlfriend Carrie — Andrew’s mother, who is a recovering addict — by planting drugs in her car. With this act, she inadvertently aids the patriarchal machinery to beleaguer yet another woman — who was trying her best to reform in order to qualify as her son’s caregiver — for not living up to its standards of “female caregiving”, which stand in direct contrast to male caregiving that has its bar set criminally low. (Think abusive partners and fathers in the characters of Dylan Hinchey and Kenny McMenamin, or even incestuous and infidel ones like John Ross.) In case of men, their absence in the household is mostly justified by their role of being the “sole breadwinners” of the family, but even when not (as is the case with Freddie), they are let off the hook for far lesser owing to their male privilege and entitlement, which allow them to occupy spaces they are often undeserving of.
The rare accomplishment of Mare of Easttown lies in the remarkable ways in which the screenplay weaves, even disguises every suffering of its protagonist into a plot point that ripples through the town and alters the course of life for more than one character, thereby showcasing the far-reaching consequences of social inequalities, even when inflicted on one person. The murders and bloodshed are merely symptoms of this pain spilling out from every crack of this run-down, grey little town; the real mystery lies in its relentless agony born of its mouldering feudal structures that refuse to outgrow their degeneracy while competing with their richer urban cousins. Therefore, it is the women who are largely left to shoulder the burden of this trauma, which they inherit, nurture, and pass on as heirlooms to their children who must then embrace it as their own, and hope to surmount it.
All seven episodes of Mare of Easttown are streaming on Disney + Hotstar Premium.
