“I’m Persephone, Queen of the Underworld”: Metramorphic swerves away from death in HBO’s Sharp Objects

Abstract

In this article, I analyze HBO’s adaptation of Sharp Objects, reading it through the prism of Bracha L. Ettinger’s Demeter-Persephone complex. I argue that when viewed from a matrixial angle, and as a depiction of intergenerational trauma, Sharp Objects reveals the effects of a continuous reopening of historical scars in the matrixial web. By screening what Ettinger calls mother-phantasies, Sharp Objects offers an aesthetical-ethical space in which we might learn to offer compassion, respect, and subjectivity to the archaic Mother and to all mothers, thereby opening a passageway to a relation of response-ability, which may be reparative to the matrixial web.