Reader, as I promised last month, this is the second feminist spotlight in a series of three that is going to be looking at T.V. shows (specifically mini-series) as a whole, as opposed to individual characters within T.V. shows. Last month we talked about the failed attempt at subverting the loner-genius trope in The Queen’s Gambit, and this month we’re going to be talking about a show that unfortunately is also a bit of a failure on the feminist front, which is Little Fires Everywhere. (Don’t worry; next month, for International Women’s Day, we’ll talk about a show that is actually successful).
The real problem with Little Fires Everywhere is not so much a story problem, as it is an adaptation problem. Without significantly changing either story or character personalities, the adaptation of this novel nevertheless made a series of small subtle changes that serve to undermine the nuance that the novel offers in favor of a more straightforward us vs. them narrative. So, I’m going to be going through the characters that are set up as rivals in this show, and talking through the changes that were made which are to the shows detriment. I’m going to be spoiling most, if not all, of the shows plot twists so beware if you have not seen it or read the book, because spoilers are incoming in 3, 2, 1…
So let’s talk about the central relationship in the show, the one between Reese Witherspoon’s Elena Richardson and Kerry Washington’s Mia Warren. On the surface, this relationship remains the same, but enough has shifted to lose a lot of the value that was in the novel. For starters, there wasn’t really a villain in the book. Each character did both good and bad things, and the novel observed them without passing specific judgement on them. In the show, there is a definite villain and it’s Elena. The narrative fairly clearly frames Mia, as the good, loving, enlightened mother and Elena as the bad, spiteful, and racist mother who is only out to ruin people’s lives. This is not a fair adaptation of the woman from the novel.
Elena of the novel was a deeply flawed woman, to be sure. But she wasn’t evil, so much as she was complacent. She was a former liberal flower-child whose lived a very nice, comfortable upper-class life for most of her adult life, and has become very satisfied with it and herself. She has gotten so comfortable with it that she forgets that she never really worked for it, and that she has a fair amount of privilege that has enabled her to live her perfect, little, rule-bound life with the part-time job and the golden children, and that following “the rules” as she puts it is not what got her where she was, but her parent’s wealth. In some senses, following the rules has trapped her, because when they fail her, when they don’t provide a script for a daughter who is acting out, for a son who is sleeping around, for a woman who followed a different life plan, for a more nuanced situation than plain right and wrong, she falters, falls apart, and lashs out, which is what causes her to do such terrible things. This, of course, all blows up in her face because she can’t handle any of the situations she’s in through this method and she loses Izzy because of her following the rules mentality. Elena of the book struck me as, above all else, a deeply sad woman, who no longer had anything but following the rules and couldn’t cope when the cracks appeared. Mia’s final art project for her, then, implies that gilded cage that Elena has built for herself, and Mia’s sense of pity, rather than hatred, towards her.
In the show, though, Elena is not a victim of her own self-satisfaction, but a villain, through and through. Instead of using Mia’s past to make her move out, more because she is jealous of Mia’s relationship with Izzy and her strong bond with Pearl, and her happiness with her artist’s lifestyle, and lack of gratitude towards Elena’s job offer, all of which comes back to her inability to cope with people not following the rules, Elena of the show uses the information to first attempt to blackmail Mia to prevent her from testifying on Bebe’s behalf, then drops this bomb on Pearl in an attempt to destroy her relationship with Mia. Like, think about that. She deliberately destroys a teenager’s life because she doesn’t like her mother very much. That’s truly messed up. And where Elena of the book was a loving if unobservant mother, whose harsh treatment of Izzy stems from a subconscious fear going back to the difficult pregnancy and baby Izzy’s multiple illnesses, in the show, Elena is just deliberately nasty and harsh to Izzy with none of the psychological reasoning to explain away her behaviour. Izzy actually being a closeted lesbian bullied by her former girlfriend also adds an aura of martyrism to all of her behaviour which was not there in the book (where she was just a misunderstood artist who could sometimes do stupid things), making Elena’s behaviour towards her even worse. In the book, Elena also is quite upset about the possibility that Pearl might have gotten an abortion, mainly at her son’s lack of responsibility towards the situation, whereas Elena of the show does not seem to care at all when Lexie reveals she is the one who got the abortion. And, to top it all of, Elena is super racist, a theme which is not explored at all in the book. This makes Mia’s final art project a scathing indictment of Elena’s racist and cruel behaviour, rather than an uncanny and pitying insight into the Richardson family psyche. That Elena is the villain is even further hammered home by the fact that the three remaining Richardson children decide together to burn the house down, because their family is corrupt and needs to be scorched to the earth. That’s not exactly a nuanced look at Elena’s behaviour.
This also then leads to a lionizing of Mia, which is rather unjustified. Mia of the book is clearly a happier person than Elena, and certainly a better mother. The book does not villainize her in any way for her choice to take and raise Pearl, but it doesn’t go out of its way to explicitly condone her behaviour either. Like Elena’s, it observes her actions without commenting on them. The show, though, lionizes her actions which are, it must be said, super illegal. She has multiple speeches about how Pearl is her daughter, so she had an absolute right to do what she did, it’s almost made out to be her brother’s dying wish, and Pearl, given the opportunity to meet the people who should have been her parents, decides wholeheartedly that Mia is her true parent and gives up the chance. Mia is the clear hero to Elena’s villain, and this lack of nuance is deeply frustrating. When everything Elena does is villainized and everything Mia does is praised, it strips any nuance away from the show, and it erases both women’s identities as flawed and unique individuals to make them archetypical.
This problem extends to the women they champion in the custody battle of May Lin/Mirabelle, though in actually a rather odd way. Both Linda and Bebe have all of the nuance and backstory ripped away from their stories, with their screentime boiled down to the essence of their plotline. This serves the purpose of making Linda seem like a much better mother, as her casual racism and lack of concern for her daughter’s diaspora is cut as is her decision to simply go get a replacement baby from Hong Kong when Bebe kidnaps May Lin at story’s end. The only thing they really kept is her wailing in grief when her child disappears, as well as her obvious love and affection. On Bebe’s side, the only thing really kept is her decision to give the baby away and an added scene of her breaking into the birthday party, to scream about how May Lin/Mirabelle is her baby and attempt to grab her, which serves to make her look much more unstable than she was in the novel. But, because Elena champions Linda and Mia champions Bebe, the show frames Bebe has obviously right and Linda as obviously wrong, because of their alignment with the show’s hero and villain. A situation that never lost sight of how complicated and painful it was for everyone involved in the book becomes another battle of us vs. them, losing sight of the nuance that made the custody battle so powerful in the book.
And that is the overall issue with the adaptation of Little Fires Everywhere. The story of the novel is about women, specifically mothers and daughters, and the relationships between them, and how those can be tested and how they can go wrong and how people’s flaws can hurt them and others, and how they can or cannot be overcome. The story of the show is about an evil rich, white woman who torments a Black single mother and an immigrant mother until her home is burnt down as punishment. That’s not nearly as nuanced or as feminist. The failure of Little Fires Everywhere is that by taking a strong story and not understanding what made it work, the show ultimately did not successfully adapt it and lost out on bringing a nuanced and powerful take on the facets of motherhood to the screen, which is a real shame.
That’s all I’ve got for you today, you guys should let me know in the comments your thoughts on Little Fires Everywhere, stay safe, wear a mask, get vaccinated, and I’ll see you on Wednesday.
Until the next time.
The Phantom of the Bookshelf 