Warning: Spoilers ahead for the first episode of HBO's "Sharp Objects."
The first episode of "Sharp Objects" is full of shadows and echoes and things you can’t quite fully glimpse — mysteries you know are there but can’t yet see, stories with contours you can’t totally make out. There are histories lurking underneath everything, and so far, all we can see are the outlines.
But it’s also a show with words scratched on its surface. Sometimes they’re pitch-black, slantwise jokes about femininity and social expectations, sometimes they’re warning signs, and sometimes they’re straight, uninflected daggers of self-loathing.
As we discover in the last shot of the premiere, Camille Preaker literally carves words into her skin, turning herself into a lexicography of pain. She writes the inside words on the outside, naming and defining her story on her body.
If "Sharp Objects" is an extension of Camille’s own self, an indication of how much its camera is also Camille’s eye, it makes sense that many of those words are also scratched and painted on the show itself. They hide in plain sight, suddenly visible in one frame and disappearing in the next.
Many of those words are hallucinatory — they appear in places words wouldn’t otherwise show up, or you can only see them for a moment. Beyond Camille’s own hallucinations, though, "Sharp Objects" also extends her fixation on words into a broader visual style, often using signage and lettering as a wry commentary on characters and their actions.
The first one we see seems completely innocuous. Camille (or someone else) has used thumb tacks to spell out "ASK!" on the divider of her cubicle in her St. Louis newspaper's office.
It’s exactly the sort of meaningless, mindless thing you’d do while sitting at your desk. And its message reads as a chipper reminder for Camille to do her job. Once you see it in the context of the rest of the episode, though, “ASK!” seems like the viewer being prodded to ask about hidden mysteries, and like Camille begging to be asked real questions.
On "Sharp Objects," it surely can’t be a mistake that the word is spelled out with literal pins.
Now we get into the less cheery vocab. There are many words scratched onto Camille's desk, but the two most visible are "BAD" and "A DRUNK."
“BAD” and “A DRUNK” are carved into Camille’s table.
"DIRT" is written on Camille’s car.
This is the first of the clearly hallucinatory words. It could easily be something scrawled onto Camille’s dirty car with a finger, but there’s no word on the trunk in the first several frames, and then it appears suddenly. (The image also returns in one of Camille’s memory flashback sequences.)
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