I cannot stop thinking about the last ~15 minutes of Big Little Lies, and how it was about communication between women and deliberately cutting men out. For one thing, it is almost completely silent– sound only returns at the request of the female detective, who is also the one who picked up on the inconsistencies (or rather consistencies) of their stories. For another thing, major reveals happen without any dialogue at all. We see Bonnie piecing together the danger oozing from Perry, we see Jane’s horror at discovering her rapist, and then we see Celeste and Madeline put the whole thing together. Even Renata–the woman most excluded from their group– picks up that something’s wrong.
All without a single word.
It’s silly, but it reminded me of being in sixth grade. The boys in our class noticed that the girls had a tendency to look at each other when one of them said something dumb, and pretty soon any sort of sideways-look between girls got a loud round of Mr. S they’re talking with their eyebrows again! accusations. The boys were annoyed (playfully annoyed, but annoyed nonetheless) that the girls had figured out a way to talk in class without actually talking. We told them they could do it too, but they all stubbornly insisted that wasn’t possible.
Thinking back on that, it strikes me how much of female communication is nonverbal, largely because it has to be. Women are socialized not to make a fuss, to be quiet, to not take up too much unnecessary space. This pressure (along with the emphasis on the importance of women taking care of feelings and emotions) creates a quiet sub-language, a code that is not exactly hard to break unless you insist on seeing women as other. It’s in the look women share when a man catcalls one of us on the street, when we shift to make space for a woman to sit down on the bus because there’s a guy standing just a little too close to her. This isn’t some innate ability unique to ciswomen– and again, the code is not at all hard to crack unless you are convinced that women are inherently unknowable– but rather a form of communication female-identified people developed to protect each other.
I saw way too many reviewers say that they didn’t buy Bonnie knowing Perry was dangerous without having her book backstory to inform her (where she’s apparently a child of an abusive father), or arguing that Celeste and Madeline just knowing Perry was Jane’s rapist was a bridge too far, but to me, that was the most organic moment of the series. Not because women have natural intuition about these things, but because nonverbal communication is a skill women have developed to protect themselves and each other from men like Perry and so having them communicate without ever speaking a word was incredibly powerful. Without the audience ever once hearing them, these women instantly banded together to protect one of their own– and it was one of their own who noticed. The male detective basically throws his hands up and writes them off as unknowable, but the female detective is the one who knows the code and thus she’s the one with questions.
Even the last scene was a silent, female-centric haven. The bad guy is gone but the good guys aren’t there either, relegated to mere sidekicks in a story about female friendship and love. The audience is left out of their circle too, unable to hear their conversations but able to see their compassion for one another. They’re talking without words, but we still know what they’re saying.
