I’ve seen a bunch of your Animal Kingdom posts (all of which are amazing and so spot-on!!) and wanted to hear more about your thoughts about Smurf grooming (and possibly outright assaulting) her sons. While it’s never outright stated in the show, it might as well be with how heavily it was implied. It also seemed (to me, at least) like Pope got it the worst. I spent the whole show waiting for there to be some sort of confrontation about it (I know her and Deran had that argument, but it didn’t feel like enough to have just one scene when there’s been such a big impact on the characters because of it) or someone saying that what she did was wrong, so it was a little disappointing that there never really was.
Oh, I have so many thoughts about the subtle portrayal of CSA and sexual and emotional abuse/manipulation in Animal Kingdom.
I'm going to put most of it under the cut since I'm going to be talking about a lot of potentially triggering subject matter, so read the rest of this at your own risk, y'all
TW: CSA (childhood sexual assault), sexual abuse, sexual manipulation, emotional abuse, incest
From a writing perspective, the skillful way that they leave the breadcrumbs of Smurf's abuse and manipulation of all the boys is incredibly well done. Enough that it feels pretty obvious what happened without ever having to say a direct word about it.
The first and, to me, most compelling hint of how Smurf groomed and subsequently abused the boys is the distinct lack of privacy. Evidence that- from the very first episode- the audience is shown to subtly guide us towards the conclusion that there is something off about the dynamics in the family. Through J's entrance into the Cody household, it’s shown that Smurf does not respect, or even allow, boundaries. She comes into J's room when he's changing, then when he shows discomfort at her presence, she brushes him off. Makes jokes about him being shy. She tells him that she won't even look and then does and only when she knows that he’ll see it. Like she’s making a point by doing it.
This is a long-standing pattern that we see stretchs all the way back to when Pope, Baz, and Julia were teenagers and Craig and Deran were young kids when we get the flashbacks. In S6E7, Smurf walks into the bathroom when Pope has just gotten out of the shower. Her presence doesn't surprise him and he doesn’t show any signs of being embarrassed by her seeing him naked, implying that it’s something that he’s used to. And the tension between the scene and the audience gets even more uncomfortable as Smurf is the one to wrap him up in a towel and start drying him off. Like, this is very much understood to not be the touch of a mother to her child, it feels more intimate than that. Intimate in a way that’s disquieting to watch.
There’s also the fact (which I only noticed on a close rewatch while I was thinking about this ask) that it seems like none of the bedrooms doors in the house have latches or locks. With only maybe one exception, the bedroom doors are sliding doors. On my first watch, I thought it was just the doors in Craig and Deran’s rooms that lead to their shared bathroom, but the closer I looked on another watch-through, the more apparent it became that nearly all of them are like that. And since these kinds of doors don’t have handles, they don’t have locks either. A staging and narrative decision that absolutely lends itself to the idea that Smurf doesn’t allow the boys any privacy. If they can’t lock their doors to keep anyone out, then they can’t bar her from moving uninhibited throughout the house. Something that is known and accepted not just by the boys, but by other people that they bring into the Cody house: all of Craig’s hookups seem unsurprised when someone- not just Smurf- come into the room, Baz mentions to J that it was part of the reason that Cath wanted them to stop staying in Smurf’s house, and in S4E5, Angela tells Pope that they have to be quiet presumably because she knows that Smurf is in the house and would have absolutely no reservations about coming into the room while she and Pope are having sex. And notice how in that scene she also says “I’m gonna close the door” not “I’m gonna lock the door”- big difference there and I don’t think the word choice was coincedental, it was an intentional writing choice.
Then there is the fact that there are cameras everywhere. We first see them in S2E12 when Smurf tells J to get the footage from the house. When J checks the monitors, we see a lot of different angles around the outside of the house, particularly the perimeter, and since Baz has already gotten to the footage before J does the audience can assume that the cameras aren’t a secret. Something that’s reiterated when Pope also looks through the cameras when he starts losing time in S5. But it isn’t until S6E8 that we see there are also cameras inside the house, and they are all over. It wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination- given everything that we know about Smurf and the tight control she keeps over the house and the boys- that there are cameras in the bedrooms as well (maybe that’s how she knew about Pope’s hiding spot in the vent).
But the lack of privacy is just a foundational layer for the more insidious parts of their upbringing: the sexual and emotional manipulation.
There’s a lot of hard references to it, mostly by characters that are close to the family but outside of it (I’ll get to that in a minute) but there’s also a lot that could be interpreted by the way that they interact with Smurf. Broadly, just look at when the dynamic between Smurf and the boys is being established in S1. There’s an unhealthy codependency showcased nearly every single time that Smurf and her sons interact with one another: Smurf kissing Craig on the mouth (for an uncomfortably long time, let’s be real) in E1 as well as her and Deran on the couch in that same episode, then Andrew slipping into bed with her in E3. It’s all laying the framework of how enmeshed their relationship with Smurf is.
And for all of them- aside from Deran- that never changes. Because even when they try, she finds a way to pull them back in. Like with Pope in S3E12, Smurf twists and uses Pope’s protective instincts towards Lena to get exactly what she wants: Pope unhappy, isolated, and living back at home with her. And I completely agree that Pope likely got the brunt of her grooming and exploitation being the oldest and, most of the time, the least likely to fight back. Because I fully believe that when she looks at Pope, more often than not she sees Colin rather than her son and so she projects her relationship- both emotionally and sexually- onto Pope as a proxy. There’s quite a few times we see this (Shawn and Ellen did a phenomenal job portraying that ambivalent tension) but the one that stands out the most to me is in S2E11, right after Pope breaks down because he realizes that Cath never talked to the police and he had killed her for no reason. Smurf curls around Pope, holding him and pressing reassuring/comforting kisses to the side of his head in what could easily have been a short showcase that Smurf does care about her sons when they’re hurting but may not always be the best at showing it. But it goes on and Smurf starts kissing Andrew’s neck, and that’s when he tells her to get off him. A demand that she seems surprised by even before Pope pulls himself out of her hold. The fact that this shift happens after Pope receives a seemingly innocuous form of affection that turns to something more charged give the impression that he pulls away not just because he’s angry but because he’s uncomfortable. Because by this time, he’s had a healthy relationship- both emotional and sexual- with Amy and he seems to be breaking out of his passivity to the pattern of Smurf’s behavior.
But even all of these moments have a certain layer of plausible deniability to it. While certainly out of the ordinary, it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that these emotionally stunted and immature men could have an almost child-like reliance on their mother. Except that doesn’t take into account the evidence that the audience is given by other characters outside of the family. And while not all of them are the most reliable of narrators, the fact that they’re all saying the same thing without any reason to have their stories match is pretty damning. The two characters I want to focus on are Lucy and Billy.
In S3E11, when Lucy’s talking to J in order to negotiate the exchange for Marco, she says, “You realize your uncles protect Smurf ‘cause she’s jerked them off since they were little boys, right?” This is the most direct reference to Smurf’s sexual abuse and manipulation of the boys in the entire series. And with Lucy having been around at least since she and Baz were sixteen, it seems like something that she would have had ample opportunity to observe, even if indirectly, whenever she was in the house. Which- if Lucy tried to get Baz to push back against it in the same way she encourages him to break from Smurf until Baz is killed- could be the reason that Smurf finally barred her from the house when she and Baz were eighteen since we know that Smurf doesn’t allow outside influences- especially female ones- to hang around for very long.
Then in S3E8 there is a slightly vague innuendo, more allusion than outright admission, from Billy to the sexual abuse that Pope in particular faced. One that, without a little background knowledge of CSA, might go unnoticed but that turned my stomach the first time that I heard it. Billy is talking to Craig and- trying to embarrass Pope since he’s angry with him- tells him that Pope was “in diapers until he was six… the doctor said he was regressing” before going on to say that it was more likely because Pope enjoyed having Smurf touch him. Regression, especially bedwetting, is extremely common in CSA victims and can occur in people of all ages with CPTSD. And Billy, like so many others, takes the route of blaming the victim by claiming that Pope enjoyed whatever physical liberties Smurf took with his body. And when the topic of his regression is brought up again in S4E5 by Craig, Pope snaps and immediately attacks him which is another textbook case of someone suffering from CPTSD, especially when confronted with a reference to their trauma.
So while yes, the show never comes right out to say that Smurf groomed and then sexually abused the boys, the writers laid down all the hints and references to make it perfectly clear that that is exactly what she did. And Pope was likely the most intense recipient and thus the most affected by it.
