Apple TV’s thriller Shining Girls isn’t a dreamland for Kirby
The series does a much more coherent job at examining gendered violence than the novel’s somewhat restrictive portrayal of women, not just by removing the “shining” conceit but also in how showrunner Silka Luisa chose to reframe its characters. Kirby is front and center, a necessary anchoring point in a fluid reality that constantly shifts and warps and pushes her out of her own life.
But the real star of the show is Jamie Bell, who makes a greasy, cunning, spectacularly mediocre Harper Curtis. I can’t say enough mean, shitty things about Bell’s Harper because he’s so fantastically repugnant. He’s a beady-eyed grasping little rat man, an everyman opportunist with an easy slouch and a hard gaze. His whole thing of “taking what you’re owed” is born out of wartime desperation from WWI, and when he comes back to civilian life, this new hunger never leaves him.
Unfortunately, in the face of all this sweaty, righteous momentum, some of the show’s loftier aspirations fall flat. The astronomical / two stellar bodies theory that Jinny uses to theorize about Harper and Kirby’s relationship feels undercooked, like the show is pushing some kind of inevitability angle that undercuts its message about the intimacy of gender-based violence.
The whole rewriting reality bit at the end, where everyone is safe , feels weird but understandable as the logical outcome of Kirby’s drive for restitution. And when she finally kicks Harper out of the house, I was filled with dread — not at the prospect of Kirby taking control of a time-traveling house but at the fear that Apple will order another season of the show when it should end naturally right here.
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