During the fifth episode of “Big Little Lies,” director Jean-Marc Vallée unveiled an image so instantly satisfying its full weight didn’t register right away: Three women, running together in silence, wordlessly united against the pain all around them. Jane’s therapeutic jogging scenes have become a staple of the HBO limited series, but Shailene Woodley’s character is no longer alone. Her new equally tormented best friends, Madeline (Reese Witherspoon) and Celeste (Nicole Kidman), are now running right beside her. It’s a testament to the support needed to survive in a world filled with hardship, but it’s also a conviction of silent suffering. Each woman has a secret. Each woman is afraid to confess her secret, and — as the series so prominently foreshadows — it could end up killing one of them.
“You can come up with four thousand other guesses, of course, about why Amma did it. In the end, the fact remains: Amma enjoyed hurting. ‘I like violence,’ she’d shrieked at me. I blame my mother. A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.” – Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn
“every moment in this show exists so that these two women can end up alone in a room together.” — phoebe waller-bridge (x)
“My name is Ella; that’s who I am at school, hanging out with friends, while I’m doing homework. But when I’m up on stage, ‘Lorde’ is a character. “