What surprises me, time and again, is not just that this ubiquitous plot motif continues to underlie series after series, story after story, plot after plot – the one about the dead wife/mother, I mean. What genuinely confounds me is that ( Jeff excepted, because he has learned from me,) I seem to be the only person in the world who notices the phenomenon.
In a week in which we are all heart-broken and terrified as we witness what people, specifically men are capable of believing and doing when it comes to women and girls – I mean the events unfolding in Afghanistan – it will seem petty to some people that I continue to obsess about what happens to wives and mothers in made-up stories in the `enlightened` West. But as I see it, what I call the ubiquitous plot motif and what is happening in Kabul are on the same spectrum – albeit at far-apart opposite ends of it. The spectrum is called Misogyny. Versions of.
Looking through yesterday`s Guardian online last night – late night reading – I clicked on the following.
“The White Lotus is Big Little Lies with another two and a half turns of the screw – an equally sumptuously set miniseries with a mystery fatality at its heart. But this time, its subject is the monstrousness of affluence rather than mere snobbery.
We open with newlywed Shane (Jake Lacy) batting away questions from a friendly couple in an airport departure lounge about where his wife is, as he gazes down at cargo labelled “Human remains” that is being loaded on to their flight.”
I stopped reading, clicked out of the review, turned over, and went to sleep.
