Alex

ALEXANDER SKARSGÅRD

the writing for the abusive relationship in the society was strange to me, there was one line where she said if there was anywhere to go i'd just leave but we can't leave here that i thought was done well but that was kind of the only thing i thought worked about the portrayal, oh yeah, i found my post on it:

Elle’s relationship with Campbell really bothered me because I didn’t think it was handled properly. I think in the last episode or the second last episode when Elle has that breakdown about how normally she would get on a bus and leave the town to escape him but they’re all stuck here so she can’t escape him and she just wants to die, that was done well, it was probably the only thing in the show next to Sam and Grizz and Sam’s friendship with Becca that I thought was actually executed nicely. But before that point the escalation of that relationship was haphazard at best.

I could understand that in the beginning, Elle had no friends and Campbell offered her a home so to speak and she took it to survive even though she was clearly uncomfortable in that relationship from the get-go although frankly, if Campbell is supposed to be a psychopath and a master manipulator, I would’ve preferred he be more charming to lull her in a false sense of security instead of just a creep from the get-go who invites her to his place to watch porn.

For instance, in Big Little Lies, Perry Wright is charming, that’s why he’s terrifying

and when he manipulates it’s subtle so there’s a scene where Perry grabs Celeste’s arm and she says the next time he lays a hand on her she’ll leave him. They go to couple’s therapy and when the therapist asks what their insecurities about their marriage are, he says that he’s afraid Celeste will leave him and when she says I don’t know where you get that from he mentions that the earlier in the week she said she’d leave him without mentioning the fact that he grabbed her and so she doesn’t know how to respond to that and he ends up telling the therapist that he grabbed her but he’s dictating the entire session and manipulating the therapist by choosing when and what to reveal, Campbell doesn’t really do things like that, he just stands up and points guns at people when he doesn’t like what they have to say.

Back to the dynamic with Elle, it seems like immediately after she’s in a relationship with Campbell, she starts making friends so she isn’t in this relationship long when she starts seeing other outs, like she’s dancing with other girls at prom and then she does the movie night which leads Campbell to dunking her head in a bathtub and that’s awful, of course, but because it kind of just happens, I didn’t feel connected to it and also because the actress who plays Elle doesn’t actually play fear right after that, she kind of just plays confusion, it didn’t have the impact it should’ve had for me because immediately I was just like, well that’s when you leave because he literally almost killed you, which isn’t me blaming the victim, it’s blaming the writing because there should’ve been more subtleties before that and she should’ve been isolated with Campbell longer.

Again with Big Little Lies,  little by little we learn how abusive Perry is, he doesn’t just outright slam her face into the floor, which is a scene we do end up seeing near the end of the season, it starts with things like this

but because we essentially start with him being a creep and a dude who points guns at people for no reason, Campbell just comes across as cartoonish rather than villainous, for me, anyway so I kind of just watched that like, OK…