Beneath the facade of a suburban utopia - Little Fires Everywhere review

At first, Little Fires Everywhere looks like a suburban crime story; the story takes place in the 1990s in Shaker Heights, an idyllic and seemingly progressive suburb of Cleveland, where certain rules, regulations and order are necessary to keep their community harmonious and beautiful. Although reminiscent of HBO's Big Little Lies (especially in the first and far more powerful season), primarily because of Reese Witherspoon who plays a similar character and producer in both series. There is also the examination of motherhood in various forms, women's ambitions, family relationships, Little Fires Everywhere of these topics, it is also focused on racial, class and gender policies, migration and heteronormativity. It’s a series to a very specific demographic group and about what happens when their carefully constructed world starts shooting at the seams. It raises questions about who the parent is and how race and class enter those perceptions. Elena (Witherspoon) is a privileged, white woman, unaware of her racism, while Mia (Kerry Washington) is a black woman, with fluid sexuality, a subversive artist, whose class division between her and the rest of Shaker Heights is obvious - from sleeping in an old car, to buying groceries in a mostly white neighbourhood (Mia's race and sexuality are a departure from the literary template, which is a good choice for the adaptation because it adds another layer to their conflict). The drama comes when Bebe Chow (Lu Huang), a Chinese immigrant, enters the story and is actually the main narrative line in the series - a legal dispute over May Ling (or Mirabelle), a girl she left out of despair and misery and adopted by a wealthy family. McCullough, best friends with the Richardsons. The lawsuit raises questions about Shaker's complex racial past and imperfect integration approach, as well as the neglect of its own privilege.

It is interesting to analyse Shaker Heights and the suburbs in general in the creation and development of the characters in the series and the book, which provides a wider range for the analysis of femininity and identity. The suburbs, historically and culturally, have been viewed as a domain of femininity, associated with domesticity and family life, routine and order. Where the city is coded as a masculine and untidy space, the suburbs, as an empire of domesticity and family life, are coded as feminine and a disciplinary space. Subordination of the suburbs as an everyday, restrictive area of ​​household chores and raising children establishes a dichotomy of a suburban/female household, as opposed to city/masculine/free household. The suburbs are adapted to Freud's conception of femininity as “passive and intellectual voids”, as Susan Saegert writes in her essay “Masculine Cities and Feminine Suburbs: Polarized Ideas, Contradictory Realities”. Symbols of modern culture constructed as opposites: city versus suburbs, men versus women, suburbs as symbols of modern American life, but also as a statistical description of the distribution of people from different racial and socioeconomic groups. Thus, Shaker Heights is the key in forming Elena's and Mia's relationship: limited physical and mental space in a small community and frustration with their own failure as opposed to freedom, nomadism, subversiveness... On the other hand, in Little Fires Everywhere through Mia’s art, questions arise about the importance of motherhood in a crisis and questions about where we belong. The relationship of the material reality of motherhood and how the mother-artist presents her experience with boundaries. What does it mean to be emotionally attached to your children and others around you? How are the social roles that define motherhood in times of crisis evolving?

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