---
Title: Mare of Easttown
Date: 21/04/2021
Category: Arts and Entertainment
Tags: mare-of-easttown pauperization precarization
URL: https://marxismo.school/communia/en/mare-of-easttown
---


HBO kicked off the broadcast yesterday of _Mare of Easttown_, a crime series starring Kate Winslet which promises to be the best of the season but is splitting US critics into two camps.

### In this article

## _Mare of Easttown_: realism and the precarious lives of ordinary US workers

https://youtu.be/miQqyfO66uw

Trailer for _Mare of Easttown_

_[Mare of Easttown](https://es.hboespana.com/series/mare-of-easttown/2b4af585-f604-4e55-a8da-15def57d6c1e)_ is an heir to what one long-ago day, decades ago now, was _[This American Life](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/)_: a face-to-face encounter with _real_ US life. Life on the very antipodes of the corporate Manhattan shown to us by HBO in _The Undoing_. The life of a mass of workers who would appear like dangerous space aliens to the Apple petty bourgeoisie we met in _[Servant](https://marxismo.school/communia/en/servant)_.

That's the first strength of _Mare of Easttown_: flesh-and-blood characters too busy surviving first-world poverty to allow for a Netflix-like protean plot in which everything going on _means_ something to the unraveling of the central mystery. Here everything is meaningful but not necessarily instrumental to the _case_, and even though it may sidetrack the plot, we do not care because it enriches the story. Realism rules.

So accomplished is the realism of _Mare of Easttown_ that even the _[Guardian's](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/apr/19/mare-of-easttown-review-kate-winslet-hbo-murder-mystery)_ and _[Los Angeles Times'](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2021-04-16/mare-of-easttown-kate-winslet-hbo-review)_ reviews, which praise it, realized the importance of all these little details which are most striking for those who only know the US through its audiovisual storytelling. All those things that film critics consider so _normal_ in the life of precarious working-class neighborhoods that they do not consider them worth of even being reviewed:

The teenage motherhoods following generation after generation. The baby we realize will go deaf because no one wants to take care of the $1,800 it costs to operate on him or her. The _precooked _mac and cheese_ and microwave trays as the universal diet of families without daily rituals of shared meals. Or the writer who is asked not what his novel was about, but whether it was successful._

That is, what is striking and shocking is the poverty averted by a good part of the world's working class manages through community solidarity and family and friendship ties. And it is striking because from the very first scene, starting with the main character - who is a _burned-out_ local policewoman trying to avoid being held accountable - many of the adult characters strive to find ways of _re-inventing_ means to support themselves.... from which they have been dispossessed, nobody knows when. Perhaps in that past when the women's basketball team still brought them all together and of which only empty warehouses and weathered if not ramshackle houses remain.

## This message is not authorized by Joe Biden

![Mare of Easttown Poster](https://marxismo.school/communia/en/assets/mare-of-easttown-cartel-300x444.jpg)

Mare of Easttown Poster

The main virtue of _Mare of Easttown_ is to depict this social panorama like someone who photographs a rocky beach, without distressing us or oversaturating the tone, based on a normality that is the characters' one instead of the fake normality of an audiovisual production that has always been a denial of the majority of its own audience. On that basis it builds a plot structure with all the clichés of the genre and all the hooks and predictable twists that the viewer has already engraved in the memory of a thousand series and novels ... and the audience gets hooked.

And yet, in the US, some critics, starting with the _[New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/arts/television/mare-of-easttown-review-kate-winslet.html)_, have been irritated by the series. It helps that it doesn't have the usual moralizing of TV feminism or sing the virtues of the Green Deal, no doubt. But what is unforgivable for the reviewer of the _Times_ is to reflect as a general way of life something which is taboo. It is frowned upon to display this way of life beyond the portrait-drama of a particular and concrete situation. _American Miserabilism_, he calls it, disparagingly.

Moral: Joe Biden does not approve of this message. Starting last November 2, we must chronicle a _new America_, happy and _diverse_, having fun choosing pronouns and electric cars. Under no circumstances should we focus on the material and moral misery of an exhausted capitalist civilization surrounding the characters like the maze surrounds the mice of a sadistic behavioral laboratory.

No, _Mare of Easttown_ is not a defeatist chant. It does not point out exits to the maze because there are none, and it is modest enough not to try to lie with sentimentality. Nor does it enlighten us by showing us where to break the maze's walls. It shows exhausted mice, sometimes brutalized, but decidedly alive and more capable than they themselves believe. And in that collective capacity sketched in charcoal and with many shadows, it harbors if not a perspective, at least a hope of breaking these walls.