Protected: The great divides in Amazon Prime Video’s Little Fires Everywhere
Protected: The great divides in Amazon Prime Video’s Little Fires Everywhere
The adaptation of the Celeste Ng novel amplifies key themes about race, class and privilege
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Little Fires Everywhere is about many things: the pressures of motherhood, the tensions between teenagers and their parents, and the complex nature of surrogacy and adoption. But perhaps more than anything, it’s about the ever-widening gaps in society.
The arrival of free-spirited artist Mia Warren (Kerry Washington) and her daughter, Pearl (Lexi Underwood), in the upscale American suburban neighbourhood of Shaker Heights, Ohio, sets off the series’ pivotal explorations. After the Warrens rent a duplex from wealthy mother-of-four Elena Richardson (Reese Witherspoon), the two families’ lives are enmeshed.
The casting of the Warrens represents a key change from the novel on which the series is based. “Initially, I had wanted to write [Mia and Pearl] as people of colour,” author Celeste Ng told The Atlantic magazine earlier this year. “I thought of them as people of colour, because I knew I wanted to talk about race and class, and those things are so intertwined in our country and in our culture…but I didn’t feel like I was the right person to try to bring a black woman’s experience to the page.”
Showrunner Liz Tigelaar describes the casting choice of Kerry Washington as “a fundamental change to the story.” In an interview with Vulture, she said: “That was a really exciting part of the adaptation because it gave us a real opportunity to tell the story of how Mia would feel about this white family, about the type of mother she is to her daughter, and how that might be different than how a white mother parents a white daughter. We wanted to explore the story of how white progressive women see themselves as open-minded people who are doing good in the world and are blind to their own biases and prejudices.” In the series, Elena pointedly says “I have always had the best intentions.”
Elena first sees the Warrens sleeping in their car—prompting her to instantly rent them the duplex. As the premiere episode progresses, Elena finds herself drawn to Mia, perhaps out of a misplaced sense of social justice, and offers her a job as a housekeeper. In today’s parlance, some might view this offer as a micro-aggression.
Shaker Heights itself takes on more meaning as the setting of the story. Author Celeste Ng, who is Asian American, grew up in the community and sets her novel there. “Shaker,” as it is known, was founded by upwardly mobile white families but in the 1950s, it embraced a new forward-thinking ethos as one of the leading integrated bedroom communities in the United States. African American families were welcomed into the community and into the respected school system as part of an integration effort.
Drawing from her first-hand experience, Ng illuminated the cracks in the foundation of this seemingly ideal setting. She did this, in part, with her character of Bebe Chow (Huang Lu). Bebe is an undocumented Chinese immigrant who works with Mia Warren at a local restaurant. A year earlier, suffering from postpartum depression and unable to support herself and her newborn baby, Bebe is driven to extremes—she leaves her child on the doorstep of a fire station. When the series begins, Bebe has been searching for her daughter, who is in the process of being adopted by the McCulloughs (Rosemarie DeWitt and Geoff Stults), upper-middle class friends of the Richardsons.
This storyline unfurls a range of disparities that are central to the narrative: divides between birth mother and adoptive mother, between wealthy and working-class families, between the haves and have nots. When Mia and Elena take sides against each other, the tensions mount.
Little Fires Everywhere opens with an actual fire that engulfs a house in Shaker Heights. Flashing back to the previous year, the series builds on the reasons why—those fires aren’t just literal. They’re about the fundamental gaps that still separate us, and they set the story ablaze.){kind=link}