Sirens

I wrote a thread on Sirens immediately after finishing it that stirred up a lot of good conversation and had us muddling it through differently. Those thoughts deserve a more concrete space (with less spelling errors), so I am going to share and expand upon them here. The original thread holds a lot of valuable input from women about what they saw in the show so I’d encourage you to check that out as well.

(Spoilers ahead)

The sirens in mythology are monstrous sea women perched upon rocks luring sailors to their death & destruction.

We know patriarchy is strong because this myth persists despite the well known fact that men chasing adventure do daring & destructive things all the time of their own accord. Those things often involve beautiful women and get blamed on them, but women aren’t the monsters men make them out to be, they just get caught in men’s dangerous games. That’s the point of Sirens.

It was cleverly marketed to conceal this fact, portraying Julianne Moore’s character, Michaela (KiKi) as a rich, powerful, seductress controlling everyone around her and her billionaire old money husband (Peter, played by Kevin Bacon) as the friendly, aloof, along for the ride guy.

What we find out as the show goes on is what we should have known all along: he’s causing the chaos in his life and using the women he’s surrounded by to blame, fix it, or keep him entertained along the way. So is almost every male character in the show.

The sob story Peter has constructed (and maybe has even grown to believe himself) is that Kiki kept him from his kids. What we find out later as he’s about to make the same mistake again is that his kids chose to distance themselves because he threw their mom over for another woman. Peter eventually gets forgiveness from his kids while Kiki is sent away so he can do what he wants while constructing more myths about monstrous women.

The parallel story line, that of Simone, her sister, Devon, and the men in their lives shows the same thing.

Simone & Devon have both been traumatized because their dad pulled a very similar patriarchal move in their lives. He refused to get his mentally ill wife the help she needed, neglected her when she needed care, ultimately causing devastation to his whole family and requiring another woman (Devon) to swoop in and save everyone, totally ignoring the cost to her.

Simone and Devon deal with this trauma in different ways. Simone chooses the more acceptable way of presenting picture perfect while Devon is outcast as a drunk and a slut. We judge Devon for her bad choices in comparison to Simone. At the end when Simone keeps choosing the picture perfect over the ethically sound we get to switch and judge her in comparison to Devon.

Either way, the women watching the show are pushed to judge Kiki, Devon, and Simone even though they are being used as pawns by hapless men who want adventure without reality or consequences…much like sailors in uncharted waters .

The show makes this abundantly clear in often hilarious ways, like three men chasing Devon down a beach while all she wants to do is help her sister. Or Devon’s rich boyfriend drunkenly throwing himself off a cliff after she rejects his proposal and blaming her.

And it repeatedly asks us to see the women as only having bad choices they’ve been given in the game of patriarchy, like at the end when Kiki tells Devon that Simone isn’t a monster.

If you didn’t understand Simone’s final decision, what does that say about you?

Yes, we all wanted Simone to pick the women. A better question than, “ why didn’t Simone pick her sister and Kiki?” Would be, Is Simone at all set up to make that decision given the way she’s been treated in her her life so far?

And why does it matter at all what one character or another chose on a five episode Netflix series? It matters because these characters are representative of women under the patriarchy and the choices we make when all the options we have are bad. Your inability to empathise with Simone may not matter, but your ability to empathise with your neighbour down the street who grew up in the foster care system does.

The fact that so many people (especially white men) are missing the point of Sirens isn’t at all surprising.

It is disappointing though. In a world full of remakes and hundreds of action hero movies this was unique, beautiful, and really well executed.

We need more shows like this and we likely won’t get them cause men are hell bent on crashing themselves against the cliffs, blaming women, and convincing women to judge and blame each other.