Bonnie is Black

Bonnie is Black

Lois Evans

“Bonnie did not have to do jail time. [...] According to Madeline, Bonnie had performed her community service with great pleasure, Abigail by her side the whole time.” —Big Little Lies, Liane Moriarty, 482-483

I have experienced a ton of ups and downs in the two and half weeks since graduation. I have attempted to cope with my (temporary) unemployment in the following ways: sobbing to NPR Tiny Desk Concerts in the middle of the night, sacrificing my sleep schedule to binge any and every Netflix/Hulu/Amazon show that is good, forcing myself to chip away at my reading list. Parts of my pre-graduation routine have stayed intact, namely the omelet/toast/water breakfast I have each and every morning (or afternoon, depending on how late I stay up to watch Pose the night before) and because I’m in somewhat of a rut that makes me avoid people and conversation before I’m wearing a bra, I tune out my roommates’ music, Facetime conversations, absent minded humming, and otherwise unwanted but completely innocent noises. Since I refuse to download the Netflix app and further fuel a decades long television addiction, I resort to sliding my phone in my armpit while an episode of Actors on Actors or a Hollywood Reporter roundtable entertains me.

This morning, as I considered weddings and how Mumford and Sons even the most hipster-adjacent ones end up (I had just finished reading a graphic novel memoir about a wedding), I decided to switch things up with my morning noise distraction YouTube playlist. Instead of finishing the Julia Roberts/Patricia Arquette Actors on Actors I had started the morning before, I scrolled down my suggested videos (which included sewing tutorials, movie trailers, bon appetit recipe demos, and HOW TO OUTLINE A STRONG OPENING ACT typed just like that) and came across a clip of Zoë Kravitz’ appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert*. I knew it was press for the upcoming second season of Big Little Lies, which premieres tonight, so I pressed play and made my omelet.

Zoë Kravitz and Stephen Colbert on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

The funny thing about late night talk shows and those awful press runs Hollywood deems necessary for actors, is that the teeny tiny trailers hosts show as introductions to their guests are often hit or miss. In my post-grad Hollywood/film interview binge, I’ve watched a ton. I feel confident in saying that the clips used for the BTS snippets of Fosse/Verdon do a spectacular job of emphasizing (white) Michelle Williams’ talent, for example, while the Regina Hall/Emilia Clarke Actors on Actors interview does a terrible disservice to Clarke when only clips from the beginning of Game of Thrones’ final season are used to highlight her work. I would have chosen the Valyrian/Dothraki “I will be evil and conquer the world” speech from the awful series finale because Clarke really acts her ass off, but I digress.

Zoë Kravitz’ Big Little Lies clip on The Late Show is an example of a good one, mainly because it made me consider something about Bonnie, Kravitz’ character, that I hadn’t until the moment I saw it.

Bonnie is Black.

This, of course, is a result of Zoe Kravitz’ Blackness. Like, duh, yes, obviously. An important detail in this realization comes from the fact that Big Little Lies is an adaptation of  Liane Moriarty’s synonymous 2014 novel. The book is your normal beach read (and I mean that in the most celebratory way possible) with its twists and turns, short snappy chapters, and compelling characters. In short, Celeste (played by Nicole Kidman) is physically and emotionally abused by her husband Perry until Bonnie pushes him to his death when she and the other women characters of the novel catch him in the act of abuse. There’s a lot more that happens—the book is nearly 500 pages, after all—but that’s what you need to know for this discussion.

Anyways, the adaptation of the novel captures the heart of the story, putting the female friendships and the question of domestic violence at the forefront of the show. The differences between the novel and its HBO iteration are tiny, but substantial: the show replaces the book’s Australian setting with that of Monterey, California, Madeline cheats on her husband, Bonnie is Black.

Zoë Kravitz in Big Little Lies' season 2 promo portrait

Bonnie is Black. And this makes way for the biggest book to show change of them all—the women get away with killing Celeste’s husband in HBO’s version of Big Little Lies. They call Perry’s murder a freak accident. He fell down a bunch of stairs after beating his wife, look at the universe, look at justice. And the authorities on the case take their accounts with suspicion, but viewers are led to believe that they have no grounds to pursue further investigation. The first season, which was supposed to be a stand-alone but was brought back after critical and popular acclaim, ends with the story’s characters (called the Monterey Five in the show’s second season) watching their children play on the beach. Each of the five, especially Zoë Kravitz’ Bonnie, are somehow free of any guilt caused by their big little lie.

The challenge of the show’s second season is introducing frays to the first season’s neatly tied ending. A bunch of new elements have been added to heighten the second season’s stakes, elements I’m excited to view tonight, but I think that the most subtle and impactful element of the series could be Bonnie’s identity.

As I’ve already written, Bonnie is Black. She is a Black woman who killed a white man in the United States. In the books, Bonnie is a white yogi (may we all pause for laughter) who embodies the youth women, like Reese Witherspoon’s character Madeline, feels they are losing. Moriarty gives Bonnie an arc in which she is viewed as a caricature, a vapid cheerleader-type blonde and develops depth and grit when she’s the one to kill Perry. Her husband, and Madeline’s ex, Nathan, explains Bonnie’s violence at the end of the novel by telling the characters that she has PTSD from growing up with an abusive father. He says all of this to persuade some of the peripheral characters to corroborate their “Perry fell” story, but it ends up being for naught. Bonnie confesses to the police. She tells everyone that she’s done lying and is “found guilty of involuntary manslaughter [...] sentenced to two hundred hours of community service” (Moriarty, 483). A slap on the wrist.

I’m not gonna stand here (or I guess sit here, since I’m typing in bed) and say that Book Bonnie should’ve gone to jail or been punished. I don’t exactly believe in the prison system—live with a prison abolitionist for a year and you’ll start to reconsider how much sense incarceration makes, but you know, a later discussion—but belief isn’t necessary to have a firm understanding of the societal categories that affect how people are treated in court rooms.

Black Bonnie would have never gotten two hundred hours of community service that she completed with “great pleasure” with her Black daughter on her hip. Least of all in Monterey, California. She’d be dead. We should all know that Black and Brown people are systemically incarcerated, killed, and oppressed by the United States government at wild rates compared to white folks, but I’ll offer some stats to support this idea.

According to policescorecard.org, a website that, according to its founder, activist Samuel Sinyangwe, “evaluate[s] the police in California based on an unprecedented amount of data on police use of force, shootings, arrests, misconduct complaints and more,” 63% of people killed or seriously injured by the police in San Francisco (the closest big city to Monterey) are Black. This is out of so few Black SF residents that you can’t even read their population percentage on the demographic chart provided by the website. Only 25% of the people killed or seriously injured by the police in San Francisco were white. Police violence is police violence, but the racial discrepancy is one that we should consider at all times. The San Francisco Police Department received an F grade on their police scorecard, which you can read for yourself here. That’s just two hours away from Monterey which, according to DATAUSA was 65.7% white and just 3.56% Black as of 2017.

What do you think would’ve happened to a real life Black Bonnie?

But let’s return to the Colbert clip for a second, and think about what it conveys to me in light of all these stats and figures.

Zoë Kravitz and Reese Witherspoon in Big Little Lies season 1

Reese Witherspoon’s Madeline is shown approaching Zoë Kravitz’ Bonnie at some point of the evening, clearly concerned about their whole situation. “Are you all right?” Madeline asks, to which Bonnie responds, after a beat, “Do you care?” With shock on her face, Madeline replies “Do I care? What’s going on?” At this point, Bonnie, who looks frazzled and not at all her normal Bohemian self in a hoodie and t-shirt, steps out of her home and closes the door behind her.

“I killed someone, remember?” She says. And when Madeline whispers “yes,” Bonnie nods. She nods and says, quietly, “that’s heavy.”

Bonnie is Black, and I hope that this season of Big Little Lies doesn’t shy away from the complications and nuances of Bonnie’s race. I imagine it will, as whispers of Bonnie’s backstory taking space this season have been confirmed by various cast member. I assume HBO Bonnie’s backstory will be similar to that of the original, but I hope the writers don’t take the abusive father thread and run with it. I want them to keep that, as it offers the opportunity to discuss the cycle of abuse as it relates to adult children (as opposed to the first graders of season one), but I want race to be folded into that discussion, especially as this is only a little over a week since Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, a mini-series that explicitly discusses racism and policing in the Central Park Five case, premiered on Netflix.

I’m excited for the new season of Big Little Lies, and I’ll be running back from church to crack open a cider and watch tonight. I hope you do the same, and have fun because TV’s supposed to be entertaining, after all. But, you know, thesis brain gonna thesis brain, so watch critically too, if you can.

*I have a tangential story about Stephen Colbert’s daughter in the recesses of my brain, but I’m too chicken to put it on the internet. Ask me about it in person. It takes place at Peculier Pub on Bleeker, January 2017.