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King makes Gypsy’s shock and humiliation palpable. In the next scene, Gypsy’s mouth is horrifically bruised, and her teeth have been reduced to stumps. Before Gypsy begins to realize what’s happening, the buzz of the dentist’s drill amplifies. But her teeth begin to rot, and her mother takes Gypsy to the dentist. In the second episode, the show makes clear how much she’s being forced to endure: Gypsy has taken to sneaking sugar late at night, her first act of rebellion against her mother, who insists she’s allergic to it. King, in many ways, has an even more demanding role, in that she has to convey Gypsy’s journey from victim to willing participant to a woman who sees murder as her only means of escape. Read: At 50, Patricia Arquette is getting some of the most exciting roles of her career The sicker Gypsy appears to be, the more kindness she and her mother receive. Gypsy and Dee Dee are “like royalty” at a particular medical center, a doctor says in one scene.
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They’re also rewarded by the people around her. Instead, she uses restraint, playing Dee Dee as a woman whose worst behaviors are governed by fear.
#Hulu the act full#
Arquette could easily go full Mommie Dearest with Dee Dee, leaning into the character’s monstrousness. The relationship between the two women is the show’s most fascinating element, and it relies upon the extraordinary performance of its two stars. It delves into the texture of Dee Dee and Gypsy’s life together: the details of their lies, the physical brutality Gypsy endures by way of unnecessary procedures, the question of how so many doctors could have been compelled to believe Dee Dee. The Act, like most superior true-crime stories, isn’t merely interested in re-creating what happened. A few scenes later, illustrating the absurdity of Dee Dee’s insistence that Gypsy’s hair won’t grow, the 5 o’clock shadow is already visible on her scalp. “I wonder what it would be like if it grew out,” Gypsy says, wistfully. In one of the first scenes in the show, Arquette’s Dee Dee shaves her daughter’s head with tenderness. King’s Gypsy speaks in an unnervingly high-pitched voice (much like the real Gypsy), and is dressed by her mother in doll-like outfits: soft pink sweat suits, floral pinafores with Peter Pan collars. This is body horror by way of Walt Disney, a ghoulish fantasia of princess gowns, stuffed animals, prescription drugs, and physical harm. The particular horror that Dee Dee represents-the fundamental corruption of the maternal imperative to provide care-is magnified in The Act by stylistic choices. But by the time she was old enough to doubt her mother’s claims, the two women were as imprisoned by codependence as they were by Dee Dee’s imagination. Rather, Gypsy was the victim of her mother’s Munchausen by proxy. She told friends and neighbors that Gypsy, a teenager, had the learning capabilities of a 7-year-old. The real Dee Dee Blanchard insisted that her daughter suffered from an encyclopedic list of ailments and disorders: cancer, muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, asthma.
#Hulu the act series#
The new eight-part miniseries on Hulu is adapted by Michelle Dean and Nick Antosca from Dean’s 2016 BuzzFeed feature, “Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter to Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom Murdered.” The series fictionalizes some of the details, but otherwise faithfully adapts the true story of a young woman in Missouri who plotted to kill her mother. To reference Casey Anthony is to dig up a tangle of ideas about the cultural fascination with women who harm their own children, a dynamic that The Act explores in visceral, psychological detail. The scene might feel like a throwaway moment-an interlude illustrating Mel’s short-lived suspicion of Dee Dee, who has recently moved with her daughter, Gypsy (Joey King), into a bubblegum-pink house built for the Blanchards by Habitat for Humanity. Dee Dee Blanchard (Patricia Arquette) is silent, but her gaze is nervous, and her forehead is furrowed. “A car smells like a dead body for a month and nobody notices?” Mel (Chloë Sevigny), similarly skeptical, remarks that you can tell when somebody’s no good all you have to do is pay attention. “Do you believe that Casey Anthony shit?” Shelly (Denitra Isler) exclaims. The scene is set in 2008, smack in the middle of the Nancy Grace–fueled wave of “tot mom” national hysteria that peaked when Anthony was arrested (and then acquitted) for killing her daughter. Midway through the first episode of The Act, a group of neighbors are chatting on a front porch when Casey Anthony’s name comes up.