Trinkets: More Than Just Pretty Tokenism
A review of one of Generation Z’s best TV shows
Credit to Netflix for this picture.
In April, the BBC reported Netflix had gained 16 million subscribers during the first three months of 2020, “thanks to lockdown”. With many of us having more time at home than ever, it’s unsurprising we’ve also been consuming more TV too. So, for educational purposes only, I thought I’d keep up with some YA content. As a high school teacher it never goes amiss to know something about pop culture, even if it’s only to out yourself as being ‘boring’ because you “don’t get it.” But, I get Trinkets.
The three female protagonists, Elodie (Brianna Hilderbrand), Moe (Kiana Madeira), and Tabitha (Quintessa Swindell), form an unlikely friendship because of their mutual participation in Shoplifter’s Anonymous meetings. From Episode One, when the SA leader sweetly dripped phrases like, “It’s good to put our truths into the universe, this is a safe space” and “We are incredibly grateful for that share”, I was into it. Gentle fun poking of the best kind.
I used to pity Generation Z, not only are they infinitely screwed-up from an entire lifetime of social media presence, but they haven’t been coming of age with killer TV series soundtracks either. Until Trinkets.
The Millenials had:
My So-Called Life, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dawson’s Creek, One Tree Hill, The O.C. and Veronica Mars. While the Stranger Things soundtrack is a piece of genius, that primarily lies in the way it seamlessly mixes foreboding with nostalgia; the nostalgia for a musical period before Gen Z’s time. There’s even a pivotal scene that features a song from The Never Ending Story! Peak reminiscing for a simpler time, maybe?
And yes, there have been some high calibre Disney songs keeping today’s pre-tweens entertained, ‘Let it Go’ and ‘How Far I’ll Go’, being the most played on Spotify in July 2020, but a series with a musical score as good… No.
Trinkets follows in the footsteps of some of the afore mentioned shows: there’s a gig venue where various parts of the action unfolds; one of the love interests is a musician; the lyrics in the musical score have been carefully curated to reflect the nuance of each situation unfolding on the screen.
The soundtrack:
It’s female heavy. Appropriate for a show that presents us with three female leads. Janelle Kroll, Amber Mark, Lykke Li, Clairo, and newcomers Sydney Franklin, and Penelope Darling can be found emoting the experiences the girls live through. “I never love half-hearted, I’m down to get bruised” and “You forgot your sympathy, but I brought you flowers” underpinning how destructive a girl’s determination to hold onto her first love can be.
The main love song is an ode to Elodie’s mother, not a boy. Better yet, Elodie, who writes and performs it, is attracted to girls but the producers still didn’t make it a dedication to one of her love interests. Which, yes, would have been as cliche as it being about a boy. Thank you, Keegan DeWitt, not only do we share a name, but maybe a creative brain too?
We need to take a moment however, to honour Kat Cunning for her turn as Sabine, Elodie’s love interest. Not only is she a singer with a beautiful voice but my own girlfriend (at 33) admitted her knees went weak at the moment Sabine gestured for Elodie to join her on stage. That casual summoning, so publicly unabashed, is bound to give a lot of baby gays all sorts of tingles, and more importantly, reassurance that they can live in full colour too.
Reppin’ the LGBTQI+ community:
And yes, the series does show the lesbians as being more coy about their sexploits, but not in a Willow and Tara (from Buffy) ‘we better keep this ambiguous so as not to incur the wrath of the homophobes’ way. Elodie is showing us that, ’it’s hard to know what to do in the bedroom when all your friends are straight’ , which is totally relatable for audience members who have an attraction to people of the same sex, it hasn’t been included to placate the straight!
In fact, teenage sex is presented so realistically in Trinkets, I feel like scenes from it could be used in Sex Ed classes. Moe and Noah both acknowledge they only need a few minutes for the deed to be done, in a bathroom no less, and when Tabitha suggests using toys for her pleasure, Brady is a. Offended and b. Refuses. Watching in my mid-30s, I felt some relief that stage of my life, where a lot of your own desires as a woman are deferred for the benefit of someone else, be it a parent or partner, is over.
The tiny infringements on the autonomy of the girls because of societal expectations of them to be nice, and handle things with grace and a smile, were presented to be both unrealistic and unfair without those words needing to be trotted out during tantrums..
Trinkets is beautifully understated throughout. Racial profiling is a recurrent theme but is only directly referenced once. We are shown shop assistants being dubious about Moe, the Latina, a number of times but she seems so used to it that she doesn’t pass comment. I don’t think it was accidental that they chose her to have Mexican parentage, in this political climate. Neither was it fluke that it’s her that loses a vital academic opportunity while an affluent, white, male counterpart, who does far worse things, doesn’t. But we are nudged towards noticing these disparities, not dragged there and the show feels more natural because of it.
Moe being obnoxious while simultaneously wearing such a cool tee that I wish I was as bold as her!
In fact, the absence of storylines peaking where they could is part of the pleasure of watching Trinkets. The climaxes are almost anticlimactic, but in a realistic sense: little brother goes missing, but is found before the parents even notice; a confrontation between two members of the football team ends in crossed words but no fists; there’s even an arty social media account that Tabitha opens under a pseudonym to express her ‘authentic’ self, and it’s the kind of output you would expect from an angsty teen… Distinctly average, self-indulgent, filtered to the max. Not, in any way a masterpiece, but also no less important because of that. The real drama lies in the facial expressions, the pregnant pauses in the dialogue, the mise-en-scene.
Honestly, I cheered when the ‘villain’ got his comeuppance with the one-liner, “Nah, you did this, you messed with the wrong girls.” That’s writing for teens at it’s finest, no monologue necessary. Justice served.
The non-binary storylines:
Tabitha is mixed race and when she is wrongfully accused of shoplifting by a white woman, her mum recounts a tale of being suspected of the same thing in her youth. “Instead of walking out with my head held high, I swallowed it and just dropped 5 grand right there in the store, just to show them. I didn’t even wear that shit. It was so stupid.” The scene was poignant because neither of them had an answer in terms of what to do, but both were demoralised. It was refreshing to see black women in roles where their every response wasn’t one of a stereotypically reductive ‘strong black queen’. They were allowed to be vulnerable. They didn’t have to be the ones to solve the problem, or be the bigger people. This basically leaves the issue to us to confront and be uncomfortable with, and that’s more fitting if you want to mobilise your audience to fight for social change.
I asked my friend, a psychiatrist, what Trinkets would need to include to accurately portray the seriousness of Kleptomania. His response served as the professional validation for my enjoyment,
“You’d want to see that it’s an impulse control disorder, the person doing it might know it’s wrong but will be overwhelmed by the urge anyway. A show should depict that struggle.”
If you recall The Bling Ring, or followed the real-life case it was based on, you’d see that this is where depictions of shoplifters diverge, Trinkets shows us people who do it to escape, or do it to have control, for just a moment. We see Elodie stealing in the mini mall and then, through some wonderful cinematography choices we see the strip lighting recede, hear Everlasting Love start playing and see her move elegantly, almost like on a stage, across the aisles stashing things in her pockets. It looks transcendent, as if what she’s actually stealing are a few moments of unadulterated bliss for herself. But there’s no rhyme or reason for the stuff she takes. The stuff itself doesn’t make her happy.
The contrast between casual theft and Elodie’s Kleptomania allows the series to have some ‘fun’ scenes: competing for who can “lift” the best stuff; sex toy stealing, and some very teenage shenanigans at a hotel. But the shame is very much captured, the secrecy and isolation are highlighted. Again, not to appeal to the sensibilities of moderators, but to reflect real nuance in the experiences of shoplifters, and it’s powerful.
Finally, three teenage girls that don’t fall out because of a love triangle; where one of them doesn’t feel in the shadow of another; where they offend each other because of honest mistakes and make-up again without great fanfare; dress in casual, comfortable clothes more often than dressy ones and, most importantly, have loyal friends that support each other to be the best they can be. Maybe, just maybe, the girls in Generation Z don’t have it so bad after all, this series has a better pay off than just “Clothes Before Bros” anyway. (And in a mere two series, comprising a total of twenty episodes, compared with One Tree Hill’s nine series, with 187 different episodes and opportunities to say anything as consistent and empowering.)
Dialogue Welcome
If you’ve seen it, do you agree? If not, are you going to give it a go? I’d love to hear your thoughts, so drop a comment below, and yes, you’re welcome to come at me for berating the shows millennials were raised on, but I suggest you rewatch a few episodes first!
