Directed by acclaimed Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón and starring Cate Blanchett, the Apple TV series Disclaimer is in full swing, currently airing its fifth episode, with two episodes to go until the finale.
The story centers on Catherine Ravenscroft, a renowned journalist engaged in exposing the unseemly truth about others. She receives a book titled The Perfect Stranger, followed by a disclaimer on the title page: “any resemblance to persons living or dead is not coincidence”, kicking off the show’s events.
Catherine is undoubtedly at the center of events, beginning with the onslaught of conflict that unfolds between her and Stephen Brigstocke. Circumstances, games, preemptive strikes, and icy revenge are the keynote of their entanglement. The loss of their son devastates the Brigstockes and Nancy Brigstocke dies of cancer in despair. Stephen is tidying up Nancy’s room when he discovers several erotic photographs of a strange woman and a manuscript called The Perfect Stranger. It dawns on him that this is a sign from his wife pointing to the accidental death of Jonathan Brigstocke which he decides is related to Catherine, a woman he met on a trip to Spain, so he begins a series of acts of vengeance. He not only sends the manuscript to Catherine to cause her mental stress, but also sends the photos to her husband Robert to break up their relationship overnight; Stephen is the intensifier and creator of conflict, but he is also Catherine’s mirror in the dark. Catherine’s job is to uncover and expose the dark side of society’s wrongdoers, but when confronted with Stephen, she becomes the sinner who is exposed and disclosed, a poignant shift from the guardian of the truth to target, and her position within the family is on shaky ground. What is even more interesting is that Catherine’s monologue in the show is always in the second person; she never says “I” but “you”, as if she is examining and analyzing herself.
The essential problem that exists in Catherine and Robert’s marriage is another thing worth discussing. It’s not the problem of trust and betrayal, but rather the balance between inferiority and control. The narrative device in the show is very interesting and the plot disclosure about the perfect stranger is done by Robert. When the large-scale images, ambiguous atmosphere, and liberated sex images appear in his mind, the biggest emotion Robert feels is jealousy, not sadness at being betrayed. The reason Robert feels this way is because he has failed to dominate his partner sexually. Sex in a patriarchal society is not just about fulfillment and love, it is also about conquest and submission, and if a man has the power to keep a woman at a disadvantage, then he has the say in the family.
Such allusions to class abound throughout the series. A more visceral image is when Robert goes for a bus ride the day after he receives the photo, and he easily labels the people on the bus. He deduces that the women on the bus must be working-class, a good woman without vanity or time to affairs, and that the man is a builder, perhaps working in some rich person’s house. His reasoning is evidence of the values that he, as a middle-class man, gives to others, a kind of condescending arrogance that comes from the rich, whom he calls “sanctimonious twit”. The more debatable family ethic is that his first instinct when he learns of Catherine’s affair is to protect Nick, their child, a grown man of twenty-five.
Nick has an awkward relationship with his family, especially his mother. From the time he was almost drowned at the age of 4 on a beach in Spain with his mother to the time he grew up and was forced to be protected by his father when his mother had an affair, it is clear that he is completely driven by his parents. He has his own loneliness and sadness as well as a nasty side. Whether it’s online chats with Stephen, who poses as Jonathan, or the occasional drug use, he can be found hovering on the brink of self-loathing from time to time. The loneliness from childhood keeps him lagging behind society, and his family causes such marginalization of his personality that he becomes someone who needs to be protected, even as an adult. The most dramatic scene of the series so far is the online chat between Nick and Stephen. Facing each other’s questions about the perfect stranger’s comments about the protagonist, he suddenly receives a photo of him and his mother at the beach when he was a child after leaving a lot of criticisms and insults to the heroine, and then he suddenly realizes that the fiction is the reality. Such sharp exploitation of his unstable mental state makes the already weak parent-child relationship even more fragile.
The more familial ethos of the parent-child connection is between Catherine and her mother, who spills her heart out while her mother caresses her hand as she falls asleep. It’s one of the few intimate and tender moments in the show, and the mother’s love for her child amid a cold relationship becomes one of the warmest scenes. But perhaps this is also a hint or ambush, as the extreme love of a mother for her child highlighted in the show has not yet portrayed Catherine’s for Nick, and with two episodes of Disclaimer left to go, it is doubly expected that any truths are hidden, and in the finale perhaps such struggles and pains will be answered in ways viewers would not expect.