"Top Of The Lake" Season 2 Is A Mess, Just Like The Real World
Top of the Lake’s Robin Griffin — played by Elisabeth Moss — is a rarified sort of female protagonist. As a detective specializing in crimes that involve sexual abuse (and a sexual abuse survivor herself), she’s a less cartoonish version of Law & Order: SVU's Olivia Benson. She’s tough and capable, beat-up and broken. She’s made of china and steel. She’s difficult to love but impossible to ignore.
In Season 2 of the series (which Sundance is rolling out over the course of three days, starting Sept. 10, after which it will be available on Hulu), the tenuous balance between Griffin’s outer strength and inner fragility begins to fall apart. And as she attempts to solve the murder of a sex worker — pregnant with a baby who does not share her DNA, stuffed in suitcase and pushed out to sea — the trajectory of the series starts to fray as well. There are too many broken narrative threads: too much coincidence, and little coherence. This season, like the one before, is about misogyny, but it’s also about the way women are reduced to their status as mothers. It explores both what it means to be a mother and the way women, desperate for motherhood, may turn their backs on other women. It’s also about surrogacy and rape culture, race and sex work, and whether good men exist.
It’s arguably trying to do too much — many of the tensions, especially those regarding the racial dynamics of sex work and surrogacy, get frustratingly lost in the tangle. Yet Top of the Lake is the first piece of fictional media I’ve seen in months that has made me feel anything. We’ve all figured out the places to find pat, soothing answers: That’s why, when the news is at its most exhausting, I turn to reruns of SVU. But when I want to see my own fatigue and conflict with the misogynist world reflected onscreen, there’s Top of the Lake. It’s a different sort of self-care; instead of muting my confusion and frustration, it acknowledges and amplifies it.
It’s no coincidence that this narrative was cocreated, written, and directed by Jane Campion — one of the few female directors who’s managed to navigate the enduringly sexist and exclusionary terrain of Hollywood. In work ranging from The Piano to In the Cut, she’s explored what happens when women trespass into worlds (physical, emotional, occupational) and access knowledge that has been hidden from them — and the violence that often follows when they do. She’s enthralled by the misogyny of these worlds, obsessed with depicting them in a way that suggests both her disgust and their endurance.
The second season of Top of the Lake explores this theme in far more ragged fashion than the first, in which Griffin investigated the disappearance of a pregnant Thai teenager in a small New Zealand town. That season, like so many projects by filmmakers who’ve recently come to television, felt like a taut and deeply atmospheric piece of storytelling. The six episodes were supposed to stand on their own: one season, and then done. But when they were both in Los Angeles for the Emmys, Campion slid a napkin under Moss’s hotel room door with a simple question: TOTL 2? Moss agreed, and Campion recruited Australian native Nicole Kidman — who’d previously worked with Campion in the 1996 adaptation of Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady — to costar, along with Gwendoline Christie, best known for her role as Brienne of Tarth in Game of Thrones.
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