‘Bad Sisters’ Goes Medieval with Flagellation

The religious practices of old can be a handy shorthand in television. It’s not used to excess these days, but there are examples here and there. In the Dead Ringers series, the Sackler-esque Parkers engaged in trepanning, the practice of exposing the brain to higher levels of oxygen via holes drilled in the head; a practice used by monks of yore who believed they were hearing the voice of God. In the most recent season of Fargo, there was Ole Munch, the sin-eater who was cursed with baleful immortality as he absorbed the darkness of others in neverending debt; another archaic practice that was meant to cleanse the souls of the wealthy at the time of their death. When I last wrote about this season of Bad Sisters, it was to praise the terrifying character of Angelica, played by Fiona Shaw and it’s to this frightening zealot I return. Like the others I’ve mentioned, Angelica practices an old way of worship, and fittingly for someone so wrapped up in judgment and sin, her old habit is a form of flagellation.

The moment we see this comes when Angelica is getting dressed for the day. It’s a normal enough sequence until Angelica takes out a length of chain with a passing resemblance to a prong collar and wraps it tightly around her upper thigh. It’s a sudden moment of strangeness that perfectly punctures Angelica’s Good Samaritan image. Ritual flagellation is specifically the act of whipping oneself for whatever sins someone has committed and can be broadly applied to any act that harms the self as a form of penance. This is also known as mortification of the flesh and can include such implements as the hairshirt or the cilice, strips of coarse fabric or animal hair that irritate the skin. Angelica uses a metal cilice, a length of chain that pinches and bites into the flesh with small barbs. Leave it to her to kick it up a level. This was all meant to physicalize the spiritual struggle against sin and to remember always to repent.

It’s a heady idea, torturing the self as penance for sin. In a more contemporary context, it presents as a form of self-harm. Self-harm comes from many different motivations and in many different forms, but religious flagellation would be a physicalization of judgment, of anger, turned inward against sins. It’s a fitting thematic device for a season that revolves around sin, guilt, judgment, and regret. The Garvey sisters all struggle with conflicted feelings over the things they have done; whether it’s Ursula having an affair and stealing pills, Bibi confessing fears about connecting with a new baby, Eva with her growing intimacy with Ian as they try to co-parent Blanaid, or Becka with how things ended with Matt, Grace for what she was driven to do to be free of JP, or all of them for whatever they had to do to cover up a murder and go on with their lives. Angelica’s flagellation is literal, and an emblem of the standard she inflicts on others, but the rest of the characters engage in some form of it in their own ways.

It’s worth wondering what a story is communicating when it invokes these old, medieval ways and what we get when we place them inside our contemporary setting. One effect is that it efficiently illustrates how deep a character’s devotion is and how that depth has alienated them from the familiar world. With Dead Ringers, trepanning was used to show how removed from average humanity the super-rich are and how that distance creates a delusional sense of enlightenment. It’s also a sharp observation on how many “new age” ideas are merely recycled and debunked things that should stay in a drawer marked “regressive bullshit.” On Fargo, sin-eating was literalized as a larger comment on debt, both financial and social. Ole Munch lives a husk of a life with a soul weighed down by obligation and sins consumed. He’s there to make you wonder if we wouldn’t be better off choosing forgiveness.

With Bad Sisters, seeing actual flagellation prompts us to wonder how much we figuratively flagellate ourselves. We may not be carrying secrets of murder but we’ve all beat ourselves up for one thing or another. Viewers are prompted to compare their self-flagellation to the cilice that sinks into Angelica’s thigh and wonder if theirs is a similarly hurtful, archaic thing. We all feel guilt, we all struggle with our sins, but Bad Sisters pushes us to wonder if that’s worth hurting ourselves over.