How does this supportive sororal network gradually embraced by the show’s women turn into the nest of monsters perceived by its men?
The most immediate and obvious reference to “sirens” in Netflix’s new mini-series by that name is not – as the opening sequence might have us believe – to the mythical creatures, half-bird and half-woman, who sing atop seaside cliffs to lure sailors to their demise. Despite the ethereal vocalizing playing behind dramatic shots of steep beach bluffs and ubiquitous references to birds of prey and monstrous women, it is actually the sirens of emergency vehicles that the show most overtly invokes: ambulances, police cars, and the code the protagonists text to one another to signal they are in crisis.
The crisis at hand, as we learn in the show’s opening minutes, is that peppy, pressed-and-dry-cleaned Simone (Milly Alcock) has stopped responding to those emergency texts, so her bedraggled sister Devon (Meghann Fahy) embarks on a 17-hour trek from Buffalo, NY to the pristine New England island where Simone has found summer employment. Here, at the opulent “Cliff House” estate of hedge fund bazillionaire Peter Kell (Kevin Bacon), Simone’s work as a personal assistant to his glamorous wife Michaela (Julianne Moore) apparently leaves her no time to reply to her sister’s increasingly frantic voicemails and texts. Devon has been floundering with the fallout of their father’s progressing dementia, struggling to forestall her own descent into full-blown alcoholism, and—no longer able to go at it alone—has come to the island in all her grungy glory to confront her sister in person.
We quickly begin to understand why Simone has moved to the island to escape from this hornet’s nest of family drama, as a constant series of alarms seems to follow Devon wherever she goes, threatening to overwhelm the distant siren song with more immediate siren wails. And the sense that the sirens’ more mythical register has been absorbed into background ambiance, rather than foregrounded as catalyst for character or plot, is perhaps why it has received so little attention in recent reviews. Reviews in The New York Times, The Guardian, and Vulture mention the hybrid figures from Greek myth as the show’s namesake only in passing, before turning to focus on the star-studded cast and comparing it to other recent hits, like The White Lotus and The Perfect Couple, that similarly probe how the dark lure of sex, drugs, and money unravel even the most perfect façades of luxury and class. The critical consensus, in short, seems to be that while the mythical sirens are intriguing, they are ultimately beside the point, their voices giving way to the louder blare of emergency alerts.
This is unfortunate, because it is precisely in building out its topical references with mythological resonance that Sirens exceeds the historical scope and intellectual depth of the sister-shows to which it is so readily compared. Its allusions subtly but significantly engage with questions of how matters of social class and gender determine our luck not only in this life, but in our afterlives and legacies as well. Critics generally seem to take the homonymic wordplay on sirens (mythic sirens / police sirens) as a bit of a bait-and-switch—an intriguing idea ultimately abandoned as the show gets swept up in sisterly squabbling and “affluence porn.” But that interpretive bifurcation is not so much a battle to be won as a hint towards a pattern that will be mirrored within the myth of the sirens as well, where we can tease out two competing stories about who—or what—these creatures are. And it is here, in the mythic register, where we move beyond the simplistic divide between the “haves” and “have-nots” into larger questions about narrative, power, and control. Who holds the strings to the stories we tell? Who crafts the myths that become the stuff of cultural commonplace? Who shouts the loudest, and who is left to listen?
When, in writing this piece, I found myself trying to track down the sources for my own vague intuitions about the sirens of Greek myth, I found references to their singing traced primarily back to Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, both of which cast the cliff-side chanteuses as one of many monstrous obstacles for the heroes to outpace and outwit on their extended journeys home. These temptresses, who distract from their hideously hybrid bodies with their mesmerizing voices, famously confound passing sailors just long enough to watch them crash on the rocks below, delighting in their deaths.
The men of Netflix’s Sirens would recognize—belatedly—this version of the sirens put forth by epic bromance. Whether Michaela’s husband Peter, Simone’s summer fling Ethan, or the pack of men literally chasing Devon across the island (Buffalo side-piece Ray, island crush Morgan, and estate gardener Eddy), all of the sexually available men on the island seem to be unable to resist the women’s charms. At various moments, we watch both Peter’s recalcitrance and Bruce’s belligerence completely dissolve the moment Michaela’s eyes meet their own. Simone inspires outlandish grand gestures in pursuit of her approval. And Devon, again, finds herself literally running from the pack of male prospects competing absurdly for her attention as they race after her down the beach. They are pathetic, preposterous, completely unable to help themselves. It is exactly what Michaela’s glam-squad-cum-Greek-chorus promises (or perhaps forewarns?) when Devon finds herself forcibly taken dress shopping for Michaela’s gala: “Men will come running!”
It is only later, as they watch the love stories they had built up in their minds crash and flounder on the rocks of rejection, that the men suddenly see the “monsters” these women supposedly are. “Go away, monster!” Ethan screams at Simone. Later, he will call her a “witch” and, high on pain medication after a drunken tumble down a beachside cliff, insist he has seen her “wings.” Realizing for the first time that his years-long affair with Devon might pose a threat to his marriage while simultaneously reeling from a “traumatic” midnight swim, Ray snarls at Devon: “you’re the dark current!” Bruce, reflecting on his wife’s suicide, laments to Peter, “She shipwrecked me! Made me lose my kids!” Peter nods in agreement. “I know how that can happen.” Despite each of these men having thrown themselves off of (literal or figurative) cliffs, their particular brand of shared, twisted logic ensures that it is somehow the women’s fault when they find themselves at the bottom.
Initially, this is the version of the sirens that Devon sees as well. Convinced that Michaela has some sort of unnatural hold over her sister, she sets out determined to infiltrate Michaela’s “cult” and liberate Simone. When Simone insists that her employer is really her “friend” who “has [her] back” and genuinely wants to help, Devon insists that Michaela just has her “talons” so deep in Simone’s brain that she cannot tell she is being manipulated.
But there is another story about the sirens, too, one referenced by the title of the series’ fourth episode, “Persephone,” which Devon slowly begins to perceive. By name-dropping the Greek underworld’s reluctant queen, the show evokes the lesser-known origin story for the sirens recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphosis. In this version, when the young goddess Persephone is abruptly abducted one day while gathering flowers, her companions desperately scour the earth, seeking their friend. When their terrestrial search proves fruitless, they wish for wings to search the skies as well. This plea is granted, and they sprout feathers from the neck down, transforming them into the hybrid bird-women we recognize from their cliffside appearances in Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneas: singing irresistible songs to vulnerable sailors, cackling as they steer their ships into the rocks, crunching with glee on the bones of their victims.
Importantly, though, despite these later authors portraying the sirens primarily as man-eating monsters, as Ovid tells it, their original transformation has nothing at all to do with seducing men. Instead, their avian transformation is entirely motivated by a deep loyalty and desperate affection for their lost friend, for whom they will literally remake themselves, down to their very bones, if it might grant them the chance to save her. Their calls have nothing to do with seducing sailors; they are cries to their sisters, cries of concern, warning, and grief.
And the longer Devon spends on the island, the more this interpretation seems to hold sway. As Devon gets closer and closer to Michaela’s inner circle, she begins to realize that, possibly, Michaela actually…is just trying to help? Or, at least, she is not the full-blown evil harpy Devon had thought. Sure, it is a little weird that Michaela conducts the transformative heart-to-heart that persuades Devon of this while naked in the bathtub. But she does seem to have a soft spot for Devon and Simone, seeing her own grief over finding herself “motherless” reflected back in them. “We’re birds of a feather,” Michaela tells Devon, “We share the same pain.” No one can bring back the mothers they have lost, but Michaela seems to find purpose in mothering other young women in place of the children she was never able to have.
This bond, Devon slowly recognizes (though not in so many words), represents Ovid’s version of the sirens, not Odysseus’s. Michaela is not, as it turns out, a monstrous cult-leader murderess; she is just a woman missing her mother and grieving the children she has lost. “I wish I could see my babies,” she sighs—a lament surely familiar to the Goddess Demeter, craving the return of her daughter Persephone from the underworld. Devon, too, retraces elements of Ovid’s origin myth in her frantic search for her disappeared sister, and in her willingness to physically transform herself to gain access to wider searching grounds.
Admittedly, on Netflix, the change is less dramatic than in Ovid: rather than literally turning into a bird, Devon simply needs to swap her dark, grungy garb for sunnier Lily Pulitzer prints, to lose her scruffy eyeliner and add in some puffy headbands and heels. (But in case the subtlety of the siren metamorphosis is lost on viewers, Devon’s cellmate in the police “drunk tank,” who initially proposes the transformation/infiltration plan, is wearing a cocktail dress ostentatiously decorated with feathers). This version of the sirens is about women helping women—consequences be damned.
So how does this supportive sororal network gradually embraced by the show’s women turn into the nest of monsters perceived by its men? As we watch this shift transpire again and again throughout the show, we can trace a two-part pattern of aggressively not listening and radically revising history that will prove as old and familiar as the tales of Homer himself. In the Odyssey, as the hero’s fleet of ships prepares to sail past the sirens’ infamous cliffs, Odysseus instructs his men to block their ears with beeswax, making them impervious to the seductive songs. Following suit, the suitors of Sirens are, to a person, absolutely terrible listeners. They might as well have beeswax jammed in their ears. When Simone explicitly tells Ethan that she and her father “don’t speak” due to his part in her traumatic childhood, Ethan surprises her the following day with a visit from the very man she has gone to considerable trouble not to see for the previous decade. Ethan is shocked, then aggrieved, that Simone fails to appreciate his romantic gesture. “Does it mean nothing to you,” he asks, “that I flew your dad in?” Simone, frustrated, explains: “It means that you don’t listen. It means you profoundly misunderstand me!”
Devon encounters similar behavior among her suitors. After shouting at them repeatedly to “go away” and to stop following her, Ray catches up and hopefully offers, “Okay, well, I brought you a flask!” Devon, incredulous, reminds him that she has been trying to be sober for the past year: “I’ve told you like forty times I’m trying to be sober!” she snaps at him, “You just never listen to me!” Whether literally (as when Simone encounters Ethan drunkenly stumbling towards the beachside rocks) or more figuratively, the women repeatedly caution their suitors away from the edges of precipitous cliffs…only to find the men first ignoring their warnings, then re-inventing their words.
It is the great irony of the show, then, that the great seductive power of the sirens has virtually nothing to do with their actual “song,” and everything to do with a kind of willfully obstructed listening that refuses to interpret any utterance as anything other than a come-on. That the siren calls have such an erotic effect on the men who hear them is an unfortunate, unintended consequence of daring to speak, or simply exist, with the face of a beautiful woman (for, we should recall, in Ovid, the women’s original voices and faces are left untouched as the rest of their bodies transform into birds). The men in this show are simply so narcissistic that the idea they might not be the intended audience has never crossed their minds, and so their encounters with their “sirens” invariably turn into stories of rejection and blame.
That original core of the myth, the story of love and transformation, of sacrifice and sisterhood, seems far away by the end of the series. However strong the love may be between Devon and Simone, however genuine the maternal affection Michaela feels, the aspirations of money and the obligations of care will prove stronger. In the end, our cast of characters will be as splintered as we found them, though perhaps into shards of a slightly different shape. But, although they prove fleeting, there are moments of honest affection, magical moments that almost let us imagine the characters—or the women, anyway—all raising each other up on a swell of “radical generosity” (to use Michaela’s term). That these are the precise moments which have the strongest sense of surrealism—scenes spotted by sun-flares and underlaid with otherworldly harp chords—cements our sense that this vision of mutual support is something that does not quite belong to our everyday reality, something that needs a more gothic or mythic genre to bring it to life. It is one that is so un-intuitive to a life of hustle and to the aspirations of social climbing that it almost seems uncanny. But that alternate Olympia is there, if fuzzy around the edges, pricking at our senses just often enough to help us imagine what it might look like if we sought out those relationships, learned to really listen when they are in trouble, and chose to hear the words they are crying out, not just what we want to hear.
Sophia Richardson, lapsed Shakespearean, is now a lecturer at MIT’s Writing & Communication Center. Her two cats, Leo (orange), and Lyra (full of bees), are the reason she Cannot Have Nice Things.