On April 17, 2019, Hulu launched the 6th episode of their true crime, biopic, "The Act." The show so far has six hour-long episodes, depicting the stranger than fiction, real-life case of Dee Dee Blanchard's 2015 murder.
The episodes have ranged from uncomfortable, to cringe-worthy, to nail-biting stressful as it depicts the dramatization of the torture Gypsy Rose went under before she ended up murdering her mother.
The show began with the discovering of Dee Dee's body by neighbors Lacey and Mel. The show then jumps back to show us the past few years leading up to Dee Dee's murder, falling out teeth and all. The show has done an excellent job of making the audience physically feel the oppression that Gypsy must have felt in that house and the lighting does that for us, painting the house in suffocating darkness.
It's for a more sickening relief when Gypsy rests her head against the sunny glass window of the bus at the end of episode 6. While Gypsy Rose has expressed her displeasure in the show, the dramatization presents an accurate feeling of the events, which may be different than the actual reality, but the show seeks to present us with accurate feelings of the torture.
While Gypsy convincing her boyfriend to murder her mother is absolutely a crime and she should be punished for it, the show is asking us to feel for her and the events that lead to her mother's murder. In the most recent episode, Gypsy began to experience the aftershock of her mother's murder, seemingly questioning the choices she has made.
The most recent episode made an interesting choice to stray away from showing the murder in graphic detail, and instead focused on Gypsy's birth, and the first few years of her life, while alternating between Gypsy and Nick on the run and the flashbacks. I was not personally a fan of the flashbacks as I couldn't decipher what the show wanted me to feel about them. Sympathy for Dee Dee? Or an understanding of how things went down? And why have they chosen this, instead of focusing on the morbid details of the murder?
It seems that only time will tell in the coming weeks exactly what Hulu has planned for their overall story.
