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In HBO’s teaser for the second season of Big Little Lies, we’re given little more than the promise of Meryl Streep and screaming. Zoë Kravitz’s Bonnie screams into a forest; Laura Dern’s Renata screams, arms outstretched, into the sky. Reese Witherspoon’s Madeline screams into a steering wheel. The women of Monterey are no strangers to the practice—lest we forget that Renata’s original poolside shriek was memorialized with Generation Z’s most prestigious artistic honor, a GIF. As screaming fast becomes a pop-culture mainstay, from the return of angsty noughties-era Screamo music to The Bachelorette, it truly takes center stage on California’s beaches, where the women of Big Little Lies express their fear and anger with a flex of raw vocal release. Even off set, at a roundtable discussion with Oprah for the Hollywood Reporter, Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman, both producers for the show, admitted to liberating their pent-up frustration after the cameras stopped rolling: Kidman by throwing a rock through a window, Witherspoon by screaming in a way unfamiliar even to her, “like, howling.” In the new season there’s even more wailing to be had. It all begs the IRL question—are there benefits to screaming into the void?
