Abhiroop Das
Amazon Prime’s ‘We Were Liars’ is the story of a 17-year-old named Cadence Sinclair who is searching for her lost memories of the past year. The mystery revolves around the wealthy Sinclairs on their annual summer vacation at their private island off the coast of Massachusetts. While the family appears close-knit and perfect on camera, dark secrets and greed lie beneath, with each adult playing their own games. The Liars — Cadence, Mirren, and Johnny Sinclair, and Gat Patil — have spent each summer on this island, promising to never let things change. But the mystery behind Cadence’s Summer 16 has changed everything. Now reunited with the other Liars this summer, Cadence, still struggling with trauma from the accident, retraces her steps. The memories she uncovers change her forever.
Created by Julie Plec and Carina Adly MacKenzie, the psychological thriller series stars Emily Alyn Lind, Shubham Maheshwari, Esther McGregor, Joseph Zada, Candice King, Mamie Gummer, Caitlin FitzGerald, and David Morse, bringing Beechwood Island’s harrowing reality to life. Using lies as an instrument, the story expertly weaves through complicated family dynamics, pointing to the toll it can take on family members across all ages. Their anxieties are captured in an extremely realistic fashion, using the environment as a narrative tool to understand the inner workings of the protagonist’s mind.
We Were Liars is an Adaptation of a Fictional Novel
‘We Were Liars’ is an entirely fictional story adapted from the 2014 novel of the same name, penned by E. Lockhart, and developed for the screen by creators Julie Plec and Carina Adly MacKenzie. While the showrunners make a variety of changes throughout the narrative, its core remains the same. Numerous inspirations from real life led to the creation of the book, beginning with the author’s personal experiences. She mentioned that the concept of Cadence came as a transposition of her own ambitions and feelings of anger and desperation, despite the writer and character themselves leading vastly different lives. Other instances from Lockhart’s life, such as her time as a scholarship student in a private school, inspired the character of Gat Patil. The connection here seems to be a sense of disconnect and disillusionment with the ways of the privileged and the elite.
Furthermore, Lockhart stated that while she has never been afflicted with migraine, several people close to her have, and she used that as a basis to explore how pain and mental instability would affect the way one perceives the world and reacts to its stimuli. The author elaborated that the sibling rivalry over Harris Sinclair’s property and wealth stems primarily from the tale of King Lear. However, the weaving of Wuthering Heights into the tale surprises even the author herself. This realization came to her far later, implying that specific experiences from real life have unconsciously seeped into this mystery. Deeply rooted in real-life experience, the emotions of love and despair and the themes of race and class consciousness pervade the narrative.
We Were Liars Touches on the Many Forms of Racism and Classism
Gat Patil becomes the story’s primary mouthpiece for pointing out the difference in the lives led by common people and those born in wealth. Privilege becomes one of the key points of discussion, with the liars coming to despise the superficiality and vanity of their parents, eventually taking drastic measures to combat it. The narrative reflects on the many injustices that are faced by people subjected to racism and how wealth is often generated on the back of environmental exploitation, with innocent lives being pushed further into poverty. These moments of acute consciousness bring great change in the protagonist’s mind, who begins to see her life differently. The main characters reject the cruelty that comes with privilege and display great sensitivity to disparity.
One of the central motifs in the narrative is that of fairy tales. According to the creators of ‘We Were Liars,’ fairy tales hold weight because of the human truth they enclose within. These mythical stories of wonder are reproduced over the ages, expressing the basic yearnings of humanity through fantasy, attaining a timeless quality. This facet of storytelling is reflected in Cadence’s own fabrications of truth, which find their way back no matter how many times she attempts to bury them. Similarly, the protagonist, taking after her grandmother, uses fairy tales to analogize the fictional world she inhabits, and by extension, can serve as an analogy for society at large. Certain truths can only be conveyed through stories as a way of softening their impact, and ‘We Were Liar’ functions as one of them.
The Sinclairs Draw Inspiration From the Author’s Childhood Experiences
The Sinclairs are a fictional family specifically created for ‘We Were Liars.’ However, they seem to be inspired by a host of real-life wealthy families that the author encountered as a child. During her ferry rides on the way home, a young Lockhart would notice many private islands with lavish, isolated houses. This kickstarted an imaginative exercise that would give birth to the setting of the story. Thus, billionaire families that own entire islands in America can serve as the inspiration for the Sinclairs. This includes the big names such as the Malone family, which owns Samsan Clay Island in the Bahamas, and the Ziegler family, which used their properties at Hay Island, Connecticut, as a summer cottage.
Since Beechwood Island is said to be located in the Massachusetts region, particularly amongst the Elizabethan islands, the most likely inspiration for the Sinclairs is the Forbes family, which possesses most of the islands in that region. While little else is known about the family’s business operations, their considerable wealth and connections seem to imply that they have dipped their fingers in many major industries. The patriarch, Harris, is described as a capitalist who is deeply racist and archaic in his attitude. His control reverberates in his daughters’ desperate attempts to inherit the Sinclair property. This reflects how power can quickly blind people, sowing chaos and distrust, which can only be overcome by strengthening the bonds with loved ones.
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