Viewers of Pretty Little Liars will remember the shocking but rather insignificant scene in season five when Toby Cavanaugh, driving to his police academy graduation, gets injured in a traffic accident. The other vehicle is never seen. It strikes suddenly on the driver’s side, and Toby’s left leg is broken by the impact. When he next appears, on the morning of the following day, he sits in a wheelchair, showing discomfort only when his girlfriend, Spencer Hastings, one of the eponymous Liars, is arrested in front of him for murder.
We never learn who was driving the other vehicle, or why the driver was so careless as to hit a stationary pickup truck. Was Toby parked in the middle of an intersection? Was the other driver driving on the sidewalk? Did his or her brakes fail? We simply don’t know.
Toby’s accident serves a couple of purposes. It occurs in a mid-season finale, an episode in which the viewer has already been promised that a character will die. The incident, therefore, functions as a ruse, but it also facilitates an allusion. Ruses and allusions: Pretty Little Liars is not just reliant upon, but totally addicted to these devices.
In the next episode, we again find Toby in the wheelchair, his leg in plaster. A month has passed, and it’s Christmas. Spencer and Hanna Marin, another of the Liars, are breaking into the home of Alison DiLaurentis, their erstwhile friend, who until recently was presumed dead. They suspect that Ali is A, their tormentor and that she murdered Mona Vanderwaal, who herself was A for some time, in the previous episode. They’re now raiding Ali’s house for proof.
Confined to the wheelchair, Toby watches them through a telephoto lens from the house next door, which belongs to Spencer. Binoculars would have sufficed; Toby is no photographer. By this point, however, anyone familiar with the films of Alfred Hitchcock will recognize the allusion to his 1954 thriller, Rear Window. Toby then spies a third figure inside Ali’s house, hooded and carrying a large knife: A.
While Spencer hides, Hanna obliviously continues to sleuth in the attic. It’s 2014, so Spencer tries to text her a warning, but Hanna sustains the allusion by carelessly having left her phone downstairs. Toby tries to warn her by flashing his digital camera’s flash, also to no effect.
The scene illustrates the show’s absolute devotion to the practice of allusion. The Liars’ sleuthing could have been done without Toby watching, as it usually is. His leg was seemingly broken only so that the allusion could be staged. In the next episode, he walks again.
An uncharitable viewer might argue that such allusions bespeak lazy storytelling, but I want to suggest that this practice contributes much to the haphazard complexity that makes Pretty Little Liars such a charming series. A moment hardly passes without a reference being made to some other work of culture, and Hitchcock is a frequent guest. The Liars’ local cafe is called Rear Window Brew, and the show has featured prominent, extended allusions to several other Hitchcock films, including Vertigo, The Birds, North by Northwest, and Psycho. Literary allusion is even more pervasive: the Liars — one of whom, Aria Montgomery, dated their English teacher for several seasons — are shown reading, or at least carrying, an array of American classics. Mona reads Henry James’s Terminations; Spencer, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War; Ali, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Allusions such as these add considerable depth to the characters through the implications they carry.
The implications of the show’s various allusions are rarely voiced. In fact, their potency is derived from their ability to signify what cannot be explicitly stated, in either verbal or visual terms. The show’s many allusions to David Lynch‘s cult favorite Twin Peaks are a case in point. There are numerous plot similarities between the two series, but the specific Twin Peaks allusions in which Pretty Little Liars indulges point to darker sexuality than would normally be permissible on a network like ABC Family.
We encounter a bird that squawks Ali’s secrets; a friendship bracelet bearing Ali’s name, discovered in the forest; a video of Ali, filmed in the forest by Ian Thomas, a secret boyfriend who was secretly videotaping her and her friends, as well as being threatened by her. Why we ask, would Ian and his friends secretly videotape teenage girls in their bedrooms? The reason is left unsaid. These allusions to Twin Peaks invoke specific elements of the sexuality of that show’s murder victim, Laura Palmer: the talking Mynah bird that bites her at the party on the night she dies, the broken-heart necklace buried in the forest, the film was taken at a picnic in the woods by a secret lover.
Ali’s diary also features prominently in Pretty Little Liars. It describes a summer of flirtation, rather than a lifetime of incest, rape, and drug abuse. Nevertheless, the allusions point to a darker account of Ali’s activities before her “death” than could be directly represented. Ali is 15 when her mother buries her alive in Spencer’s backyard. Both Ian and Ezra Fitz, adult men whom she secretly dated, explicitly deny having had sex with her.
Anyone familiar with Twin Peaks may find in these allusions an alternate explanation. Pretty Little Liars could be described as Twin Peaks-lite, borrowing elements of Lynch’s story but repackaging them for a younger audience. Allusion as signifying practice, however, permits the erotic horror of stories like Twin Peaks or Psycho to infiltrate Pretty Little Liars without the need for direct representation. Allusion facilitates interpretations of the show’s events and characters that transgress the moral limits imposed by its medium and audience.
By opening itself to this profusion of signifiers, Pretty Little Liars allows an array of contradictory interpretative possibilities to coexist. The other side to this chaotic state of affairs is that it becomes impossible for anything to ever be fully explained, or for the truth about anything to ever be satisfactorily revealed. This tension between the promise of a conclusive revelation and its consequent impossibility is the central operation of the show.