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Fun movie. In regards to Amy checking off the MRA-fears list, I took this as a conscious (both for Amy the character and the writer) inversion of her "Cool Girl" act. She knows exactly what immature and self-centered guys want out of women, she's willing to provide it if they live up to what she perceives as their part of the bargain, and she inflicts exactly what they fear the most once they don't. She has accurately read a misogynistic culture and can switch from a chili-dog loving blowjob nymph who walks around in lingerie to the "psycho bitch" who steals sperm to get pregnant and fakes a rape accusation. I think the other strength of the movie's take on this sort of gender politics is that it implicitly suggests that for someone to do these things - trick someone into a pregnancy, fake a rape, etc. - they'd have to be as cold-bloodedly manipulative as Amy. This is not the scenario that your typical MRA talks about, that women revert to dead-eyed lizards when no one is watching, that every smile is an act. The film proposes that it is difficult, that it takes a combination of absolute sociopathy and extraordinary willpower, to fake a rape: Amy coldly twisting the twine around her wrists, silently using the wine bottle, etc. This is markedly different from the misogynist's worldview, that a woman can just scream rape without physical evidence and the world will believe her (it won't). Pretty film, though less showy than what I normally associate with Fincher. Great score. Filled with great performances, I didn't know Rosamund Pike was that good an actress and I'll join everyone else in being surprised at Tyler Perry stealing the movie. That he'd fit perfectly as a natural showman for an audience that he doesn't himself associate with is interesting in light of his directorial career. The scenes with Rosamund Pike made up to look like she's not wearing makeup were a hell of a thing, that Amy Dunne essentially tried to live her life with all the prep that an actress has to do to appear on camera.
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Oct 6, 2014 18:38
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DrVenkman posted:Which is why the scene with the ex is a shame. It's a stronger movie if you believe that Amy is a product of a lovely upbringing and a sham marriage. It's a little less fun when the movie seems to point out that nope, he just married a psycho lady. It almost makes Nick entirely sympathetic, because it seems to be saying that the moment their marriage started to waver, she would've gone full Amy on him. I disagree here. I think it would be a shame if the movie suggested that an ordinary woman, a more representative woman, would go full psycho just because of a mundanely bad relationship. She's still not "just a psycho lady," she is the product of a lovely upbringing, but if you're worried about potential misogyny I don't think you want to depict a guy who is lousy in a fairly ordinary way (immature, self-centered, cheats, general shitbag) is enough to have a woman act out that list of MRA fears. And while Amy is obviously a heightened, unrealistic character (in a good, entertaining way), it adds a veneer of realism that this isn't the first time she's done this sort of thing. People repeat patterns of behavior, it's very rare that one's experience with someone be the first that someone is behaving in a particular way. You get to see how faking her own death is something she's built up to, rather than coming out of the blue.
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Oct 8, 2014 15:45
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K. Waste posted:And, yet, in a fantasy staging of this scenario - in which almost everyone has an ulterior motive and at least two of Amy's S.O.'s are shown to be manipulative and duplicitous, and in which Amy's own plans are increasingly befuddled by 'regular people' - people assume that the guy crying foul on Amy's rape charge is being totally honest just because he presents himself as a victim and Nick sympathizes with him. We should be unwilling to trust him as to his own behavior, that he merely "pulled back," but willing to believe that he didn't actually tie Amy to his bed and rape her. He's a proto-Nick, so while he's likely not a rapist, he's probably a worse guy than he presents himself as. We shouldn't believe he's being "totally honest," but the clear way he fits into a pattern of behavior for Amy communicates that she did fabricate some sort of crime with him. In a work of fiction in which every other example of Amy accusing someone of a crime is a case of her having faked it, but having a trigger that set it off, the implication is that for the one character where we don't get direct confirmation that she faked it we may infer that she did so, but there was something that set it off that he isn't telling us. Zwabu posted:If you had a film/book where a black character embodies the entire checklist of every single negative stereotype of black people, or a Jewish character who embodies the checklist of every stereotype against Jews, I think a lot of people would find it problematic even if it was clear that "well this character doesn't represent ALL black people/Jews". Amy doesn't embody the entire checklist of every single negative stereotype about women. She performs a specific checklist that reflects a specific set of fears that are associated with a group of men that she is specifically reacting to. Sir Kodiak fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Oct 8, 2014 |
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Oct 8, 2014 16:52
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That law enforcement would let someone who is publicly sympathetic, famous, and well-off skate by without serious investigation of wrong-doing doesn't strike me as particularly unrealistic. If they go to bat for the weirdo stalker rapist and are wrong they look completely horrible. The fact that the guy is dead, so nobody needs to build a case against him and he can't defend himself, only helps.
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Oct 14, 2014 03:22
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limeincoke posted:I'll accept that maybe, just maybe, the FBI guys in charge of verifying her story maybe were told to sweep it under the rug due to the public backlash they would get. However, someone in Desi's life would eventually get on a news outlet with proof that there's no way he could have done it. Like I said, all it would take is work security footage being leaked showing him at the office the morning she was kidnapped. BTW did it ever say what Desi does for a living? This is assuming this evidence exists and that someone happens to know about it and they put together that it exculpates Desi. And it doesn't change any of the character developments, the actual heart of the story, if it turns out (in a scene which never happens and which would be outside the scope of what the film is concerned with) that such evidence comes out a week later. We already know that Amy was taking a risk, we don't need to see whether she gets unlucky and someone comes forward anymore than we need to see what happens after the end of any movie.
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Oct 14, 2014 04:14
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