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eshock posted:There's room for a sympathetic reading of Amy, but other people are right, Affleck is portrayed way too sympathetically after it's revealed Amy is still alive. From then on he's just basically a good dude waging war against a murderess succubus. Not to pick on you, but... this is a sentiment a lot of people seem to have about this movie; namely that Ben Affleck's character is Sympathetic, that the antagonist is one dimensional, and that this makes this movie misogynistic. I just got back from seeing this myself, and I gotta ask you guys: were we watching the same movie? Because Nick Dunn is not sympathetic. At all. Ever. He breathes insincerity and is just as fake as Amy, even more so, maybe. People say that Amy embodies the "psycho bitch" stereotype, the great fear everywhere that women are just evil sluts using men to get what they want, and while that is somewhat true (and probable intentional), Nick is a stereotype too. If Amy is the Psycho Bitch (tm), Nick is the Nice Guy (tm), the oh-so-sweet fellow that plies you at a party and sweeps you off your feet with kindness, but all in service to get sex, to get good food, to get clean sheets... to get a wife. In Nicks, case, he gets all that, and money; for videogames, for a new house, for a bar. You can see his gift giving in the very beginning and know the kind of man he is: he gets his sister a board game she never liked (but he did, and it gets added to his bar anyway) and gets his wife a kite, because she's "never flown a kite before." Classic Nice Guy behavior: doing what he wants to do (move back home get a house, get a bar) while telling others and himself that it's for her sake. You get the very distinct impression that people don't really mean much to him; he pays more attention to his cat than any other human! He's revealed to everyone as a lying, cheating scumfuck, but while Amy has to go on the run and deal with thieves and creepy rapey ex boyfriends, Nick gets some help from a lawyer, has a loyal sister who looks out for him, avoids jail time and is treated even by the audience as a kind of hero! Isn't that interesting that a woman gets punished for playing to a stereotype and a man gets rewarded for doing the same, even by the audience members? Funny, that. That, in the end, is what this movie is about; it's not only a satire of society and the masks we wear, but the nightmares that keep us wearing those masks. Everyone except for the sympathetic characters (the sister and the lady detective) is representative of the desire to be loved by our peers, friends, family, and the fear that none of those people ever truly loved us. You have the parents who exploited Amy's childhood for wealth and fame, and who can't appear in public, even plead for help in finding their missing daughter, without a plug for their stupid books; you've the helpful, friendly strangers that turn on you and steal from you the minute you show more money than they do; you have the former boyfriend who helps you out only to lock you in a prison for sex; you have the media personalities who feign outrage over your actions one day only to treat you like a saint another, and always the ghoulish crowd, snapping selfies and searching for autographs, not because they give a drat about anyone involved, but because everyone loves a good story. It's all about image and fame, and that's why Amy is the central character to the piece. The image of something, of a perfect woman, a perfect man, the perfect marriage, was shown to her to be the most important thing, thanks to her parents, so she spends her life cultivating perfection and searching for fame. That's her driving force, more than a desire to use or destroy Nick or any other of her boyfriends; think of how engrossed she is in her image on TV. People will say that its a desire to destroy men that Amy does what she does and is so happy with the results but that isn't it. It's that, for the first time in her life, she is more important, more famous, and more loved, than the character in her loving parent's books. So yeah... Tremendous movie, first really good one of so-called Oscar season. Hope it does well, and that Rosamund Pike gets some accolades, because she really knocked it out of the park with this one.
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Oct 4, 2014 03:35
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Taear posted:She was going to get him killed. Yea he's selfish and a cheat. But she was going to actually get him killed. Good. Too many of that sort in the world, in my opinion. And you keep insisting that her flight was all about getting Nick killed, but that was secondary to actually getting control of her own life and what she wanted to do, which was getting out of the shadow of "Amazing Amy" once and for all. And as for killing NPH, well, what the hell else was she supposed to do, stay locked up in his rape house? He'd overpower her if she tried the frontal assault, and he'd track her if she tried to run away, so hence the misdirection and slashy. Still self defense, in my opinion. Look, guys, I've seen a few pieces of "misogynist" media in which I am meant to hate the overbearing shrew/ monstrous psycho-bitch for the taking advantage/killing of the poor widdle nice guy, but I usually never feel that way, and applaud the woman for improving her station. When the deck is so heavily stacked against women as it has been in nearly all of history, is it really so wrong for a girl to do what she can to get ahead? When all society is based on lies and manipulation, (as this movie claims society and marriage for appearance is), why is a woman who learns how to game the system a bitch while a man is "just a decent guy doing what he has to?"
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Oct 4, 2014 05:07
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SALT CURES HAM posted:BECAUSE MURDERING PEOPLE IS GENERALLY A VERY VERY lovely THING TO DO AND YOU ARE A HORRIBLY BROKEN PERSON Again, what loving murder? The only time she kills somebody, it's to escape being held by a crazy creep who wants a very specific image for him to hug and kiss and love and call George, and to require her not to kill him is to require her to either accept that or wait for rescue like a good little damsel in distress. Which option would you take? And as for the frame job, it was apparent to me that it was actually never going to get as far as the death penalty: he had an excellent lawyer who would have saved him from that, and a loving sister that foots the bill. Plus, he's great at manipulating others himself, as we saw with that one interview; I've got no doubt in my mind that the holes in the case would have prevented him from the death penalty, if not got him off entirely, even if she actually killed herself. After all, she is only a woman, and there's plenty more where that came from, am I right, fellas?  Megasabin posted:She is a sociopathic/has antisocial personality disorder. She has a set of ideals (money, societal status, conceptualized perfect life based on a fake book character) that have been embedded in psyche from an early age by her parents, and any partner she has is a means to achieve these goals. She is entirely narcissistic in the pursuit of these goals, has no empathy towards others, and shows no guilt or remorse in the lives she destroys in her attempt to reach her goals. The author/director’s etiological explanation for her condition is how her parents raised her—they basically manipulated her life from an early age to achieve their own goals, and in the process of creating the fake character, engrained a picture of a certain lifestyle into her psyche that eventually became her life goal. But see that's the thing:Every trait you list as something that makes Amy worse than Nick- the narcissism, the set of ideals, the manipulation- is something that Nick exhibits too. He manipulates everyone around him and doesn't give any sign that he actually cares about anyone beyond his adorable kitty, and the only difference between his manipulation and Amy's is that he has to spend significantly less effort to do it. Besides, all of the things Amy "lies" about- the temper, the violence, the self-centeredness- are traits Nick actually end up exhibiting, so how much of what she wrote was actually lying? Again, the only difference I discern between Amy and Nick, is that Nick is too much of a coward to go to the lengths that Amy does in getting what she wants. A lot of people around here seem to think I'm defending Amy's actions, and I'm not. As some of you have said, she is an evil woman, one of the most deliciously realized, in depth female villains to have graced the screen in a long time. I'm not downplaying the terrible things she does, and I'm not sympathizing with her; any sympathy I have is with the poor baby they're going to have. But I am trying to get people to examine why they revile her for her actions, and not anybody else for doing the same actions. Some folks in this thread are bound and determined to take Amy to task for lying, manipulating others into an image, and punish them for not living up to it, but when last I checked, EVERYONE in this movie lies, manufactures an image, and punishes others for not living up to it. This is a society of lies and deceit, where people keep up appearances and the only societal rule is "Do as thou wilt, but don't get caught," and yet we insist on holding Amy to a higher standard than we do any other person, saying "She's a psycho-Bitch who uses men!" when everybody uses everybody. Why? In the world presented here, is she really that much of an aberration, when the task of keeping up appearances makes sociopathic ghouls of nearly everybody?
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Oct 4, 2014 12:56
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Hey, here's a pretty good review I found: http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2014/10/05/3576170/gone-girl-review/ It goes a little bit into what some folks have been saying, an overall positive picture but also an examination of the shortcomings. I think I may have to track down this book now...
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Oct 5, 2014 21:44
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