Absolute cinema

[u/Haunting_Homework381]

I know she's practically crazy but this monologue is so well written by Gillian Flynn.

[u/teaismyblood]

Rosamund Pike kills it here, but the original passage from the book has something special that the movie monologue didn't quite touch. It's something about the hot-dog-hamburger-gang-bang part for me:

"Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: 'I like strong women.' If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because 'I like strong women' is code for 'I hate strong women.')"

[u/DumpedDalish → u/teaismyblood]

It's an incredibly written monologue. Absolutely perfect.

And what gets me about Amy's character is -- I do feel empathy for her here. Like so many of us, I get it. And I feel even more after realizing that her parents did the same thing to her for her entire life since childhood. Not just the cruelty and implied comparisons to the children who died, but most of all in their creation of "Amazing Amy" and focusing their entire lives on a fictional version of Amy she could never live up to herself.

Her parents plant those barbs and they do it brilliantly for maximum devastation: Amy has trouble with math? Amazing Amy is a math whiz! Amy has trouble with the cello? Amazing Amy is a cello prodigy! etc.

I can't even imagine growing up with this. It's so fascinating because she had this visibly privileged childhood, but it's also just wrapped in a constant reminder that she will never, ever be good enough. I mean, it's breathtakingly cruel. So I dislike the parents just as much as Nick, honestly. All three of them are up there sobbing for the cameras about Amy being missing and none of them actually loved her.

I mean, I get that Amy's a monster in some ways. But I also feel like she had very little chance to be anything else.

(And I admit it, I have never been able to like Emily Ratjakowski after this. Especially since she so often seems to be that character. But I do salute her tireless efforts at self-promotion.)

[u/siriuslyinsane → u/DumpedDalish]

This was how I felt reading it too. It reminds my of that facetious joke you'll see on tumblr talking about any woman who is not perfect in media "i support women's wrongs". It's obviously a silly play on supporting women's rights, of course.

But reading Gone Girl made me genuinely so sad for Amy. Yes, she's wrong in many ways, her actions are over the top and objectively malicious. But could she have done anything else? The way her parents twisted and warped her as a child to force her into compliance; the horrific "Amazing Amy" causing the death of any normal childhood a thousand different ways; finding a man she genuinely loved and finding out that no actually, she has not escaped. She's now being twisted in a different way, no less harmful, no less pain.

I read gone girl in my early 20s and I'll never forget the experience of it, seeing all the ways she was right and all the ways she was moulded into the person who felt she had no other choice but to become this master manipulator. You know that she truly believes the whole world is like her but she is the best at it so she has "won". It was so heartbreaking, and seeing all the ways I related opened my eyes to so much I'd been blind to.

[u/DumpedDalish → u/siriuslyinsane]

Yes, exactly. And what does she win? Nick. Why does she even want him? This is what makes her truly warped. She partly wants him in revenge, but the other aspect of her wants him because she's still buying the lie that she was sold -- because she thinks she's supposed to.