Part I: PROLOGUE
I started writing this, and then got a notification that Youtuber Shanspeare dropped a video that essentially is about the same general topic, referencing plenty of the same movies I’m about to. Yay! I’m still going through with this, so we just have companion pieces now, I guess! We have different perspectives, and I have since tried to edit my own work to avoid discussing the exact same talking points as them. It’s a video worth checking out before or after reading this. I really only bring it up because I love their videos. Consider this to be an unpaid ad for the Shanspeare Youtube channel, link below.
Earlier this month I published a piece detailing what I love about Jennifer’s Body, where I compared it to a similarly bizarrely satisfying film, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane. I do believe it to be a bit of pre-text to this issue, so if you haven’t read that… do so! It does contain spoilers, so you don’t have to read it if you haven’t seen either movie yet. I respect your choice. This piece contains some vague spoilers as well, but as I’m not focusing on any particular movie, there’s no required viewing here. Just proceed with caution.
PART II: So, what are we doing here again?
Every so often, when “good for her” movies and villainous women are discussed, people (we can generalize it to cishet men for now though we’ll be delving deeper very soon) get quite upset. Since these women are often framed as “bad people” or “antagonistic” forces in the story, rooting for them is almost always met with more backlash than their male counterparts. If you root for a male villain, it’s because he’s a “complex” “interesting” character. Women villains don’t tend to get that same grace from particularly straight male audiences… and that alone should be enough to tell you why I think it’s marvelous!
I don’t tend to love writing issues on what is practically just niche Film Twitter discourse, and while I do believe to a degree this still is that, within the past 5 years, the Women’s Wrongs Genre has taken new life and became more ingrained in our culture. One movie, one character, above all else, I think has become synonymous with the genre. That is Rosamund Pike’s Amy Dunne in David Fincher’s Gone Girl, based on the book by Gillian Flynn, who also wrote the screenplay for the film.
“I’ve grown quite weary of the spunky heroines, brave rape victims, soul-searching fashionistas that stock so many books. I particularly mourn the lack of female villains — good, potent female villains. Not ill-tempered women who scheme about landing good men and better shoes (as if we had nothing more interesting to war over), not chilly WASP mothers (emotionally distant isn’t necessarily evil), not soapy vixens (merely bitchy doesn’t qualify either). I’m talking violent, wicked women. Scary women. Don’t tell me you don’t know some. The point is, women have spent so many years girl-powering ourselves — to the point of almost parodic encouragement — we’ve left no room to acknowledge our dark side. Dark sides are important. They should be nurtured like nasty black orchids.”
If I’m not mistaken, this quote was from an essay written in 2012. Before we even continue, let me also specify that I do not appreciate all of the rhetoric in this quote. I think it’s particularly outdated that could have been worded more carefully. There’s room for all types of women and personality types, after all. We can have a spunky brave rape victim AND a good potent female villain, you know! It just comes down to good writing. I recognize this was pre-MeToo era, so the media landscape was much different. I can put two plus two together and see what she means, and the rest of the essay really helps paint a picture of her point. Her point being, there’s a lack of nuance in the pure of heart, noble woman protagonist archetype oftentimes. We get generically good-hearted women who can’t wrong anyone or do much wrong or else they’d be automatically dubbed “unlikable” by critics and audiences alike. You can’t be a flawed woman if you want people to root for you in a patriarchal society. It’s all very reactive. Seeing writers throw that on its head, not worrying about respectability or being “liked” is a power within itself.
PART III: Let’s just discuss the girls a little bit.
I believe in our current field of feminism, post 2017, we’ve actually grown further away from women that are even morally gray. Gillian Flynn writing Amy Dunne, a character who, although is widely acclaimed and beloved in our circles, also came with her own deal of criticism, after all. She’s been dubbed as “anti-feminist” especially in the wake of 2022 where people would use her likelihood to villainize one Amber Heard. If you just google “Amber Heard Gone Girl,” which I do NOT recommend you do, there are literal publications that have actual articles published about the “similarities” between cases… journalism is just so low right now, but that’s not my point. My point is, I don’t think we should let violent misogyny bring down our perception of work. Gillian Flynn sure didn’t intend for anyone, particularly incels, to project this meaning onto Gone Girl. It was written over a decade ago! I imagine there to be a comparison to the movie Fight Club, but I have not seen Fight Club, so if that doesn’t work… uhh… Breaking Bad? I haven’t seen that either. I don’t really consume media that a lot of straight males gather around, that’s really my bad. My point just is, media being weaponized in ways that is not the creative intent, shouldn’t inherently devalue its quality. That’s not to say you can’t have moral objections to the work in its own right. I just can’t get behind criticism beginning and ending with critiquing how others have analyzed, interpreted, or defamed it. You should be able to analyze the material without others influencing your perception, I really do believe.
Of course, Amy Dunne isn’t the first of her kind. Gillian Flynn’s first novel, Sharp Objects, could be a pre-cursor to what Gone Girl would become, actually, and has been adapted as a limited series. I would argue Gone Girl had a factor in the reappraisal of Jennifer’s Body, actually, but this isn’t even considering the rich history of women in film. Like, hello… Carrie!!! The imagery of that entire prom sequence is still just so iconic. Her tearing up everybody after getting showered with pig’s blood… my goodness! While on topic of Stephen King, there’s also Misery, which… I haven’t read or seen. Sorry, but I imagine it fits in the grand scheme of things.
I’d suppose a common thread for a lot of these would be women’s suffering leading to their future decisions. You can see Gone Girl as a girlboss movie, but it’s not without Amy Dunne getting wronged more than once. By Nick, by the people who literally jump and rob her, Neil Patrick Harris basically had her on 24/7 surveillance when she was with him, which is… a lot. As much as she’s a mastermind of her own fate, she really learned the hard way that… faking your own death really isn’t a vacation, is it?
Jennifer’s Body is a movie that’s entire catalyst is a literal failed virgin sacrifice leading to her death and subsequent possession, then it ends with Jennifer getting murdered again. Mandy Lane not only gets treated as an object rather than a human throughout the entire film, but she really had to FIGHT to survive at the end, like she really gave her blood, sweat and tears to get away with it! Carrie is relentlessly harassed, both at home and at school, which all culminates in the third act bloodbath. I’d say this is part of what makes these types of movies so embraced, there’s catharsis in seeing women reach a turning point once they hit their lowest. Having to watch women get abused in one form or another, we are so used to seeing them portrayed as virtuous. Although they get mistreated, they deal with it and end up in a better place, but not through taking matters into their own hands, by climbing up some sort of ladder, where they really come out on top over their harassers. Maybe they rub it in their face, or confront them in the third act, but the real victory is in accomplishment, not in action. Watching women get in punches of their own directly can be something so rewarding in its own right. They get wronged, but they do wrong two times over.
Which brings us to movies such as Us. I wouldn’t consider it as part of the “good for her” umbrella, but it applies in the broader sense. This film navigates two very complex arcs that flips what you expected from the narrative entirely. Is either Adelaide or Red a hero or a villain? They both had been done wrong in such extreme ways and are also sort of made to wrong each other in the process. I actually don’t have an answer for you, just raising the point that I think Jordan Peele mastered a really interesting story of two often misunderstood characters. Everybody should really go rewatch Us and fully appreciate what both he and Lupita Nyong’o captured there.
PART IV: Are we losing the plot?
Let me link another Youtube video made by one of my favorite people, Julia Cudney (go subscribe!) because I’m about to discuss the same points she made, and it’d just be easier to have it linked. Like, I’m cheating right now, go watch this video and then come back to me.
It’s no secret that I do not love Last Night in SoHo. I just rewatched a clip of it that had gone viral on X, and it made me realize that my distaste for it, is almost solely because of the third act. It undermined its entire mystery and appeal with one last-ditch twist. Again, the video linked above describes it better than I could bother doing right now. Even if you don’t look at the thematic implications of it, I just find it to be poor storytelling. Throwing away everything that had been set-up with no expertise or finesse, just for a cheaply “satisfying” conclusion, rather than delivering upon actual catharsis in something being unfolded in the way it had been promised. It’s the lowest common denominator of twist endings, clear as day exemplified on film.
In an equal but opposite way, Promising Young Woman also features a twist in its last 15 minutes that narratively undermines every concept it had at play. Where Last Night in SoHo was aiming for feminist girlboss empowerment, Promising Young Woman aimed for bittersweet satisfaction… and also failed really bad. Mind you, I believe the Promising Young Woman screenplay to be a mess from top to bottom, but none more thematically twisted than the very last 15 minutes. Hopefully I don’t have to explain that one to you, if you know you know, and if you don’t… there’s countless thinkpieces about that one, even just my Letterboxd review. But, honestly, a nightmare. If you could possibly avoid engaging with it at all, at this point I recommend doing just that!
I don’t bring these up to analyze either of their shortcomings, but to beg the question… is it just so over? As I’ve already said, in a post-2017 landscape, any feminine presenting characters are already fighting an uphill battle. Girlboss feminism is the current era we’re in, and mind you… misogyny is still at play. You can’t go 3 seconds online without seeing someone call characters like PJ from Bottoms or Skyler White the worst people to ever be shown on screen in the history of time. Like, you don’t want real morally gray female characters, do you? You can’t even handle Jules from Euphoria.
I also think on X particularly, people are very quick to shut down any possible “feminism” themes they see and write it off as corny or lame. I remember one time someone posted an image of the final shot from The Menu, and someone quote tweeted it with “oh, it’s one of those movies” with a clearly negative connotation. Solely because it’s a shot of Anya Taylor-Joy… not being dead? at the end… eating a burger, I guess? It’s sort of just a counter-cultural idealogy, even though the horror genre has been built upon “Final Girls” since the beginning of time. The Menu wasn’t even a movie concerned with “girlbossifying” Anya Taylor-Joy’s character, we barely even get to learn anything about her. The movie was “good for her” in the same sense Scream was “good for” Sidney Prescott. If we can’t even have final girls anymore without it being seen as corny, the horror genre is like... obsolete.
I guess this is just the natural conclusion. Me rambling about a bunch of nothing for a few paragraphs, and not answering much of anything. This isn’t even relevant for seasonability. Most of the movies I brought up weren’t even horror. Uh… Happy Halloween, I guess! Mwahahaha. Stay safe, and definitely be sure to tag me in all of your Halloween costumes. No reason, I just love seeing all of them... Okay, bye.