Gone Girl with Princess Weekes

00:00:01
Speaker 1: On the Bechdel Cast, the questions ask if movies have women and them, are all their discussions just boyfriends and husbands, or do they have individualism? It's the patriarchy, zephynvest start changing it with the Bechdel Cast.

00:00:16
Speaker 2: Hi, Gone Girl, Hi, Gone Girl.

00:00:19
Speaker 3: We're just two gone girls living in gone girl worlds where feminism has been solves for now. That is, Oh yeah, gone girls rule the gone world and all of the Nicks live to serve them.

00:00:35
Speaker 4: Right, And then he has to sing a song about.

00:00:38
Speaker 3: I'm just nick, you know, exactly exactly I honestly maybe there are parallels. We can't talk about it today. Welcome to the Gone Girl episode of the Bechdel Cast. My name is Jamie Loftus.

00:00:52
Speaker 4: My name is Caitlin Dernte, and this is our show where we examine movies through an intersectional feminist lens, using the Bechdel test simply as a jumping off point to initiate larger conversations. But Jamie, what is the Bechdel test?

00:01:09
Speaker 2: Wow?

00:01:09
Speaker 5: Is it?

00:01:09
Speaker 4: When two Gone Girls?

00:01:12
Speaker 5: Oh? No?

00:01:13
Speaker 2: How like?

00:01:13
Speaker 3: What bottomized are we that? That is what I was about to say, We're sick. It was like when two gone girls talk about girls being gone. For two gone girls with god names talk to each other about being gone outside of the context of a man for more than two lines of dialogue. If you want to know the actual definition, you could listen to any of our five hundred other episodes. But I think that for today's episode, that should be the new the new rule. Two gone girls talking about being gone. I agree, And there's sort of plenty. There's a couple of gone Girl discussions throughout the course of this movie, and I feel like also Amy is in discussion with herself for so much of the movie.

00:01:54
Speaker 5: I just.

00:01:56
Speaker 3: This is going to be an episode. The Bechdel Test, if you're not aware, was originally created by queer cartoonist Alice at Bechdel with Liz Wallace, which is why it's often called the Bechdel Wallace Test. Originally created as a bit a one off in her common collection likes to watch out for about how not just women, but queer people rarely spoke to each other in movies, and it's since taken on a life of its own and been through three thousand discourse cycles. Much like the movie we're talking about today, Gone Girl.

00:02:32
Speaker 4: And we have a wonderful returning guest here to join us in that discussion.

00:02:37
Speaker 3: Alzheimer.

00:02:37
Speaker 4: She's a writer and video essayist in one of our faves. You remember her from our episodes on Space Jam and Wild Things. It's Princess Weeks.

00:02:47
Speaker 5: Hi, Got Girls, Hi, Girls Girls.

00:02:50
Speaker 4: Oh my god, we're all together, Gone and the three of us. It's like girls gone Wild like that.

00:02:59
Speaker 5: Yeah, Girls Gone Wild Things Jam. I love it.

00:03:06
Speaker 4: So tell us about your history, your relationship with Gone Girl.

00:03:12
Speaker 5: Oh my god, Well, like I guess, over a decade ago, I read all of Gillian Flynn's books, Shop Objects, I forget what the middle one is called, and then Gone Girl, and I ate them all up. I loved it. And then the movie came out. I saw the movie in theaters with my ex boyfriend. Well that's not why we broke up, but I loved the movie, and I, you know, woke up one day and saw everyone was discoursing it, and I'm just like, but I like it. But I also understand it this course, But I feel like as things have evolved, especially the way this film intersects with like race and gender and like the true crime bubble, I feel like part of what makes it such a fun texted to discussed from like a multitude of different lenses. Is that there is what Gillian Flynn as Word of God says about her work. There is how people feel about the work itself, and there's people who are responding to jillians Flynn's work through anxiety about what men think about Gillian Flynn's work. And I think in all of that you get this really interesting storyteller who really wants to talk about like white female villainy looks like unafraid of caring about what men necessarily think. But it's hard to do that because they're always watching. The Knicks are always watching.

00:04:38
Speaker 4: It's true, Yeah, Jamie, what about you.

00:04:41
Speaker 3: I read the book when it first came out, and this was again over ten years ago. I was not really thinking about feminist theory as much at this time. The feminist theory I was thinking about is no longer, I don't know whatever. It's been a while to years for discussions like this. I really enjoyed it. I thought it was very different from what I had sort of come to expect from that genre. And then when I saw the movie, I feel like I secretly liked this movie for a long time. Because I do love to throw myself into a pit of discourse snakes, but the Gone Girl discourse was one that I always shied away from because I was sort of afraid to be like. I like this movie a lot, and I think that it has aged in a really interesting way. I sort of like it for completely different reasons that I liked it when I first saw it, which was more just like, this is an incredibly well written and well performed thriller. I don't know. I mean, yeah, I wrote this down get ready, I'm here woman for Gone Girl. I like, I'm the here woman saying that Gone Girl. Good movie, A lot of stuff to talk about, and it was like an interesting trip down twenty fourteen essay Lane to prepare for this episode. And I think that there are a lot of there's a lot of criticism of this movie that is still really prescient and makes a lot of sense. And then I think that there's some criticism that has sort of not held up as well over time. And I do feel like there is a cathartic element to watching Gone Girl and seeing a woman in a fairly quote unquote I mean, and again, this is with an enormous amount of privilege, but in a fairly ordinary marriage that we see in movies all the time, and she's going to kill Neil Patrick Harris about it. And then other things I love in this movie. Tyler Perry dramatic role, jump scare. I always love that.

00:06:53
Speaker 5: So good.

00:06:53
Speaker 2: He's so good in this and that's always like, wow, you range.

00:06:57
Speaker 3: He's Billy Flynn in this Essentially, I was like I would have accepted a song from that character.

00:07:03
Speaker 2: More like Gilly Flynn.

00:07:08
Speaker 5: That's screenwriter Caitlin those Hot far Wait who Billy Flynn is from Chicago?

00:07:15
Speaker 4: Richard Gear of Chicago. Yes, okay he is.

00:07:18
Speaker 3: I feel like Tyler Perry is the Billy Flynn of this movie anyways. Yes, am Rada dramatic role totally. I feel like there's little elements of this movie. When I watch it every couple of years, you're like, oh, yeah, em Rada, and then you have like cool Tereu.

00:07:32
Speaker 5: I don't know.

00:07:33
Speaker 3: I always forget the carry coons in this movie. This movie is like cast so absurdly well except for the fact that I will never believe that a Ben Affleck character is from Missouri. Unfortunately, you just have to change the location if you're going to cast him in the Leaf Austen. Yeah, yeah, they should have moved to Southee and that's just unfortunately true. Anyways, I like the book, I like the movie, and I'm ready to be read for filth.

00:08:02
Speaker 2: But it's true. Caitlin, what's your history with God Girl?

00:08:06
Speaker 4: Well, I'm about to say two potentially shocking things here to twists. Wow, maybe twist number one. I had never seen this movie until.

00:08:19
Speaker 2: Ye shock. I love that for you. This is shocking news.

00:08:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, you saw every movie that came out in the last thirty years.

00:08:28
Speaker 4: I thought so too, but somehow, Well, I'll tell you why, which connects to the second twist, which is I did read the book in twenty fourteen, even though we famously don't read books on this show.

00:08:43
Speaker 2: What brought you to the book?

00:08:45
Speaker 4: My roommate who I was bunking with when I did the like Be You in LA, because I of course would never mention that I got a master's degree in screenwriting from Boston Universe City. And something I probably actually never mentioned is that I did like an optional extra semester in LA, which is like what prompted my move here in twenty fourteen, and the roommate I had during that semester, was like, I just finished this amazing book. Here, you can borrow it. So she let me Gone Girl, and I read it within the course of like a pretty short amount of time. Usually takes me forever to read books, because I read three pages and then I fall asleep for two weeks, and then I read another three pages. Anyway, but I read it within a couple weeks, I think, and the book rubbed me the wrong way, in a way that I still can't put my finger on exactly. I have some kind of vague ideas of why it didn't really work for me, and I feel like I still have those sensations. But yeah, I think reading the book bok made me not want to watch the movie, even though I just love a David Fincher thriller or David Fincher movie in general. I mean, seven haven't seen it in a number of years, but like it was one of my favorite movies in my teens and early twenties. I love the Social Network. I really liked Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, Like I'm a fan of his thrillers. But I was like, this new movie is really good too, The Killer. Yeah, whatever, I heard that yeah, I miss I didn't see that one yeh is on Netflix, but uh yeah, I was like not really thrilled about seeing this movie after reading the book, so I just never got around to it until now.

00:10:40
Speaker 5: I think it's so funny Kylene, because I've always said it. I think of her three books, I think Gone Girl is the weakest. I love sharp Objects, the most dark places of the second one, and I felt like the third one is the most funny enough. It's the most normy of all of her works, and it's the most that gives you the twist half way, so that I think with the rest of the books, you fund it out later and it's much more of like a psychological examination for like the female character, and it's the first time she's like, it's this dual narrative where a man is present, and I will get into it. I think, I think I'm picking up what your vibe was off. But we'll get there. Yeah, yeah, Princess, when did you?

00:11:21
Speaker 3: Because I definitely I just got the audiobook from the library because rewatching the movie made me want to re listen to the book because I definitely read it over ten years ago, and all I remember, I mean and it's cool that we have an adaptation here that's actually adapted by the author. But like, I just remember the book being even harsher and like, yeah, the language, that's because half of it is from Nick's perspective, which I mean, you do get Nick's perspective a lot in the movie, but you don't get the like his inner monologue, which I remembered and then I had to go back and confirm this, but his inner monologue is like every woman he encountered. He is like this bitch, like yeah, everything, which I want to revisit it. I haven't read the other books me either.

00:12:07
Speaker 5: Yeah. I really love Sharp Objects and Dark Places. I think they're both really good. I think you're so right. In the book, Nick is much less of a victim of, like clearly domestic violence as he is in the movie. It's definitely more of They're both pretty narcissistic. But still, you know, just because he cheats, only you technically can't frame him for murder, though I do understand the inclination. I think my one big note I had about the fincherm movie versus the book is that in the book they all show that Amy was this kind of way towards women, and like there's a theme there's a woman in the book whose life she also destroyed, which I thought was better because then she isn't just someone who's like finding men to fix them. It's like, no, the people around her in her little inner circle, she like absorbs them and then like destroys them. And I felt like that was a little bit more balanced. But I think for the sake of the film, it was more streamlined to be the more like Hitchcockian blonde, you know, vamp sociopaths quote unquote character versus that other bit of it.

00:13:14
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's not like I wish that the movie was more of like I didn't like I didn't really want to hear Nick's inner monologue, and the way the movie is presented, I think that was a really smart choice and like worked better for the format. But yeah, the whole thing of the book, and then at this point I don't specifically remember this, I had to like go back and cross check that the book like more clearly contextualizes Nick's own misogyny through the lens of his dad and how his dad treated the women in Nick's life, and like, and that's I think that you only get like one reference to that. It's well placed, but it's like Marco has like you're acting just like dad by right, you know, like being a horrible husband. But that's sort of all we get. But it is more contextualizing the book. Again, I feel like in most adaptations, we're talking about a screenwriter deciding what stays and goes in an author's work, and we don't have that here. And so I was I think it's interesting what she keeps in what she leaves, and also is sort of relieved to read that David Fincher kind of like deferred to her a great deal, because you never know, you never know.

00:14:28
Speaker 4: I also don't remember the book very well, having read it about ten years ago, but either this was placed more emphasis on in the book or this just stuck with me, maybe a little bit of both, but I remember there being discussion of like the concept of the cool girl, like that really stuck out to me from.

00:14:49
Speaker 2: The difference there.

00:14:50
Speaker 3: I don't know if it's like now or later, but like, I want to talk about what is in the book that didn't make it to the movie, because I'm like, why why Tay got this awesome whe.

00:15:01
Speaker 4: Well, how about this we take a break, we come back and do the recap, and then we start our discussion with those like adaptation changes. Wow, we'll be right back.

00:15:24
Speaker 2: And we're gone girl.

00:15:27
Speaker 3: We were gone, we're girls. We're back, but now we're here women. That should just become a facet of the show that we never explained.

00:15:39
Speaker 2: We're like and we're here women.

00:15:42
Speaker 4: Okay, So here is the recap of Gone a Girl. It is one of the longer recaps I've written. It is a very complicated story and I left out a bunch of stuff, but it's still quite long, so bear with me. And then we'll all will place a content warning at the top because.

00:16:02
Speaker 2: The content warning for it everything.

00:16:06
Speaker 5: There's a lot.

00:16:07
Speaker 4: There will be discussion of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, as well as false accusations of those things. So that's what we're working with.

00:16:20
Speaker 3: Also, murder and murder of Neil Patrick Harris tragic.

00:16:26
Speaker 4: And that's its own subgenre.

00:16:29
Speaker 5: Okay.

00:16:29
Speaker 4: So we open with ominous voiceover from Nick Dunn. That's Ben Affleck's character, that suggests that he has like violent thoughts towards his wife. Then we see him on the morning of July fifth, Nick goes to a bar called The Bar that.

00:16:51
Speaker 3: So early twenty tens to do that kind of cutey little wink wink, nod nod. Although I will say it kind of looks like I don't know if we're supposed to hate the bar.

00:17:01
Speaker 2: But I'm like, hmmm, kind of looks like a fun dive.

00:17:04
Speaker 5: I go, it's a place where I would go.

00:17:06
Speaker 3: I would go to Carrie Kuhon's bar where you can play the game of life with Carrie Coon.

00:17:11
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm going, yes, absolutely so. He and his sister, his twin sister Margo played by Carrie Kuhon, co own the bar together and today is also the five year anniversary of Nick and his wife Amy's marriage, and every year for their anniversary, Amy comes up with a scavenger hunt with riddles that he has to solve to get his gift Amy.

00:17:38
Speaker 2: Amy ex.

00:17:41
Speaker 5: Her.

00:17:43
Speaker 4: I know, God, that is a little exhausting. Also, like there was one year I think it was like the previous year that he never solved one of the clues. So did he just not get a gift.

00:17:54
Speaker 5: That year, which would be hilarious. My first note was that, like when I talk about their second years, he was like, she got me a beautiful notebook. I got her a kite, and I was like, electric chair, I sent him under the prison.

00:18:09
Speaker 3: Yeah, if someone got me a kite, I don't care if it's a symbolic kite.

00:18:14
Speaker 4: No, no, no, thank you.

00:18:16
Speaker 2: Come back with a gift.

00:18:18
Speaker 5: I'm planning, like, we will be planning your murder if we receive a kite for any gift, for any occasion.

00:18:24
Speaker 3: In general, the number one gift giving advice is do not gift someone a metaphor gift them a gift.

00:18:32
Speaker 4: Come on, ideally, just give me money anyway. Okay, So we get this flashback that's accompanied by Amy reading a diary entry. We will get many of these throughout the movie. This flashback, we see Amy played by Rosamund Pike, and Nick meet for the first time at a party in two thousand and five, and they hit it off.

00:18:58
Speaker 3: They have and her our bantering.

00:19:02
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:19:03
Speaker 5: I was like, I felt so bad because I was watching it. I was like, man, I would have got caught because I was like, I was so it was so smooth and corny. But I was like, damn they tried into men. Is really a curse because I really would have been like, wow, he is so cool, he's so funny.

00:19:17
Speaker 4: He's not like the other boys.

00:19:19
Speaker 5: I was like, oh my god, he actually cares what I think. We like, we hit up and the next thing you know, he goes to me and then I'm like, what happened?

00:19:26
Speaker 3: And I feel like ben Affleck can really channel that for a guy that doesn't Oh wait, no, we can't go there.

00:19:35
Speaker 2: Wait, Caitlyn, do.

00:19:36
Speaker 3: You remember do you remember the Ben Affleck Rayah video that we used to really be into, where he would.

00:19:44
Speaker 2: Go, hey, it's me, oh for Riah's briefly obviously before he reunited with the love of his life.

00:19:55
Speaker 5: And I think this is.

00:19:56
Speaker 3: Also pre Anna to Armis, who we also talked about in a recent episode, because she was and she had the cardboard cutout of herself in ben Affleck's yard.

00:20:04
Speaker 2: He's really lived.

00:20:05
Speaker 3: But he was on Riah for a bit or some dating app and a woman he matched with was like, I don't believe you're Ben Affleck, and he sent her back this horrific front facing video where he said.

00:20:15
Speaker 2: Like, Sophie, it's me.

00:20:18
Speaker 3: You're just like whoa, I'm really on the Okay, continue, I am going to drop that video in the chat.

00:20:25
Speaker 4: Okay, So back in the present, Nick returns home to discover that his home has been vandalized and that Amy is missing. So two cops show up, Detective Bony, which what a silly name?

00:20:44
Speaker 2: What for a character?

00:20:46
Speaker 3: Okay, I did, I did, just it's at the very beginning, guys.

00:20:50
Speaker 4: Okay, yes, Detective Bonie and Officer Gilpin played by Patrick Fugut aka the kid from Almost Famous. So they start to Sam in the house and Detective Boney sees a poster for something called Amazing Amy and she's like, wait a minute, your wife is Amazing Amy. And then we get a flashback where Amy's mom and dad made their living by writing children's books about Amy, where they embellished her life and made her seem more impressive than she actually was.

00:21:24
Speaker 3: They like passive aggressively attacked her to the tune of millions of dollars.

00:21:28
Speaker 2: Yea, yeah, it's like proto like you two family vloggers.

00:21:32
Speaker 5: I was like, wow, really trailblazers in their field, but traumatizing their child.

00:21:38
Speaker 3: I liked thinking about how that would look with like other iconic children's characters where they're like, wait, are you married to Amelia Bedelia? And Ben Affleck's like, yeah, you can say that.

00:21:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm married to my wife, Madeline. She grew up in Friends.

00:21:59
Speaker 4: Yea wife, Hippi Longstocking. Okay, so her parents got very rich off these books, and now Amy has a trust fund. And then also the night where we get this flashback, there's this I think book release party and Nick proposes to Amy. Then we cut back to the present. Nick is at the police station. The cops are already treating this as a missing person's case, so they ask him some questions. They learn that she doesn't have any friends, that she doesn't have a job or have anything to do all day, and so the cops are starting to get suspicious. That night, Nick goes home to his sister Margo's place because forensics is like collecting evidence at his house, so he's staying there for a little while. We get another flashback where Nick and Amy are two years into their marriage and it's still perfect and amazing and they never fight or have any problems.

00:23:01
Speaker 3: That's the scariest That's one of the scariest ideas that the movie posits that a relationship could be.

00:23:07
Speaker 2: Like so great for two years, yeah.

00:23:11
Speaker 4: And they're still horny for each other still, that they're like having sex in the middle of a bookstore offensive.

00:23:20
Speaker 3: I was off, like, She's like, don't you know who I am? I'm Amelia Badelia. I get to fucking the store.

00:23:30
Speaker 5: Now I keep thinking about this is my husband?

00:23:32
Speaker 3: Do you know?

00:23:32
Speaker 5: Little critter? Big critter? Now adult critter?

00:23:43
Speaker 4: Okay. So then there's a press conference where Nick and Amy's parents, who have arrived, address just like kind of various things about this case. And then Amy's parents tell the police about various stalkers that she has had over the years wonder why, including a guy named Desi Collings. Also, forensics finds an envelope at Nick and Amy's house labeled Clue one, and it's one of the clues that Amy left for Nick for her anniversary scavenger hunt, and Detective Bony tells Nick that if he can solve these clues, it'll help her track Amy's recent movements and it might provide some clarity on the case. So he finds the next clue in his office where he teaches at a community college. There's also a pair of red panties that get discovered there and we're like, hm, whose are these? And then that leads him to the third clue. I mean, and now we're getting into national treasure territory where it's like this clue leads to another clue, and it leads to another clue.

00:24:53
Speaker 3: Would it make this story better or worse if Amy left a clue that was contingent on daylight savings times?

00:25:00
Speaker 5: I will never know. Yeah.

00:25:01
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it makes you wonder if this case maybe would have been solved faster if they could have just stolen the Declaration of Independence.

00:25:10
Speaker 3: Truly, I do believe that she is calculating enough to successfully kidnap the precedent. Yes, this is a case of like Amy has incredible skills and we just need to like give.

00:25:25
Speaker 5: Her a better place for them. Yeah, exactly, put her in the White House. I mean, just the patience she has. It's like, honestly, if I've lead anything from being a true crime voyeur, it's that if you don't have patients, don't even try to attempt like a long crime, because you'll get exhausted. That's why I just read, Yeah, she reads a whole diary, basically three hundred entries of make Believe Girl.

00:25:50
Speaker 3: It's why, Like, and then I cross checked in the book she's doing it even longer. It's like over a year of planning that goes into they just.

00:26:00
Speaker 4: Get a divorce that I honestly think that's what kind of rubbed me the wrong way about this story, Like the lengths that she goes to to like ruin his life and frame him for murder. I'm like, just like use your words, just say hey, I want a divorce by I have a.

00:26:19
Speaker 3: Theory about well not a theory, but like I feel Amy has this like real fixation on controlling a narrative because her life was defined by a narrative about her that was untrue and that she had no control over. Yeah, that she like will do anything to control a narrative.

00:26:39
Speaker 4: That makes sense in any case. Uh, Nick not really fit, discovers the third clue at his father's house, but he doesn't tell Detective Bony about this third clue. We get another flashback. Some time has passed and Nick and Amy's perfect quote unquot marriage isn't quite so perfect anymore because the recession of like eighth nine has hit and they both lose their jobs. Amy's parents borrow most of the money out of her trust fund, so their financial situation is very unstable. They're arguing it becomes a gamer, right.

00:27:22
Speaker 5: Truly set again. I was like, I get it, Like it's like, like sick, She's really right this diary for the girls.

00:27:28
Speaker 3: Like yeah, she's really pushing every and like yeah she's she's pushing a lot of buttons where he's like, what do you mean I'm a gamer?

00:27:38
Speaker 5: Because you don't trust me?

00:27:41
Speaker 4: No, no, we don't. So back to the present, Amy's parents have set up this like find Amy headquarters and this find Amy hotline and Nick shows up and he's kind of like schmoozing with people, and everyone's starting to feel like Nick doesn't seem upset enough that his wife is miss his wife is missing, so he's like seeming more and more suspicious. Then we get another flashback, another diary entry from Amy describing how they moved to Missouri, where Nick is from, to take care of his sick mother, but Amy feels that Nick is not thrilled that she is there with him. Back in the present, we get a big reveal that Nick has been having an affair with a young woman named Andy played by Emily Radikowski. So the plot thickens. Oh and you thought that was thick, Well, wait for this another flashback slash diary entry where Nick and Amy get into an argument and he pushes her, so she is now terrified of him, and she tries to procure a gun for protection. So we're like, oh my god, Nick is violent, he's scary. He did kill her.

00:29:02
Speaker 5: I gotta say, being married to a woman named Amy and then having an affair with a near teenager named Andy is also a red flag. I was like, that's very You're not that smart. You're gonna slip up. It's gonna be bad. You gotta go a different, totally different first name.

00:29:18
Speaker 3: Like it's just like interesting that Nick seems so devastated by the loss of his job, but like doesn't really try to write again. Meanwhile, Amy's written one of the greatest novels of all time. It's called Gone Girl. Yeah, she certainly is keeping her skills sharp. But Nick, yeah, Nick kind of for all of what is awful about him. He's going through a lot. He lost his mama and I mean all this stuff. But I was just like Nick, instead of having a teenage girlfriend, like right, do your morning pages king, Like, come.

00:29:52
Speaker 5: On, the artist waster No, And it's so funny. The entire time I was watching the film, I was trying to tell myself because we know that the this is an unreliable narration, but it feels so close to like Nick's own douchary that it's like, well, how much of this is really what was kind of happening? Because the affair is real, the distance is real. And I think that one of the things that's interesting is that Nick never does enough to make me not think that he wouldn't push her, you know, like it's like he never does enough in his own you know, space to make me think that. So it is interesting how we're being coaxed to still believe at the end that he is capable of being violent in mind because we see him shows her at the very end of the movie. Yeah, so I'm like, well, if you weren't before, you are now.

00:30:42
Speaker 3: You are right, And it's like they're both. I think it's amazing that, like Gilliam Flynn manages to get this across even though you don't get the internal monologue of Nick where it's like they're I mean, obviously Amy is like like a generational, unreliable narrator, but Nick also like you see him constantly distant himself from his own actions and constantly justify his own bullshit. Yeah, to the point where you're like, I have no idea, who is right here? She really is amazing.

00:31:11
Speaker 4: She's amazing Amy, Jamie.

00:31:16
Speaker 2: Amazing James.

00:31:18
Speaker 3: I kind of want to get an amazing Amy poster for my house cut for the girls.

00:31:25
Speaker 5: All right.

00:31:26
Speaker 4: So, now it has been three days since Amy went missing and Margo finds out about Nick's affair with Andy. She's furious. We see throughout the movie, you know, Nick is confiding in her and like consulting her, and she's kind of helping him through this, but he had been lying to her about this affair. So she discovers it and now she's furious and she doesn't really know what to believe anymore. And then that night there is a vigil for Amy and Nick gives a speech, which is interrupted by a neighbor woman named Noel, who had claimed to the police to be Amy's best friend.

00:32:08
Speaker 2: And also the twist, it's Casey Wilson.

00:32:11
Speaker 4: Yes, you're like, whoa, And so she's yelling saying, what did you do to your pregnant wife, or rather your gregnant wife. It's true she she fakes a greg and everything. Yeah, So the cops are like, okay, Nick, the evidence is stacking up against you, because they had also found a ton of blood that had been cleaned up in the kitchen. The vandalism from this like alleged home invasion seemed fake. Nick is in a ton of debt, and it seems like he has made all these like big ticket purchases that he denies. He had also recently bumped up Amy's life insurance to one point two million dollars amateur seriously. And on top of that, the medical reports have just come back confirming that Amy was indeed with greg So it now really seems like Nick murdered his gregnant wife. Meanwhile, Detective Bony goes to Nick's dad's house in search of Amy's body, because she's like, I can't really make a murder case without a body. I gotta find this body. What she finds instead is Amy's diary a body of work. I mean, yeah, it's been partially burned, but it's mostly still intact. And so she discovers, you know, all of this writing from Amy saying I'm scared of my husband. At the same time, Nick solves the third clue that Amy left behind and he comes upon a wrapped gift box. It's also like in the wood shed where she had stored all of those like big item purchases that Nick had allegedly made, and so we're like, what's going on here? And then smash cut to Amy on the morning of July fifth. She is alive and well, she's driving away. Her voiceover is explaining how she faked her own disappearance slash death because she wants her lying, cheating husband to go to prison for murder. And we're like, wow, twist alert.

00:34:37
Speaker 5: Legends only.

00:34:39
Speaker 2: I like a car It's like a Carrie Underwood song. Dude, It's just like yeah.

00:34:44
Speaker 5: And I told my fiend too. I was like, yeah, do it.

00:34:48
Speaker 3: Yeah, It's it's a great David Fincher assignment because he will show you every single detail, whether you like it or not. Because I feel like it's very easy to be like, how is she even or organizing this?

00:35:00
Speaker 2: There's so many X factors.

00:35:02
Speaker 3: And then you see her scary calendar with the color coded post its and you're like Amy, Yeah, yeah, I mean so unfortunately, you gotta love Amy.

00:35:13
Speaker 5: I mean, you know, we love we love a villain dotagonist and like it's so funny. Well, then the post is where she's like, kill self question mark.

00:35:22
Speaker 2: I was like, she has a bunch of them on a bunch of different dates. Which month will it be? I was just like, you're so amazing.

00:35:29
Speaker 5: It's like.

00:35:31
Speaker 3: Wrong, Yeah, it's true what they say about Amy, She's amazing.

00:35:36
Speaker 2: Oh God, she's a planner and I respect that.

00:35:39
Speaker 5: I love them.

00:35:40
Speaker 4: You're great, Yeah, such a planner.

00:35:43
Speaker 3: I just found it so satisfied when she like rips the last kill self question mark posted off the calendar, I'm like, ah, it's so great, so good.

00:35:55
Speaker 5: Okay.

00:35:56
Speaker 4: So we get a series of flashbacks showing how she did this, how she accomplished this, like framing where she befriended Noel, that neighbor woman, so that she could tell her stories about her husband's violent temper. She also stole her pregnant pee so that she could fake her own pregnancy. She also purposely racked up credit card debt. She put her own blood on the floor and then cleaned it up and did it very poorly on purpose, and wrote this diary where part of it is true, like the early stories about them, like getting together and falling in love are true, But then she just started making things up about his violent tendencies and things like that. Then she's says something like Nick fell in love with a version of me that I was pretending to be. I was pretending to be cool girl. I was not like the other girl's girl. And that's something I want to talk about more because I wish we had gotten more of that in the movie and we don't really but.

00:37:09
Speaker 3: Anyway, God, yeah, and then we'll have an adaptation to talk about that too, because there's just I mean, it doesn't change the story meaningfully, but they just she cut out a lot of her own, like banger lines.

00:37:19
Speaker 4: Anyways.

00:37:20
Speaker 5: Yeah.

00:37:21
Speaker 4: So then Amy changes her appearance. She dyes her hair, she puts on glasses, she gives herself a black eye, and then she rents a little house somewhere in this like kind of small housing community place. She meets her neighbor, Greta. Meanwhile, we cut back to Nick. He opens the anniversary gift and letter that Amy left him, where she implies that she's framing him for murder, but it's also like vague and cryptic enough that the cops would never like interpret the letter as evidence for that. So then he goes to defense attorney Tyler Perry.

00:38:04
Speaker 3: Legend, what was the last time we had a Tyler Perry dramatic jump scare. I feel like it wasn't too long ago.

00:38:11
Speaker 4: I know, we talked about this recently. What was the movie?

00:38:14
Speaker 2: It's the year of the Tyler Perry drama roll. I don't know. I know he's in Vice. What was the movie?

00:38:20
Speaker 5: The first? But my first Tyler Perry jump scare was Star Trek, like the yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, I was right. I was sorry because I was like that was I was like, what are you doing here? Like, you're not in a dress, You're.

00:38:35
Speaker 2: You're not the director of this movie. Why are you here?

00:38:38
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's gone girl. And then what else does he I mean, it happens like once every five years, just to keep you on your toes.

00:38:46
Speaker 4: Yeah, he's like, I'm not always medea. Yeah, sometimes I'm in Star Trek.

00:38:52
Speaker 5: When he rescued Megan and Harry from the British that was also one of his dramas, I know.

00:38:58
Speaker 3: And then you're just like, well, it's a shame that his labor practices are so abysmal, because I like being jump scared. I remember when he played Colon Powell and you're like, huh, oh my god, you know, this is my favorite Tyler Perry dramatic role jump scare by doing a good job. Yeah, everyone in this movie is doing a great job.

00:39:24
Speaker 4: Yeah. So Tyler Perry's character's name is Tanner Bolt and he agrees to defend Nick, and Tanner tells Nick to find this guy named Tommy O'Hara, who Amy had pressed charges against eight years ago. So Nick talks to Tommy O'Hara, who says that Amy had framed him for rape. Nick then also pays a visit to Dosy Collings played by Neil Patrick Harris, and according to Amy, they had dated in high school, she broke up with him, he harassed and stalked her, and then attempted suicide. But when Nick talks to Desi about that, Desi denies it and shuts the door in Neix's face. He was doing the Rose from Titanic line where he's.

00:40:14
Speaker 3: Just like, you're being very rude.

00:40:16
Speaker 2: You shouldn't be asking me this, and he slams the door.

00:40:21
Speaker 4: Bye.

00:40:22
Speaker 2: Wow, he doesn't deserve it, but you're right.

00:40:26
Speaker 4: Then Nick and his sister Margo get to work with Tanner to figure out Amy's game plan and how to unravel it and how to get people to like and sympathize and empathize with Nick. Meanwhile, Amy is still staying in this little housing complex somewhere in the Ozarks. She's pretending to be a woman named Nancy from New Orleans, and she's becoming friends with her neighbor Greta and this other guy, except that they see her drop a bundle of money, so they become suspicious and then they gang up on her and steal her cash. So now she's like completely fucked and desperate. So Amy arranges to meet up with Desi Collings. She tells him a whole story about how Nick threatened to kill her if she left she lost the baby, and so he sets her up in his secluded lake house. It's well stocked and very luxurious, but he seems very controlling, and it seems like he kind of intends to kind of trap her there and keep her there.

00:41:33
Speaker 3: Right and again it's like it calls I don't know, like what this movie does so many times. So well is like Amy is lying to an extent, but by how much because based on the behavior we see him display, like it seems like, you know, hit, his whole thing is my protection of you is contingent on my.

00:41:54
Speaker 4: Yeah, yes, yeah, So basically everyone in this movie is an awful person. Yeah, okay. So back in Missouri, Tanner Bolt is encouraging Nick to go public with the fact that he was having an affair with Andy and acknowledge that he was a cheating jerk, so that they can get ahead of the story before Andy goes to the cops or the press.

00:42:17
Speaker 3: Because Tyler Perry knows what Emily Radakowski's gonna do. He's got her number.

00:42:23
Speaker 5: Dramatic timing.

00:42:24
Speaker 4: Yeah, so they're trying to get ahead of the story, but it's too late because right as Nick is about to appear on this kind of like Dateline twenty twenty type of show with a journalist named Sharon, Andy goes public with the affair. But nonetheless, Nick gives an amazing interview with Sharon and it seems like he's going to be redeemed and it works. People see the interview and they're like, Wow, that was so raw and honest, and like, maybe he's not such a bad guy after all. But then the police find what they think is the murder weapon with Amy's blood on it, which she obviously planted there to make him seem guilty, and so he's arrested. Meanwhile, Amy is still at Desi Collings is feeling trapped, so she stages a scene to make it look like he raped her, and that night she coerces him into sex and then slits his throat and kills him. Then Tanner bails Nick out of jail. Some time passes as they await trial, until one day, about a month later, Amy shows up at their house. She's all covered in blood, presumably right after she killed Desi. She tells the police about how Desi kidnapped her, trapped her at his lake house, raped her repeatedly, but she was finally able to kill him and get away and return home. And so now Nick and Amy are like back at their house and Nick is like, you're a liar and a scary person and I'm leaving you. And Amy is like, well, you can't do that. That's not gonna look good. Yeah, And then they do these various TV interviews and things where they're both pretending to be in love in public and then in their private lives. The dynamic is so weird and just bizarre. And then one day she's like, by the way, I actually am pregnant. Now I'm pregnant now sorry, and then Nick realizes he's even more stuck there, and he feels like he has no choice but to stay and raise the baby with her, even though she's a lying, manipulative, so seopath the end, and that's.

00:45:00
Speaker 2: What we call marriage.

00:45:05
Speaker 4: There's a line where he's like, why are we trying to make this work? We just resent each other and try to control each other, and she's like, well, that's just marriage, baby, and it's like, yikes.

00:45:16
Speaker 3: That's very, very scary. And I also just like I don't know. I was like, what is Gillian Flynn's writing process? And she's like, I work in a basement. I was like that tracks, that tracks. It feels like you wrote.

00:45:30
Speaker 2: This in a basement. Good for you.

00:45:32
Speaker 4: Yeah, let's take another quick break and then we'll come back to discuss. And we're back.

00:45:49
Speaker 3: Boy, oh boy, gone girl, Oh gone girl, And.

00:45:53
Speaker 4: Again we are we are not gone girls anymore. We are back.

00:45:57
Speaker 3: We're back women, We're back friends were shooting start. Can I just share the lines from the cool girl dialogue that didn't.

00:46:03
Speaker 2: Make it in the fun?

00:46:05
Speaker 3: Yeah?

00:46:05
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I can't. Okay, I have it pulled up.

00:46:08
Speaker 3: Okay, there's first of all, uh it's a little heavy on the hot dog slander for years, truly whoa. But I found that the hot dog slander was removed for the film, So I have to imagine that Gillian learned from her mistake, got a lot of feedback from the hot dog girl lobby, and was like, I admit I was wrong to say that, let's keep hot dogs out of it. So things that are added. So this is an extension of what's there. 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 bear, loves threesomes and anal sex and jam's hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she's hosting the world's biggest culinary gang bang, while somehow maintaining a size too, because cool girls are above all hot. Okay, here's another one. You are not dating a woman. You were dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by social awkward men who'd like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I think this line is awesome and belongs in the movie, But I mean the meeting comes through and then it ends 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 flock someone else because I like strong women as code for I hate strong women.

00:47:32
Speaker 5: Bars.

00:47:32
Speaker 2: So there's there's a lot going on in this.

00:47:35
Speaker 3: I mean, and this this has been you know, analyzed and talked about and quoted at nauseum for well over ten years. Now, what I feel like is changed, and I saw like some criticism or just like commentary.

00:47:47
Speaker 2: I guess to this. To this effect is that in the movie.

00:47:53
Speaker 3: It mainly and I think princess it speaks to your point of like how Amy mistreated and manipulated woman is taken out. Most of the stuff that stays in is what's critical of men. What is kind of taken out is Amy's internal criticism of women, because the full cool girl speech in the book seems to be coming down pretty hard on women who quote unquote cater to this fantasy, just as hard to the men.

00:48:21
Speaker 2: That kind of slurp it up. Yeah, they're both misogynists.

00:48:24
Speaker 5: And I think, you know, I think one of the hardest things about like discourse about books nowadays is that, like there's this assumption that the narrator is supposed to always be the voice of reason, which I don't know where that has come from, because it is as a creative of the Lilita podcast, you are aware that like that is just not how fiction works often. And I think that the thing about Gone Girl is that it became so ubiquitous that the very worst kind of people absorbed it and use it to play into their own sexist narratives while ignoring that like the book is critical of sexism in its own ways. Especially, I think that what's difficult about Gone Girl is that there are women who really connect with Amy because of the valid things that she deals with in her relationship with Nick. And I think because women enjoy Amy, there became this desire to be like, but do you understand that she's a bad person. It's like, yes, we do understand that she's a bad person. We're not having a fight club situation where we don't understand the text. It is just sometimes nice to see an examination of that with a character who is bad enough to be like, okay, he did a and I want to destroy his life and I'm like, yeah, that's not a reasonable reaction. But it was nice to watch.

00:49:52
Speaker 3: And there's a lot of valid criticism of this movie as well. But I feel like it's like a lot of the stuff I was sing was like, why do women connect with it? You're like, it's just like cathartic, and like it's cathartic to see someone who is completely like I don't know, And I think to some extent acting out of her own privilege, because the character that Amy writes for herself is not judgmental. She writes herself as the cool girl, but you know, when we see how she reacts in actual situations that we are certain are happening, she is judgmental of Missouri in general, even though she writes like, I'm a Missourian and I'm totally okay with that. I just wish he had asked me. That part feels true. What doesn't feel true is like she clearly hates being in Missouri. When we hear her talk about the Casey Wilson character, she thinks everyone there is like not as good.

00:50:47
Speaker 2: As her and not as smart as her. So it's like this dual reality of like Nick is a.

00:50:53
Speaker 3: Terrible husband who is making who like expects her to move there because he needs to move there. It's not a discussion. And then when they get there, he makes no effort to include her or make her feel like she belongs there. And then on the other hand, it seems like Amy genuinely doesn't like or respect anyone who lives there.

00:51:16
Speaker 5: Or his own family because he's not close to Go. And I feel like, if there's any character who you trust is probably Margo Go, because she's the one who's like when she sees Emma rad Cassie, she's like, what are you doing? You eat? Like everything that. I love how much she shades about that relationship at every regard because it's like it's so not okay, and I love that the text points it out all the time. But like she's not even close to Amy, like she has no roots in that community except these artificial ones. And I think to your point, the moment that I always think is when she's talking to Gretta about how when she saw Nick with Andy for the first time and how he does the lip thing on both of them, and Greta's like, that's the most discussing thing I've ever heard, and I'm like yeah, I was like yeah, because everyone has a story of like that realization of like not only being cheated on, but like having him do the exact same thing with another person. And I think that those very like n universal gut punches of like betrayal and expectation of like gender performance are just so there and clear that I feel like a lot of people connect with it. And I think the other thing that I think has been made clearer more recently as we've seen just like true crime really pop off, is that there are a lot of women who think these things, and like it's not because of Gone Girl. It is like a part of the way in which misogyny it becomes internalized and gets turned on each other because that's what it wants to happen. Because it's like, she hates Nick, but the way she talks about Andy is like so dehumanizing. She's like she's just like a men and night when she's got the huge cam on me tits, and I'm just like okay, okay, okay. She hates women right like you hate women? We get a girl, you're the coolest girl in the world.

00:53:09
Speaker 3: She hates and it's wild that I don't know like she It's why she's so frustrating, and I always just get I don't know, I get annoyed that a lot of the criticism around this seem to assume that, like the women who are enjoying this story can't cut through that and understand that, Like, particularly in the book, it's obvious that she doesn't like women.

00:53:30
Speaker 2: Or poor people like she does not she gets.

00:53:33
Speaker 3: I mean, it's she's in a bed situation obviously when she is robbed, because she's, you know, carrying around a stack of one hundred dollars bills.

00:53:43
Speaker 2: With her baddye job.

00:53:45
Speaker 5: I read it.

00:53:46
Speaker 2: But like you know, Amy set herself up for that one.

00:53:49
Speaker 3: The plot point itself, like does it look great that we have like very few poor people who appear in the story and then two of the only poor people we meet aggressively her. That plot point kind of sat a little flat with me, and it felt like that was an under examined point. But I feel like Amy. Part of why Amy is upset is like her money has gone. And also I think that like she does think she's better than people, and she's like, I can't believe I got outsmarted by poor people. Yeah, Like there's an element to that, and.

00:54:22
Speaker 2: I think to build off of that.

00:54:23
Speaker 5: The reason why I enjoyed that moment, and I think it's I think it's more present in the film than the book, is how Greta is able to realize the manipulation. And I think the thing that's really interesting is like you have like the class element and the racial element with Amy because she's like this new elite white woman who as soon as she's kidnapp it's instantly like we have to find her, which is like, you know, everything's being a reality around and she's so used to everyone believing her and trusting her and just taking her word for it. And when she meets the first person who's actually been a victim of domestic violence because from like an actual work and environment, that character is able to clock her instantly is like, oh, you're not from here. Your accent doesn't work, like you know, you don't respond to the name, Like for the first time, no one's buying her a bullshit because she's with someone who doesn't care about all the class and gender signifiers. That she usually uses to get away with things. And I think one of the issues with Gone Girl that people talk about is like the false rape allegations, which is very true to bring up because it is rare, less than one percent, and that's really important. And I also think it's important to recognize that like white women have had notorious cases of not lying about rape, but lying about murder. You know. I think of in like nineteen eighty three, there's a woman named Diane Downs who lied about a stranger shooting her three children and it was really her. There's Susan Smith, the infamous woman who lied about her kids being kidnapped by a black man, but it was really her who killed her children. You have the most recent like the Sherry Papani kidnapping hopes for this woman lying about being kidnapped by some Latino people. So I think one of the most the things about Gone Girl that is interesting is that it does call out the white privilege of women who think they can manipulate the system using their whiteness to do so.

00:56:20
Speaker 2: And I think that is very.

00:56:22
Speaker 5: Key to that conversation now that we can't also critique the use of sexual violence and how she manipulates that. But I think she's able to do that because people will believe her because she is a rich white woman. And it's not that she's lying about it out of a gender thing. It's part of her own narcissism of knowing that, oh, I can get away with it, and that's what's more important.

00:56:43
Speaker 4: Yeah, she weaponizes her white womanness, knowing that there's so much you know, media frenzy around oh when a white woman, especially one who is wealthy and classically beautiful, is missing murdered, the response of the police when a wealthy, beautiful white woman goes missing or murdered is far more like, yes, we must solve this case, versus any time a black or indigenous woman, for example, is missing or murdered, you know. And so she's like kind of weaponizing that and taking full advantage of it, knowing that she can probably get away with it if she plays her cards right. And I thought the movies not that the movie like necessarily explicitly examining that, but it's definitely a component of.

00:57:38
Speaker 3: The story, right, I mean, and Princess, I feel like you have I want to link to your true crime video in the description because it's like one of the clearest breakdowns.

00:57:49
Speaker 2: Of this unless you don't want us to. It's just like that's so sweet of me to say, but like, yeah, it is really good.

00:57:57
Speaker 3: It's really good, and it's I revisit it every couple months since it came out because it covered it's so comprehensive and it addresses all of these like really really messy intersections that I think that this, you know, and it's imperfect because it's one person trying to do it, but I think that, yeah, it's a slippery slope to set up a character who is bold enough to lie about rape and assault and murder. It's like you're setting yourself up to go through a thousand rounds of discourse if anyone ever reads your work. And I feel like that was something that was a huge point of contention when this movie first came out. That makes total sense, and most writers seem to sort of fall where we're talking right now of like, well, women across the board are often sexually abused and mistreated, but Amy is the person who is well placed to get away with something like this. They're like, without her whiteness and privilege, this falls apart.

00:59:01
Speaker 5: It doesn't work, And like Amy for all of My girl Boss and I you know, hashtag relatable queen. You know she's an abuser. She's an abusive person like this isn't someone who is just like plucked from an environment. She is a narcissistic abuser who in the same way that like you know, Tyler Dirdon, or like any other male villain that we in pulp culture enjoy despite knowing that they're a villain, she occupies that same space. But because she is a woman and the subject matter of the work, and especially I think because the writer of the books is a woman, I think if the right of the book was a man, we'd have a totally different totalation. Because Flynn calls herself a feminist, she and I think she knows and she understands the discourse that is around her work. But I think also as a writer, it's a thing of like, well, I also want to write villainous women and what that would look like. And I think we can discuss the pros and cons of that, but I would much rather discuss it with someone who has like the intellect as a writer to know what she's like, how she's putting that live wire together, than someone who was just doing it passively, right.

01:00:08
Speaker 3: So I think something that I found got like lost in this infinity discourse that took place in twenty fourteen and when the book originally came out in twenty twelve, is that, Yes, it is a risky thing to set up a story that is narrated by a woman who is lying about all these things, but Gillian Flynn does take care to put many other women in the story who feel many other ways, and in the character of Grete, like you're saying Princess has actually experienced this, And I don't know, I feel like there were sort of like alarm bells set off of like this book thinks that this happens all the time, But I feel like there is enough in the way that other women act and react within the story to indicate that, Like, even without reading Gillian Flynn's being questioned about this, it feels clear that Gillian Flynn understand and there is a full on gradient, you know, whether you like her work or not.

01:01:04
Speaker 4: Yeah, And just to share some quotes from her on that topic. So she identifies as a feminist, and she said this in response to people accusing her of writing misogynist caricatures of women, and of having a deep animosity toward women. She said, quote to me, that puts a very very small window on what feminism is. Is it really only girl power, and you go girl and empower yourself and be the best you can be. For me, it's also the ability to have women who are bad characters. The one thing that really frustrates me is this idea that women are innately good, innately nurturing. In literature. They can be dismissively bad, trampy, vampy, bitchy types. But there's still a big pushback against the idea that women can just be pragmatically evil, bad, and selfish. I don't write psycho bitches. The psycho bitch is just crazy. She has no motive, and so she's a dismissable person because of her psycho bitchiness unquote. And then she wrote on her website she like kind of admits that her female characters are quote not a particularly flattering portrait of women. Fine by me. Isn't it time to acknowledge the ugly side? 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 unquote, so you can think about what you'd like, but you know, she has a firm point of view on that, And I tend to agree that, you know, this idea that just because women are like socialized to be polite and sweet and nurturing, doesn't mean that all of our personalities manifest that way, and that we don't have the full capacity for like any type of behavior or any type of personality and any type of context that would lead you to be the type of person who would do all the things that Amy ends up doing so.

01:03:26
Speaker 5: And I also think, you know, as a society, but you know, we so often want nuance in engaging roles for women, and then when they happen, we kind of discourse them to death for better or for worse. Like I definitely I'm pro discourse. You know, I love reading all the salt Burn takes because I'm yeah, we're a part of it, you know, like, yeah, it just it Sometimes it goes to a point where it's like, rather than just discussing like the finer points, it becomes a indictment on Jillian Flynn as like a woman writer and like she's secretly a misogynist, and I'm just like, why because her books contain bad female characters. That's an un that's an unrealistic standard to hold to somebody, especially when like they write mystery thrillers. It's not like they write like it's not Colleen Hoover, you know what I mean, Like it's nothing. They're writing like her novels imbued with like abusive behavior. It's very much like these dark gothic stories with women at the center of it. Whether we like it or not, I think that's more of what we need. And you know, I think when it comes to like this isn't a feminist movie, and that's okay. It is literally about privileged people fighting over each other when they should have just gotten a divorce. It's fun, it's engaging, and I and I also resent that because of movies like Fight Club and all the other like movies and books that CIS men largely misunderstand. There is this idea that we as CIS women are all so misinterpreting our like nihilistic text. It's like no, no, no, no Amy deserves to go to jail, but we're gonna enjoy the ride while it's happening.

01:05:09
Speaker 3: Like Yeah, I think it's so clear she'll never like because she's protected by so much privileged, she'll never go to jail and she's chosen or she's you know, ended up with a guy who is like just like thick and like is not able to outsmart her, like isn't and that's bad. He's in an abusive relationship.

01:05:34
Speaker 5: But I don't know, Yeah, it's good storytelling, you know, it's not necessarily about having the perfect moral ending. I think, to me, what I enjoy critiquing is like the response to it. Because I don't know if you guys are familiar with the gone Girl hoax Valeo incident in California. What Okay, So let's see about six or seven years ago at this point, there was a couple that was suffered a home invasion in kidnapping. They were a couple in Valeo and they talked about how these men broke in wearing wet suits, tied them up, blindfolded them, kidnapped the FEMA member the couple and the police did not believe them. They thought that this was a gone girl hook, that's what they called it. They mocked them publicly. Found out she was telling the truth. They were telling the truth and it was a you scandal. They sued the department for like thousands of dollars because they maligned them all over by calling it a hoax, not even bothering to investigate it. They called her a bitch. The police department called her a bitch. Yeah, I'll leave a link to it in the chat and then you guys can share that with people. And I think about that all the time because I think to myself, like, if you live in a society that already believes that women are liars, then it doesn't matter that Gone Girl exists or not. That's just giving them a little bit, like did you see that movie? And I think that's the catch twenty two is like we live in a sexist, misogynistic, patriarchal society, and even when you have someone like Flynn making really engaging art about this subject, this is also part of their result and I despise it, but it is part of why the discourse happens, because like they called it the Gone Girl hoax, and I just remember reading about it and thinking, you know, it sucks that when we have these texts that choose to be dark with us at the focus. If we are bad that becomes part of the public miasma of how they already view us as people, which.

01:07:42
Speaker 2: Is something that happens with men, and it's very upsetting.

01:07:45
Speaker 4: Yeah, it reminds me of when Fatal Attraction came out and everyone hated Glenn Close, not just her character, but like hated her as a person because people saw that movie and they were like, well, she, I'm not used to seeing women this way. She's so scary and evil and what if a woman does that to me? And oh my gosh, And just like the reaction to this portrayal of a woman that was kind of I guess probably more common in like film noir era of like the forties, but then you know, we got it away from that in a lot of mainstream entertainment for several decades, and then when like, yeah, these like nineties thrillers kind of like erotic thrillers resurfaced, then everyone was like, oh my god, women can be bad, yi.

01:08:43
Speaker 3: Right, and like that, I sort of would to revisit Fatal Attraction, but there's like a whole you know, like conversation about but I feel like that's part of like even contrasting it with Gone Girl. It's like yes, you're getting a lot of discussion. But it's like so few of those thrillers were actually written by women and like meaningfully include them in the process, And it makes Gone Girl stand out because it totally changes the nature of the conversation that they're having. Also, I'm looking at this Vallejo piece, and the cop who basically perpetrated this hoax was they Detective Matt Mustard. So I'm just throwing that out there. I guess that we got a detective Bonie, we got a detective Detective Mustard. Are these clue characters wherever he is, I hope he's doing poorly?

01:09:38
Speaker 5: Yes? Yeah, But Caitlin, your point is so poignant because I recently rewatched Fayla Trashing because I was doing something about Don't Worry Darling like a year or so ago, and I ended up rereading Backlash, and just the way that Fayla traction went from being like a man being introspected about how he like ruined his own marriage became like this bitch is crazy. And when you read what fail attraction, I gotta tell you I'm with her until the body boiling, Like until that point, I was like, I see I see yeah, I'm not going to be ignored dad. I was like, that's right close, because how dare he mess with you like this? It's very much like that, and I think it ties into the cool girl monologue as well, because what it really is because you notice that these women are usually blonde, very traditionally attractive white women, and really what it is is that men being confronted with the anxiety that their sex toy object woman could kill them because they love to call women crazy, they let to say, oh my crazy is blah blah blah, but like they did that she could actually be quote unquote crazy is their biggest nightmare to be in the reverse side of having to worry about violence being done to them by a person or a body that they usually see as not a threat. It's like, all of a sudden, the thing that you just want to use as a come dispensary is like, no, actually I want things from you, Like I think that's kind of the thing about even with Gone Girl, where she was like he stopped trying and then I had he had to go, and I was just like, man, you really do stay around for a long time that he stopped trying. You're like, maybe they'll try again tomorrow.

01:11:14
Speaker 2: Right, And it's like, I don't know. That's like part of what's so cathartic about it. It is just seeing someone being.

01:11:18
Speaker 3: Like I mean and again it's like and none of that makes her loss of an abuser, but it's the two things. Anytime two things need to be true, it's gonna result in a lot of difficult conversation. I have a quote on because I was interested in it, Like Rosamund Pike is so incredible and love her. Oh my gosh, she was nominated for an Oscar, I think very rightly so, so I just wanted to see, like what her take on Amy was when she was prepping for the role, and she had a really interesting quote, Yeah this is back in twenty fourteen, in like how she was contextualizing how Amy gets to where she's at. She says, quote, I always think that people who have the hardest time in the spotlight are the people who have unearned fame, like the girlfriends of people who are famous, or people who become figures of attention not through their own merit. And that's what Amy has. Because she's the subject of these books. She's not only the subject, but it's like she's been given a fictional twin who's better than her, more accomplished than her, more popular than her, and more loved than her by her own parents. That's a recipe for narcissism right there. Because you're entitled and you feel inadequate. Then that makes a very insecure adult who simultaneously has very high expectations of themselves and others. That for me was my end to the character. And I think, like that makes a lot of sense. And even I don't know until I read that quote, I was like, oh, yeah, Like Nick has an actual twin, Amy has this like sort of phantom limb of this fictional Amy that doesn't actually exist. She's always had difficulty connecting with people. And again just going back to the idea of like Amy has never controlled a narrative in her very privileged life, but you know everything that sort of happened to her, her life has been guided by other people. And with Nick, you know understandably, like if you're parent are sick and you need to move home, okay, but you have to have a discussion with your spouse about that. You can't just tell them we're going and then leave them to rot. In this ugly assmic mansion. Sorry yeah, uh so, uh Meryl, Well that's great, But yeah, I mean I think that like Amy is very well set up for who she is. I also feel like there is this stereotype, but I also have met people who have this experience of like just being raised by psychologists and therapist. You always end up with just an interesting person who maybe you wouldn't guess was raised by mental health professionals. And I say that with love, But yeah, I mean, I think like criticism of Amy sometimes feels like it's taking place in a vacuum, as if you're not given a lot of context on not just how she gets from A to B in a very extreme way, but how the world enables it. And again, I know that that starts as slippery slope, where like I know that having it suggested that like a woman can use a fundamentally misogynist world to bend to their will is not true. But I think in the context of this story, Gilliam Flynn does a good job of setting up how for this story it works. Prinstance, I'm really interested in your feelings on how this movie interacts with like true crime media and how these stories are reported.

01:14:42
Speaker 5: Okay, So I got into true crime mostly because I used to watch twenty twenty in my room by myself, because I was that kid. And I remember watching the Amanda Knox twenty twenty docs and just being like.

01:14:53
Speaker 2: What do you mean there's no DNA?

01:14:55
Speaker 5: Why is she in jail? And that only happened to black people. And I think Amanda Knox being convened did for being awkward in the public eye of Italy has always stuck with me because I think that's so indicative of how true crime works. I think with Nick, even though he definitely has some shady aspects to him, the panopticon level of attention that he got for just doing like smiling too much, and I think about too like when that picture happens, someone says smile at him and he just responds.

01:15:26
Speaker 2: Like a doberman, and I'm like, what even his idea?

01:15:29
Speaker 5: And just like you know, the people coming towards him and trying to be like, hey, like how can we help you, and him trying to be polite, but that sees people going as like, well, he doesn't seem sad enough, and that happens so often, usually with women. And I think what's interesting as well, is that like Nick on paper and especially how Amy writes him in the journal has all the makings of a family annihilator. Girl. It's like the debt, the loss of a job, the income being only in the woman's name, like a baby on the way. Those are all like classic family annihilator like tropes, which you know she probably write in one of those books she was reading.

01:16:08
Speaker 2: And so it interests out, Oh my god, her little Skelter, her little library.

01:16:14
Speaker 3: I also, oh my gosh, how much that people in the movie interact with media to craft this narrative, Like Amy knows what's going to work.

01:16:22
Speaker 5: Yeah, Also that she shows no one checked out her library card or whatever, because like he didn't see that she was ordering Helter Skelter and all these other books, like what's that clicking, Missouria? Okay.

01:16:32
Speaker 4: Also I have another little plot hole where Okay, we learn that there's a neighbor whose name is Watchful Wally, implying that he's like very snoopy and like always kind of like watching them and watching their house. He's the guy who calls Nick and is like, your door is open and your cat's outside. You might want to check on that. And that's how like Nick ends up discovering that this like Home and Asian happened anyway, watchful Wally, where were you when Amy was leaving the house on July fifteenth? It seems like you were right there having a watchful eye. How did she seek a watch undering a watchful.

01:17:16
Speaker 5: I bet she had him under surveillance. I bet she had like a secret camera. I just gee her too much credit. I'm just like, he's just that good.

01:17:23
Speaker 3: She did kind of think of everything, so she really I also like the fact that Nick, again Nick a victim of abuse and objectively a bad husband. Yeah, which you know, I trust our listeners to be able to understand that. But the fact that he all he like from the beginning, when he's first asked by the detective like, well, what is she into? He's like, she's a big reader. I'm like, oh, yeah, of her murder library.

01:17:49
Speaker 4: She's like.

01:17:51
Speaker 3: Reading to plan to ruin your life. You just didn't notice the genre she was heavily trafficking in.

01:17:57
Speaker 2: Sure just signed that.

01:18:00
Speaker 5: I cannot explain to you the ways in which that, Like, if anyone asked me this sign, oh do you want to like up your insurance?

01:18:06
Speaker 3: No?

01:18:06
Speaker 5: Who are you I would ask like as like absolutely, I don't care about insurance. I want everything to be given to the government when I die. But that's the true crime angle, is like the fan fare, and also that there's so many women around because there has been like everyone's in a true crime, but definitely women especially get put the forefront of those situations, and like Noel constantly like putting herself into conversation, the Nancy Grace XP, who is just hitting here, like what is this man doing? And I'm just like all of it kind of just shows the farce of thank you. It all just kind of shows the farcical nature of it and how it's never based on facts or a total inventory of information, but just the play by play moments of like intense emotion of like this innocent young white woman. They don't say that, but that is the path of it is missing and we all just need to galvanize and protect her. And her husband is being very suspicious because he's not sad. And I think all of those things are stuff that you saw in the dep Herd case of like who's more charismatic, who looks like they're being their their most authentic self, And how Nick is able to convince everyone that he's genuine by giving a highly curated, highly you know, feedback looped interview that he's prepped for for a significant amount of time, and everyone's like, Wow, he's he's a good man, Savannah. The media really manipulates and warps the way that we via that kind of information, and it wants us to view it at the most surfaced level thing. And that's why people go to jail when they should most of the time. And that's why we had, you know, with the Gabby Poto incident, what that play by play wait it happened online did, besides being super toxic, was it left a lot of evidence of people who assumed, based off of nothing, that she was an abusive person, only to find out that she had been murdered by her partner.

01:20:10
Speaker 2: Which is typically what happens in these situations.

01:20:13
Speaker 5: But even amongst other women, there is this internalized misogyny that is so quick to say that it is feminist to say that women can also be bad people, and it's like, yes, However, we live in a society and like, when a situation like this happens, typically it's these ways until proven otherwise. And I think it was River Kwan who wrote a very good article about this during the deb Per trial, which is like assummation of it is basically saying that, like, we are at a place where people want to believe that we've moved past the point of needing to believe women because the default is believe women, But the reality is we've never even started to believe women.

01:21:00
Speaker 3: Oh god, yeah, well, because that's like what's so difficult about having this conversation. And I know that our listeners are like media literate and competent, and it's like, I don't know, there did feel like an element of like, if you enjoy and want to interact with this, you are endorsing the reality in full that's presented, where it's like you're total like we all know on this gorgeous zoom call that women by and large do not lie about this, and that the way that media is presented is interesting to me. In this movie, I feel like there are moments that are sort of editorialized to a point where I don't know. I mean, I think that Amy anticipates media and the world underestimating her, and she studies the narratives that have worked and perpetuated in the past. I think this movie really smartly avoids social media because that's another whole, you know, wormhole that you would have to narratively unpack. But in terms of like the Nancy graces of the world and the exploitation with which these stories are handled, like Amy studies the narratives that are true and have happened and take advantage of them in order to sort of pull this off. And it's like, I also think that if you leave Gone Girl being like all women are doing this, that's an incredibly poor read of the movie. That happens all the time, and often with David Fincher movies specifically. There's absolutely people that leave this movie thinking like women are bitches, women are liars, just as they let Fatal Attraction feeling that way, and to some extent, I mean, I don't know, I feel like we've sort of been through the ringer of having this discussion over the years of like well as a writer, especially Gilliam Flynn, as a woman writing this, how much can you hold her accountable for someone watching this movie and leaving with.

01:22:57
Speaker 2: A brain dead take about it.

01:23:00
Speaker 3: I don't know. I think we recently had this conversation about Goodfellas where you're like a million people leave Goodfellas with the wrong idea about what the movie was about. But if you're watching it, it's clear what it's about. I don't know, it's true, it's true.

01:23:15
Speaker 5: It's a large or problem, and like I just started recently watching Breaking Bad to prepare for hashtag content, and I'd always heard about like, oh, yeah, Skyle's a bitch, but that I've also been a live long enough as I have seen like, but people just don't know how to read her and she's technically good. Later within the first season, I'm like, of course Skyler is right. He's being like egotistical and insecure about like his balls and his money because of the cancer. What's not clicking, and what's not clicking is just a resentment towards how do I put this? I think when it comes to that intercession of like race and gender, I feel like, post to the twenty sixteen election, once it was released that a number of white women voted for Trump, it became this thing to be able to say, you see, how they're really the problem, and all of a sudden it became an easy way to not talk about race and power and gender and how it intersects, but to make somehow white women the seventh season big bad of culture to pivot away from white men. And I feel like things like Gone Girl, even though it came out before then, are used to uplift that idea. There is this desire to do woke misogyny by attacking white women de facto for their like white feminity and like historical indictments, while ignoring that it was against people of.

01:24:40
Speaker 2: Color and not against white men.

01:24:42
Speaker 5: You know, it's like if we stop using black and brown experiences to justify your hatred of white women. But I think that's a part of it is that, like a lot of people dislike white women because of their own power, and they become a symbolic way to attack all women by putting them at the top of the at the totem pole and then having them be the ones in which she put all that harm towards. Because you look at any wife in any of these shows, their biggest crime is being a hypocrite or being slightly nagging. They're like, they're worse and the murderers. I'm like, that's not true, right, Camilla Soprano is not as bad as tell you. A soprano. You cannot tell me that because she makes ZD and wanted to have sex with a priest one time, that that means that.

01:25:28
Speaker 2: She's among us who.

01:25:32
Speaker 5: Yeah. So I think it's all connected to just a way in which that we're still trying to process talking about all these things, but the loudest, most un intellectual conversations will always rise to the surface. And I think also with women, this ties to Barbie and something like and Ley Wonder Woman. There is this need to critique white women from misogynistic framework that has really trickled into film, and it's frustrating because it's useless and not helpful, and it just feels like a way of just having men use the language of diversity to be horrible sexist. And yeah, Gone Girl is like one of those texts that they used to to embody that.

01:26:20
Speaker 4: And I have to kind of assume that one of the reasons that this movie and the book faced the backlash that it did. As far as Gillian Flynn being accused of how dare you write a bad character because women are good in a way that like completely erases and disregards the idea that women and fems again are full human beings capable of the full range of human emotions, behaviors, experiences, etc. Kind of ignoring that. I wonder if the reaction was the way that it was because we're just so used to as far as like you know, pop culture movies, TV, books, et cetera, the most popular depictions of women have just been so flat, so one dimensional, so underdeveloped, you know, the love interest, the damsel blah blah blah. That when you do see a woman that is a departure of those types of like stock characters, and especially one that behaves badly and is abusive and is a liar and manipulative and all that kind of stuff, no one knows how to handle it or interpret it. Or you know, we're so used to seeing women this way on screen and then assuming that women are just probably that way in real life. And again, we live in a society, right, and our perceptions are in misogyny external and internal, really warp perceptions of of the behavior of women.

01:28:03
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it feels ongoing still this and again a lot of the criticism of centering a woman abuser makes sense to me in the context of when the movie was released, But there is sort of this feeling of like I think sometimes it's positioned as like, but women just got to be characters.

01:28:26
Speaker 2: You can't make them evil right away, you have to, like, and I think it.

01:28:30
Speaker 3: Does sort of mistakenly like I feel like there's a way where you could see it as this like still patriarchal thinking of like, well, we just got allowed, we just became considered marketable, like you know, less than twenty years ago, so we should spend a couple of decades making movies about how awesome women are and how But again, it's like sort of catering to patriarchal thinking because theoretically every kind of women, with every kind of character, that's the equity standpoint, because men have been behaving horrifically in movies since the beginning of time and are always praised for it, and a lot of those movies are amazing. But it's like, yeah, centering a woman who is objectively a bad person and we have a lot of information about her, it felt like to some extent people were like, well, this is gonna set us back actually, because there is not a redemptive arc for her. So in like the movie sense, it feels it's kind of frustrating and that's complicated because you have to layer it with how many men go to see Gone Girl and leave with the wrong message. I don't think that that's Gillian Flint's problem necessarily, and so I don't know. Ye also watch more movies if you think that.

01:29:49
Speaker 5: I mean not to say that there isn't say that there isn't like definitely a gender issues, but like you think Betty Davis would just playing likable women her entire career, right because she was not and she got two oscars. Baby. Yeah, I totally get what you're saying. And I think that's been a that's always a narrative of like, well, we just got this, so let's try and wait, you know, ten or so five years. And I get why that happens. It's just cycimical because like one bad person doing a bad thing does not completely flip the script, you know, like one notable case of like a false assault allegation does not erase the countless others of how statistics work. And yet we're like when The Joker came out, you know, there was so much whinging about like what it would do to like society and culture and what did it do? Absolutely nothing except Get Walk finally Get Jaquim in Oscar that you should have gotten ten years ago. That was the extent of its impact, Like we don't need to like enough, let women be bad, let women plan their man's demise in peace?

01:30:58
Speaker 2: Okay, cop, are you a detective Mustard?

01:31:04
Speaker 3: Like it's so yeah, And I think it reinforces the idea that every movie that centers a woman has to be about feminism, and that is also an extremely limiting idea, or every movie that centers a woman has to be an overtly feminist movie in order to be considered successful.

01:31:25
Speaker 4: Even just this like subgenre of women seeking revenge, Like I'm fascinated by the like hell hath no fury like a woman scorned premise and the many many movies that we get kind of based on that premise, many of which we've covered.

01:31:44
Speaker 2: Just did Revenge, bur we did.

01:31:46
Speaker 4: Our second revenge, per I don't even what did we cover on the first revenge? So many I don't even know anyway, Yeah, we've examined a lot of them on the show, and there it stands to reason that they would all be pretty different movies coming at that topic with different angles and and this is just an entry in that subgenre that is quite different from many of the other ones. It's nothing like kill Bill or do Revenge or you know other ones that I can't remember.

01:32:23
Speaker 2: And that's a good thing, Like yeah, for sure.

01:32:27
Speaker 5: And also Revenge is like it's like one of the best things to watch and me, like Shakespeare did it and like everyone said it was okay when he did it, So like, what's the big deal. Why can't Jillian do it? Why can't Jillian have a toxic person ruin their loved ones' lives, you know?

01:32:42
Speaker 3: H Yeah, And she also recently started her own book, Imprint to to to spread the good words, so I'm.

01:32:51
Speaker 2: Excited about that. Yeah.

01:32:52
Speaker 3: I feel like in terms of like how because I did, I have a distinct, like Twitter memory of Gillian Flynn's quotes about being a feminist and being the author of Gone Girl. I remember that and how heavily discussed that was and I think it's aged pretty well she is. Yeah, And also I think like again, there should be and have been more stories about women and women who are unreliable narrators. I feel like you can't just let men be unreliable narrators. It's so limiting and that's no fun.

01:33:28
Speaker 2: It's just no good for real.

01:33:30
Speaker 5: And I will say on a shallow note, like you know, as a millennial in the situationship era, this movie really does hit different.

01:33:38
Speaker 2: It's like, wow, uh, it really do be like that sometimes.

01:33:42
Speaker 5: And I think that's the thing as well as like a lot of like female revenge movies do live at this, Like I think of like do revenge what you just mentioned live with this indition of like the frustration it is to like be a woman who has to be nice in the face of like bullshit because you can't because like if Amy could just like cancel him on Twitter, I think she would have just done that. Like if she could have just done that, she would have just wroughte a long, expensive tweet thread. But she would be a bad person if she did that, because then people would pull up her own tweet history and then she'd have to be canceled. It's like, no, I have to plan my death so that I can always win. I love, I understand Nick Dunn is a bad person. One of two hundred and fifty. Yeah, like like a notes app.

01:34:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I guess my.

01:34:34
Speaker 3: Like on this because it's like it's so funny we've put taking for almost two hours, and we've really only talked about the like controversy around Gone Girl and how it's like received. But like, I think that this movie's success does not mean that we shouldn't continue to get movies about more diverse women doing bad stuff. I want to see a movie about it, every kind of woman doing something horrible. And this movie is good, and we have a lot of other women in the story to bounce what's going on with Amy and Nick around. One thing that I thought didn't work as well for me in the context of the movie versus the book, because when we hear Nick and Amy talking about Andy in the book, they're talking about her, they're describing her to sound like kind of a I think that like she's she comes off in the movie as bimbo who is really naive because of her youth, because of all of this stuff. And I think that Emily Radakowski, who has gone on to have a whole career, including a book that I have not yet read, but that sort of addresses her personal history, being heavily objectified and thought of as a brainless bimbo. So if we have people who have read that, please let us know, but that is like who she's cast us here, She's in a prestige movie. I think that it's like the signifier of Emily Radikowski in twenty fourteen. We're not supposed to think she's smart. It's almost like a cultural signifier of how she was viewed at this time. And I don't think the movie does very much to challenge that. It just sort of does present to the point where Tyler Perry can anticipate what she is going to do.

01:36:12
Speaker 2: She is fully upon.

01:36:14
Speaker 3: She doesn't seem to have any sort of like I don't know. I think she was sort of uncritically presented as a brainless bimbo. And you do get moments where it's like, well, Nick is lying to her and that's obvious and we know that that's bad. And you know, Amy is outwardly misogynistic towards her when she's watching her on TV. But it also feels like there could have been a few small things done to make her more of a person.

01:36:42
Speaker 2: I don't know.

01:36:42
Speaker 3: I don't think she came off very sympathetic when she is like in a terrible situation, she fortunately, I mean, the only good thing is that she is an adult at the time of the relationship. But it's like she's right, she's like twenty if that, I don't think Margo even believes that she like you know, is still completely connected to her family. She's I like the detail that she's like godspell rehearsal. I was like, go with Godspell, Like go with that, get out of this relationship, go vi a godspell, forget this ever happened. But like it's another way that Nick is a shitty person. He's abusing this power dynamic. And I feel like the story she like symbolizes is like, oh, Nick wants to be with someone who's like being replaced by a younger woman and being replaced by someone who's quote unquote unchallenging. And it just felt like the movie kind of went with that logic in a way that it felt like there could have been little things done to push back on mm hmmm agree.

01:37:39
Speaker 4: I think the way that also it goes pretty unchallenged where Nick suggests that maybe the perpetrator of this kidnapping and violence toward his wife was an unhoused person because there's a quote unquote serious homeless problem that you cops should check out, and is just like shrug.

01:38:01
Speaker 3: Well, but also I saw that as well, and then I also was like, well, everyone he's surrounded by would not push back on that, Like that's true. He's surrounded by cops who certainly like wealthy white suburbanites, so right, he's like he's surrounded by Nimbi's It makes sense that, Yeah, no one is saying anything, but yeah, I didn't think that was the worst choice. But again, it's like there's stuff with privilege that is like it's all put out before you, but the viewer is very much left to their own devices to tease out when people are acting with their own bullshit privilege.

01:38:39
Speaker 4: Right, No characters around him, you know, push back on him saying that, But then the unhoused people you see on screen are like drug dealer.

01:38:49
Speaker 5: You know.

01:38:49
Speaker 4: It's just like the same way that it doesn't challenge the movie. Yes, frames Andy.

01:38:55
Speaker 5: It's giving three billboards.

01:38:57
Speaker 3: And that yes, right, and have Margo who princess You alluded to this earlier. I think like Margo is the closest thing we have to someone with their head on and like connected to their brain, and it's working.

01:39:15
Speaker 2: Well for the whole.

01:39:17
Speaker 5: Movie, which was nice.

01:39:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not I feel like you.

01:39:20
Speaker 3: Need Margo to like justify how you, as an audience member are feeling. And also like I thought it was she was well written in that, like she wants to believe her brother. It is reference that they are both still actively grieving at their mom. She doesn't like Amy, but also her not like she says it at one point, She's like, just because I didn't like spending time with Amy doesn't mean I wish you were dead, Like I think she has like a pretty reasoned take on stuff and is the one crucially I think princess you said earlier, like who is constantly like this relationship with Emily Radakowski is fucked up. This is fucked up what you were doing. It's creepy, It grows, it echoes things that your father did that hurt you, Like what the fuck is wrong with you? And you're having sex with her when the eyes of the world are on you, like you are out of your fucking mind? And yeah, yeah, I just like Margo. I guess that that's what I have to say.

01:40:20
Speaker 4: Same, I love her too, Same, I'm rooting for her.

01:40:23
Speaker 3: And the very like cynical ending where Tyler Perry, you know, like Billy Flynn he's like, well, I'm catching a playing out of here. Uh, and you know the cars pull away, which echoes Chicago to be it echoes Ititanya where it's like the caravan moves on. Your moment is over and now you have to live the rest of your life. And you know, Nick is like, well, what am I supposed to do? And he's like, I don't know, like get a book deal, do a lifetime movie and call it a day, which, unfortunately, I think is something we are watching play out in real time again right now with Gypsy Rose Blanchard. It's like, I think that it's important that movies like this exist, and I think it also shows that it doesn't change very much, Like there's very very little. I mean, the mediums change. This movie doesn't touch social media at all, but the grind and churning of like, well, capitalize on your moment and the spotlight, no matter how creepy or horrific it is, because people.

01:41:22
Speaker 2: Are going to move on and you're to be left behind.

01:41:25
Speaker 3: And yeah, I don't know, that's sort of That's the only thing in Amy's logic that I don't understand because I'm like Amy, the caravan moves on, and then he could probably quietly leave you at some point, right, But whatever, I.

01:41:40
Speaker 5: Think she's trusting that he's I think because again, we don't believe that ben Affleck is from the gray state of Missouri. But it's supposed to be this idea that he's so salt of the earthman that he'll just never leave his sheill that he'll be caught in. It's like very heteronormative, toxic bullshit, which is like, you know, the strengths are not okay, so it's possible. Doesn't think. There's so many things working in Amy's favor that are fucked up, and it's like the straight stop being okay is one of them. Why privilege is the other one. But Nick is one Reddit thread away from freedom, you know, just got to get the details together.

01:42:14
Speaker 4: Yeah, he has to make his own escape plan, which he's not nearly as capable of as Amy is. To go back to Margo really quick. I also really liked her and the fact that she was presented as this very you know, like observant, level headed person with a good brain. That worked, although there were a few times where I wish she actually pushed back against Nick a little more, where there's a scene where he's just been interrogated by Detective Bonie. Again the character's name is Detective Bonie. You know, he got an earfull from I think his mother in law. There's this like different He says something like, I'm so sick of being picked apart by women. Oh also because god, yeah, because Missy Pyle is in the yeah, as missus Nancy Grace.

01:43:03
Speaker 1: Yeah.

01:43:03
Speaker 4: Right, And then she's you know, like accusing him of murdering his wife on national television. So he's just like, I'm so tired of being picked apart by women. And he's like, I just need you to like listen to me and not judge me, Margo, and she's like, Okay, I will, And it's like, I don't know, Marco, you should keep questioning everything your brother does.

01:43:23
Speaker 5: Yeah, I know.

01:43:24
Speaker 3: I feel like the way that I was able to get into, like, as a clearly smart person, why is Margo sticky around? I feel like I'm defending Gilliam Flynn way more than I anticipated. But like the fact that Margo does not seem to have a lot of people in her life outside of her family. She's recently lost her mom, her dad is fading, and she quote unquote just got her brother back after he was in New York for years. I feel like she's doing a lot of mental gymnastics to preserve this relationship because she doesn't have many, But I don't know.

01:44:02
Speaker 2: That was just how I read it.

01:44:03
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, I see that interpretation.

01:44:06
Speaker 3: Because he's also like he's being such an asshole. And it's interesting which moments she chooses and which she doesn't, because it also feels like her anger with the Emorta relationship is also motivated by the parallels that that shows with their parents, So that does feel like an attack on her as well in some ways, but other times she kind of rolls over for him, and heways bold of Missy Pyle to be like, I think the twins are having sex.

01:44:34
Speaker 5: Really, I know whoa whoa, And someone said sol recent like twin sess and then I was like, oh my god's and.

01:44:45
Speaker 3: Adding the little detail that I feel like is reflective of reality based on the Gone Girl in Vallejo incident, is that like one.

01:44:55
Speaker 2: Of the cops, which was who he was?

01:44:57
Speaker 3: Who and what almost famous kid?

01:44:59
Speaker 4: Oh fugit?

01:45:02
Speaker 3: Yeah, Officer almost Famous is watching Nancy Grace consistently and his investigation is informed by what she's peddling, and so it's like this horrible circle.

01:45:14
Speaker 2: That it just felt like that was like a little detail.

01:45:16
Speaker 3: That was a really smart comment on how you know, media and oppressive police forces are often just working.

01:45:26
Speaker 2: Hand in hand to get it wrong.

01:45:29
Speaker 4: True.

01:45:30
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I loved how the female officer always had something to drink in her hand. I love a hydrated woman.

01:45:37
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh.

01:45:37
Speaker 3: Yes, I had a list of this MOVIEE had really good product placement. We saw diet coke, we saw aspirin from CBS. We saw a king sized KitKat as a sign of liberation. She's when she's doing the cool girl speech, she's eating a king sized kit cat.

01:45:56
Speaker 4: And the implication that she's deliberately trying to like gain weight to make her more unrecognizable because you see her eat like a burger and a bunch of like drink soda and eat the yell like candy bars and stuff like that.

01:46:10
Speaker 5: I think it's I think it's supposed to be like, doesn't care about her weight anywere, because she talks about like you're supposed to like eat hot dogs, but say a size too. So I think she's like, He's like, and now I'm gonna eat every single kit cat that I didn't eat for five years of my marriage.

01:46:24
Speaker 3: Right, it was like straights for not a and and that like that's commented on later where I mean, if we haven't really talked about it very much. But the Neil Patrick Harris character, you know, did he deserve to be murdered? No? What is true about what we've been told about him when we meet him? I'm not sure what we know about him is that he is a very controlling person. Because when he meets her again and you know, sort of takes her back, like quote unquote, he thinks he's taking her back when she's asking for help and he says to her like, I need you to be you again, And he's like I need you to be cool girl again, because he's like, there's gym upstairs, lady.

01:47:02
Speaker 4: He buys your hairy yeah yeah clothes. And then yeah, when you see her a couple of weeks later, she's you know, blonde makeup on, you know, slim figure, et cetera.

01:47:14
Speaker 3: You know, I can't say I was sorry to see him go, and like and then and Neil Patrick Carris is really good. But I just want to quickly shout out there is Duncan Spawn, which I feel like Ben Affleck probably insisted on. It's it's Officer Bone or Detective Bonie who's drinking a large She's holding out a large styrophone dunks cup at the beginning of the movie, which I think, again, I'm like, you're not in Missouri, You're just not. You are in the suburbs of Boston, admitted. Is this the movie that Ben Affleck refused to wear a.

01:47:46
Speaker 2: Hat for? Okay, it is.

01:47:47
Speaker 5: I love that everyone makes fun of him for that, But as a New Yorker, I would never wear a Boston Red Sox hat. I would insist on it being something else.

01:47:55
Speaker 3: Well, and he also, I mean, Ben Affleck knows his audience. But okay, I'm sorry, I just wanted to revisit this because it's such a weird anecdote about this very serious movie. Ben afflex refusal. Okay, I'm pulling this from the Things dot com. Ben Afflex refusals to wear the Yankees hat for the film Gone Girl did shut down the production for four days.

01:48:18
Speaker 2: What that's obscene.

01:48:20
Speaker 4: That's ridiculous.

01:48:22
Speaker 3: Wait, okay, I know why he refused.

01:48:24
Speaker 2: Why did it?

01:48:25
Speaker 3: Okay, Ben Affleck says in an interview with The Times, I said, David, I love you, I would do anything for you, but I will not wear a Yankees hat.

01:48:34
Speaker 2: I just can't.

01:48:35
Speaker 3: I can't wear it because it's going to become a thing. David, I will never hear the end of it. I can't do it.

01:48:41
Speaker 2: And I couldn't put that hat on my head.

01:48:44
Speaker 3: And it's down production for four days. So okay, So Ben and David are in an argument. Now they stop talking to each other. So it's because the boys were fighting.

01:48:57
Speaker 5: Man, no straw, no wonder they run the country are the most broken.

01:49:04
Speaker 3: I can't believe that, because I was like, did they shoot it with the Yankees cat on that they had to reshoot it? No, the boys were just fighting, and so no one could work for four days because you were like rare. Men are amazing leaders of the free world.

01:49:22
Speaker 4: They're awesome. Millions of dollars while we're sharing a few fun little tidbits like that shout out to the orange cat that is the chillist cat in the world should have been the star of the movie. As far as I'm concerned, I think that's good. They were clearly not dog people. They were cat people through and through Yeah, I say that would love.

01:49:45
Speaker 2: One of Amy's.

01:49:46
Speaker 4: Anniversary clues that we see in a flashback is a Pride and Prejudice reference, specifically a reference to Jane Bennett guess who played Jane in Pride Prejudice two thousand and five.

01:49:59
Speaker 3: That that's wonderful.

01:50:02
Speaker 4: I love, and then a big barf peepe pooh pooh to the line where Nick tells Amy that she has a quote unquote world class vagina.

01:50:13
Speaker 3: In front of the press, in front of a bunch of journalists like seventh journalists.

01:50:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh god, I know.

01:50:21
Speaker 3: I kept going back and forth with like, because that proposal was also invented for the movie.

01:50:26
Speaker 2: And I was like, because I was like, would I like that? Would No? I would not like that.

01:50:31
Speaker 3: But look, I'm open to being told I have a world class vagina, but like in private.

01:50:37
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, or in a good roast, you know, like where it's where it's fitting.

01:50:42
Speaker 2: No, I agree with you.

01:50:43
Speaker 5: Jab. It was one of those moments where like I am so weak that I was like, oh yes, and I was like, oh wait, no, I forgot how the rest of this movie.

01:50:54
Speaker 3: Because again that's like Nick taking control of the narrative and like Amy is left to I mean, and she's happy about it, But I don't know. It's interesting. I was like, did Rasamund Pike, who narrated the Gone Girl audiobook this is for on my own time? Does anyone else have anything else they would like to discuss about.

01:51:13
Speaker 2: The movie Gone Girl? No, I'm good, I'm tapped out.

01:51:18
Speaker 5: I think I'm so, I'm Gone Girl.

01:51:20
Speaker 3: I'm I was here a woman now I'm Gone Girl. So does this movie pass the Bechdel test?

01:51:28
Speaker 2: Yes?

01:51:29
Speaker 3: He does a couple different ways. I'd be I honestly wasn't keeping super close tabs on it, which just shows how little that has to do with what the show is about at this point. But Marco and the detective speak many times we have what are we having?

01:51:44
Speaker 4: Amy and Greta?

01:51:46
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think those are probably the primary two dynamics that we have, Amy and Missy Pyle Nancy Grace, Like there's there are I don't. I just don't care about it for this one. Yeah, it doesn't seem very pro But what about our metric, Well, you mean the nipple scale, our scale where we rate the movie zero to five nipples based on examining it through an intersectional feminist lens.

01:52:11
Speaker 2: Yes.

01:52:12
Speaker 4: Wow, this is a tricky one because, as we've said, it's not like a feminist movie or like a movie that feels especially empowering for women. But it is I guess feminist in the sense that it shows a female character that is a bad person, and it presents that unapologetically. And as Gillian Flynn has said, like, feminism isn't just girl power girl boss like woo, who you go girl? It is acknowledging women and fems as fully formed people who are capable of everything. And so that's the big thing to appreciate about this movie for me, and I also appreciate and not to hand it to a male filmmaker, but I do appreciate that, you know, Gillian Flynn was brought on to write the first draft of the script, and generally, when that happens, it's understood that a professional screenwriter will then come on and rewrite the script and the you know, person who's the major creative voice behind the story won't have much creative autonomy after that kind of first draft.

01:53:36
Speaker 3: But which we've seen, I think the ones that hit for me on the off the top of my head where it's like stories allegedly about women that are swept out from under a woman showrunners. Two HBO shows it was like Big Little I Season two and The Idol were both iragially like written and run by women. And then at some point in the production the big man in charge came in and was like, allow me, I've got this, And what did those two things produce? Two horrible seasons of television? That's total craps.

01:54:05
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, so but Gillen Flynn stayed on board the whole time. You know, Fincher was like, you've done a great job, and he, by her account, seemed like he respected her vision and was very encouraging of her writing and her writing process and the various drafts that she wrote.

01:54:27
Speaker 3: So I just don't cross him about the hat. Don't cross this.

01:54:31
Speaker 4: He won't talk to you for four days. Yeah, mad, absurd, But yeah, I don't know. I appreciate that it examines, not super explicitly or closely sort of the like it does examine like the media frenzy, uh when white woman goes missing and is presumed dead and murdered. But you know, I guess there are just there are other movies who actually examined that more closely. From a like, Hey, why is the though? Why are we so obsessed as a society when a beautiful, rich white woman goes missing and we care so little when pretty much anyone else is presumed to be murdered? Kind of thing? But you know, it does present that to some extent.

01:55:14
Speaker 2: And I don't know.

01:55:16
Speaker 4: I don't know what to give this as far as the nipple rating goes, though, I know so it almost doesn't feel I.

01:55:23
Speaker 3: Must want to abstain.

01:55:24
Speaker 2: I'm like, I know, I don't know. I don't know.

01:55:28
Speaker 4: Can I pass? I'll give it look the cat, Yes, I'll give it one cat, one orange cat.

01:55:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't really know. Uh, I feel like we should try.

01:55:41
Speaker 3: I don't know, Princess, do you have a rating in mind?

01:55:44
Speaker 5: I'm gonna roll this D six and see what I can and see what it says. What do the gods think we should give this movie? Three nipples?

01:55:52
Speaker 2: Okay?

01:55:53
Speaker 5: I would say three and a half nipples sounds fair because I think that if I had a critique it as a film, I do think that it goes on a wee bit longer. I feel like after she arrives and I'm like, there's thirty more? Oh?

01:56:07
Speaker 4: Was it thirty more minutes.

01:56:08
Speaker 5: What are we doing here?

01:56:09
Speaker 2: I was like, Yeah, it did drag a little bit.

01:56:11
Speaker 5: And I do think that even though I understand it's use of it, the aggressive use of fade to black, it reminded me of in The Phantom Monace, where literally Lucas uses every transition in Windows Media Maker, like swipe this way, swipe that way. So for those two things, and I also think that while it's a very very good adaptation, I do agree with what Jamie said, it's a little extra missing that I think adds a little bit more nuanced to it, beyond the male anxiety. And for that, I will say three and a half nipples closed for but not quite Okay, Yeah, I was like three three and a half.

01:56:53
Speaker 3: I understand, like, and this doesn't account against the movie, but a lot of people go to see this movie and they take away the wrong message. That is not a fault of the movie, but it feels so present to the ugh twenty fourteen was a fucking time.

01:57:08
Speaker 2: But I think that this movie does.

01:57:11
Speaker 5: I don't know.

01:57:12
Speaker 3: I mean, we shouldn't be afraid to acknowledge that women abusers exist in the world, and Amy is an incredibly cathartic character to watch, but she's still an abuse it. There's all of these like two to five things need to be true for you to engage with this movie, and that's also true.

01:57:29
Speaker 2: Of the world. I think it's well done.

01:57:31
Speaker 3: I love that it's written and adapted by the same person, and there's a very singular vision. The performances are amazing. It is obviously it takes place in a very myopic, white privileged world.

01:57:43
Speaker 2: I don't fucking know.

01:57:45
Speaker 3: I'm going three three. I give it one to Gilliam Flynn, I give it one to Rosamund Pike, and give it one to.

01:57:55
Speaker 4: The cat Nice.

01:57:56
Speaker 2: No, the Yankees hat?

01:57:58
Speaker 4: Oh what hat? Does he end up wearing it with some other Oh? Oh a Mets? Oh?

01:58:04
Speaker 2: Still a New York team though, Yeah, it's because it's the Yankees and the Red House have.

01:58:08
Speaker 4: A more okay, yeah, oh my god sports rivalry.

01:58:11
Speaker 5: Yeah.

01:58:11
Speaker 2: I mean, he wasn't wrong.

01:58:13
Speaker 3: I feel like David Fincher's being the weird one for having a hissy fit about it for four days. I think that that's the weirder thing.

01:58:19
Speaker 2: Just they are like twelve New York teams. You don't need it to be the.

01:58:23
Speaker 3: Yankee if it was any other actor saying I can't wear a Yankees hat, but like Ben Affleck is the one that could. That's like, I think sophisticated dvaing on his part, or just put him in a Missouri team hat. Saint Louis. There's gotta be teams Cardinals.

01:58:42
Speaker 5: I think.

01:58:43
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I'm a sporty.

01:58:45
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're cool girls sports.

01:58:48
Speaker 3: I et hot dogs and I know I drink beer, and I watched the game I did Kitly you saw me drink a beer last night.

01:58:56
Speaker 5: It's true.

01:58:56
Speaker 2: I'm not like Wow, I'm not like them whatever.

01:58:59
Speaker 5: You wrote the book on hot dogs, so you really are like the apex cool girl. Die?

01:59:04
Speaker 2: What does that mean?

01:59:05
Speaker 3: Give me five years, I'm gonna kill somebody.

01:59:10
Speaker 4: Oh right, well, I guess if for anyone who's counting or updating our Wikipedia, I'll also give it three nipples and they're all going to the cat Princess. Thank you so much for thank you so much. Where can people check out your work, follow you online?

01:59:28
Speaker 5: Etc? Oh my gosh. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. Is always a pleasure to talk to you, beautiful, beautiful humans. You can find me on YouTube at Princess Weeks. I do YouTube videos about all kinds of pop culture stuff. By the time this podcast goes up, there'll be a video about how South Park accidentally had a really good case study about what mutual abuse is and is not, and I was just like, Wow, why watch the lat of south Park for that? You can find me there. I'm also on TikTok under I think it's just my same name, Princess Weeks, where I just talk about all the shows I'm watching and all the people that I think are attractive. Very simple, elegant. It work, yes, hashtag content, hashtag content.

02:00:15
Speaker 3: I'm gonna quickly plug my letterboxed account, which I made two days ago. It's My username is Jamie Alert and you can follow me there.

02:00:27
Speaker 5: I've been.

02:00:27
Speaker 3: I was avoiding it because I was like, I don't want another thing to check, But in a moment of weakness, I decided I do want another thing to check. So follow me on the thing and I'll check it, you know.

02:00:38
Speaker 4: While you're at it. Follow me on letterbox. I think my username is just Caitlin Durante.

02:00:44
Speaker 5: And letter box you can follow the Bechdel Cast.

02:00:47
Speaker 3: The Damn Bechdel Cast.

02:00:49
Speaker 4: We got all kinds of lists of the box there and you can also follow us on mostly Instagram, kind of Twitter, at Bechdel Cast and our Matreon.

02:01:04
Speaker 2: The most important.

02:01:05
Speaker 4: Place to go it is our Patreon where you get two bonus episodes every month plus access to the back catalog. It's five dollars a month and it's at patreon dot com slash Bechtel Cast.

02:01:19
Speaker 3: And with that you can get our merch at tebow dot com slash the Bechdel Cast. And it's time for these guns to get.

02:01:27
Speaker 2: To girl, Girl, Bye Gone Bye.

02:01:35
Speaker 4: The Bechdel Cast is a production of iHeartMedia, hosted by Caitlin Derante and Jamie Loftis, produced by Sophie Lichterman, edited by Mola Board. Our theme song was composed by Mike Kaplan with vocals by Katherine Volskrosenski. Our logo and merch is designed by Jamie Loftis and a special thanks to Aristotle Acevedo. For more information about the podcast, please visit link tree slash Bechdel Cast