Wednesday, November 19, 2014

I Am Dunne

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(Spoilers For Gone Girl ahead.) I was just going to tweet this but 140 characters is slightly less than I need to bash it appropriately - this article at IndieWire on how the character of Amy Dunne in Gone Girl isn't a feminist hero is exactly the kind of stupid bullshit I was complaining about yesterday. I didn't even like Fincher's film (my review) but writing an article complaining the following...

"Amy is not only vicious to her philandering husband and other men who she tortures using her feminine wiles; she is also equally hostile to women, speaking ill of the “stupid” neighbor she tries to quickly befriend, and throwing venomous barbs at the large-breasted student her husband is having an affair with. Amy’s self-involved, beautiful, blond, white, trust fund brand of feminism just rings tone deaf to me in a world where women of all colors, creeds and classes are claiming the feminist mantle in the name of justice, rather than a plea to “have it all.” Amy’s self-victimization presents feminism as its worst possible caricature: one of spoiled rage and privilege, rather than a very real call for women’s stories to be told and women’s voices to be heard."

... is the biggest fucking waste of time. You're kidding me - Amy Dunne is a caricature of spoiled rage and privilege? She's (gasp) not nice to other women? Heavens to Betsy, who'd have ever gotten that? It's a good thing she's a murderous villain in a movie thriller and not my Women's Studies professor then, otherwise I'd be so confused.
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2 comments:

John said...

I thought it was pretty good. Usually when a man is accused of killing his wife he did it. Well, not this movie, the wife turns out to be a major bitch. What did bother me which I'm sure was done on purpose was all of the talk I heard that Ben Affleck shows his goods in the movie. It was so fast, a shower scene, if you blink you missed it.

amola-tesouras said...

Take it from a woman's point of view: I for one liked that Amy Dunne was a supremely selfish individual thinking only of herself and seeing her husband and everyone around her as objects. As opposed to Alex in fatal Attraction for example, who becomes obsessively attached to a man: she was a caricature of female desire and emotion, a cautionary tale against infidelity.

Amy is not a caricature of feminism. She's a real human being, and they come in all shades of good, bad an inbetween.