The Bechdel Cast - Gone Girl with Princess Weekes

Episode Date: January 25, 2024

This week, Gone Jamie and Gone Caitlin chat with special gone guest Princess Weekes to discuss Gone Girl! Check out Princess's video essay we mentioned, "True Crime & The Theater of Safety" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec7o2uJeFDE&t=1s | "Survivors of Vallejo 'Gone Girl' case respond after police apologize for calling them liars" - https://abc7news.com/gone-girl-kidnapping-aaron-quinn-denise-huskins-vallejo-police-department/10759218/ | "who's afraid of amber heard?" - https://internetprincess.substack.com/p/whos-afraid-of-amber-heard Follow Princess on Instagram and YouTube at @Princess_Weekes and on TikTok at @princesspendulumSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th 2017 was assassinated. Crooks Everywhere unearthed the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks. She exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Kay hasn't heard from her sister in seven years. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. What was that?

That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. Can Kay trust her sister or is history repeating itself? There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller

from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality,

cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast or wherever you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. On the Bechdel cast, the questions asked if movies have women in them. Are all their discussions just boyfriends and husbands or do they have individualism? The patriarchy's effing vast. Start changing it with the Bechdel cast.

Hi, Gone Girl. Hi, Gone Girl. We're just two gone girls living in Gone Girl world, where feminism has been solved, for now, that is. Oh? Yeah, gone girls rule the gone world, and all of the Knicks live to serve them. Right. And then he has to sing a song about, 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. My name is Caitlin Durante, 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? Is it when two gone girls talk to each other? How lobotomized are we that that is what I was about to say. We're synced.

When two gone girls talk about girls being gone for two gone girls with gone 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 500 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 this movie. And I feel like also Amy is in discussion with herself for so much of the movie. I just, this is going to be an episode. The Bechdel Test, if you're not aware, was originally created by queer cartoonist, Alison 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 comic collection dykes 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 um and been through 3 000 discourse cycles much like the movie we're talking about today gone girl yes but and we have a wonderful returning guest here to join us in that discussion. All-timer. She's a writer and video essayist and one of our faves.

You remember her from our episodes on Space Jam and Wild Things. It's Princess Weeks. Hi, Gone Girls. Hi, Gone Girls. Oh my God, we're all together gone. And the three of us, it's like girls gone wild. Everything like that. Yeah.

Girls gone wild things jam. I love it. So tell us about your history, your relationship with Gone Girl. Oh, my God. tell us about your history your relationship with gone girl oh my god well like i guess over a decade ago i read all of jillian flynn's books sharp objects uh 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 this course. 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 text to discuss from like a multitude of different lenses is that there is what jillian 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 Jillian Flynn's work through anxiety about what men think about Jillian 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 it's true yeah jamie what about you i read the book when it first came out and this was again over 10 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 wild 10 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

than 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 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 2014 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 gonna 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 so good he's so good in this I'm always just like wow you have range he's Billy Flynn in this essentially I was like I would have accepted a song from that character more like Gilly Flynn

that's screenwriter caitlin derosa wait who billy billy flynn is from chicago richard gear of chicago yes okay he is i feel like tyler perry is the billy flynn of this movie anyways yes m rata dramatic role totally i feel like there's little elements of this movie when i watch it every couple years you're like oh yeah m rata and then you have like cool carrie coon i don't know i i always forget the carrie 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 gonna cast him in the lead. Yeah. Yeah.

They should have moved to Southie. And that's just unfortunately true. Anyways, I like the book. I like the movie. And I'm ready to be read for filth. But it's true. Caitlin, what's your history with Gone Girl? Well, I'm about to say two potentially shocking things here. Two twists, even. wow maybe twist number one i had

never seen this movie until really yes shocked i love that for you this is shocking news yeah i thought you saw every movie that came out in the last 30 years. 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 2014, even though we famously don't read books on this show. What brought you to the book? My roommate who I was like bunking with

when I did the like BU in LA because I of course would never mention that I got a master's degree in screenwriting from Boston University 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 2014 and 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, it 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 made me not want to watch the movie, even though I love a David Fincher thriller or David Fincher movie in general. I mean, Seven, haven't seen it in a number of of years but like it was one of my favorite movies in my like teens and early 20s i love the social network i really liked girl with a dragon tattoo like i'm a i'm a fan of his thrillers but i was like his new movie is really good too the killer yeah i heard that yeah i miss i didn't see that one yet. It's just on Netflix. But yeah, I was not really thrilled about seeing this movie after reading the book. So I just never got around to it until now.

I think it's so funny, Caitlin, because I've always said that I think of her three books, I think Gone Girl is the weakest. I love Sharp Objects the most. Dark Places is the second one. And I felt like the third one is the most funny enough it's the most normie of all of her works and it's the most that gives you the twist halfway so that i think with the rest of the books you find 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 is off but we'll get there yeah yeah princess when did you because i definitely i just got the audiobook from the library because re-watching the movie made me want to re-listen to the book because I definitely read it over 10 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 because half of it is from Nick's perspective which you 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, like, go back and confirm this, but his inner monologue is, like, every woman he encounters, he's, like, this bitch. Like, every, which, I want to revisit it. I haven't read the other books. Me either. Yeah, I really love Sharp Objects

and Dark Places. I think they're both really good. I think you're so right. In the the book nick is much less of a victim of like clearly domestic violence as he isn't as he is in the movie it's definitely more of they're both pretty narcissistic but still you know just because he cheats on you technically can't frame him for murder though i do understand the inclination. I think my one big note I had about the Fincher movie versus the book is that in the book, they all show that Amy was this kind of way towards women. And 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 finding men to fix them. It's like, no, fix them it's like no the people around her and 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 sociopath quote-unquote character versus that other bit of it 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 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 Margot is 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 contextualized in 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 and what she

leaves and also was sort of relieved to read that David Fincher kind of like deferred to her a great deal because you never know you never know I also don't remember the book very well, having read it about 10 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. That's there. 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 take out this awesome lie 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 cool Cool. Wow. We'll be right back. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017 was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia.

I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unhurts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When you think of Mexican culture, you think of avocado, mariachi, delicious cuisine, and of course, lucha libre. It doesn't get more Mexican than this.

Lucha libre is known globally because it is much more than just a sport and much more than just entertainment. Lucha libre is a type of storytelling. It's a dance. It's tradition. It's a dance. It's tradition. It's culture. This is Lucha Libre Behind the Mask, a 12-episode podcast in both English and Spanish about the history and cultural richness of Lucha Libre. And I'm your host, Santos Escobar,

the emperor of Lucha Libre and a WWE superstar. Santos! Santos! Join me as we learn more about the history behind this spectacular sport from its inception in the United States to how it became a global symbol of Mexican culture. We learn more about some of the most iconic heroes in the ring. This is Lucha Libre Behind the Mask. Listen to Lucha Libre Behind the Mask as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you stream podcasts.

I've been thinking about you. I want you back in my life. It's too late for that. I've been thinking about you. I want you back in my life. It's too late for that. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. One session. 24 hours.

BPM 110. 120. She's terrified. Should we wake her up? Absolutely not. What was that? You didn't figure it out? I think I need to hear you say it.

That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. This machine is approved and everything? You're allowed to be doing this? We passed the review board a year ago. We're not hurting people. There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller

from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're gone girl we're we were gone we're girls we're back but now we're heroes now we're here women uh that should just become a facet of the show that we never explain. We're like, and we're hair woman. 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 also place a content warning at the top because what aren't we placing a content warning for i know it's everything there's a lot 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. Also murder. And murder. Of Neil Patrick Harris. Tragic. And that's its own sub-genre. Okay, so we open with ominous voiceover from Nick Dunn,

that's Ben Affleck's character, that suggests that he has violent thoughts towards his wife. Then we see him on the morning of july 5th nick goes to a bar called the bar that so early 2010s to do that kind of cutie 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 but i'm like hmm kind of looks like a fun dive't know if we're supposed to hate the bar, but I'm like, hmm, kind of looks like a fun dive. I'd go. It's a place I would go. I would go to Carrie Coon's bar where you can play the game of life with Carrie Coon.

Yeah, I'm going. Yes. Absolutely. So he and his sister, his twin sister Margo, played by Carrie Coon, 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 amy i know i oh 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 that year which would be hilarious i my first note was that like when they talk about their second year she

was like she got me a beautiful notebook i got her a kite and i was like electric chair i was like send him under the prison yeah if someone got me a kite i don't care if it's a symbolic kite no no no thank you come back with a gift i'm planning like we will be planning your murder if we receive a kite for any any gift for any occasion in general the number one gift giving advice is do not gift someone a metaphor gift them a gift 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 2005.

And they hit it off. They have banter. They're bantering. Yeah. I was like, I felt so bad because I was watching 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 being tried to demand is really a curse because i really would have been like wow he is so cool he's so funny he's not like the other boys i was like oh my god he actually cares what i think we like we hit up and then next thing you know he ghosts me and then i'm like what happened

and i feel like ben affleck can really uh channel that for a guy that doesn't oh wait no we can't go there wait caitlin do you remember do you remember the ben affleck Raya video that we used to really be into? Where he would go, hey, it's me. Oh, kind of. Thanks for Raya. That's how it is. Briefly, obviously, before he... Reunited with the love of his life.

And I think this is also pre-Anna de Armas, who we also talked about in a recent episode because she had the cardboard cut out of herself in Ben affleck's yard he's really lived but he was on raya 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 like sophie it's me you're just like whoa i'm really on. Okay, continue. I am going to drop that video in the chat. 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 Boney, which, what a silly name what a character okay i did i did just it's at the very beginning guys okay yes detective boney and officer gilpin played by patrick fugate aka the kid from almost famous anyway so they start to examine 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

they like passive aggressively attacked her to the tune of millions of dollars yeah yeah it's like proto like youtube family vloggers i was like wow they're really trailblazers in their field of traumatizing their child 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 could say that yeah i'm married to my wife madeline she grew up in france yeah, my wife, Pippi Longstocking. Oh, my God. 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 persons case. So they ask him some questions. They learn that she doesn't have any friends, that she doesn't have a job or like 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. That's the scariest scariest that's one of the scariest ideas that the movie posits that a relationship could be like so great for two years yeah and they're so horny for each other still that they're like having sex in the middle of a bookstore really offensive i was i was i was offended i like she's like don't you know who i am i'm amelia bedelia i get to fuck in the store now i keep thinking about this is

my husband do you know little critter he's big critter now. Adult critter. 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. I wonder why. Including a guy named Desi Collings. Also, forensics finds an envelope at Nick and Amy's house labeled Clue 1. And it's one of the clues that Amy left for Nick for her anniversary scavenger hunt. And Detective Boney 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, hmm, 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. Would it make the story better or worse if Amy left a clue that was contingent on daylight savings times? We will never know.

Yeah. 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 truly i do believe that she is calculating enough to successfully kidnap the president yeah she yes yes this is a case of like amy has incredible skills and we just need to like give 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 learned anything from being a true crime voyeur it's

that if you don't have patience don't even try to attempt like a long crime because you'll get exhausted that's why i just read yeah she writes a whole diary basically oh 300 entries of make-believe girl but it's what 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 this just get a divorce 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 bye i have a theory about well not a theory but like i i feel like 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 narrative that makes sense in any case uh nick not really discovers the third clue at his father's house but he doesn't tell detective boney about this third clue we get another flashback some time has passed and nick and amy's perfect quote-unquote marriage isn't quite so perfect anymore because the recession of like 0809 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 nick becomes a gamer right truly sad again i was like i get it like it's like like check she's really writing this diary for the girls yeah 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 it's because you don't trust me 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. 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 Ratajkowski. 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 maybe he did kill her 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 nick 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 uh 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, do your morning pages, King. Like, come on. The artist's way, sir. No, and it's so funny. The entire time I was watching the film, I was trying to tell myself, because we know that this is an unreliable narration but it feels so close

to like Nick's own douchery 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 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 my opinion because we see him shove her at the very end of the movie yeah so I'm like well if you weren't before you are now right and it's like they're both i think it's amazing that like gillian 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 distance 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 she's amazing amy yeah jamie well amazing jamie i kind of want to get an amazing amy poster for my house that would be cute for the girls all right 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. 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 and also the twist it's Casey Wilson yes yeah you're like whoa and so she's yelling saying what did you do to your pregnant wife? Or rather your Greg-nant wife? It's true.

She fakes a Greg in 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 1.2 million dollars amateur seriously and on top of that the medical reports have just come back 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 woodshed 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 5th. 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 legends only god i love carrie it's like a Carrie Underwood song, dude. It's just like, yeah. And I tore my feet in two. I was like, yeah, do it. 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 organizing this? There's so many X factors. And then you see her scary calendar with the color-coded post-its. Because I feel like it's very easy to be like, how is she even organizing this? There's so many X factors. And then you see her scary calendar with the color-coded post-its. And you're like, Amy. Yeah. Unfortunately, you've got to love Amy.

You know, we love a villain do tag in this. And it's so funny. In the post-its where she's like, kill self? I was like, it me. And she does a process where she's like, kill self question mark. I was like, it me. She has a bunch of them on a bunch of different dates. Which month will it be? I was like, you're so amazing. It's like Tracy.

They weren't wrong. Yeah. It's true what they say about Amy. She's amazing. Oh, God. She's a planner. And I respect that. I love it.

You're great. Yeah. Such a planner and I respect that. I love a planner. You're great. I am such a planner. I just found it so satisfying when she like rips the last kill self question mark posted off the calendar. I'm like, yeah, it's so great. So good. Okay. we get a series of flashbacks showing how she did this, how she accomplished this framing, where she befriended Noelle, 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 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 girls 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 anyway god yeah and then we'll have an adaptation talk about that too because there's just i mean

it doesn't change the story meaningfully but they just uh she cut out a lot of her own like banger lines anyways yeah 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 for that so then he goes to defense attorney tyler perry legend take the case what was the last time we had a tyler perry dramatic jump scare i feel like it wasn't too long ago i know we talked about this recently what was the movie it's the year of the tyler perry drama role i

don't know i know he's in vice what was the movie? The first, my first Tyler Perry jump scare was Star Trek. Like the. Yes, it was Star Trek. That's what we talked about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. I was right.

I was right. Cause I was like, that was, I was like, what are you doing here? Like, you're not in a dress. You're not. You're not the director of this movie. Why are you here? 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 yeah he's like i'm not always medea yeah sometimes i'm in star trek when he rescued megan and harry from the british that was also one of his dramatic i know and then you're just like well it's a shame that his labor practices are so abysmal because I like being jump scared. Remember when he played Colin Powell and you're like, huh? Oh my God.

Remember that? You know, remember that? Anyway, this is my favorite Tyler Perry dramatic role jump scare by a lot. He's doing a good job. Yeah. Yeah.

Everyone in this movie is doing a good job. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone in this movie is doing a great job. 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 Desi 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 nick's face he was doing the rose from titanic line where he's just like you're being very rude you shouldn't be asking me this. And he slams the door. Bye. Wow. He doesn't deserve it, but you're right. 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 right and again it's like it 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 his whole thing is my protection of you

is contingent on my 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 because tyler perry knows what emily ratajkowski is going to do. He's got her number. Dramatic timing. 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 2020 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 calling ziz 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 um 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 sociopath. The end. And that's what we call marriage

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 god 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 this in a basement good for you yeah let's take another quick break and then we'll come back to discuss Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16, 2017, was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now.

The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unhearts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When you think of Mexican culture, you think of avocado, mariachi, delicious cuisine, and of course, lucha libre. It doesn't get more Mexican than this. Lucha Libre is known globally because it is much more than just a sport and much more than just entertainment. Lucha Libre is a type of storytelling. It's a dance. It's tradition.

It's culture. This is Lucha Libre Behind the Mask, a 12-episode podcast in both English and Spanish about the history and cultural richness of Lucha Libre. And I'm your host, Santos Escobar, the emperor of Lucha Libre and a WWE superstar. Santos! Santos! Join me as we learn more about the history behind this spectacular sport from its inception in the United States to how it became a global symbol of Mexican culture. We'll learn more about some of the most iconic heroes in the ring. This is Lucha Libre Behind the Mask.

Listen to Lucha Libre Behind the Mask as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you stream podcasts. I've been thinking about you. I want you back in my life. It's too late for that. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. One session, 24 hours. BPM 110, 120. She's terrified. Should we

wake her up? Absolutely not. What was that? You didn't figure it out? I think I need to hear you say it. That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. This machine is approved and everything? You're allowed to be doing this? We passed the review board a year ago. We're not hurting people. There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams.

Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Boy, oh boy. Gone girl, oh gone girl. And again, we are not gone girls anymore we are back we're back women we're back fans where should we start can i just share the lines from the cool girl dialogue that didn't make it in yes yeah yeah yeah i can't wait i have it pulled up 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 beer loves threesomes and anal sex and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she's hosting the world's biggest culinary gangbang while somehow maintaining a size two because cool girls are above all hot okay here's

another one you are not dating a woman you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who'd like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them i think this line is awesome and belongs in the movie but i mean the meaning 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 fuck someone else because i like strong women is code for i hate strong women bars so there's there's a lot

going on in this i mean and this this has been you know analyzed and talked about and quoted ad nauseum for well over 10 years now what i feel like has changed and i saw like some criticism or just like commentary i guess to this to this effect is that in the movie it mainly and i think princess it speaks to your point of like how amy mistreated and manipulated a 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 that kind of slurp it up yeah they're both misogynist and I think yeah 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 as the creator of the Lolita podcast, you are aware that 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. 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 seeing 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 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 as her

and not as smart as her. So it's like this dual reality of like, Nick is a 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. Right. Or his own family, because he's not close to Go. And I feel like if there's any character who you trust, it's probably Margot Go, because she's the one who's like, when she sees Emma Redcastle, she's like, what are you doing? Like, everything that she, i love how much she shades him 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 there 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 greta 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 disgusting thing I've ever heard and I'm like yeah I was like 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 non-universal gut punches of like betrayal and expectation of like gender performance are just so there and 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 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 he she talks about andy is like so dehumanizing she's like she's just like a mennonite when she's got the huge come on me tits and i'm just like okay okay okay she hates women you hate women we get it girl you you're the coolest girl in the world she hates and it's wild that i don't know like she it's why she's so 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 or poor people like she does not she gets i mean it's she's in a bad situation obviously when she's robbed uh because she's you know carrying around a stack of a hundred dollar bills idiot with her bad side job i mean but like you know amy set herself up for that one 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 rob her? That plot point kind of sat a little flat with me and it felt like that was an underexamined point. But I feel like, you know, Amy part of why amy is upset is like her money is 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 of that and i think to build off of that the reason why i enjoyed that moment and i think it's i think it's more present in the film than the um book is how gretta 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 York elite white woman who as soon as she's kidnapped, it's instantly like we have to find her, which is like, you know, everything's being rallied 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

and comes from like an actual working environment that character is able to clock her instantly as 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 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 1%. 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 1983 there was 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 Papine kidnapping hoax for this woman lied 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. And I think that is very key to that conversation. Not 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

yeah yeah she weaponizes her white woman-ness knowing that there's so much media frenzy around, oh, when a white woman, especially one who is wealthy and classically beautiful, is missing or 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 is examining that, but it's definitely a component of 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 of this. Unless you don't want us to. It's just, like, one of my. No, no. That's so don't want us to it's just like one of my that's so sweet of me to say but like yeah it is really good it's really good and it's i revisit it

every couple months since it came out because it's 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 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 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 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 durden 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 rest of the book was a man we'd have a totally different totally 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 is just doing it passively. Right. So I think something that I found got like lost in this infinity discourse that took place in 2014. And when the many other ways and in the character of Greta, like you were 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 understands there is a full on gradient, you know, whether you like her work or not. 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 dismissible 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 um you can think about what you 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. Yeah. And I also think, you know, as a society, but, you know, we so often want nuance and 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 just like. Yeah. It's fine.

I mean, it's like, we're a part of it, you know? Yeah. Like, yeah. It just, 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 not like they're writing like romance novels imbued with like abusive behavior. It's very much like these dark Gothic stories with women at the center of it, whether you 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 also misinterpreting our like nihilistic text it's like no no no amy deserves to go to jail but we're going to enjoy the ride while it's happening like yeah and it's also so clear she'll never like because she's protected by so much privilege 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. 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 Vallejo incident in California. What? Okay. So, let's see. About six or seven years ago at this point, there was a couple that suffered a home invasion and kidnapping.

They were a couple in Vallejo, and they talked about how these men broke in wearing wetsuits, tied them up, blindfolded them, kidnapped the female member of the couple. And the police did not believe them. They thought that this was a gone girl hoax. 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 huge scandal. They sued the department for like thousands of dollars because they maligned them all over by calling it a hoax um not even bothering to investigate it they called her a bitch uh the police department called her a bitch

yeah i'll 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-22 is like we live in a sexist misogynistic patriarchal society and even when you have someone like fly Flynn making really engaging art about this subject, this is also part of the 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 is something that happens with men. And it's very upsetting. 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 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 yikes and like that i sort of want 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 you're having also i'm looking at this uh vallejo piece and the cop who basically perpetrated this hoax was named detective matt mustard um so i'm just throwing that out there i guess that we got a detective bony we got a detective detective mustard are We got a Detective Mustard. Detective Mustard. Are these Clue characters?

I was going to say. Wherever he is, I hope he's doing poorly. Yes. Yeah. But Caitlin, your point is so poignant because I recently rewatched Fail Attraction 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 Fail Attraction went from being like a man being introspective about how he like ruined his own marriage became like this bitch is crazy.

And when you read what failed attraction, I got to tell you, I'm with her until the bunny boiling. Like until that point, I was like, I see. Right. I see. Yeah. I'm not going to be ignored, Dan. I was like, that's right. Like close.

Because how dare he mess with you like this? ignored dad i was like that's right like 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 love to say oh my crazy blah blah but like the idea 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 a cum 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 to he had to go and i was just like man you really do stay around for a long time after they stop trying you're like maybe they'll try again tomorrow right and it's like i don't know that's like part of what's so cathartic about it is just seeing someone being like i mean and again it's like and none of that makes her less 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 like rosamund pike is so incredible in love her oh my god 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 2014 in like how she was contextualizing how Amy gets to where she's at. She says, quote, I always think the 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 in 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,ably like if your parent is 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 ass mcmansion sorry uh so it's gray but yeah i mean i 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 therapists 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 a 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 gillian flynn does a good job of setting up how for this story it works princess i'm really interested in your feelings on how this movie interacts with like true crime media and how these stories are reported okay so i i got into true crime mostly because i used to watch 2020 in my room by myself because i was that kid and i remember watching the amanda kn Knox 2020 docs

and just being like, what do you mean there's no DNA? Why is she in jail? And that only happened to black people. And I think Amanda Knox being convicted 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 the thing about too, like when that picture happens, someone says smile at him and he just responds like a Doberman.

And I'm like, it wasn't even his idea. 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 read in one of those books she was reading and so it interests oh my god her little her little library 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 yeah also that just shows no one checked out her library card or whatever because like you didn't see that she was ordering helter skelter and all these other books like what's that clicking missouri okay also i have another little plot hole uh 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 invasion happened anyway watchful wally where were you when amy was leaving the house on july 15th it seems like you were right there having a watchful eye how did she sneak out under your watchful i bet she had him under surveillance i bet she had like a secret camera i just give her too much credit i'm just like he's just he's just that good she did kind of think of everything so she really did i i also like the fact that nick again, 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. She's like, reading to plan to ruin your your life you just didn't notice the genre she was heavily trafficking in sure just signs that like i cannot explain to you the ways in which that like

if anyone asked me to sign oh do you want to like up your insurance no who are you i would ask i was like absolutely i don't care about insurance I want everything to be given to the government when I die um but that's a true crime angle is like the fanfare and also for that there's so many women around because there has been like everyone's in a true crime but definitely women especially get put at the forefront of those situations and like noelle constantly like putting herself into the conversation the nancy grace xp who was just sitting here like what is this man doing and i'm just like all of it kind of just shows the farce of it all nancy grace impression thank you um 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 deb herd case of like who's more charismatic who looks like they're being 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 view that kind of information and it wants us to view it at the most surface level thing and that's why people go to jail when they shouldn't most of the time and that's why we had you know with the gabby pateo

incident what that play-by-play way 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 which is typically what happens in these situations. 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 um i think it was river kwan who wrote a very good article about this during the debt per trial which is like a summation 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 yeah well because that's like what's so difficult about having this conversation like and i know that our listeners are like media literate and competent and it's like i'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 totally, 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 left 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 gillian flynn as a woman writing this how much can you hold her

accountable for someone watching this movie and leaving with a brain dead take about it I don't know we 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 yeah it's tricky 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 skylar's a bitch but then i've also been alive long enough to 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 Skylar 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 intersection of like race and gender, I feel like post the 2016 election, once it was released that a number of white women voted for Trump, it became this thing to be able intersects, but to make somehow white women the seven season big bad of culture to pivot away from white men.

And I feel like things like Gone Girl, even though it came up 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 femininity and like historical indictments while ignoring that 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 naggy and they're like they're worse than the murderers i'm like that's not true right camilla soprano is not as bad as telly soprano you cannot tell me that because she makes zd and wanted to have sex with a priest one time that that means that she's among us

you know yeah so i think it's all connected to just the way in which that we're still trying to process talking about all these things but the loudest most unintellectual conversations will always rise to the surface and i think also with women this ties to barbie and something like like Wonder Woman. There is this need to critique white women from a 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 embody that. 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 like Gillian Flynn being accused of how dare you write a bad character because women are good right in a way that like completely erases and disregards the idea that women and femmes 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, etc. 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. And our perceptions are in misogyny external and internal

really warp perceptions of of the behavior of women yeah and it feels ongoing still this and again a lot of the criticism of centering a woman abuser it 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 you can't make them evil right away you have to like and i think it 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 we just got allowed we just became considered marketable like you know less than 20 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 woman 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 it people are 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 Flynn's problem necessarily. And so, I don't know. Also watch more movies if you think that.

I mean, not to say that there isn't, not to say that there isn't like definitely a gender issues, but like you think Betty Davis was just playing likable women her entire career? Right. Because she was not.

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, 10 or so, five years. And I get why that happens. It's just so cynical 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 that's 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 joaquin an oscar that you should have gotten 10 years ago that was the extent of its impact like we don't need to like enough let women be bad let women let women plan their man's demise in peace okay what are you a cop are you what are you detective mustard 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 even just this like sub-genre 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 on the show. We just did Revenge Burr. We did our second Revenge Burr.

I don't even, what did we cover on the first Revenge Burr? There's so many, I don't even know. Anyway, yeah, we've examined what did we cover on the first revenge there's 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 off the top of my head and that's a good thing like exactly yeah so for sure and also revenge is like it's like one of the best things to watch immediately like shakes 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 yeah and she also recently uh started her own book imprint to to to spread the good word so i'm excited about that yeah 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 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 that's no fun it's just no good for real and i will say on a shallow note like you know as a millennial in the situationship era this movie really does hit different it's like wow uh it really do be like

that sometimes 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 which you just mentioned live in this intention 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 wrote a long extensive 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 it i understand nick dunn is a bad person

one of 250 um yeah like a notes app yeah so i mean i guess by like on this because it's like it's so funny we've been talking 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 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 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 ratajkowski 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 as here she's in a prestige movie i think that it's like the signifier of emily ratajkowski in 2014 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. She is fully upon. She doesn't seem to have any sort of like, I don't know, I think she's 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 i don't know i don't think she came off very sympathetic when she is like in a terrible situation 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 having a fair right she's like 20 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 be a godspell forget this with that get out of this relationship go be in 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. Agreed. 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 everyone's just like shrug well but also i i thought 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 nimbies it makes sense that yeah no one like 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, but the viewer is very much left to their own devices to tease out when people are acting with their own bullshit privilege. 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. You know, it's just like the same way that it doesn't challenge the movie yes the way it frames andy it's giving three billboards in that yes right and then we 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 well for the whole movie which was nice yeah it's i feel like you 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 referenced that they are both still actively grieving 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 she were dead like i think she has like a pretty reason to take on stuff and is the one crucially,

I think Princess, you said earlier, like who is constantly like this relationship with Emily Ratajkowski is fucked up. This is fucked up what you're doing. It's creepy. It's gross. 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 i love her too same i'm rooting for her and the very like cynical ending where tyler perry you know like billy flynn he's like well i'm catching a plane out of here uh and you know the cars pull away which echoes chicago to me it echoes itonia 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 in the spotlight no matter how creepy or horrific it is because people are going to move on and you're going to be left behind 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 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 I it's supposed to be this idea that he's so salt of the earth that he'll just never leave his child, that he'll be caught in this like very heteronormative, toxic bullshit, which is like, you know, the straights are not OK. So it's possible. There's so many things working in Amy's favor that are fucked up. And it's like the straights stop being OK is one of them. White privilege is the other one. But Nick is one Reddit thread away from freedom.

You know, just got to get the details together. Yeah, he has to make his own escape plan, which he's not nearly as capable of as Amy is. To go back to Margot 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 boney again the character's name is detective boney you know he got an earful 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 my god yeah so annoying shut up because missy pile is in the movie yeah she has mrs nancy grace yeah 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 margo you should keep questioning everything your brother does yeah i know i i feel like the way that i was able to get into like as a clearly smart person why is margo sticking around i feel like I'm defending Gillian Flynn way more than I anticipated. But like the fact that Margot

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. That was just how I read it. Yeah. No, I see that interpretation. 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 emrata 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 anyways bold of missy pile to be like i think the twins are having sex you're like i know i was i was like whoa whoa it was and someone said someone literally said like twin cess and then i was like oh my god how's the droughts and adding the little detail that i feel like is reflective of reality based on the gone girl in vallejo incident is that like one of the cops which was who he was who and what almost famous kid oh yeah patrick fugit yeah officer almost famous yes is watching nancy grace consistently and his investigation is informed by what she's peddling and so it's like this horrible circle that it just felt like that was like a little detail

that was a really smart comment on how, you know, media and oppressive police forces are often just working hand in hand to get it wrong. Yeah. And I loved how the female officer always had something to drink in her hand i love a hydrated woman oh my gosh yes i had a list of this movie had really good product placement we saw diet coke we saw aspirin from cvs we saw a king-size kit kat as a sign of

liberation she's when she's doing the cool girl speech she's eating a king-size kit kat as a sign of liberation she's when she's doing the cool girl speech she's eating a king-size kit kat 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 yeah like candy bars and stuff like that i think it's i think it's supposed to be like doesn't care about her weight anymore because she talks about how like you're supposed to like eat hot dogs but say a size two so i think she's like she's like and now i'm gonna eat every single kit kat that i didn't eat for five years of my marriage right it's like straights are not and and that like that's commented on later where i mean 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 a gym upstairs lady he buys her makeup yeah yeah clothes and then yeah when you see her a couple weeks later she's you know blonde makeup on you know slim figure etc you know can't say i was sorry to see him go and like and then neil patrick harris is really good in it but i just wanted to quickly shout out there is duncan spawn which i feel like ben affleck probably insisted on it's it's officer boney or detective boney who's drinking a large she's holding out a large

styrofoam 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 admit it is this the movie that ben affleck refused to wear a yankees hat for okay it is 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. Well, and he also, I mean, Ben Affleck knows his audience. But OK, I'm sorry.

I just wanted to revisit this because it's such a weird anecdote about this very serious movie. Ben Affleck's refusal. OK, I'm pulling this from the things.com ben affleck's refusals to wear the yankees hat for the film gone girl did shut down the production for four days what that's obscene that's ridiculous wait okay i know why he refused why did it 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 i just can't 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 and i couldn't put that hat on my head and that

shut down production for four days so okay so ben and david are in an argument now they stopped talking to each other so it's because the boys were fighting men are so strong no wonder they run the country am i right the most broken i can't believe that because i was like did they shoot it with the yankees cap on that they had to reshoot it no the boys were just fighting and so no one could work for four days because they were like men are amazing leaders of the free world 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 chillest 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 and i say that with love

one of amy's 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 and prejudice 2005 that's wonderful i love rosamund and then a big barf peepee poo-poo to the line where nick tells amy that she has a quote-unquote world-class vagina in front of the press in front of a bunch of journalists like seven journalists yeah oh god i know i i kept going back and forth with like because that proposal was also invented for the movie and i was like because i was like would i like that what no i would not like that but look i'm open to being told i have a world-class vagina but like in private yeah yeah or in a good roast you know like where it's where it's fitting no i i agree with you jamie it was one of those moments where

like i am so weak that i was like say yes and oh, wait, no, I forgot how the rest of the movie goes. 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 Rosamund 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 the movie Gone Girl?

No, I'm good. I'm tapped out, I think. I'm so, I'm Gone Girl. Seriously? I was Hero Woman, now I'm Gone Girl. So, does this movie pass the Bechdel test? Yes. It does.

A couple different ways. I mean, I honestly wasn't keeping super close tabs on it which just shows how little that has to do with what this show is about at this point but margo and the detective speak many times we have what do we have amy and greta 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 relevant. But what about our metric? Well, you mean the nipple scale or scale where we rate the movie zero to five nipples based on examining it through an intersectional feminist lens?

Yes. 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 woohoo you go girl it is acknowledging acknowledging women and femmes 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 uh 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. the major creative voice behind the story won't have much creative autonomy after that kind of first draft but yeah which we've seen i think the ones that hit for me on the top off the top of my head where it's like stories allegedly about women that are swept out from under a woman showrunners to hbo shows it was like big little lies season two and The Idol were both originally 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 crap yeah yeah so uh but Gillian 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. So, I do appreciate that. Just don't cross him about the hat. Don't cross this guy about the hat. I mean, he won't talk to you for four days yeah madness absurd but yeah i don't know i i appreciate that it examines not super explicitly or closely sort of the like it does examine like the media frenzy uh when a white woman goes missing and is presumed dead and murdered. But, you know, I guess there

are just, there are other movies who actually examine that more closely from a like, hey, why is this 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 you know it does present that to some extent and i don't know i don't know what to give this as far as the nibble rating goes though i know it almost doesn't feel i must want to abstain i'm like i know i don give it you look the cat yes i'll give it one cat one orange cat yeah i don't really know uh i feel like we should try i don't know princess do you have a rating in mind let me i'm gonna roll this d6 and see what it can mean and see what it says what do the gods think we should

give this movie three Three nipples. Okay. I would say three and a half nipples sounds fair. Because I think that if I had to 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 30 more, I was like, 30 more minutes. What are we doing here?

I was like, it did drag a little bit. And I do think that, um, even though I understand its use of it, the aggressive use of fade to black did. Yeah. It reminded me of in the Phantom Menace 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 jb said there's a little extra missing that i think adds a little bit more nuance to it beyond the male anxiety and for that i will say three and a half nipples a close four but not quite okay yeah it was like three three and a half i understand like and this is an 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 2014 was a fucking time but i think that this movie does i don't know 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 abuser there's just all of these like two to five things need to be true for you to engage with this movie and that's also true of the world i think it's well done i love that it's written and adapted by the same person and there's a very singular vision the performances are amazing uh it is obviously it takes place in a very myopic white privileged world i don't fucking know i'm going three three i'm giving one to gillian flynn i'm giving one to Gillian Flynn. I'm giving one to Rosamund Pike. I'm giving one to the cat. Nice. No, the Yankees hat.

Oh, okay. What hat does he end up wearing? The Mets. It was some other. Oh, a Mets. Oh, still a New York team though. Yeah. Because it's the Yankees and the Red Sox have them more.

Okay. Yeah. Oh my God. Sports rivalry. Yeah. I mean, he wasn't wrong 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 just give him a different hat they're like 12 new york teams you

don't need it to be the 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 diva ang on his part or just put him in a missouri team hat st louis there's gotta be teams cardinals i think oh yeah i'm sporty yeah we're cool girls yeah i know sports i eat hot dogs and i know i drink beer and I watch the game I did Caitlin you saw me drink a beer last night it's true I'm not like them

whatever you wrote the book on hot dogs so you really are like the apex cool girl what does that mean give me five years I'm gonna kill somebody all right well I guess 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

where can people check out your work follow you online etc oh my gosh well first of all thank you so much for having me. It 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 a lot of south park for that um 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 the people that i think are attractive. Very simple, elegant work. Nice. Hashtag content.

Hashtag content. I'm going to quickly plug my Letterboxd account, which I made two days ago. It's, my username is Jamie Alert. And you can follow me there. 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 what? While you're at it, follow me on Letterboxd. I think my username is just Caitlin Durante. And follow us on Letterboxd. You can follow the Bechtel cast. The damn Bechtel cast. We got all kinds of lists and stuff there and you can also

follow us on mostly Instagram kind of Twitter at Bechtel cast and our

matrion the most important 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.com slash Patreon, where you get two bonus episodes every month, plus access to the back catalog. It's $5 a month, and it's at patreon.com slash Bechtelcast. And with that, you can get our merch at tpublic.com slash The Bechtelcast. And it's time for these gons to get girl. Bye. Gone. Bye. Gone. Bye.

The Bechdel cast is a production of iHeartMedia, hosted by Caitlin Durante and Jamie Loftus, produced by Sophie Lichterman, edited by Mo Laborde. Our theme song was composed by Mike Kaplan with vocals by Catherine Voskrosensky. Our logo and merch is designed by Jamie Loftus and a special thanks to Aristotle Acevedo. For more information about the podcast,

please visit linktree.com. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017 was assassinated. Crooks everywhere unearthed the plot to murder a one womanwoman WikiLeaks. She exposed the culture of crime and corruption

that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Kay hasn't heard from her sister in seven years. I have a proposal for you. I'm not going to let you go. or is history repeating itself? There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams.

Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions.

Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday.