Kitten Night Farts

Jennifer's Body (2009) Gone Girl (2014) Hannibal (2013-2015)

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)

― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“No one ever thinks chicks do shit like this. A girl can only be a slut, bitch, tease, or the virgin next door.”

he should have died for this

Did anyone else notice this scene? When Nick opens the refrigerator he disregards Amy’s thoughtfully-labelled containers of healthy food (”heart-smart!!”, ”blueberries - for immunity”, “spinach - for strength”) and instead selects the unhealthy tub of ice cream; the only Amy-free option. It’s a subtle but effective detail by Fincher to indicate Nick’s contempt for Amy’s thoughtfulness and gives us an insight into the couple’s home life. Also, when Nick notices the cat watching him do this, he feeds it in order to placate the animal’s judgement (representative of Amy’s judgement) and to remedy his own guilt. He’s also bribing the cat to ‘his side’ in the war of Nick v.s. Amy (a childish to-and-fro game I like to imagine the couple played out with their pet leading up to the disappearance). Furthermore, the fact that this scene follows the [spoiler] reveal of Nick’s affair with Andie sways us to even further dislike Nick and to sympathise with Amy. From this point onwards Nick is exposed as the “oblivious and uncaring” husband he knows he is and this is exactly what Amy wants us to see.

“Amy’s “Cool Girl” monologue makes explicit the film’s central critique of contemporary identity. We allow ourselves to appear shallow on the surface because other people like us that way. More importantly, we do it because we have our safe refuge on the inside where we can say to ourselves, “that’s not the real me.” We “endure” subjugating our own desires to the desires of others because we believe in this refuge, but the reality is that we’re allowing our identities to be determined by someone else’s desire. There’s a fine line between compromise and self-effacement, and Amy’s critique of modern society is that we allow ourselves to be erased and replaced with someone—something—else. We are exactly what we pretend to be. The distinction between external appearances and internal reality exists so that we can maintain the illusion of being what we want to be while still enjoying our easy, comfortable lifestyles. Amy’s argument is that instead we should appear to be the best version of ourselves, because being our best—showing our best on the surface—erases the gap between internal and external identity. Amy kills the version of herself she created to please others and becomes the film’s paragon of self-realization. She throws away the Cool Girl and becomes the Gone Girl.” (source)

Julianne Moore’s acceptance speech at the 2015 Critics’ Choice Awards

Female Psycopaths in Film

Julianne Moore wins Best Actress at the 2015 Critics’ Choice Awards (x)

women who support other women = baes

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (via mrgolightly)