Gone Girl: A Movie Review

Finally had the chance to watch Gone Girl last Monday where I have to plead with the guard at the employee exit to let us in at Shangrila because the mall's already closed. Good thing he listened to me and allowed us in after radio-ing for an approval from his boss. (You rock, kuya!) Moving on, here are my comments on the movie:

1. The acting was not that impressive.

          -  Some reviews had praised Rosamund Pike's acting on the film. I didn't think it was anything special. She basically spoke in a deadpan manner all through out the film,  and did nothing major that can showcase her talent as an actress. I think what happens is a misplaced appreciation. Instead of appreciating the plot of the film which was tied in to any brilliant sociopathic plan Amy Dunne executes, some people look at the complete contrast between her pretty face and her character in the film then easily credits her and her acting for the twists of the film.

     2.   The character is not sociopathic enough. 

          -  After reading about sociopaths and psychopaths, I have learned the key traits of sociopaths as well as how to identify them, and one of their key traits is lacking the capacity to love any other person other than themselves. In the movie, Amy Dunne's mental illness seem to spring from only one cause: her love for her husband Nick Dunne. So much so that it made her contemplate ending her own life -which was a "notice me, love me plea" masked as a form of revenge. It also made her kill another man, etc. In reality, sociopaths function just for themselves and no one else. If ever they will be doing favors for someone else which might seem as a form of love, it will be because they want something in return from them but once they get what they want, they can drop you like a hot potato and move on to their next target. Therefore,  the character created cannot be labelled a sociopath since she can love,  albeit the crazy kind.

    3.    Why didn't they find Amy Dunne? 

          -  If Nick Dunne employed the best and most expensive lawyer and everyone knew about the men she previously dated,  then why didn't they think of looking for her at their homes,  especially with the ex who can't move on and moved to be closer to her?  Just doesn't make sense!

    4.    The movie will make you recognize some of your exes/colleagues/etc.  

         -   As being a sociopath is fairly common nowadays,  I can't help but muse at how similar the main character in Gone Girl was to a former colleague I had who seem to be causing a lot of stress and conflict whenever she's around and whom we even suspect to be quite a crook who steals from the company's funds. Just like Rosamund Pike's character in the movie,  she is also a go-getter and always seem to get what she wants.

    5.    The movie may also promote victim blaming and slut shaming. 

         -  Just as the movie will help us identify when someone we know have idiosyncracies or any form of mental illness, I can predict that in the same way,  chauvinists and similar types of people who watched the film/read the book may use the movie/book as an excuse to victim blame and slut shame people who may have been real victims of rape and other crimes. I certainly hope not.

Always A Fighter

A sad fact of life: It is easier to leave your current partner and find someone else who will give you what you want rather than staying when things have gotten difficult to try to make things work and reach a compromise.

In my earlier relationships, I have always been responsible for leaving. Why will I put up with endless fighting when I can just find someone else who won't fight with me? I justified leaving each relationship I had by rationalizing that I can just find one whose interests and principles match mine and who will be easier to get along with than my current partner. I highly value myself and I should fight for my ideals and what I want, even if it means having to leave another person for it. I was not afraid of being alone.

If we were to base our relationship pattern with how we were as babies -as suggested by most psychology and self-help books- then it can also be concluded that I had been a "leaver" since birth. I came into this world a week earlier than expected. I had left my mother's womb before I was completely "baked". Interpreted, it can be both positive -meaning I am more prone to be early for appointments. Or negative -meaning I am also most likely to leave a relationship too soon, probably before it is given a chance to hurt me.

But lately, I have tried to unhinge from my usual pattern of leaving. In my last two relationships, whenever I felt the urge to up and leave, I either control it and try to give another chance to my partner or when I've already expressed my need to be free, I listen and easily accept when they try to reason with me to stay.

In short, I had become a fighter not for my own cause but for the other person -fighting to keep them in my life, fighting to love them still despite any shortcomings they may have had.

But now that I am opening myself to lessons as part of my goal to a happier me, I am trying to strike the right balance between loving myself and being fair to the next person I will enter a relationship with. This means I won't just fight for anyone if they are not worth it simply to deviate from my old pattern (because the old pattern did not work).Being raised by parents who never wanted to meddle when I try to ask them to beat up past bullies at school, I know that waiting for someone to fight for you makes you weak. Fight for yourself because you are worth it.

Yes, I am back. And this time the fighting is for myself.

Giving Self Help Books A Chance

Me and one of my best pals Ruth had once agreed that people who read self-help books are losers of some sort, laughing and making fun of her blue-eyed contact lens-wearing former classmate in school  who bragged that his favorite books include overrated self-help book titles. I personally hated the preachy tone some self-help book authors use in their books. I don't wanna be paying money only to be ordered around by some self-righteous know-it-all stranger.

Around nine years have passed since we made fun of the self-help guy, and after a few failed relationships and lessons, I have decided to give self-help books a chance. After all, what's wrong with wanting to improve yourself if it will help you communicate better with others and have better relationships with everyone?

I have found that not all self-help books preach in an irritating know-it-all voice, and I also found that these books operate mainly under one principle (which echoes and confirm what I have been thinking and theorizing about relationships all along) - the more you demand, the more you push your partner away and the less you demand, the happier you will be.

Case in point based on my observation of the people around me is when a girl pushes for marriage to her boyfriend who is not yet ready for it or when a guy pressures his girl friend to convert to his religion when the girl doesn't feel like converting to a different religion. In both cases, the person's desire to get what they want becomes so great that it outgrows their love for their partners and it consumes them so much that it becomes their chief goal in life, without caring anymore for anything less. It's actually sad when I see friends become like these, and it can only be called as what Eckhart Tolle said, "simply using the person you are with as a means to an end". The relationship or the person you are with is no longer of primary importance to you or even of no importance at all because what have become most important to you now is what you can get out of the relationship -be it marriage, sex, money, yielding of one's will or some sort of reinforcement to your ego.

Here are similar words of wisdom from Anthony Robbins:

“Some of the biggest challenges in relationships come from the fact that most people enter a relationship in order to get something: they're trying to find someone who's going to make them feel good. In reality, the only way a relationship will last is if you see your relationship as a place that you go to give, and not a place that you go to take. ”

Start by Believing In Yourself

A most common reaction to breaking up is usually finding replacement to erase the LGS (Last Girl Syndrome) or LBS (Last Boy Syndrome) stuck in their heads/hearts. In fact, some boys and girls even go on a  "race" to enter a new relationship if only to avoid the embarrassment that comes with "being replaced" as well as to get out of the pain and heartbreak in the quickest time possible.

What happens then is an impatient quest for a replacement that compromises the quality of the relationship and the person being sought. When we don't pause to breathe from a heartbreak, we mostly end up in -guess what- another heartbreak which brings us back to where we started.

It is so easy to just plaster on a band-aid to a wound rather than being bothered with the meticulous cleaning of it that most of the time we just end up wondering why the wound is not healing at all. Then we end up taking off the band aid much much later only to discover that underneath what we've hidden from the rest of the world for a time (which we led everyone to believe is already healing speedily) is a wound that's still as fresh as it had been the day we first got it injured. Now don't we wish we had just took the extra time to clean and treat it correctly the first time around instead of just going by a quick fix that ended up being a waste of effort on our part?

Similarly, healing from a broken heart/ relationship that ended requires hard work and a determination to fix ourselves -and the first step in doing this is by starting to believe in ourselves.

Believe in yourself that you are worthy of love that people write novels about. Believe that your soul mate is in fact out there and not aborted at birth, that you are worthy of getting a proposal bestowing you a lifetime of love, or that you deserve to have some one you will love enough to propose your life to. Identify your own faults that are preventing you from getting a shot at full happiness and believe that you can change them. After all, anything worth having is worth working hard for and waiting for.