“Good for Her!”: Are Bad Endings All That Women Deserve?

Content warning: This piece contains spoilers for Midsommar, Gone Girl, Knife+Heart, The Shining, and The Witch. There are mentions of murder, suicide, sexual assault, and trauma.

If there is anything that pervades film criticism in social circles, it is the omnipresent, conversationally charged idea of tropes. Tropes are a staple of film culture, undoubtedly, and have achieved such a stature through their common use as part of the language of film analysis; the damsel in distress, the knight in shining armor, concepts so often warped and repeated that the presence of a random trope, or some subversion of it, is a given. With such high relevance, tropes have grown to become powerful cultural tools through the way we talk about them. The simultaneous beauty and cruelty of using the same character motifs in screenwriting is the way those motifs will fester. They infect and spread throughout the sphere of artistic thought. In a way, this is a wonderful thing. Different veins of feminist filmmaking and criticism have thrived on tropes, specifically the dissection and reconfiguration of highly imbalanced, highly uneducated gender dynamics in film. Yet not all tropes are healthy. Some inadvertantly breed intensely negative or narrow-minded ideas (I can promise nobody appreciates how many movies used to encourage the mentality that women become supermodels when they remove their glasses), and one of the most recent to create such a bitter taste in the proverbial mouth of empathetic feminist writing is unequivocally the Twitter-friendly “Good for Her” trope.

The primary glamour of “Good for Her” is its popularity with progressive minds. If you’ve never heard of it, the chances are solid that you’ve probably still seen it in action. It’s almost the same resolution every time as it’s a trope of formulas and it’s quite dedicated to them. Woman Is In State of Distress or Great Scrutiny, Woman Suffers From Distress/Great Scrutiny, Woman Escapes Distress/Great Scrutiny by Extreme Display of Agency or Marvelous Punishment of Offending Parties. It provides the inherent appeal of women who reclaim themselves from trauma through radical action, and in an era of the world where people care more commonly about female agency than they ever did, it has spread like wildfire. Gone Girl, The Witch, Ready or Not, and various other movies in love with the Messy White Woman figurehead all ushered in the concept of women fighting back and surviving social extremities, and among the flock, Midsommar in particular has become one of the most heinous red flags in the discussion of trauma in movies.

For the people who watched Dani’s (Florence Pugh) story unfold, it was nearly impossible not to have great empathy for her. Her family was effectively slaughtered with only hints through Facebook posts and her panic disorder was left greatly exacerbated not only by the grieving process but a relationship that was her worst nightmare in the wake of tragedy: A relationship with a big bearded guy named Christian (Jack Reynor) who tells her she’s crazy because his buddies tell him the same thing over beers. From the very beginning, we understand Dani’s anguish, and we grow to resent the selfishness and “My Parents Bought My Scholarship” arrogance of the men surrounding her. It is unfortunate, then, that Ari Aster’s sympathetic story for Dani is eventually dogged by brutal cosmic irony. Though the script was written from Aster’s experience with manipulative and unhealthy relationships, it has been a topic of much debate as to whether the last hour of the film really honors survivors of emotional abuse. 

All of the gaslighting men are murdered in increasingly gruesome ways, most notably Christian who is raped while under the influence and subsequently burnt alive. These murders culminate in an ending where Dani is the last survivor and suffers a psychotic break as she embraces a white nationalist cult that will eventually sacrifice her in the distant future. There have been droves of social media arguments on the implications of such an ending but one should still have nothing but respect for the fact that this conclusion, for many, is still an emotional cleanse. Ultimately that’s what it aims for. Viscerally exorcising Aster’s intended audience of the traumas they’ve never seen reconciled in a mainstream horror movie. But there comes a point where you step over the boundary from understanding catharsis to ignoring how this story might be poking the open wounds of a significantly bullied character. Any level of understanding for the film’s plot implies that Dani is expendable not just to Christian, not just to Christian’s friends, but also to the Hårga, and her death at their hands is planned and grisly. She has not found a “new family” as has been noted by supporters of the ending, but rather she’s embraced the only place she feels she belongs anymore. She has been manipulated once more, and this time by a force that doesn’t even care about her as a human but as a cog in their cultural clockwork.

The insistence of “Good for Her” stories to grant women agency through the cost of their own sanity is a common one, and has been received as insulting in its worst cases. However, there is something to be said for the inaccuracy that is also brought to the table when debating about these films. Some titles are seemingly tossed into the stratosphere of the trope solely because they feature a woman who does things. Robert Eggers’ 2015 film The Witch is proclaimed (and condemned) as part of the “Good for Her” movement, but it is much more simplistic and gleeful in its depiction of puritanical satanism. The film meets its mythology and research right where it’s at, the Wiccan perspectives of damnation included. Thomasin’s introduction to the coven is not implied to be a bad thing; following true satanic belief, she’s quite relieved to be accepted even by evil, and it’s very much a happy ending. 

Even when the trope is not argued inaccurately, it can be argued in frighteningly tone-deaf fashion. David Fincher’s Gone Girl has an entire subdivision of “Good for Her” memes around its belt and anyone who’s watched the movie and paid attention would find it wildly disconcerting. It is blissfully ignorant to say the least as Amy Dunne is an antisocial monster regardless of what narrative you may spin about Gillian Flynn’s thematic intentions. She is a murderer, manipulator, top-to-bottom fitting the bill of any proper American serial killer. It begs the question if people even pay attention to how women are portrayed in genre films or if they consume these films because a white woman killing people is attractive to them. It further begs the question of whether people truly want to see stories where women thrive and if they even care that the vast majority of these stories may posit women as punching bags to be pummeled, demeaned, or demonized further by their own worlds. If the Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides got their non-intersectional feminist kicks in before they all killed themselves, would it have been cool then? To each their own, but the continued abuse/stress apologia only implies that dialectics in film criticism have died a bloody death.

One of the clearest faults of how we converse over “Good for Her” is that so many talking points often only concern the easiest female archetype for mainstream audiences to digest: the white, cisgender, heterosexual woman who is great at screaming and/or being covered in other people’s innards. It’s been a fixation of audiences for a while, even as far back as Shelley Duvall’s interpretation of Wendy in The Shining (though her brand of panic was more disturbing because it was barely staged) and the reappraisal it garnered in a generation that relearns every couple years how crazy Stanley Kubrick was. Without trying to nitpick or pull out what parts of this archetype’s experiences are valid or should be understood, because trauma is not exactly a competition, it is odd how many people will idolize these movies that obviously denote some sense of privilege but skim over art that tries to flush out minority anguish through the use of horror and risky narratives. 

Yann Gonzalez’s Knife+Heart was a neo-giallo all about gay murder, quite provocative in itself and the ways it created flashy set-pieces around the gory demises of queer sex-workers, but it was not suffering without resolve. It unveiled a violent victory over the killer and allowed for those who survived to come together in relief that, at least for a while, the fear for their life was gone. While through the specific context of pornography, this great suffering was not only reflective of what queer individuals live with every day but also what may lead to the sense of paradise that we all hope for. Whether sexual, romantic, platonic, or singular, we have a vision of queer joy, even in such a colorful succession of death after death. Yet you don’t often hear about Knife+Heart because agony and happiness must exist by themselves, never pain to make healing more beautiful, never ecstasy to make pain more deep. Stories with nuance and social layers aren’t allowed; only stories that paint misery from a place of privilege.

The problem with “Good for Her” as a topic in film criticism is that it glosses over the gravity of manipulating and bullying traumatized female characters. They are just movies, but what does it say that we’re meant to witness women explode because everyone/everything they know has kicked them down and we find it entertaining? If the movie’s intent is to disturb, why are we never distraught by it? Why are so many of us just humored? When the camera cuts, the spirit of that trauma lives on in how we discuss it. What does it say, then, that we can only discuss trauma by glorifying it? What does it say about how much our perception of trauma has been poisoned that we’ve grown numb to the depiction of it? I know when I escaped a mentally abusive friendship last year, there was nothing that felt “good for me” about it. The humiliation and emotional scars it gave me still live long after those ties were cut. The pain that I felt is a part of life for me now. Is it “good for me” just because I lived through it? Is it good for any other woman who’s lived through the same or substantially worse? We deserve more horror movies that can contribute to a healing process, not the “Good for Her” stories that mask implications of our worthlessness under the guise of empowerment.