as lovely as your gifset is, i'd have to disagree with your analysis. amy has always been capable of awful things (and has been ever since she was a child), she's never been afraid of nick her husband (just initially charmed, then disappointed in). i think the opening scene is meant to set up the audience (who haven't read the book/have no idea whats about to happen) in thinking that her husband is someone who alarms her (which makes the audience think that he may have harmed her).
Hi there anon :) I’ve got many similar responses to my analysis which I don’t mind at all cause I love debating and discussing films hehe. I’m about to explain you all more about my analysis, so this going to be a long post. If any of my followers isn’t interested in reading it, I ask you to please keep scrolling :D
In my opinion, Amy has not always been capable of awful things, otherwise she has always been stitched by many people and many things into some kinds of person she actually doesn’t really like. I said in my analysis that her husband and all the things happening throughout the whole movie change her tremendously, which meant that not only has her husband changed her, but also her parents, the society, the media, and men. She has always been forced to be a certain kind of person those people might like, a person those things order her to be. Just like what Rosamund said, Amy is like a machine that can change her personalities depending on the situation. Maybe we can never find out who she truly is, because she’s been set by many things. Her parents kind of order her to be a perfectly perfect person with their Amazing Amy books. We can tell that by this line Amy said in the movie; “amazing amy has always been one step ahead of me" implying that deep in her parents’ mind, they sort of want their real-life Amy to be just like their fictitious Amy. So Amy has always tried to be a perfectly perfect person, a smart person, a wife who does not only do the housekeeping but also do some real job that earns money.
And then she meets Nick, who seems to love a cool girl; a kind of woman who seems very easy to be loved by men because a cool girl loves what her man loves, does what he tells her and never protests on anything her man does, but actually a cool girl is also a kind of woman who doesn’t really exist because again, it’s the kind of woman who has been set by movies, media, society and men themselves. So this time Amy is again trying to be someone she’s not. She has always been kind of controlled by people around her. And that’s what I meant by her being under her husband’s control. The under-controlled Amy is somehow represents women in our real-life society, where we often controlled by our society and men and let them do whatever they want without even protesting. That often leads us women to become “frightened” of men, and to me that’s also the idea behind the opening scene, that women are not capable of speaking up against it while men are happy because they have their supportive silent women by their side. It’s pretty symbolic. It doesn’t have to mean that Amy is literally frightened of her husband at that scene, because that Amy we sees is just another personality she has as a result of her being set and forced by her surrounding. We also need to take a look at the fact that Nick himself has always been used to be taken care of by women; his mother and his twin sister Margo who seem to always serve him, to always do whatever they can for him, and that makes him a man who really depends on those kinds of women. And that’s also what he seeks in women he chooses to love; a woman who is willing to do everything for him, a woman who makes him feel superior. That is his idea of who Amy is when he first meets her and also when he decides to marry her. In other words, the cool girl.
But, Amy is actually not a cool girl. I mean, she has been raised by the parents who want her to be a smart woman, a productive woman, a woman who inspires many people (at least that’s what their Amazing Amy’s like). So, when Amy starts to ask more from Nick, which Nick is never ready for because he thinks he’s the one who’s asking things from his wife because he’s the superior (and maybe that also represents most men in our society?), Nick begins to show her that he’s actually “the real baby of the family”. He begins to feel that Amy is not the cool girl he’s looking for, so then he starts cheating on her when he finally finds another cool girl. Not to mention the fact that he can never answer the clue in one of his anniversary treasure hunts with Amy; (I don’t quite remember the exact words so forgive me if I’m not 100% right) "when your poor Amy is cold, this dessert just must be sold" implying that he doesn’t care enough of his own wife.
Amy, who is already trapped inside the idea of cool girl, somehow being pushed to form yet another personality because she’s dealing with a lazy husband. She’s adapting (x) (x) because she’s now “under the control” (notice that I use quotation marks because I don’t mean she literally being under control; it’s symbolic) of her lazy husband. That might be the situations she’s dealing with while she was with her ex(s). She then begins to form another kind of personality; the one with rage. She symbolically starts gaining power from all her past experiences of being under control to create a mirror. By a mirror I mean that it’s when she’s becoming the one who’s “taking control”, the one who’s setting up other people’s personality, and that’s what being showed in the closing scene. I think it’s also a symbol for women having power, a symbol for women finally being able to speak up, a symbol for women finally being set free from the cage and say “yeah this is who I really am. Now you have to deal with me.” It doesn’t mean that she’s literally a villain, though in the movie she seems like a villain. It’s all a symbol, to me.
