Ok, last one for today–like I said, I am making myself write, but for the life of me, I can’t remember what I had planned for this one.

I finally watched 2006’s Bastrop-filmed, Robert Earl Keen-cameoed All the Boys Love Mandy Lane. There’s all sorts of self-reflection here: it’s Texan, my name is Mandy, but there’s also the topical Amber Heard hatred.

Oh, now I remember: it’s about how easily we slander pretty women, which is tangential to the point of the movie…

This is all coming about because of the Blake Lively smear campaign, which was orchestrated by the same people Johnny Depp hired to takedown Amber Heard. This is such a weird new world of celebrity, all about image tarnishing and reputation management, and I can barely handle my own digital footprint. In a way, it’s cool I could hire someone to do that; in another way, it is absolutely terrifying.

What I keep coming back to is this:

This is two women talking about taking down another woman. I can’t stop thinking about it.

As much as I want to roll my eyes at this, and I very nearly dismissed all of it, I keep coming back to that line texted between two women talking about a third: People really want to hate on women.

The Mandy Lane movie is tedious to watch because of the way it handles Amber Heard’s beauty (and there is absolutely no denying her beauty: remember her at the beginning of Zombieland in 2009? Her 2011 turn as Chenault in The Rum Diary, where she was so stunningly gorgeous Johnny Depp left his French model wife?) This movie was made before all that, when she was a 20-year-old Austin native running around a *ranch in Bastrop allegedly 150 miles from the nearest gas station* as the quintessential–one might say apex–final girl.

In the movie, she resembles a cross between Bella Swann and Betty from the Riverdale series (indeed, Mike from the Twilight movies is one of the better presences in this horror movie). She is constantly pawing at her locks a la Kristen Stewart with her hairpiece, even in some really pivotal life-or-death scenes, and though she’s supposed to be a runner (the final girl has to be in shape enough to run!) her form is gawky at best.

Throughout the movie, the characters’ motivations are so flimsy that the final twists don’t shock because it’s been so hard to tell which character is deceitful and which is just played by a bad actor. The premise, though, is that all the boys are indeed in love with Mandy Lane, and that genuinely motivates every single action they take. It makes zero sense.

It’s hard to talk about Mandy Lane without giving away the end of Mandy Lane, but the idea is that it is supposed to be some sort of commentary about their focus on her, in hindsight. But to get there, you either have to see the twist coming (I did not) or endure this weird behavior the whole movie in order to get to the twist, which honestly does not hold up even when you look back at everyone’s actions through that lens.

I’m going to confess, I thought I knew the twist, and it involved everyone pretending to be so in love with Mandy to be faking it for very detailed conspiracy reasons (maybe that says more about me than the plot, but I’m convinced I read this in a review or spoiler somewhere). That would have made more sense. The people who died had more motivation to kill than the people who actually did the killing. And I think maybe that was the commentary. That beautiful women make us do stupid things.

So back to Blake Lively, and Johnny Depp running off with the co-star young enough to be his daughter, and this book on my nightstand about Helen of Troy, and the women who work as hired guns to take down other women. Yes, it is silly that Blake Lively’s haircare line flopped. In some contexts, it is really funny, as is the fact that Nicepool’s man bun is now part of a case presented in a court of law.

And we are forgetting the context of the movie that started all this. Mandy Lane is a slasher where dumb, good-looking kids (young Luke Grimes is in this one) are meant to get hurt, but It Ends with Us tackled domestic abuse in a way that resonated with a lot of people. I got annoyed because, in the end, the lesson was simply that Blake Lively’s Lily Bloom did not deserve to be abused because she was so beautiful and kind and good. Seriously. That’s what her knight in shimmering armor tells her (accidental Johnny Depp reference I’m rolling with): he says she saved him by looking out her window; he saw her pretty face and decided not to die. Her face saved him, like Helen’s launched a thousand ships. I got the impression, sitting in the theater, that those of us who don’t look like Blake Lively will probably need to fend for ourselves; furthermore, the implication that, if we aren’t perfect little sweet and kind angels, paragons of motherly virtue and patron saints of flowers, maybe we deserve what we get…that stung. It always does. So I almost jumped on the bandwagon when an actress’s public image took a hit, because it was gleeful and fun to do so.

Ultimately, though, I side with the creators, and in this case that means Colleen Hoover. I have never read a single Colleen Hoover book, but I’m not going to deride anyone who reaches that many people. If she wrote the book on men mistreating women and she sides with Blake Lively, flower puns and all, that’s enough to give me pause. It’s the other women’s words, the women destroying another woman for sport (and, yes, pay) that convinced me this is more than just a case of silly celebrities spatting over who gets more attention at the movie premiere.