Sleeping Dogs Lie 2006

My poor rating has nothing to do with Amy's secret.

For the basic premise of the film to even work she had to reveal something way out there; something especially shocking to a majority that she would be negatively judged for, and that she would feel strong embarrassment and shame around. I’ve seen reviews where others have said they could think of better shocking secrets she could have had, but I’ve seen no actual examples.

No, my issue with this film is where it all leads to and the message it ends with. Maybe it is true that the general population of romantic couples just lie and pretend to get by without less conflict, but that's just deeply depressing to even think about, and I firmly believe it shouldn't be that way.

I don't want to be with someone who lies to me. I don’t want to lie to the person I love. I don't want to be fed a tailored version of a person. I also know and understand that people are often several different versions of themselves over the course of their lives. I don’t have to love a past version of someone to love a current one. I don’t even have to love every single thing about a current one, but I have to be able to either accept or tolerate or compromise somehow with that person about whatever that said thing is.

I also don't want to be with someone who is going to push me for me information I'm not comfortable or ready to share with them. Responses to the repeated hesitation Amy had about sharing her crazy confession on either of these dude's ends should have become something along the lines of, "The fact that you don't want to share with me is very difficult for me to accept, but you should only do so if you feel okay to, and I'm going to do my best to let it go and respect your choice; because I love and want to be with the person you are right now."

So, it's not that I believe that they were entitled to the information, but I also don't believe that straight up lies are necessary or right. It's basic respect both ways.

It's fair enough that they wanted to know, wanted Amy to feel comfortable enough with them to entrust them with the big, bad secret, wanted to know out of curiosity; but it wasn't fair to push or try to guilt her into sharing.

It’s fair that she was afraid to share. I mean, her worst fear and more came true when she did, so why would she so easily risk going through similar again; but it should also be at least understandable on her end that it wasn’t easy to accept that she wanted to withhold something about herself on their end. Learning to view other people’s perspectives is vitally important in all relationships.

Patience and understanding would have been more likely to encourage Amy to share initially, rather than her feeling pushed into lying and making something up just to get the dudes off her back. (In the second instance she was presented a lie to go along with.)

It was also incredibly unfair for the original boyfriend to be like, “I wish you’d never told me,” when he would not back off insisting that she tell him. He asked for it and he got it. She was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t.

The fact that she was that hesitant should have prepared him for the possibility that he would be really uncomfortable with the answer to the question. Then later on he had the audacity to turn around and ask to see it for himself when he was previously so completely disgusted? He’s the disgusting one. It’s not that people can’t think on things and change their minds with time even, but he should have at least been far more sensitive in bringing it up because he’d just spent so much time punishing her about it.

It was also really terrible that Amy’s mother lied about her sexual past to her husband. Because what people find important to themselves is deeply personal, and if it was really important to him that he be with someone who hadn’t had sexual experiences with others, then it was absolutely fair for him to seek that out in a person. It doesn’t mean that if he’d had experiences of his own it was literally fair of him in the grand scheme of things or even that I personally agree with such a preference either way, but if it is not my life or my body that I’m sharing with somebody else then I can fuck off with what I think.

It’s why cheating is such a reprehensible act. You’re making extremely intimate choices for someone else. It’s not an accident. It’s not an “oops” mistake. It’s a conscious choice that you make. There’s no way anyone ever does it and never considers a current partner every step of the way, outside maybe being under the influence of alcohol or drugs to a very major extent. It’s completely horrible.

I want to be with someone who chooses to be with me based on actual facts about me and not what I’ve lied about so that I can appear to be what they want. I don’t think I could live under the weight of such a facade but for so long. It would kill me inside. I cannot fathom how other people do it without a second thought.

I would have preferred this film to end with Amy being given the choice of when and if she was going to share her secret with her next boyfriend, and that could have even been left open for us to not know the answer to.

Another direction they could have gone was for her to meet some other dude who told her that her secret couldn’t be worse than his and it be something like, “I got drunk and fucked a sheep.” Like, can you imagine that being the last line of the movie to pair with the first line, and then the camera pans to Amy breaking out in a mixedly shocked smile?

I think it’s totally fair to settle with everything not being “perfect” in a relationship, sure. Because I think people do tend to set their expectations too high these days and forget that we’re all far too complex in our individualities to ever match up entirely ideally with another person. But making up lies and making demands from each other? No. Just no. That should not be something anyone settles for.

It occurs to me that there might be this argument that there’s a comparison to be made between Amy’s mother keeping her sexual past quiet and Amy not wanting to share her sexual secret confession and that the original boyfriend was in fact entitled to the information because of what I said about making intimate choices for someone else. So let me try to unpack the differences I see.

We don’t know the exact details surrounding Amy’s mother not disclosing her own past, but I speculate that because her husband was so proud of the fact that she’d “never been with anyone else” that it was information he asked for at a very early stage of their relationship. It sounds as though she outright lied, or she let an assumption go on uncorrected, at the very least. It certainly wasn’t that she told him she was uncomfortable sharing details of what she’d previously done as Amy first did, she just claimed (directly or indirectly) she’d never had any sexual experiences with other people.

There’s a marked difference between “No, I’ve never 'done it' with anyone else,” early on in a relationship and “I did a specific something sexual in nature once upon a time, and I’m ashamed and afraid to share because of the negative judgment I might receive for doing so,” later on in a long-term, established relationship.

Right though, but because this was with an animal, does that change the importance of her sharing? I don’t actually know. That’s not a subject I want to even attempt to get into discussing, and no, I’m not interested in animals that way myself, and no, I’m not defending anyone who is.

But, again consider the fact that the guy changed his fucking mind and wanted to watch her perform the act on his own dog later. I think we can conclude that he was actually okay with it in the end.

I do think it matters that Amy regretted ever having done it. Amy's mother didn't seem to regret what she'd done, just that she lied about it. Does Amy really want to carry on with a lie to her chosen life partner and the regret that comes with it?