Amélie Poulain is not very nice...

WARNING! Film Spoilers for the french film 'Amélie' (2001) ahead!!

You were warned!!!

Anyway, I just realised something, Amélie Poulain is not very nice at all.

Now some of you will disagree because Amélie Poulain is the poster girl for INFP and as a result she is an adorable, squishy, cinnamon roll, manic dream pixie girl. While that is true, she is also a bit evil.

In the film, there are some characters we so not sympathise with, the main one being Collignon, the nasty greengrocer. He bullies his disabled employee mercilessly in full view of all his customers. While no one likes the way the employee is being treated, no one directly confronts Collignon on his behaviour and he is not referred to a union rep or anything.

Instead the main character, Amélie Poulain, decides to take matters into her own hands in the most passive-aggressive way possible, gaslighting! Now I was not aware of the concept of gaslighting when I watched the film, but I am now, having been a victim of it myself. Gaslighting is a form of manipulation using persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying, it attempts to destabilise a person's mental disposition. It is nasty stuff when you really get down to it.

Now you might think Collignon deserved it, he was a bad person and he needed to be punished. I think the problem with the film is that it presented the outcome of gaslighting as positive. Collignon learnt the error of his ways and became a better person for it. Reality is not that simple. People don't just learn to be good because inexplicable bad things keep happening to them.

Was I a bad person who needed my behavior correcting? Life is not black and white. The truth is most gaslighters are out for their own gains, not social justice. The fact that Amélie Poulain can get away with very nasty psychological manipulation without besmirching her integrity is incredible. You might think she had good intentions, but there were better, more ethical ways to deal with the problem in my opinion.