‘It Ends With Us’ Should Have Warned Audiences Ahead of Time
The new film It Ends With Us starring Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni is marketed as a love story where a young woman is swept up in a courtship with a powerful neurosurgeon. But the reality is that within the film, and especially in the book that it’s based on, the real story is a powerful representation of the complexities and heartbreaks of domestic violence.
The book by author Colleen Hoover and the movie capture how historical and unaddressed trauma begets other traumas. The challenge point when we think about authentic storytelling with fidelity as it relates to these issues is it’s not just about these stories, it’s about how we prepare people for them, and how we caretake for them afterwards.
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By glossing over its domestic violence content in the film’s marketing, and by not providing any content warnings prior to the start of the film, It Ends With Us ultimately fails the survivors it is supposed to advocate for.
As the executive director of Network for Victim Recovery of DC (NVRDC), an organization which advocates to ensure individuals impacted by crime are afforded meaningful rights and access to supportive services to mitigate the negative effects of trauma post-victimization, our staff supports survivors of domestic violence every day. What’s important to these survivors is feeling safe, and seeing a world where accountability exists and matters. More than 83 percent of the people we help are women or identify as female, and an alarming 79 percent of NVRDC cases involve sexual assault and/or intimate partner violence.
When watching the film in a packed theater with a colleague on opening night, our first reaction as the film ended was disappointment that no resources were immediately offered for survivors as soon as credits rolled. Later, there was an end credits message, though it came after many had left: “If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, help is available. Visit www.nomore.org for more information and support.”
We both knew that the film must have impacted folks in that room as, statistically, more than one in three women (35.6 percent) and more than one in four men (28.5 percent) in the United States have experienced physical violence, rape or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime, per the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t depict domestic violence on film. We should, but we should provide proper warnings to viewers prior to the opening credits to ensure that any survivor of trauma who would like to leave, can. This is something routinely done on TV shows, and should be adopted for movies, because when we have survived a traumatic experience like domestic violence, and we see similar stimuli in the future, we don’t just remember our own experience, we relive it.
In our trauma-informed care work, we know that the best thing we can do to help trauma survivors when they may be about to experience something like their trauma is to let them know what comes first, next and last. While most survivor reactions to trauma are socially acceptable — exhaustion, confusion, sadness, anxiety, agitation, numbness — delayed responses to trauma can include flashbacks, sleep disorders, fear of recurrence, depression and worse. A simple note to the audience about what will be depicted is an easy way for the entertainment industry to start moving toward trauma-responsive storytelling. The industry already does this by offering support and resources when content deals with suicide.
While I applaud Ms. Lively for her statement on her Instagram story which acknowledged how prevalent this issue is in the U.S., many people will not see this. Instead of a statement after the fact, the film could have made a powerful statement, true to its intentions, by partnering with the National Domestic Violence Hotline or even offering hyper-local resources based on the theater the film is screened in. More communication is better, and these same sentiments should have been shown in the theater immediately following the film.
When he set out to create this film, director and star Baldoni wanted to make sure the film did not have a “male gaze” and received support from NO MORE, a foundation dedicated to ending domestic and sexual violence. This shows that Mr. Baldoni had the best intentions for survivors when setting out to create this film. With just a couple of additions, he could’ve stuck the landing.
I would like to see Hollywood adopt a trauma-informed approach in both the pre- and postproduction process. This would mean acknowledging the reality that a high percentage of audience members (given prevalence rates) have been impacted by this issue in some way and offering help for those who may need to support someone in their life who is affected by domestic violence. Most survivors of domestic violence first seek care from a friend (just like Lily did), so arming not only those affected by domestic violence but also every friend and family member who saw It Ends With Us would help the film realize the book’s purpose as a powerful illustration of the trauma that is all too common in our lives today.
Bridgette Stumpf is the founder and executive director of Network for Victim Recovery of DC (NVRDC). She has been a Maryland certified police instructor since 2009 and served as part-time faculty at George Washington University, teaching Victims, Victimization & the System. She was selected as the 2020 Social Enterprise Scholarship winner by Harvard Business School’s (HBS) Club of Washington, D.C., and was individually honored with the 2022 Sandra H. Robinson Women’s Caucus Award from the Trial Lawyers Association of DC.
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