Blake Lively’s It Ends With Us: The Problem With the ‘More than a Victim’ Discourse

There’s actually a very understandable reason that some folks were turned off by Blake Lively’s It Ends With Us press tour, and specifically her message to survivors of domestic abuse and generational trauma, and it gets to the heart of an important aspect of domestic violence that often gets overlooked. So let’s talk about it.

In It Ends With Us, Lively plays Lily Bloom, a woman whose fairytale romance with Ryle (Justin Baldoni) turns into an abusive relationship when he becomes violent towards her. At the film’s premiere, Lively was asked what she would like to say to real life victims who might see the movie and recognize their own traumas in it. “I think that you’re so much—and not to minimize it—but you are so much more than just a survivor or just a victim,”Lively responded. “While that is a huge thing, you are a person of multitudes, and what someone has done to you doesn’t define you. You define you.” She added that It Ends With Us, “is a story that covers domestic violence but it’s not about domestic violence.”

What this answer, like so much of our conversation about domestic violence, misses is the sense of shame victims of DV often experience. In fact, this is why Lively deserves huge props for bringing a nuanced portrayal of abuse to the forefront with IEWU. I just wish her response showed the same kind of nuance and sensitivity as the film. I’m sure it wasn’t her intention, but the language Lively used in this answer plays right into people’s shameful associations with DV.

Saying someone is “more than just a survivor” or “more than just a victim,” implies that there’s something bad about identifying as a victim in the first place. Or that being a victim is something that must be compensated for. Our culture commonly associates victimhood with weakness, and, even if we don’t mean to, sometimes our language reinforces those connotations.