YEAR: 2014
DIRECTOR: David Fincher
KEY ACTORS: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike
CERTIFICATE: 18
IMDB SCORE: 8.1
ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE: 87%
SEX SCORE: 2/5
✔️Rewatchable. God, is it rewatchable. I can’t drag my eyes away.
✔️And it passes the Bechdel Test. Admittedly, much of the talk between named female characters is about Amy but it passes the rest!
❌ But I do not want to fuck either of them, no matter how hot they are! They’re terrifying and deeply, deeply unattractive because of it.
❌ And there’s nothing here to prompt fantasies for me. It’s messed up!
❌ Finally, it’s not sex positive at all. Sex is a weapon; relationships are a lie. It’s. Messed. Up!
As always, this contains spoilers so watch the film before you read on. Seriously, I’m going to reveal all sorts of plot twists so if you’ve managed to avoid them, please watch it before reading as the reveal is incredible!
[CW: rape, abusive relationships, murder]
STREAMING: Netflix, Amazon Prime (rent £3.49, buy £3.99), YouTube (from £3.99). For a full list of streaming options, check out JustWatch.com
This week is usually the week for a ‘bad’ film – one with a bad message or one that’s really sex negative. It’s previously been a chance for me to rant about offensive humour or the patriarchy. This week’s movie, however, is not a bad film at all. In fact, it’s a pretty incredible film! But Gone Girl still gets to go in the ‘bad’ movie slot as it only scores 2 out of 5 – from a sex positivity perspective, it is a bad film. And although I couldn’t give it marks for its sex content as, wow, all the relationships are weaponised in a grossly unhealthy way, Gone Girl does have some fascinating and pertinent things to say about marriage and, you’ve guessed it, the patriarchy!
Gone Girl begins when Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) discovers that his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), has been abducted from their home. Investigations suggest that she’s been murdered and soon Nick is the prime suspect. He’s been having an affair, there are money problems, and Amy’s diary reveals that their marriage has been on the rocks and she is afraid of Nick. He has been violent towards her, he has pushed her to the ground; she fears he might kill her. Except that Amy isn’t dead at all. And, other than the affair, none of the terrible things she accuses Nick of are true either. She’s planned the whole thing to frame Nick for her death as revenge for being such a terrible husband. It was going exactly according to plan until she is robbed and has to turn to an old lover for help. Unfortunately, Desi is as bad a person as Amy and keeps her locked up in his lake house, nominally for her own good and acting like a blueprint for how to be an emotionally abusive partner. Amy can only escape by murdering Desi after framing him for rape as justification for her act, at which point she returns to Nick and manipulates him into staying with her.
It’s so fucking messed up!
Before I properly get into what I find interesting about this film, there are a couple of problematic themes that I want to cover, and these certainly contribute to why this isn’t a sex positive film. The first, and most potentially harmful, is the idea that a woman would lie about being raped for her own gains. Ouch. Twice Amy ruins the life of someone who has wronged her (one of whom she kills) by fabricating a rape – and she is believed. It’s because of exactly stories like this, and the always present power of the patriarchy, that he-said-she-said disputes rarely side with the accuser. How do you know she’s not making it up? they ask. Can you prove it? And to add fuel to the fire, here Amy does have evidence but she’s made that up too. It makes a great story, without doubt, but it saddens me every time I see it as it’s just one type of story but it drowns out the millions of real ones; the one falsehood that rape deniers bring up as evidence when they don’t want to believe an accusation of assault. And now we have ‘proof’ that evidence should be distrusted too, even physical and DNA evidence can be manipulated. This is not a good message and one that I wish would stop getting airtime.
My other potential problem is one more of language than theme, because I don’t know how to talk about Amy: she’s a psycho, she’s insane, she’s batshit crazy…she doesn’t have a diagnosis of a mental health disorder, she’s just not a good person. Although Amy’s choices and decision making processes aren’t rational or potentially that healthy, I am very aware of the damage that can be caused by resorting to language associated with mental health conditions to describe bad people. It perpetuates unhelpful stereotypes and encourages stigma. So yes, Amy is horrific; she’s arguably one of cinema’s greatest villains, but I’m not going to call her a psycho.
So…Gone Girl. Wow.
This is going to sound strange considering the fucked up and murderous conclusion of the film but there is a lot about the film that is really quite relatable.
Not the conspiracy or murder, obviously, but in how our true selves are revealed as we progress through long term relationships and marriage, and how disappointing this can be. In her book, ‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: monstrosity, patriarchy and the fear of female power,’ Sady Doyle suggests that Gone Girl – book and film – were so successful because ‘that kind of rage bubbles underneath the surface of many “normal” marriages, and behind the smiles of many seemingly happy women.’ Through Amy’s extreme actions, women were able to ‘vent their daily indignities and unspeakable anger safely and without consequence.’ Now, I don’t mean to suggest that many, or any, married women are suppressing an anger of that degree, but it’s not such a stretch to imagine a large proportion of women who find out many years down the line that their marriage isn’t what they expected.
Because who among us hasn’t worked to only show the best of themselves in a new relationship? Who hasn’t pretended to be more interested in their potential date’s hobbies, or pretended to be someone slightly different to who they really are to make themselves more attractive? And this might not be a conscious effort; sometimes we just don’t share our whole warts and all selves straightaway. But we can’t keep up the charade forever so what happens when the NRE (new relationship energy) and shine has gone and we realise that we don’t like who our partners really are or who we are with them?
And this is again is where the influence of the patriarchy can be felt. In a traditional marriage, women are much more likely to be the ones to change and make sacrifices for the marriage, fulfilling their role as housewife. Once children arrive, this divide between who we were before the marriage and who we are now widens, with women tending to take on the majority of childcare responsibilities. It’s really not hard to imagine this as a situation that breeds resentment and anger. And I say this as someone who is very happily married! As Sady Doyle put it, Gone Girl is a reaction to the ‘daily, grinding violence of subservience and loss of self’ associated with an unfulfilling marriage: ‘if you’ve been through enough, the difference between making a man better and making him sorrier can be tough to figure out.’
Viewed in this context, Amy’s anger and violence could almost be a direct attack on the patriarchy, and is perhaps more understandable for that. Discussing it on the Unscrewed podcast, Jaclyn Friedman felt that Gone Girl ‘takes seriously the suffering of misogyny’ – all those little slights, little oppressions and little dismissals, all those micro-aggressions, that wear us down or wear us out. Or in Amy’s case, fire her up.
And, obviously, Amy takes this way too far! Nick may not be that great a guy but he doesn’t deserve what happens to him. But I think that’s why Amy is such a fantastic and horrifying villain. She’s not a megalomaniac, she’s no Bond baddy in her evil lair; she’s a fucking genius but her end goal feels oddly suburban, even in the context of her incredibly complex plan. She could be any disgruntled and disaffected housewife; she could be anyone of us. Her complaints aren’t irrational, her reaction is. So what’s stopping more women responding in this way?
Terrifying attack on the patriarchy aside, I do think this film has some very interesting perspectives on relationships in general. Although Amy’s version of events prior to the beginning of the film is manipulated for her own gain, she does state that the start was real – ‘it had to be.’ And the beginning of their relationship is just adorable. It’s exactly what Hollywood has led us to believe new love should be – softly lit, with flirtatious humour and beauty all around. They look good together, they have adorable in-jokes and literally sweet familiar gestures like the lip swipe after walking through the sugar snow: ‘We’re so cute. I want to punch us in the face!’ It’s perfect; they’re perfect. There was a lot about their marriage at that stage that made me wonder if I wasn’t making enough effort in my own – I’ve never made a treasure hunt for our anniversary, for example! ‘We were the happiest couple we knew,’ Amy boasts.
But she also makes it clear that this perfection isn’t real and isn’t without effort: ‘I forged the man of my dreams.’ And not just in her efforts to mould Nick. This, of course, is where the famous Cool Girl monologue comes from:
Oh, this is a powerful idea. And I’ve written about it before because it was such a familiar idea to me. I have spent so much of my life trying to be the Cool Girl and always feeling like I didn’t make the grade. Knowing and recognising the Cool Girl, and knowing and recognising how easy it is to fall into the trap of being the Cool Girl is such an important part of new relationships. She’s a movie trope, like the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but that doesn’t stop men from wanting her, and wanting women to be her.
(As an aside, I actually only stopped trying to be the Cool Girl when I essentially gave up dating and met up with the man who would be my future husband for sex! He wasn’t supposed to be important so I didn’t bother to pretend – we wanted to fuck each other and luckily that didn’t change the more we got to know each other. As a dating strategy, it was hugely liberating and I’d definitely recommend it!)
Amy’s take on the Cool Girl is also interesting because she doesn’t see it as a universally bad idea. She and Nick both became better people for pretending to be exactly what the other wanted. It made her smarter, it made him better – hence forging the man of her dreams! But forging really is a violent and explosive metaphor that suggests a lot if energy and effort, and Nick’s unforgivable sin was no longer making the effort to maintain the delusion. Although Amy clearly resents what she had to do to be the Cool Girl, it was worth it to be part of the whole. Their marriage looked good from the outside so it was worth it. Except Nick stopped pretending and Amy realised that she didn’t like who he’d become – or perhaps who he really was: ‘He actually expected me to love him unconditionally.’
And this is where Amy’s ideas about marriage, in my opinion, do split from reality and where her true villainy lies. Yes, Nick may not be the same as when they married, but she isn’t either. Her dismissal of him without taking any responsibility is irrational. Also, Nick’s version of events don’t exactly paint her as the ideal wife – and I don’t mean ideal as in Stepford. Her anniversary treasure hunt quite obviously does not bring Nick joy and yet she persists. She’s trying to force him to remain that person he was pretending to be, even when it’s obvious that it’s making him unhappy.
And is that fact that Nick barely knows his wife his fault or hers? Maybe he wasn’t paying attention or maybe she was keeping too much hidden. Whatever the truth, they did not communicate enough for the relationship to work. Long term relationships require constant adjustment and compromise, especially when the two of them have gone through such significant life changes by losing their jobs and moving from New York to Missouri. How could they stay the same?
My final point on this movie is about how it plays with the idea of appearance vs reality. This is, of course, Amy’s main complaint in their marriage, but it extends beyond this one area. Amy has always had to maintain an outward appearance of success and overachievement because she has constantly been in competition with her fictional alternate in the Amazing Amy books her parents wrote. Appearances were important to her – which may be why Nick’s actions were so unforgivable.
The film also dwells a lot on public appearances with regard to the murder investigation and trial. Nick’s reflexive smile when on camera or when taking a selfie mark him out as insincere and suspicious; Andi, the young woman Nick was fucking, fundamentally changes her appearance once his infidelity is revealed to make him look worse: ‘Why is she dressed as a babysitter? The girl with the giant come on me tits?’ The main role of Tanner Bolt, the fancy lawyer that Nick hires, seems to be to manage the optics of the situation as it got further out of control, reminding Nick that ‘this case is about what people think of you. They need to like you.’ The truth doesn’t matter, Bolt seems to imply. It’s how he appears.
Which, of course, is the crux of the whole plot and how the movie ends.
Nick and Amy are back together; she’s persuaded him to stay by becoming pregnant and using the guilt of his own absent father to convince him not to leave her. And his tour de force performance to persuade the American public that he wasn’t a murderer worked so well that Amy sees some hope in him after all. Their marriage filled with resentment as their real personalities were revealed has become a knowingly sham marriage where they keep up appearances and, I can only imagine, torture each other forever more!
‘Promise me we’ll never be like them,’ Amy asked Nick early in their relationship, eager not to be one of those drab and predictable couples who argue all the time.
Well, they’re certainly not like other couples…
Nick Dunne: You fucking cunt!
Amy Dunne: I’m the cunt you married. The only time you liked yourself was when you were trying to be someone this cunt might like. I’m not a quitter, I’m that cunt. I killed for you; who else can say that? You think you’d be happy with a nice Midwestern girl? No way, baby! I’m it.
Nick Dunne: Fuck. You’re delusional. I mean, you’re insane, why would you even want this? Yes, I loved you and then all we did was resent each other, try to control each other. We caused each other pain.
Amy Dunne: That’s marriage.
Wow.
This movie is messed up…
Next week: Practical Magic
That was a really fantastic and fascinating review, and one I’m going to have to re-read to be able to fully digest. So much to think about!
One tiny note, it’s Rosamund Pike, not Pilcher.
Oh my, she’s the author!! I’ll edit, thanks ?
Excellent discussion. I loved the book, it was absolutely jaw-dropping. I still remember reading the big reveal moment in the waiting room at the doctors surgery and gasping out loud! There is definitely so much in the way of subtext and deeper issues relating to marriage and, as you say, the micro-aggressions that accumulate over time. Terrific post.