Gone Girl

While most women weren’t led to Amy Dunne’s murderous extremes, the 1950s did engender a particularly pernicious creation of the housewife. Having been afforded the liberty of her own job, education and personal income before the war, many women purposelessly returned to the kitchen sink, jobless but for their domestic and familial duties, when the troops returned. But why does the cliche still exist today? In The Feminine Mystique (1963) Betty Friedan outlines one explanation for this anachronism: 

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“the “happy housewife heroine” is the fictional embodiment of the post-war “feminine mystique”, which “makes certain concrete, finite, domestic aspects of feminine existence – as it was lived by women whose lives were confined, by necessity, to cooking, cleaning, washing, bearing children – into a religion, a pattern by which all women must now live or deny their femininity”.

(Walters, The Horrors of Home, 62)

 

If one is to follow Amy’s narrative, to perform her proper feminine identity she must adopt the roles of mother and wife to fulfil her female potential. By denying Amy the chance to have a “purpose”, that is to have children, it appears that Nick simultaneously promotes and restricts Amy’s fulfilment of her feminine identity. When they first meet, Nick ironically states that he will “save” Amy, the blonde size two with “delicate” hands, as if she is the princess and he is the knight in shining armour, but by the time that Amy is gone it appears that all Nick wanted was to put his princess back into her ivory tower. She moves from the walls of her parents ‘prison’, in which she was never as good as their fictional alter-ego Amazing Amy, to the walls of the Dunne’s suburban home. The premise of their relationship changed: following his redundancy, Nick no longer could or wanted to be the fairytale prince who saved his princess, and Amy was left with a beige life in a beige suburban home. As Friedan’s writing confirms, the domestic life is the new ivory tower.

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Furthermore, the pallid beige colour scheme of the Dunne’s house, which is enhanced by Fincher’s choice of yellow lighting when the couple are together on screen, infers that their marriage has gone stale. It associates their home with mundanity, giving the viewer an insight into the films overarching prognosis that, once married, a couple lose the initial spark of attraction that brought them together. Despite going to greater extremes than the average couple with marital issues, Nick and Amy’s relationship does outline that marriage can be a trap for both women (Amy) and men (Nick).

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However, this doesn’t brush away the misogynistic overtones of Fincher’s film. It is worth comparing the extreme lengths to which Nick and Amy go when their relationship begins to fall apart. Nick has an affair, whilst Amy devises a convoluted plot to kill Nick, only to return covered in the blood of another victim once Nick has passed her traumatising test to see if he really ‘gets’ her. Evidently, Gone Girl reinforces rather than challenges misogynistic gender roles that, on the surface, it appears to confront. Yes, Nick’s life sucks, but from the looks of things, Amy’s life sucks more. 

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Therefore, despite blatantly under-lining contradictions inherent to contemporary notions of masculinity and femininity, such as Amy’s infamous ‘cool girl’ speech, or Nick’s deconstruction of his own performed masculinity at the party, Gone Girl still follows a heroic man/monstrous woman narrative. The only two women saved from this are Nick’s sister Go, who runs The Bar, and Detective Bony, both of whom have opted out of romantic relationships and have notably masculine jobs; they are only exempt from cliched gender roles because they have renounced their femininity.

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The destructive femininity seen in Gone Girl comes from a decidedly patriarchal point of view. Amy has soft and angelic features, is frequently dressed in white, bleaches her hair and has a “delicate” frame that she maintains by starving herself of chocolate, burgers and soda. On the surface, Amy is the ‘ideal’ woman. She is the personification of Naomi Wolf’s Beauty Myth (1990) and embodies all of Freidan’s criteria for the “problem that has no name”, despite experiencing it over fifty years after The Feminine Mystique was written (Friedan 1963, p.15). 

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Evidently, the social pressures placed upon women to fulfil a capitalist patriarchal idea of femininity, represented by Amy in Gone Girl, haven’t disappeared:

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“If I only have one life, let me live it as a blonde,” a larger-than-life-sized picture of a pretty, vacuous woman proclaimed from newspaper, magazine and drugstore ads. And across America, three out of every ten women dyed their hair blonde. They ate chalk…instead of food, to shrink to the size of the thin young models.”

(Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 17)

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Woman have shaped themselves to an image of femininity constructed by ad men. And perhaps the image of the liberated woman, represented by the cool girl sequence in which Amy gains weight, dies her hair brown and wears comfy mismatched clothes, is also a capitalist image constructed by others to allow herself the pleasure of feeling ‘free’. Who knew freedom looked like a KitKat and a baggy shirt? 

Consequently, despite boasting a few knowing scenes and a seemingly liberatory sequence, Gone Girl misses the political potential of the feminine. It depicts the feminine as a facade that woman adopts to maintain a mysterious interior, but in doing so complies to its patriarchal definition; woman can be different to man so long as her difference is controlled, surveyed and managed. The surveillance society depicted in Gone Girl extends beyond the exterior community, it exists within the head of every woman who, in keeping with feminist theorists such as Naomi Wolf, equates femininity with beauty, to the extent that she does not challenge the hierarchical and normative concept of beauty in the first place. Beautiful isn’t an adjective, it’s a value judgement.