Were there chances, I would recommend every female to watch the movie Gone Girl, no matter she is a teenage girl troubled by her own image, a housewife whose entire life focus is husband and children, or a successful professional enjoying complete financial independence. It is not the normal type of inspirational movie or the “chicken soup for the soul”; it is on the other end of the spectrum—dark, cynical, even psychopathic—even though bright light aesthetically infiltrates every scene. This stark contrast gives you goosebumps; It serves well the theme that a female is pretending to be someone she is not and enslaved by the obligation to maintain what she is not—just as the movie is in no way bright and cheerful though the colorful settings may have suggested otherwise.
Gone Girl is a femme fatale movie to a certain extent. But it is more on the side of Thelma and Louisa than Basic Instinct. Amy is perfect and amazing. She and her husband Nick appear to be the happiest couple made for each other, except—they are not. After she disappeared and made her husband a suspect murderer, she was unrecognizably changed into the real Amy—tomboyish, cruel, decisive, and she symbolically destroyed every piece of femininity in her. She’s gone, no longer worrying about pleasing her husband, or restraining herself such that people would like her based on the worldly definition of success and beauty. She revenges, ruthlessly torturing and punishing anyone coercing her into being the person she is not, including her husband.
The monologue appears in the middle of the movie when she stepped onto the road of desperado points out the embedded disgruntle and depression she was having all the time being a perfect Amy in the worldly eye. Her voice was in the background while she was driving on the American Highway, recklessly, smoking cigs and throwing garbage outside the car window, despising girls in other cars who acts what they are not, and devouring hamburgers and pies. The monologue goes,
“Nick and Amy will be gone. But then we never really existed. Nick loved a girl I was pretending to be. “Cool girl.” Men always use that, don’t they? As their defining compliment. “She’s a cool girl.” Cool girl is hot. Cool girl is game. Cool girl is fun. Cool girl never gets angry at her man. She only smiles in a chagrined, loving manner and then presents her mouth for fucking. She likes what he likes. If he loves girl gone wild, she’s a mall babe, who talks football and endures Buffalo wings at Hooters….
When I met Nick Dunne, I knew he wanted cool girl. And for him, I’ll admit, I was willing to try. I wax-stripped my pussy raw. I drank canned beer watching Adam Sandler movies. I ate cold pizza and remained a size two. I blew him semi-regularly. I lived in the moment. I was fucking game. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy some of it. Nick teased out of me things I didn’t know existed. A lightness, a humor, an ease. But I made him smarter, sharper. I inspired him to rise to my level. I forged the man of my dreams. We were happy pretending to be other people. We were the happiest couple we knew.”
She was taught to be someone she is not when she was very young. Her parents forged her into an “amazing Amy”, a perfect prototype of her. She will lose the pride and love from her parents if she deviates from this expectation. Same thing with Nick. She probably will lose his love if she stopped to be perfect. So she chose to disappear. In orde to remind her numb self of who she really is, she made a do-over of her life in a most subversive and dramatic manner. She seemed to win at last—she controlled her husband and inflicted on him untold psychological pain. Ironically, she did all these because she loved him—she even killed for him. She is a sad character because after all these pain, she did not set herself free like Thelma and Louisa did; she simply caged herself and broke out once she found the cage was becoming suffocating.
She is the reflection of a majority of women in the society. They want to break free but only to find themselves transferring from one prison to another. Or more accurately, the entire world is a prison for women, and there is no place to hide—there is no way that a woman can disappear and totally be herself. Call it cynical you want, but the world is getting harsher on and asking more from its daughters than sons—it asks from them to accomplish things impossible. It asks them to be successful in career and to be good mothers and wives; it only allows them to be free from exploitation if they have independent income, but then, they may have to endure the worldly accusation or judgment of being a “bitch” that no wonder no man loves. Simply put, there is no way that a woman can do a thing right. There will always be voices against her, judgment sabotaging her, prejudices diminishing her and strong forces cornering her to give up what she has. The world asks too much from women, too much.
The movie Thelma and Louisa ends with both of them committed suicide driving a car down to a valley against the rainbow, holding hands, in the most artistic fashion possible. That’s the way out for a women living under the context of permeate exploitation. In this new age, women are facing a worse scenario: there is no way out—not even non-existence—as the prejudices, the judgments, the vilification will not stop simply because of one’s disappearance. Women are forever imprisoned, in family, in relationships, in their career, with the cell labeled “love” and “success”.
Our gone girl never made it far.