I never had any intention of reading Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, but when Dan and I flew out for my brother’s wedding in October, I forgot to pack my iPad. No books for the entire weekend?!
At the airport bookstore, I picked up Gone Girl, basically the only option that appealed to me at all. I totally devoured it during my free time that weekend, desperate to find out how the crazy book ended. The movie reviews for the adaptation were good, so a few weeks ago, Dan and I went to see Gone Girl for our Date Night.
We collaborated on this review, because Dan is very wonderful and supportive!
http://instagram.com/p/tqowxLro6e/?modal=true
Brita’s Spoiler-Free Review of Gone Girl, the Book
This is a fast-paced, suspenseful novel that I couldn’t put down. I love the concept of unreliable narrators, and Gone Girl has two of them. As a feminist, I had very conflicting feelings about the characters and the plot. I read a comment on a review that unfortunately I can’t find again to link that described this book as an MRA’s wet dream.
Brita’s Review of Gone Girl, the Book, with Spoilers
How epic was the twist that the diary entries were fabricated?! And yet, even then we don’t know exactly how much of the diary was a lie, particularly in the earlier entries. How did Amy really feel about their first anniversary, for example?
Nick is a misogynistic asshole, even if he doesn’t exactly deserve to be framed for his wife’s murder. He keeps claiming that he doesn’t want to turn into his dad, but he did a long time ago.
So why am I conflicted as a feminist? On the one hand, Amy is an incredibly compelling character, even as a total psychopath. The existence of a psychopathic female villain who is compelling and dare I say sympathetic is a great break from traditional female archetypes.
But her actions as a psychopath AND her identity as a feminist are practically a checklist of a Straw Feminist. Accuses her ex-boyfriend of rape. CHECK. Plays mean girl tricks at school. CHECK. Fakes a pregnancy. CHECK. Frames her husband for murder. Frames another ex-boyfriend for rape and kills him.
When comparing Nick to Amy, suddenly the lying, cheating, unappreciative, misogynist seems quite reasonable. This is even more true in the film adaptation, where the lack of the inner monologue helps Nick seem more sympathetic and Amy even more ruthless.
Of course, Cate at BattyMamzelle takes both of my feminist reactions one step further in a beautiful analysis of the role reversal in Gone Girl.
But in truth, Amy simply took her frustrations to the same “logical” conclusion that men get to every day in the real world. Instead of just leaving Nick, she transposes all her frustrations onto him and then punishes him for them. But how is that any different from the men who beat their wives because they’re frustrated with their own unemployment? Or hide their assets so they can run off with the new girlfriend and leave their wife destitute? Or the ones who kill their wives for cheating, or God forbid, “dressing too sexy” or even looking at another man? In Gone Girl, Amy and Nick’s positions are simply reversed from the traditional roles of aggressor and victim…
When we talk about men who hurt women, we’re talking about men who are angry that women failed them. Even when you get to the most extreme kinds of misogyny à la Elliott Rodgers, it’s all about the perceived failures of women and the men who were “wronged”. All Amy did is exactly what men do in real life. She took it into her own hands to “make him pay” and it’s a little silly that this one, imperfect, fictional character is being used as an avatar to substantiate the irrational fears of men who would harm us as soon as help us. There’s no reason to expect that you might encounter an Amy in real life, so all of the exaggerated concern is really just a display of misplaced misogyny.
Finally, the best part of the book, as many others before me have noted, is Amy’s epic rant about the Cool Girl. The Cool Girl is just one of many variations of the woman whose entire existence revolves around a man’s. Another classic example in film is the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. You can read the entire quote at Goodreads, but here’s just a key part. And if you don’t think the Cool Girl is a problem, then you’ve been lucky not to receive the same dating advice I once did about changing your personality and interests to attract a man.
Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot.
Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.
Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl.
Dan’s Thoughts on Gone Girl, the Film
After Dan and I saw Gone Girl, we went out to dinner, where we spent almost the entire time discussing the film. I filled him in on a few bits from the book that weren’t apparent in the movie. When we got home, I asked him for a summary of his thoughts, and I typed them up as the bullet points below.
- Did not like ending. There’s no reason to stay in a relationship with a psychopathic murderer.
- Disappointed that the detective didn’t figure out Amy’s plotting.
- Also what was up with the Feds? The implication was that the FBI is totally useless like everything else in the federal government. They came in, ate up Amy’s story, and did nothing.
- Excessively gory sound effects during the scene that was probably excessively gory except we both closed our eyes. We should’ve plugged our ears too.
- A very good movie. Well-timed. It didn’t feel like it was dragging on, but didn’t feel too quick.
- The intro was a little weird with the hard cuts.
- Ben Affleck did a great job, as did Rosamund Pike.
- It did a very good job of portraying how the media skews criminal trials. But I wasn’t sure why the police got the media involved in the beginning.
- It also shows the pros of having diversity in your marriage, not having people in the same line of work.
- Additionally: reasons why you should share financial responsibility in a relationship and not let just one person handle it.
- The story has an asshole man and a sociopathic woman. It makes you sympathize with the man. But bear in mind that men are statistically much more likely to be assholes than women are to be sociopaths.
Have you read Gone Girl or seen the movie? What did you think?
