I resent the fact that Gone Girl seems to force a "misogynist or feminist?" sort of position. It invokes a lot of complex stuff, but does not lend itself to especially nuanced interpretation, nor, in my experience, do any of David Fincher's recent films (I hated The Social Network for similar reasons). Gone Girl is manipulative and cowardly in shielding itself with a "strong female character": after all, goes the so-called feminist reading, the wronged woman ultimately "wins!" She plays the conflicting demands on her against themselves, thereby highlighting their latent badness! But she wins only in the hyperbolically media-saturated, mono-opinionated world that viewers see constructed IN the movie, which spells her defeat in those viewers' "real" reality. So at the same time as the movie seems to envision itself as a critique of this "real" reality in its calling-out of how we demand calculated, mass-marketed performance over or even as truth (kind of like how The Social Network showed us the supposed dark side of the Ivy League as it colonized the wider world through Facebook), the movie only works because it can trust its audience to recognize this condition as warped. Basically, it plays on people's weird desire to live in a world (and marriage) that's darker than those we actually inhabit. No real problem there. The movie's overwriting of social realism with femme fatale genre-schlock, though -- 100% in the husband's favor -- makes it appear as if there is some real "debate" to be had.
But over what, exactly? Whether women are "justified" in being psychos on this order, when the fact of the matter is that almost none of them are? (Whereas plenty of guys are assholes on the order of Ben Affleck.) Genre fiction's deliberately exaggerated reality is used as a cover to vacuously posture about "gender roles" in the non-genre fiction world. So it matters that the realistic dimensions of Fincher's work are always so tonally "off," e.g. nobody smart AT Harvard would see the school reflected in The Social Network, and WASPs in Manhattan don't act like Amy's parents, I promise. It's rare for me to leave a movie feeling so pissed off, so toyed-with by someone who isn't actually up to the task. "Jesus, is this what we're up against?," I thought, as I got in my car to the sound of local bros exclaiming about how "totally crazy" that was. This film wants to be much, much smarter than it is, and it caters to a lowest common denominator of what is perhaps an unavoidable male paranoia. Depicting that isn't where it offends; it's in structurally validating it while seeming to offer an alternate perspective.
To take the most obvious point first (and most of my criticisms are form-based, because in terms of excerpted content, you could maybe pull off the whole "but she's so strong and vital, while he's so sad!" thing): Gone Girl ostensibly announces an initial symmetry between how men see women, and how women see men, or between how archetypal versions of each gender fear, (re)construct, and misunderstand each other. And yet while Gone Girl may be "symmetrical" at the most basic level (one spouse's story played off against another), it begins with a structural source from which husband and wife shoot off in totally opposite moral and generic directions: Amy moves toward femme-fatale crudity, and Ben Affleck is "humanized" all the while. We begin with a retrospective rendition of reality -- the whole genesis of the relationship -- that seems to be shared by both spouses. In other words, we're set up for one of those "oh God, how can true love go so wrong from such different perspectives?" sort of plots. But, as it turns out, this whole thing is narrated through Amy's journal. That means that EVERYTHING we know about their past as a couple is then cast into doubt, because Amy is quickly revealed as the unreliable narrator. This in and of itself structurally biases the reader against Amy, because it makes her appear to be precisely the overweening presence/voice that she is resentful at being made to seem like in her marriage. (In other words, she both announces and discredits the source of her "crazy bitch" status.) So even in this forum to "explain" herself, Amy makes the audience more sympathetic with her husband.
In Amy's unreliable narrator status, then, we have someone who is "developed" as overbearing in her will to curate or control her husband's narrative (a trait crudely visualized with her rotation of girly pens, ink-colors, etc.), and the structural grounds on which her "development" as a character is impossible. This means, inversely, that her husband's more realistic faults are mitigated from the get-go. Everything we know about what a douche he is we know through Amy's journal; by the time we actually see him doing douchey things in the movie's present-tense (fucking his imbecilic student at his sister's house, for example, whom he later humanely notes as a "good person"), we've already been coached to see him as "boxed-in," controlled by, and rightfully rebellious against his marriage to Amy. (It also helps that Margot, the twin sister, provides a sweet, ready-made female voice of reason, and declares in the FIRST SCENE of the movie that Amy is a bitch, in pretty obvious translation.) When Affleck later admits, on network tv, to his having been asshole, he has already been "humanized" by his reluctance to perform in the media circus with which, in our Fincher-directed universe, Amy's narrative is colluding. There's no way she can catch up as any sort of flawed-but-redeemable character, by virtue of being shown to have had the first word (the movie's whole "strong woman" shield). How profoundly disingenuous.
So, then, what happens? These foundational structural biases prevent us from thinking long and hard (or, really, at all) about what we can infer is true about Amy's presentation of her marital reality, which might in turn let us imagine a less extreme form of "crazy" as a response. It is clearly true that she and her husband lost their jobs, for example, and moved to bumblefuck Missouri, where she was also close with Affleck's mom. (Though even the fact that he has a stage-four cancer mom to be close with gives him a lot more cred than Amazing Amy, whose parents are parodical versions of a Brearley School PTA meeting from God knows how many decades ago.) We know that she does, in fact, bankroll his whole life, because he has The Bar with his sister, after all, used to show how "real" he is when he presents her with vintage boardgames. So even though the empirical facts indicate that Amy is NOT full of shit, the narrative's inbuilt preferences make this all very easy to overlook. Whereas a viewer who was urged to be more generous might ask questions like, "At what point was Amy's financial generosity re-cast by her husband as controlling behavior," or, "Is it maybe unfair to expect Amy to be really, really smart and witty but not so smart and witty that she doesn't want to kill herself in Bumblefuck Missouri?," instead we are coaxed -- and by we, I mean guys and their posse of female supporters in "game girl" mode -- to reflect on "crazy girlfriends" past, and how good it is not to have married them. As an added bonus, women have the convenient out of identifying themselves as non-psychos, because the threshold of "psycho" becomes so very, very high.
Amy's status as unreliable narrator also means that when she herself says things that are not psycho, the audience has no choice but to re-examine them in the context of her psychotic escalation. Her interior monologue about being a "game" girl, a "cool" girl, for example, for as long as it pleases guys to see this role being mastered (never getting mad, never getting all crazy when your husband suddenly stops finding you interesting), could have been very resonant. But when you're confronted at every turn with a plot trajectory that exceeds in its craziness even that of the diary pages in which it's framed, how can this possibly meet with any reasonable assent? When, in one of the movie's final scenes, Amy hisses that her husband only liked himself while he was trying to be someone "better" for the "cunt" she's now become, I wanted to cheer her on -- surely this was the point at which we're meant to wonder at how Ben Affleck could have been so taken in by someone whose charms have proven so spurious? (The answer, based on the fact that the husband here gets to be the Everyman, while the wife is a projection of the Everyman's terror, is that when men perform it's courtship, but when women perform, it's a lie.) Instead, though, you are reminded that you're listening to a woman who has harvested nearly-expired sperm in order to parade her marriage before the cheapest of all possible cameras. Not coincidentally, this whole twist in the plot is set up through the use of print objects (Ben Affleck's "box of hate") that don't make their way into Amy's diary, further discrediting the diary as a source of empirical evidence about why she might've whacked out in the first place.
The end result is that Ben Affleck is seen as flawed in a "human" way, by his own guided confession, while his wife is seen as flawed in a way that threatens the humanity in all of us. He gets to be a poor sap who just wanted to do the sort of shit guys do, whereas Amy is manipulative even in her impressive capacity to critique her own powers of manipulation (though these redeeming moments of self-awareness often seem tacked on by a director who wants to avoid the sorts of criticisms the movie deserves). The "sort of shit guys do," in Gone Girl, would seem to include the following: fuck students, self-loathe, change the standards for what "being a good wife" means with little to no notice. The shit women do is to take an understandable reaction to this flip-flopping of the husband to such an extreme that it discredits their very grounds to claim a moral existence. Wronged Women thus become victim-porn stars at their own hand, in this case literally, because there is no context provided in which they aren't seen as the auteurs of modernity's oppressive mediation, into which men must admit their castrating subsumption.
I imagine that hordes of men see themselves in Ben Affleck's character. It is much easier to accept being "flawed" than it is to try to be perfect and fail, by which I mean "win," in Gone Girl's example. Amy is nuts in her "disguise" as a normal-looking woman, she's nuts in her hot-ass little white panties, she's nuts as basically ALL the things we find it easy to hate and yet want to watch parading around for us on screen. So we leave the movie theater feeling grateful to be just human, after all, to have our problems reduceable to real-life cliches (that young student fuck, oops!) instead of the more disciplined and determined "types" of high-budget genre. And for catering to such a one-sided, lazy sense of what it means to be a fallible person, in a fallible marriage, I think that Gone Girl is a douchebag of a film. I wish Amazing Amy all the best in her future endeavors.
