Gone Girl Is a Dark Look At Marriage

Warning: This article contains spoilers. Lots of them.

Tell me. Would you stay with a lying, cheating husband? Would you live with a man who uproots you from the big city to a small Midwestern town, uses your inheritance to fund his business, then considers trading you in for a younger, sexier woman? Would you manipulate a pregnancy with this guy, then pretend to the world that the two of you have the perfect life, the perfect romance, the perfect relationship?

You would if you were Amy Dunne, the twisted wife who goes missing in the new David Fincher movie Gone Girl, based on the bestseller by Gillian Flynn. But wait, you wouldn’t let him off the hook so easy. Not right away. First, you’d plan an elaborate revenge that involves faking your own death and turning your husband into the most hated man in America. But in the end, because you are so twisted, you’d have a change of heart and find a way to keep him by your side, on your terms, for better or worse.

The plot: Manhattan journalists Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy (Rosamund Pike) meet at a party and put on the airs one puts on when one is courting. He’s a salt-of-the-earth guy who knows how to make a woman feel wanted. She’s a wealthy only-child and the inspiration behind her parents’ highly profitable children’s books franchise. Nick and Amy begin a relationship that hinges on their ability to seemingly complete one another: Her cultured, rich-girl ways make him feel less like an average Joe. His visceral charm helps get her out of her own head. Naturally, they have great sex.

About a year later, they marry. Then the recession hits, they’re both laid off and Amy loses most of her trust fund, so they move to Missouri to take care of Nick’s ailing mother. Nick uses Amy’s family money to open a bar, and Amy doesn’t do much of anything but hang around the McMansion writing in her journal. As that early-relationship mystery begins to fade, their true personalities surface. Amy is not as understanding and laid-back as Nick had thought; in fact, she’s a controlling perfectionist who doesn’t have many female friends and wants Nick home all the time. He is not as romantic or cultured as Amy had thought; in fact, he spends more time lying around the house or raking up credit card bills than ravishing her like he used to. As they become increasingly disillusioned with one another, their marriage starts to unravel. They’re no longer completing as much as repelling one another.

On the day of their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy goes missing and Nick becomes a prime suspect. Halfway through the story, it’s revealed that Amy has faked her death in order to frame Nick as revenge for his infidelity (he’s been sleeping with a 23-year-old student for the past year). As he begins to realize the enormity of his wife’s evil-minded plot, he manipulates the media and makes an emotional plea designed to lure Amy home.

We all do a little bait-and-switch on one another while we’re dating. The more pretending we do, the more unstable a marriage we end up having.

Amy, turned on by Nick’s feigned renewed adoration, decides to come home and save his ass from murder charges. Yes, that means she must pin her abduction on an ex-boyfriend and then kill him. But a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do—especially if that girl is a sociopath. Her return is met with a media frenzy. People love Amy. They eat up the couple’s seemingly sweet reunion. Amy describes to Nick how she spent the past year plotting to destroy him. She is proud of her highly organized, excruciatingly detailed planning. She says that as long as he can return to being the man she fell in love with—the pretend Nick—she’ll put the brakes on her revenge.

But Amy has a past. A bad, bad past, Nick learned while she was MIA. He hates her. He’s terrified of her. He tells her he’s going to leave as soon as the media hoopla subsides. But not so fast. Amy has impregnated herself with Nick’s stored sperm. Now he must stay, he says, for the sake of their unborn child. But there’s a part of Nick that knows he couldn’t be happy with another woman, a “normal” girl. She’d be too dull compared to Amy. As much as he despises his wife, he’s addicted to the emotional high that only this crazy bitch provides. And he’s dependent on the ego boost he gets from being married to a tall, elegant, well-connected blonde. When he’s Amy’s husband, he likes the way the world sees him. Even Nick knows this is bullshit: “Love makes you want to be a better man,” he says. “But maybe love, real love, also gives you permission to just be the man you are.” Too bad it’s too late for self realization.

Many fans have been shocked by the lack of justice delivered at the end of the film. But it’s important not to get too hung up on Gone Girl’s plot, which simply serves as a vehicle for the movie’s essential message: that we’re all emotional con artists when it comes to presenting our best selves to potential mates. Yes, some people, particularly sociopaths, can take this deception to an extreme. But for the most part, we all do a little bait-and-switch on one another while we’re dating. And the more pretending we do early on, the more unstable a marriage we end up having.

“These tendencies are at the underbelly of every marriage,” Affleck said recently on Charlie Rose. “In some cases, like in Nick and Amy’s, they become toxic.” As Nick says in the book, another man, someone with fewer hang-ups and insecurities, may not have driven his wife to madness. I’m not so sure about that—Amy has always been a very sick woman, as we learn from her former boyfriends—but it’s probably true that some partners can unleash parts of us, good or bad, that others aren’t able to tap.

One of the ways Amy rationalizes why she “faked it” with Nick is by challenging us to think about how unfair the world still is to women. Even in the 21st century, females are expected to assume traditional roles and then, once they’ve passed their prime, become irrelevant. Amy was 32 and had already experienced several disappointing relationships when she met Nick. Her emotional baggage, combined with the fragile ego that comes from being the child of egocentric writers, compelled her to act the part of the “cool girl” in order to attract her husband-to-be. It’s a role many women play, she says, because they think it’s what men want.

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…basically likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain…Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl…They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. 

In the early stages of their relationship, Amy thinks she knows what Nick wants and seeks to deliver. She tries to sustain an unsustainable image throughout the first year or two of their marriage, before the charade becomes too exhausting, much to Nick’s dismay: “I thought she was so easygoing! (She used to let me go anywhere I wanted and stay out as late as I wanted.) I thought she was so open minded! (She always said she’d be up for a threesome if I got bored.) I thought she loved me unconditionally! (Why is she nagging me to lose weight?)

Part of you can’t blame him. As dumb as it was, he thought he had married someone else. (As Amy did—after all, Nick is no longer the over-the-top romantic, faithful guy he pretended to be while wooing her.) But by the time Nick realizes that Cool Girl has left the building, he’s too dependent or scared to do anything about it, so he makes his own rationalizations. (“Sure, she can be cold and distant, but at least she keeps the house clean and besides, I’ve got a mistress with an amazing rack.”) In marriage, there is lots of compromise. But when you thought you married low-maintenance and instead you got through-the-roof maintenance, compromise quickly turns to resentment, and then disdain. And then, well, you’d better hope you’re married to just an average Uncool Girl, and not a nut job like Amy.

When you thought you married low-maintenance and instead you got through-the-roof maintenance, compromise quickly turns to resentment, and then disdain.

It’s a bleak look at marriage, the idea that we’re all pretending. But it makes sense that deception leads to disenchantment. I’d like to think that one of the reasons my husband and I have been married 19 years is because we were too young and cocky, back when we first met, to even try to fake it. Most 20-year-olds don’t have enough baggage to feel the need to hide anything, and most aren’t thinking about long-term commitment anyway. So yes, we laid everything on the line. I never tried to conceal the fact that I was a little too emotional and a little too structured, and he didn’t pretend he was a fitness freak or that he’d read all the same books as I did. So now, if I get upset because he comes home with a cake that serves 8 when we have 20 over for a birthday party, the man really has no reason to be surprised. He had two decades to see it coming.

But still, how well do even well-adjusted people in “happy” marriages know each other? How well do we ever really know ourselves, when life has us constantly evolving? How much of a marriage is composed of lies we tell the other person about ourselves, either advertently or inadvertently, and that we tell ourselves about our significant others?

At the end of Gone Girl, Nick and Amy know one another better than anyone else in the universe will ever know them. Yet, Amy insists that they return to playing the roles that originally brought them together. This time around, though, there’s no fun to it. No mystery. But pretending is the only way they can live together without imploding—although I’m fairly sure they will implode, sooner or later, especially as raising a child together will only magnify their personal flaws. Amy came home because she found a way to force Nick back into the role of the devoted spouse. She’ll take whatever she can get, she’s that desperate for attention. And he’s agreed to play the man she fell in love with. Not the real Nick. But clearly the one she desires.