Why Gone Girl is My All-time Favourite (Part 1)
I don’t know where this is going when I start the blank page.
But I have to talk about why Gone Girl movie is my favourite movie of all the movies that have been made in the last ten years. I know it is not supposed to be an uplifting, cheering up type of movie but it is the comfort film of choice for me. It is the anti-Hangover series. It is the anti-men-behaving-badly-and-still-gets-the girl movie. It calls out the Cool Girl.
In Amy’s own words:
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 chagrin loving manner and then presents her mouth for fucking. She like what he likes. So, evidently, he’s vinyl hipster who loves fetish monger. If he likes girls 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 a 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 2. 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 in my things I didn’t know existed. A lightness, a humour, 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 people we knew. And what’s the point of being together if you’re not the happiest. But Nick got lazy. He became someone I did not agree to marry. He actually expected me to love him unconditionally then he dragged me, penniless, to the naval of this great country and found himself a newer, younger, bouncier Cool Girl. You think I’d let him destroy me and end up happier than ever? No fucking way. He doesn’t get to win!
My cute, charming, salt of the earth misery guy. He needed to learn. Grown ups work for things. Grown ups pay. Grown ups suffer consequences.
The film calls out the boys-will-be-boys ideal that there is such a low bar for men to behave in relationships and marriages. And women are held to such a high standard, to be forever young and ageless, to be good at our jobs but also somehow find time to squeeze time in for a stable relationship that leads to a happy marriage with 2 kids and the whole white picket fence thing. And if you have kids, you are guilted into thinking that putting your career in priority makes you a bad mother. And if you don’t have kids, you are asked about when, when when?
Meanwhile, nobody ask men why they are not married, no one asks them to give up their careers. They are praised for “helping with the kids”, as if the kids are not his responsibility and he is so kind to “help” his wife.
Well this tirade is what it is.
Back on why I like and roots for Amy Dunne every single time.
Her husband is sleeping with his student, a whole can of worms about that relationship is what it is.
He is not being emotionally available. He is no longer then man she married. He plays games everyday, sitting on his ass and not getting a job. He forces her into the shrew that she doesn’t want to be. She doesn’t want to nag. Doesn’t want to be “that kind of wife”.
Sure, Amy went over the line with the murdering of Desi. Sure, Amy does all these incredibly manipulative and twisted things. But it is to really expose how we underestimate women. You would expect this from a man, but Amy is better and smarter than an man, and more.
