I Finally Read Gone Girl

Recently, I watched the very exciting and quite nasty movie Gone Girl for the second time in my life. On my first viewing, I hadn't liked it. I had taken some offence to what I saw at the time as a clownish portrayal of a super evil psycho bitch, and a comparatively sympathetic husband despite his philandering and constant use of terms like the aforementioned "psycho bitch". 

I have to, in retrospect, blame Ben Affleck for this, because he is simply a perfect hateable husband. You can feel his smug masculine air oozing right through the screen. He is Gigli in every movie, and you can't tell me otherwise.

Since then, though, I've softened somewhat on this. Yes, David Fincher is licking up that relatable masculine perspective and there is a weird discomfort in the level on which a viewer can reasonably relate to stinky husband Nick Dunne. Yes, Emily Ratajkowski is boobies-out in a pivotal scene, rendering the greasy reality of Nick's infidelity with a much younger student of his a little titillating moment for the boys in the audience. But nevertheless, the story is a complex one that necessarily uses the shifting relatability and believability of its characters to paint quite a thorny picture of this insane, fucked up marriage. And also, it's really, insanely fun.

The Cool Girl monologue tears the movie in half beautifully, and so instantly resonates with women that it plucks Amy out of her position as a somewhat pathetic freak and plants her firmly on the ground as a righteous icon - and it's this that the story plays with. Amy is a mastermind, sure. She's a deep hater of her mentally squalid husband, and it's easy to cheer as she plunges him deeper into the trenches of public opinion, but then what she seeks is so utterly devoid of actual liberation. It's all about image and the great cage of her desire for a very particular life. Her initial plan is to kill herself, to completely leave her life just to have an impact on her husband - but she abandons this. It's not very satisfying to die, she thinks. And so the story creates this beautiful probing relationship between the great slay of destructive, insane revenge, and the actually quite pathetic tragedy of planning out a supreme schedule of self-harm to teach a man a lesson.

In the book, some things are more extreme. Because we are inside the heads of these characters, we can feel their intense hatred of each other on a more visceral level. For Nick, this extends past Amy, spooling out to intrusive nasty thoughts concerning other women in his life, a parade of disgusting bitches. These thoughts elicit some shame in him, but they are true to a view of women in general that he just can't shut out.

 "She went away. I thought the unkind thought, one of those that burbled up beyond my control. I thought: Women are fucking crazy. No qualifier: Not some women, not many women. Women are crazy." 

Things like this, I really like. Gillian Flynn lingers on the ins and outs of grievance, on the fetid ugliness of these characters and their beliefs. It makes it all the richer. There are so many little details used to emphasise the unthinking, breezy life Nick leads at the beginning of the story ("I was a man of jagged rising: 8:43, 11:51, 9:25. My life was alarmless."), contrasted with the meticulous, obsessive way Amy considers every element of her life. By the end, yes, Amy has done unthinkable, insane psychological warfare, but the result is that she is no longer the only one living her life in complete and total service of crafting a false persona - now Nick must live the life of a perpetual actor fulfilling a perfect role.

 "I was probably happier for those few years - pretending to be someone else - than I ever have been before or after. I can't decide what that means." 

It's a brilliant exploration of image and expectation and double standards and public ideals. No one here can ever be happy, and yet - they must be. They are condemned to playing their roles as suburban husband and wife, and there is something compelling about the slivers of satisfaction they get from having achieved such a feat of complete self-neutering.

The book is split into chapters of alternating perspective. We read a chapter from Nick's, and then a chapter from Amy's. This allows for the fun structure of revelations that the book is so well known for, but perhaps more interestingly - at least in comparison to the film - it allows Amy to end the book with this telling final entry:

"I don't have anything else to add. I just wanted to make sure I had the last word. I think I've earned that." 

Throughout the story, we see the couple's writerly sensibilities come through. Amy takes great pleasure in the project of plotting out her actions and writing her diary. Nick employs a certain professional understanding of her as a writer, on top of his image of her as a wife. The movie cuts out a piece of the book's ending - both are scrambling to write memoirs detailing their version of events after reuniting. Nick finishes his, but Amy' pregnancy news becomes her extortion chip, forcing him to delete the book and accept his now sealed fate as husband and father. And so Amy wins. Not the prize of a good husband, which may not even exist, but the prize of controlling the narrative. The prize of being the creator.

That, I think, is much more delicious than the movie's ending. Here, more plainly, she has something that might be worth dying for. She has the story.

What a book. 

Four Neil Patrick Harrises out of five.

 ★★★★☆