As you write absolutely delishious fics and meta, I was wondering if you've watched Gone Girl? If so, would you like to share some of your thoughts regarding Amy? I was so fascinated by her after she shed her carefully tailored "person suit"
I have seen Gone Girl! And I’ve read Gone Girl (admittedly kind of a long time ago, so don’t take anything I say about the book too seriously). I’m not sure I exactly enjoyed either the book or the movie — what I mean by that is I found the experience of actually reading/watching it to be very disheartening, if not downright depressing. To me Gone Girl felt more like an Ideas book than a book about real humans to whom I might latch on and care about. Without that emotional hook, the novel felt cerebral to me, conceptual, more about the general, abstract way modern women and men construct their own identities and the uneasy marriages that unite those false identities before slowly peeling them away, than a novel about a flesh-and-blood couple who are actually married. And the movie turned out to be a very faithful adaptation, so my reaction was much the same. It’s one of those movies I really love discussing more than I loved the actual experience of watching it. I’ve been addicted to all the thinkpieces critics have written regarding it — there’s an almost encyclopedic compendium of them here. I think the fact that the movie is such fodder for discussion, particularly discussion about women and their portrayal in this type of film, speaks very highly of it, regardless of how well it succeeds at being an actual satisfying movie.
I really want to love Amy the way I love Hannibal, but for me Amy just never coheres as an actual person. Perhaps it’s because as a narrator of her own story she’s so hugely unreliable, but it’s also down to how performative she is, she’s performative to her very bones — Rosamund Pike does an amazing job of capturing that quality. But once the person suit is stripped off Amy, what’s left? She’s still a woman who defines herself by men — to the point where she is soundly manipulated by Nick into returning home. I was disappointed that this sneering ragebox of a monster was so easily played, and that the sole object of her incredible machinations was securing ownership of this mediocre, kinda-violent lug of a man. Nick is so out of Amy’s league, particularly in the movie. In the book, I felt they were better matched: there Nick is depicted as a monster himself, though one more garden-variety than Amy. When they end up trapped in that suburban palace together, you feel it’s a fitting end for both of them, that they actually deserve each other. In the movie, Nick is more firmly depicted as the prisoner, while Amy is his jailer.
I love that you compare Amy to Hannibal with their finely tailored person suits. Amy’s is even better tailored than Hannibal’s, in that I don’t think she’s ever 100% aware of its existence. Amy is very much a product of her upbringing, the crushing standards her psychologist parents dumped on her, and the crushing standards dumped on her by men like Nick, who yearn for the idea of female perfection, but don’t actually love the idea of living with it for better or for worse. And Amy exploits and subverts those standards, sure; she manipulates them to her benefit, uses them to style herself as a Cool Girl, and then later as a Gone Girl, but in the end she is still compelled by those standards, still trapped by them. Even at the end of the story she’s 100% committed to Having It All, the perfect life, the perfect husband, and soon enough a child to match. Amy as a monster upholds the social order to a tee. Meanwhile Hannibal laughs at society— he operates within it and plays its games, but he always exists a little outside of it, and refuses to let its standards affect him. Maybe this makes him a better monster than Amy. Or maybe this just makes him a male monster, free to flout the rules in a way that Amy, poor female monster that she is, can never quite be allowed to do.
