Gone Girl: Controversial Scripts of Men and Women

Okay, so I just saw the movie “Gone Girl,” and I need to talk about it because it’s been on my mind all week. Not only was it super creepy and scary but it made me think differently about norms of women and especially men. Here’s a quick synopsis of the storyline. Nick and Amy meet at a party of a mutual friend’s apartment in New York City. They end up talking and dating and eventually Nick proposes to Amy. After they get married and into the first year of their relationship, things are great, they love each other more than words. But then when both of them lose their jobs, things become tougher for the couple. On top of that, Nick’s mother becomes ill and Nick makes Amy move out to Missouri to be closer to her in her time of need. Amy hasn’t made too many friends in Missouri and Nick has become distant. He opens a bar downtown and spends most of his time there instead of at home with Amy. He also spends a lot of his time going out and drinking with friends from high school. He even cheats on Amy with a much younger woman who was one of his former students that Amy finds out about. Amy urges Nick to spend more time at home with her and suggests that their relationship may get better if they have a baby. This conversation turns into an argument and ends with Nick striking Amy. Amy, scared for her own life begins planning her own revenge. On the day of their 5th anniversary Amy goes missing, and the viewer is left with the mystery of where Amy has gone and/or who has taken her. When Nick reports this to the police the media begin to portray Nick as the murderer of his own wife. 

Spoiler: 

If you haven’t seen the movie yet and don’t want to know what happens don’t read this part: Long story short, Amy plotted her own murder and framed her husband to look like the perpetrator. She runs off with some money and stays in cheap motels while her husband is being eaten alive by fictional news broadcasters similar to Nancy Grace. But when Amy is robbed of all her money, she has no choice but to call for help. She calls an old boyfriend, Desi, who was obsessed with her in high school. He is extremely successful and has a lot of money. Since he was obsessed with her, he agrees to help hide her at his lake house. At this point, Amy just wants to go home and be happy again with her husband who she believes misses her. However, while Amy has been hiding out, Nick has pieced together Amy’s puzzle and figured out what she has done to frame him. Meanwhile, Amy kills Desi in an attempt to make it look like he was actually the one who kidnapped her from her home. She claimed that Desi had raped her and to defend herself she killed him. She returns home to Nick who knows what she has done. But the ending involves them sharing to a news team that Amy is pregnant from a sperm donation Nick made previous to Amy’s disappearance. 

Analysis:

There’s so much more that happens in this movie so I suggest seeing it yourself to get the real gist. The part that was most confusing to me was the fact that Nick stays with Amy at the end of the movie. She admits to Nick that she killed Desi, so why doesn’t he fight to prove to the police that she is dangerous. Also, why would Amy want to go back to her husband if she hated him so much to frame her own murder around him? He also cheated on her and he hit her so why is she trying to hard to make it seem like they have everything together? The whole thing is very complicated. The aspects of heterosexual scripts of men and women come into play here as well as the ideas that revolve around cads and dads. 

At the beginning of the movie I would say Amy depicts traditional female script. She is beautiful, available for sex, and passive. Nick, I would say, also fits the traditional male script. He is dominate and sexual considering he took charge in most aspects of their sexual encounters and cheated on his wife with another woman. However, by the end of the movie Amy does not fit this script. She becomes the aggressor in the relationship when she plots against her own husband and has sex with Desi while they’re technically still together. 

But what I find more interesting is the idea of how men are supposed to act life. When talking about the cads and dads themes mentioned by, Taylor, I think Amy desperately wanted Nick to be a dad figure when he was really a cad figure. When they first met he was smooth and very attractive. As they got more involved in their relationship he started to lose interest in Amy and moved onto other women displaying his “player” type characteristics that cad figures exemplify. Also, the fact that he wasn’t interested in having a family with Amy, displays characteristics of a cad. However, the normative male scripts featured by, Kim, mirror the ideals of a cad, not so much of a dad. So then how is a male supposed to act? Are they supposed to take on the normative ideals of heterosexual males and take on the role of a cad and deal with the wrath of women being upset with them for not being more dad-like? Or, are they supposed to go against the normative heterosexual roles and act more dad-like but maybe not be as attractive to women because they aren’t cads? 

Kim, J. L., et al. (2007). From sex to sexuality: Exposing the heterosexual script on primetime network television. Journal of Sex Research.

Taylor, D. Laramie. (2008). Cads, Dads, and Magazines: Women’s Sexual Preferences and Articles about Sex Relationships.