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It’s been like a week and I’m still chuckling to myself over Gone Girl. (The book. Haven’t seen the movie.) It’s just so, so good.
I read an essay once–I forget where, it was in an anthology about horror movies–that posited that horror of the intimate, single-protagonist sort really only worked on an emotional level if there was some initial sin or bad act on the protagonist’s part that provoked the (horrific, disproportionate) response of the antagonist. They have to have done something, to have some reprisal coming, in order for the story to work. Otherwise it’s basically just a martyrdom playing out on screen for two hours, or over the course of two hundred pages.
It’s not a bad theory, I don’t think, and it’s helped explain the dissatisfaction of a few movies where the protagonist’s fuck-up is really…not that big a deal? Like Club Dread*, where the murderer is like “You said you didn’t have any pot, but you totally did! And you! You didn’t say ‘bless you’ after I sneezed!”, only it’s not horror-comedy, and you’re expected to take it seriously. Without a real transgression, a film hitting beats the seem to imply some level of guilt or comeuppance just comes off as weird and sadistic.
If you’ve seen it, Drag Me to Hell** is a good example of when it works. You tell an old-old, poverty-stricken lady she’s getting foreclosed on because you work for a soulless bank when all human decency tells you to let the poor old bat die in her own home in peace, well. You haven’t earned getting damned to hell, obviously, but you’ve done something concrete and reasonably infuriating to provoke the witch who curses you. It’s a struggle that makes sense. You, Protagonist McGee, are righteously indignant because Jesus Christ, this is an over-the-top response, and fighting like mad because you don’t deserve this, and Antagonist McBastard is over there going “You foreclosed on a dying ninety-year-old! Fuck you, you’re going to hell!”.
So, what did Nick do to deserve his fate in Gone Girl? I mean, Amy’s pretty other than else in the book. She’s pretty much Moriarty, if Moriarty were motivated by spite and not profit. But she’s also an absolutely perfect disaster to befall a man who wants, and spends much of his life pursuing, a shallow fantasy of women as toys, women who exist only to dispense comfort and pleasure, women who have no uncomfortable needs or personalities or demands to inconvenience him.
Of the three main female characters–Amy, Andie, and Go–Go is the only one who’s a real person. Nick’s twin sister is the woman he can’t leave, even if their relationship hits the skids or sours, and so she gets to be a human. Andie exists in the same twilight zone where he wishes Amy lived, where she’s sexually and emotionally available and needs nothing in return that he can’t easily give her and is automatically subordinate in the relationship thanks to the huge gap in age and status (over a decade apart; she’s a college student and he’s her professor). So what happens when Nick breaks the marriage contract and cheats on Amy with Andie?
What happens is that it turns out that Nick, who wants nothing more than to be married to a pleasant little doll who will never give him any trouble, has married the woman that every casual misogynist tells ghost stories about. As punishment for his pursuit of the puerile daydream that requires real people to act as props, he gets the vindictive monster inspired by centuries of lingering guilt over the unacknowledged unfairness of the demand that women act like toys.
I mean, let’s be clear: Amy is not a real person. In the function of this story, Amy is the monster. And Amy-the-monster is epic. Amy’s wrath knows few bounds. Amy will murder you because you make her act grateful one too many times. Amy will have a baby just to trap you. Amy will have sex with you just to say it was rape. Amy will make you fall in love with her all over again just to throw it in your face. Amy will work and work and work at something and never let on and then act as if everything she accomplished was effortless, because Amy is unknowable and omnipotent and consequently bordering on magical. Are we even sure Amy had to work at it? Of course not, because fuck if Nick was paying attention. Amy can snap her fingers and turn seven years of your life into a lie. Amy will tell the whole world about your flaws, and she can do it because you let her see the real you. Amy is every gangrenous fear of intimacy ever spawned come to life and given reason to be angry at a man, and when Nick cheats, he pulls the trigger.
And in the end, the monster wins. Nick rolls over and accepts it, and tries to spin Amy as a stabilizing, maturing force, a fire-and-brimstone god who will make him toe the line and be a good man–the good man he couldn’t manage to be under his own power–even as Go tells him that this is fucked up and terrible. Of course, what Go fails to understand is that Nick has come to the realization that he doesn’t want a real woman, a real human being of flesh and blood and frailties and needs. A real woman would be boring. The idea of being in a real relationship with a real woman still holds no appeal. Amy-the-monster has taken away Nick’s expectation of the blow-up doll, but in its place he’s latched onto the expectation of the vampire. If he can’t have the comfort of an infinitely-soothing caregiver, he needs the horror of an infinitely-terrible tyrant.
*Actually a reasonably good movie?
**Also a reasonably good movie, and one of the few I’ve seen (not usually a big horror fan, so this might not be unusual) where a female protagonist gets to play kind of cocky and brash in response to supernatural aggression without getting shoved into the vapid-slut role. Christine basically gets to be Ash.
