On Gone Girl & Emotional Neglect

Gone Girl is a story of a woman who has been used, first by her parents for financial gain and fame, and then by her husband Nick to keep his dreams afloat. Amy was once a woman who went to Harvard, had a semi-successful career, but she has fallen to the wayside for the wellbeing of others. She has never complained that her parents used her likeness and Nick has never asked how they should spend her money. Nick’s mother gets sick and they move to Missouri, away from the only home Amy has ever known in New York, and has to adjust, all without his asking if they should move or spend her money to buy a large new house. This seems to be when more and more responsibility is placed on Amy to support her and Nick’s lifestyle as well as Nick himself, with little or no attention paid to her emotional wellbeing. Nick has the bar, his young girlfriend, a teaching job, his sister, and the love of his community. Amy doesn’t even have Nick. He has no idea what she does all day or who she hangs out with and hasn’t noticed for over a year, only beginning to let his mind wander when he is questioned by the police when she goes missing. It is David Fincher (and/or Gillian Flynn) that shape the narrative to slowly reveal these details and shift your opinions on Amy’s revenge and Nick’s neglect. Amy structures her disappearance to destroy the very thing that people loved about her— being able to rely on her. Her plot to frame Nick is not just an attack on him, but on her parents who she continued to give back to even when they had already taken her privacy and her name. Amy feels that she has nothing left of herself and has no outlet, professional or personal, to express this and seeks to make Nick feel just as hopeless and unheard by framing him for a crime he didn’t commit. Her violent and manipulative behavior has been molded by a life full of emotional manipulation, causing her persona of the perfect woman to tear away at her sense of right and wrong. This evolves into a scale weighted unevenly by her trauma and causing her to take on medieval measures and drastic concepts of an eye for an eye revenge.