Did David Fincher Make ‘Gone Girl’ Sexist?
Warning: This post is filled with spoilers.
When I read the book Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn a few years ago, I thought many things: that it was an ingeniously told story, that Amy Dunne was a villain for the ages and that it was a perfect send up of marriage.
But I did not think it was sexist.
Watching the movie, which Flynn wrote and David Fincher directed, the other night, I felt differently.
The film felt kind of sexist.
Amy (played amazingly by Rosamund Pike) is, of course, a psychopath. She plays down her psychopathic tendencies when she and Nick (played by Ben Affleck) are dating and then, bored in a tiny town in Missouri, she lets her freak flag fly. She elaborately frames her husband for murder (spending months writing a fake diary) runs away and eventually murders her ex-boyfriend.
We find out, that she once faked a rape, forcing another ex-boyfriend to have to register as a sex offender (even though he didn’t rape her) and essentially ruining his life.
There are many men who believe that Amy’s behavior, while extreme, isn’t out of the ordinary. They believe that “rape” is often the result of a woman changing her mind about consensual sex. They believe that women are harpies just waiting to reveal their true, horrible selves once they have men in their clutches. They believe that women are bitches who will got to any length to make men’s lives miserable.
When Amy returns to Nick toward the end of the movie, covered in blood, and dramatically collapses in his arms in front of the cameras, he whispers “bitch” into her ear … and the audience breaks into wild applause.
This moment made me feel particularly uncomfortable. I was happy that Nick was finally seeing Amy for who she really was, but was I really going to applaud a man calling his wife a bitch? It seemed so very sexist.
But here’s the thing, there’s not that much difference between the book Gone Girl and the movie Gone Girl. Flynn adapted her own book for the screen. Amy’s actions are essentially the same.
So why did the sexism speak so loudly in the movie but seemed to hardly be present in the book? I think because in the book, there was one person telling me this story and it was a woman. Flynn is incredibly smart and in control of what she’s doing. I felt like in Amy, she had created a fantastic character and her gender really didn’t matter. Her upbringing, her smarts, her boredom and frustration and mental illness combined to create someone who felt like a fully fleshed out human being.
The fact that she had sprung from the mind of a woman helped me to not think about how she might look viewed through the male gaze. Flynn and I were two sisters in this story together — she telling and me listening.
But stick David Fincher into that equation, and suddenly things look different.
Fincher isn’t the worst offender out there but he certainly seems to have some issues with the way he treats women in his work. For the most part — his movies are propelled by energetic men fighting for what they want whether it’s a billion-dollar business, the answer to a mystery or the presidency. Women just get in the way.
Sometimes he takes a stab at a strong woman. Lisbeth Salandar in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was tougher than any other woman on screen. And although journalist Zoe Barnes is a little too weak for my taste on House of Cards, Clair Underwood is a masterfully constructed character full of virtues and flaws and as fascinating as her manipulative husband Frank.
But I’m constantly questioning Fincher’s motives in his choices for his female characters (just like I do with every male director). Is she a caricature? Is she something that men see but that doesn’t really exist? Could she stand on her own outside of the film?
So maybe I’m just being more critical of Amy in the movie Gone Girl than I was in the book because I’m putting her in the Fincher category.
Or maybe I’m being unfair to Fincher and viewing her as a sexist construct just because Fincher is the man steering the ship.
It’s hard to look at works of art independently — especially movies. We know so much about the people involved these days that we can’t look at films and not take into consideration their creators. But is it fair? I don’t know. If the author of Gone Girl had been named John Flynn would I have viewed Amy differently in the book? For sure. That doesn’t make me feel great.
I’d lke to say I’m going to watch movies and read books without regard to their authors and judge them purely based on the work. But that’s never going to happen. So for now, I think the best thing to do is continue to question.
