Gone Girl and "The Cool Girl"

There have been a lot of complaints that David Fincher's Gone Girl is a misogynistic film. Quite frankly, I understand that. After all, the film depicts its female lead as a mastermind who frames innocent men for rape, and one could even argue that the film suggests  all women are "fucking crazy bitches," to quote Ben Affleck's character Nick. In short, the character of Amy (Rosamund Pike) is manipulative, hysterical, and downright psychopathic.

However, I think that this surface-level analysis of the film doesn't fully capture its complicated commentary on gender politics. In fact, what makes Gone Girl so progressive and, from this humble female's perspective, so on point is the way that it completely shatters the male fantasy of The Cool Girl.

What, you might ask, is The Cool Girl? Well, to quote the original Gone Girl novel:

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men — friends, coworkers, strangers — giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much — no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version — maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain.

While this rant is cut down to a few lines in the film version, the message is still clear. Amy had to put on this act of femininity and play the part of what men want in order to seduce Nick. And when he finally got to know the real her and Amy's act faded away, he cheated on her and planned to leave her. While this of course in no way justifies Amy's actions, every female can identify with her experiences. And thus, in a way, Amy is not just a femme fatale but a badass female hero who, through her scheming and framing of Nick, is saying a resounding "fuck you" to every man who gets bored of a woman because he only fell in love with his own idea of her.

As Gone Girl writer Gilian Flynn puts it, "I waited patiently - years - for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we'd say, Yeah, he's a Cool Guy.”

But that never happens. Instead, women continually are forced to embody the impossible double standard of the feminine, hot and sexy yet impossibly cool girl. The girl who never nags, never gets mad, and is impossibly "chill" and understanding at all times. The girl who caters to male perceptions of attractiveness but can still hang with the guys.

We see this Cool Girl image permeating pop culture. The Cool Girl is the beer-drinking, french fry eating, football-loving "one of the guys" Sabrina (Olivia Wilde) in The Change-Up, and she's the casual sex-having commitment-phobe Jamie (Mila Kunis) in Friends with Benefits. Even Jennifer Lawrence's lovable public persona is built around this false, manufactured idea of The Cool Girl--she loves to stuff her face full of Doritos and joke about her bodily functions and yet she's still sexy and fuckable... and everyone thinks, "Wow. She's not like most girls." And that misperception that she's somehow different than most girls (because most girls are so naggy and annoying, right?) is what makes her so fucking cool to men.

 Now, there is one other reason why I absolutely love Gone Girl. And it's the same reason most people have such a problem with it.

Amy is a psychopath. She's evil. She's cunning, manipulative, and devious. She's the kind of villain that is so scary, so cold, so ruthless, she will go down in movie history as one of the most infamous and chilling villains of all time. And she's a woman.

Let's face it. All of the cool villains in pop culture are male. Consider The Joker (Heath Ledger) in The Dark Knight or Kaiser Sosse (Kevin Spacey) in The Usual Suspects. The evil mastermind is always a man. In most films, women get to play the part of the damsel in distress or even the likeable protagonist, but when do women get these meaty, challenging roles where they play complex characters, psychopaths, sociopaths, or brilliant manipulators? When do women get to play superhero villains or serial killers? When does the big twist ending reveal that the woman was behind everything? Never.

Thus, I love Gone Girl because it's not even Ben Affleck's film. Of course, it's marketed as a Ben Affleck film, considering most people don't know the name Rosamund Pike. (And this is not meant as an insult to Ben's performance--he does a phenomenal job in the film.) But Gone Girl is impactful due to its big twist in which the audience realizes that Amy is actually an evil mastermind. And it's so surprising because women NEVER get these kinds of roles, so no one would ever expect it.

So, I love Gone Girl because, by the end of the film, everyone is talking about Rosamund Pike's performance. For once, a woman gets to steal the show. Finally, a female actress gets to play a twisted character. And that's ultimately what makes Gone Girl so special--Rosamund Pike's scene-stealing performance shows just how strong, devious, and powerful women can be.

Ultimately, Gone Girl is a brilliant film because it initially reinforces the idea of The Cool Girl. It suggests that Amy is the perfect housewife, and, as viewers, we all yearn to know what happened to this perfect woman and mourn her disappearance. Then, halfway through, Fincher turns this false idea of the Cool Girl on it's head--actually, he tells us, that woman never existed. Thus, the film is great because Amy gets to punish her own husband for only loving her as The Cool Girl as opposed to the real her. She gets to punish Desi (Neil Patrick Harris), too, for only loving the idea of her, but resenting her when she gains weight and is no longer sexually available to him--and for that, she slashes his throat.

Best of all, Amy is not even punished at the end of the film. Instead, she manipulates Nick into staying with her, and she will torture him for the rest of their marriage. On top of that, Nick is forced to live with the actual woman he married--not the Cool Girl he thought she was, but the real her. And it's beyond satisfying.

FEMINIST FILM/TV RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK: BEFORE SUNRISE, BEFORE SUNSET, BEFORE MIDNIGHT

Check out Richard Linklater's masterful Before Sunrise trilogy, which depicts the development of a relationship over time, as each of the films takes place over the course of a single day. Julie Delpy's character is one of the most nuanced, realistic, and strong female characters ever written, and the films do such a beautiful job depicting the highs and lows of falling in love, settling down, and growing old with your partner.