Beware spoilers…
Rosamund Pike delivers. Amy Dunne is the best part of Gone Girl. But…
Amy is F-CKED.
She is a psychopath. A sociopath. She is sick, she is twisted, she is evil.
Is she?
And if she is… so what?
We glorify anti-heroes all the time. Michael Corleone is a cultural icon. Walter White/Heisenberg is a cultural icon. Heath Ledger’s Joker is a cultural icon. Jax Teller is a multi-murderer, also a cultural icon. But they are all, indisputably, terrible people. Horrible people. And still, there is something to be admired, non? Everyone understands, they even nod in approval, when you throw down a Corleone line (“I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse”), when you decide to be Heisenberg for Halloween, when you swagger into the party wearing Jax’s cut, when you paint Heath’s messy mouth onto your face, the villain who made Batman so …juvenile, child’s play. Babies want to be Batman. Grownups want to be the Joker.
So now we have a female character who is just as bad, just as ruthless, cunning, dangerous, and violent. Amy Dunne has arrived. And… well… I love her.
I walked out of the theatre with my cousin Cat and we looked at each other like, um, I’m kind of obsessed with Amy Dunne. On top of that, I actually find her really …inspiring.
She’s brilliant, like Walter White.
She’s playfully sadistic, like the Joker.
She’s angry, like Jax Teller.
She’s focused, she’s meticulous, but she’s imaginative and, above all, Amy is unapologetic. Even the way she kills is gorgeous. That scene is gory, definitely, but it’s also filmed beautifully. So she murders by art too. It’s EXHILARATING. She’s so f-cking smart, it’s exhilarating. And in the closing moments of the film, when she makes Nick her bitch, you’re supposed to be all disgusted by it, sure, and you’re supposed to feel sh-tty about how sad it is that two people exist in marriage just to tear each other apart, but what I ended up feeling was… a fist pump?
Never mind the messaging and what it’s all supposed to mean and whether or not the film did its job. Never mind that for a minute, we’ll get to the overall film review when we get to it. My point is that for all the times you’ve walked out of a theatre jacked up on Michael Corleone, high fiving your buddies over the lifestyle of that pig Jordan Belfort, or turned off the TV thrilled by Walt White’s brutal, unflinching meanness, this time it’s a woman. This time a woman made it “cool” to be awful.
There it is.
Gone Girl, Cool Girl.
You don’t have to wring your hands over it and worry. It’s fine.
Attached – Rosamund Pike at the Academy screening for Gone Girl last week in New York, standing in front of Oscar. Will she be holding one in February?