The Hollywood movie, “The Gone Girl”, which was in the media glare sometime back, did finally manage to get a release in India. After watching the movie, majority of the audience felt that the wife, Amy was a psychopath who was obsessed with her husband and could manipulate or even kill to retain him in her life. Though compared to her standards she considered him to be mediocre. The other point of view which the media (particularly the New York Times Review) has hyped and indicated is that how an intelligent and beautiful woman such as Amy was trapped in a marriage with an ordinary guy such as Nick. But one of the views which has not been highlighted and as rightly pointed out by my co-contributor Yash, was the role of the society at the backdrop.
Amy stages her abduction and disappears from Nick’s life, yet leaving her diary with false entries at a convenient place for the police to find and believe Nick to be behind her abduction. How is Amy able to execute this so successfully? Interestingly she uses the American society as a prop for her mission. She fakes her pregnancy, by stealing the sample of a pregnant woman and throws it out to the society who starts antagonizing Nick, for torturing his pregnant wife and getting her kidnapped. Popular television shows start analyzing Nick’s character and when his extramarital comes to the forefront, he is branded as “the selfish husband, who despite having such a beautiful wife had the audacity to date another woman.”
Nick’s smiling face on television, next to Amy’s photograph, when he is conveying to the media about her abduction, is sensationalized and showcased as his happiness, for losing his wife. The film ends with both Nick and Amy appearing for an interview in which they convey that they are about to parents, and Ellen who was earlier branding Nick as the ultimate “bad husband”, congratulates them and says that this is their happiest moment.
While both Nick and Amy were individually dying inside their marriage, because of Amy’s involving society in their marriage, they continued to stay united. The film and director David Fincher makes a point that often unhappy individuals trapped in unhappy marriages may portray themselves to be very happy, because society is expecting them to behave in a particular manner. Having the perfect wife or the perfect husband often may not be the solution to a happy marriage. As Amy puts it, “Marriage is an abduction, in which you start believing what you don’t want to realize.”
