After watching Gone Girl (David Fincher’s new hit film), I left the cinema in a state of rage. Not because the plot wasn’t engaging, the acting wasn’t impeccable and the cinematography wasn’t hauntingly beautiful… but because I felt ashamed to be a woman. It’s an experience I’ve never had whilst watching a film before, but all I could think was “How did a woman write this book?! What did women do to Gillian Flynn to make her hate us so much!?”
The cinematic backlash to the second wave feminism that hosted Michael Douglas’s overt sexism in the late 1980s pales in comparison to the level of misogyny displayed in this film. Glenn Close caused an entire generation to refer to women as “bunny boilers” in Fatal Attraction, and Gone Girl takes the same premise: an attractive, ‘cool’, intelligent and seemingly reasonable woman, wronged by a cheating/philandering lover, is then revealed to be insane after she reacts disproportionately to the man’s offences against her. Allowing the man to become painted as the victim of the situation.
Obviously, in individual situations some women are driven to insanity, just as some men are driven insane. But homicide statistics provided by the United States Department of Justice indicate that men committed the vast majority of homicides between 1980 and 2008 in the United States, representing 90% of the total number of offenders. So why then are women highlighted as violent and psychopathic in films like Gone Girl and Fatal Attraction?
The answer to this is an inherent need modern society has to blame women for the wrongdoings of men – Amy, cheated on by her husband, becomes the villain after she has what can only be deemed as a near-ridiculous overreaction. In this way, men who view the film can justify the infidelity, by the ‘girls are crazy’ mentality that has manifested itself into popular culture. This misogynistic attitude is perhaps most offensive in the scene where Amy sexually violates herself with a wine bottle in order to imitate rape. This scene is particularly offensive as it implies women lie about rape, which, as Olivia Pope so beautifully pointed out in a recent episode of Scandal; “I’d fight to the death to stand by any woman who says she was assaulted. Women don’t lie about that. There is overwhelming evidence that women do not lie about being sexually assaulted.” This progressive attitude is what we should be seeing more of in television and film. As proven by the recent scandal in the Tab, misogynistic attitudes towards rape translates into real life women in Manchester are being warned to be careful so as to avoid rape, rather than men being warned to respect women. The messages of Gone Girl therefore, cannot be seen as a single crazy woman, within this volatile and sexist political landscape. Hopefully, in ten years time, we will be able to look back at this film and find it speaks of an individual, not of an epidemic of woman-hating thoughts, but until then, I wouldn’t recommend it as a date-night movie.
(Photo credits to litreactor.com, ytimg.com)