Extra Credit Assignment
Marriage and Family Soc214335
Kimberly St. Cin
4/4/2015
GONE GIRL
Written by: Gillian Flynn
Produced By: Reese Witherspoon, Leslie Dixon,
Bruna Papandrea and Cean Chaffin
Staring
Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne Rosamund Pike as Amy Dunne Tyler Perry as Tanner Bolt Neil Patrick Harris as Desi Collings
Carrie Coon as Margo
Nick and Amy Dunne are a couple who just within the last couple years relocated to a small town in Missouri from New York to tend to his ailing mother. Nick Dunne, a small town guy who made well in the big city as a magazine writer blames the recession and the loss of his job for the decline of his marriage to his wife. On the occasion of his fifth wedding anniversary, he reports that his wife, Amy, has gone missing Nick calls the authorities when she goes missing but something is not right about his behavior. Is he hiding something? Is he sad or upset enough? While the police continue their investigation, Nick is battling a media frenzy and the people who believe his innocence is dwindling by the minute.
The Moral of the story in my opinion would be to be careful of who you trust because people aren’t always who they seem. This movie takes the meaning of feminist and psychopath to a whole new level. It’s the story of what happens when two people, completely opposite from each other marry and end up miserable and unhappy. The husband, Nick, chooses to comfort himself by turning to infidelity. The Marriage and Family textbook defines infidelity as cheating. Cheating may be conceptualized as both sexual and nonsexual. It is also quoted in the textbook that even in “monogamous” relationships, there is considerable cheating. In a study of 1,341 undergraduates, 27.2% of males and 19.8% of females reported having oral, vaginal, or anal sex outside a relationship that their partner considered monogamous. While the wife, Amy choses to plot revenge against her husband. Amy portrays the prototypical femme fatale. She seduced Nick into marrying her, controls him and when she finds out he is cheating, plots to frame him for murder. According to Google, femme fatale is an attractive, seductive woman, especially one who will bring disaster to a man she becomes involved with. Some relate the concept of femme fatale to misogyny and male fears of feminism. The Oxford Dictionary defines a misogynist as a person who dislikes, despises or is strongly prejudiced against women. Amy, targets her husband because he is flawed by cheating, her sociopathic views of this deems this as irredeemable. The story, pits a feminist psychopath against a misogynist jerk in what is a severely twisted marriage. Amy’s cool girl speech addresses how women attempt to change themselves for their husbands or the men in their lives. She emphasizes how women “unabashedly, love sex, drinking beer, and eating burgers—while still maintaining a perfect figure—and are always ready to forgive their husbands for their wrongs.” She had been putting on a façade, for the last few years of their marriage to keep Nick’s love and had just put into words a problem that many women face. She was changing her perceptions to fit what she felt her husband wanted. As our textbook states, “Rather than changing behavior, changing one’s perception of a behavior may be easier and quicker. Rather than expect one’s partner to be “on time”, it may be easier to drop the expectation than one’s partner to be on time and to stop being mad about something that doesn’t matter.” Amy was basing her idea of what a man what on that society has deemed the gender roles of women. The textbook defines gender roles as “the social norms that dictate what is socially regarded as appropriate female and male behavior. All societies have expectations of how boys and girls, men and women “should” behave.”
Amy was viewing marriage through a feminist framework. A Feminist framework perspective views marriage and family as