Gone Girl Feminism

I was told in Berlin that the feminist movement I am exposing is inspired by Gone Girl. However, my friends in Glasgow had already given me a hint. We came to the conversation by way of Ben Afflick. They collectively fostered a strong dislike for Afflick. It seemed a way for them to know that they were all on the same page about something morally or politically.  There was a lacklustre shock that I had not seen the film. The ‘oh really?’ sounded more like a feigned interest in something they wished to pass over surreptitiously. Most of them turned away, a couple of them shared a quick glance, another smoothed the sudden brake in the banter by saying with a knowing smile, ‘it’s been really influential’. She looked around to see who enjoyed her tergiversation. I knew I had been excluded from something. The film had been marked with an aura then, but an ominous one.

Plot Summary

Gone Girl reached No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list in 2012, spending 91 weeks on the chart, and it went on to sell more than 20 million copies. In the ten years after its released, 680 “girl” books were published for a total U.S. value of nearly $240 million. It spawned a critically claimed film adaptation in 2014 direct by Davis Fincher, starring Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck. That success sparked off what became known as ‘the Gone Girl effect’. A flurry female-oriented domestic thrillers like Woman in the Window and The Girl on the Train.

The narrative alternates between the point of view of Nick and Amy Dunne (née Elliott). Nick's narration begins shortly after arriving home to find Amy is missing from their home. There are signs of a struggle suggesting Amy might have been harmed or kidnapped. Amy's narration comes in the form of her diaries and follows the earlier stages of their relationship. Their marriage deteriorates; Amy describes how she hates being a housewife in the suburbs and resents Nick for making her move. It is revealed that Nick and Amy are unreliable narrators. Nick has admitted that he is cheating on his wife with his former college student and intended to divorce Amy. Amy's narration shifts to the present day, revealing that she is alive and staged her own disappearance to go into hiding. After discovering Nick's affair, she became angry at his disregard for her and planned extensively for a year to fake her death and frame Nick as revenge for wasting her life. Her pregnancy, years of diary entries, and other evidence were fabricated to incriminate Nick.

True to the film, part of the violence in Berlin is touted as vengeance on the victim for cheating on his girlfriend. True to the film, the man is trapped in a plot that frames him for something he did not do. In the film, the implacable Amy accomplishes this plot alone with years of planning. Nowadays, there is always already a group chat active- abusing and drugging men- in the name of feminism. This is true whether the victim has cheated on their girlfriend or not. With anonymity online and the security of numbers ‘the gone girl twist’ has become more elaborate and sinister, moving from literary trope to offline torture.

The cultural context of the reception of Gone Girl

This is not to say that Gone Girl sparked this off in a vacuum. The book was released in 2013. Jonathan Haidt claims that we were all on iPhones by this year and points to correlations with an extreme rise in mental health problems in teenagers. Girls fared much worse than boys. Haidt explains this disparity, in part, by pointing to the different ways the sexes use social media. While boys gravitate more to YouTube and video games, the girls gravitate towards Tumbler and Twitter. This represents a continuation of girl’s early development which displays a higher concern over status in social hierarchies and social skills. By 2013, platforms like Twitter, Tumbler and Facebook had already introduced metrics for social status such as the ‘like’, ‘retweet’, and ‘share’ options. In case you don’t know, Tumbler was a mini blogging site without any character limit and which allowed you to post media like videos. It was noted for the socially progressive view of its users, with half of Tumblr's visitor base being under the age of 25. It peaked in the year Gone Girl was published, receiving 13 billion page views. As well as other a few other platforms like Jezebel, this is where the discussion of Gone Girl would happen. Social media has since proven to polarize political opinions and push people to more extreme views. This is in great measure to do with the promotion of moral outrage to increase metrics. Girls on these platforms quickly learned that they would gain higher status- more likes, retweets and shares- if they shared stories of victimhood, or more generally, stories that roused anger. In a previous article I discussed how social media plays on certain cognitive bias to increase moral outrage, anger, and disgust. 

The three feminist interpretations of Gone Girl

Gilian Flynn conceived of a book that would offer women something different:

What I was finding was a lot of books that I didn’t necessarily always want to read. I thought, you know, in a way there’s an inequality here that men are allowed to be all these things. Male characters can be good. They can be nasty. They’re interesting [in] both ways and it really pissed me off. It really felt like women were being kept in these particular types of pretty boxes.

The Hollywood Reporter in 2019.

There are three conflicting interpretation of Gone Girl which elaborate on Flynn’s desideratum for female characters. They relate to the character of Amy and divide the feminist reception of the book. The more prominent reception of Amy celebrates her as an ‘unlikable female protagonist’. Amy was the first of her kind and Flynn has been credited with changing the entire genre of mysteries and thrillers. However, some criticized this unlikeable female because it leant on the ‘unreliable narrator’ to tell the story. The unreliable narrator often takes the form of characters who are suffering from trauma or mental illness, or substance abuse. This is what we see in The Girl on the Train, The Woman in the Window, and Flynn’s other characters in Dark Places and Sharp Objects.  It seems that women are not allowed to be bad and flawed and be loved. Flynn hits back at her critics,

In literature, they can be dismissably bad – trampy, vampy, bitchy types – but there’s still a big pushback against the idea that women can be just pragmatically evil, bad and selfish … I don’t write psycho bitches. The psycho bitch is just crazy – she has no motive, and so she’s a dismissible person because of her psycho-bitchiness

Quoted from Female villain and false accusations, Newstatemen (7/10/2014)

This leads us to the second reception of Amy which has grown in tandem with the development of a feminism that seeks vengeance. Gone Girl is a powerful first of its kind not because Amy is an unlikable character, but because it presents the possibility that women can be angry and violent and be loved. Gillian Flynn thinks that this might be the reason it connected with so many women:

I certainly think that the acknowledgment of female anger as a viable emotion, as something that should be dealt with and acknowledged and appreciated and women feeling that way was one of the reasons that so many people connected to Gone Girl 

Hollywood Reporter 2019

The problem is that there are many women who have good reason to be angry. This why the implacably recalcitrant Amy struck a chord in literary circles and inspired a new form political activism. Nowadays, we experience a barrage of sexual violence statistics on social media that are designed to inflame moral outrage. The threat of ‘toxic masculinity’, as the inner principle of all evil is drummed into us all. While this shift in cultural understanding began around the time of Gone Girl, the book responded to something prior, a predicament that tapped into the anger of millions of women. Gone Girl called out the steady banality of everyday misogyny that, at that time, seemed enough to anger women. Amy called it as she sees it in the book, chastising herself and other women for putting up with the humiliation:

I know women whose entire personas are woven from a benign mediocrity. Their lives are a list of shortcomings: the unappreciative boyfriend, the extra ten pounds, the dismissive boss, the conniving sister, the straying husband. I’ve always hovered above their stories, nodding in sympathy and thinking how foolish they are, these women, to let these things happen, how undisciplined. And now to be one of them! One of the women with the endless stories that make people nod sympathetically and think: Poor dumb bitch.

Female villain and false accusations, Newstatemen (7/10/2014)

The second interpretation views Amy, not as the classical ‘unreliable female narrator’, but one burnished with anger. However here is a third interpretation in which Amy raises gender stereotypes in arms against her husband and reaps vengeance. Amy is not only a radical who refuses to accept the stereotypes foisted upon her, she turns them against her misogynist husband as a weapon. Rhiannon Lucy Coslett explains this well in the Newstatesmen. Distinguishing a third take on Amy that would become an inspiration:

By using society’s propensity to pigeonhole women as vulnerable victims against her drunken sexist of a husband, you could argue that [Amy Dunne] is taking back the power in her relationship. As a woman, she has been forced to embody a succession of tedious female stereotypes, but she twists this oppressive force in order to get her own way.

(ibid)

Amy rails against the ‘benign mediocrity’ that most women are forced to endure with the ‘unappreciative boyfriend, the extra ten pounds, the dismissive boss, the conniving sister, the straying husband’. She conceals herself in those stereotypes that have mired her life, so that men become benighted in their misogyny. She encourages them, and the media that peddles the stereotypes, to live out that patronising contempt for women as the stupid victim, ‘the poor dumb bitch’. She entices them to see her as the damsel in distress and ‘enrols’ them as men, not just to protect her, but to attack her toxic misogynist pig.

So what’s the problem?

There is a problem and the critique that Rhiannon Lucy Coslett was countering touches upon it. Joan Smith had argued in The Guardian that the film was a misogynist one. She caimed it perpetuated the rape myth of a crazy woman destroying a man’s life and getting away with it. It is true that Amy makes two false accusations of rape and get aways with it. Smith argues that the film is ‘playing on what we now know about the behaviour of abused women and undermining the credibility of victims’ (The Guardian, 06/10/2014). Following her convincing third interpretation of Amy in the Newstatesmen, Coslett gives Smith’s critique short shrift. She simply states, ‘Amy is an exception, not the rule’. In no way does she undermine the credibility of victims. However it is a little more complicated than Coslett makes out.

Coslett’s response points to a tension in her article, an article in which she had earlier championed the use of ‘vulnerable female victimhood’. This is indeed what distinguishes the third interpretation and gives it unique force. In the paragraph above, the perception of women as vulnerable victims is called a stereotype, that not only betrays ‘society’s propensity to pigeonhole women’, but one that acts as an ‘oppressive force’ on women. Coslett celebrates Amy precisely because ‘she twists this oppressive force in order to get her own way’. There are many ways to interpret ‘the twisting’ of the stereotype of women as vulnerable. In this case, a feminist film review champions the female protagonist who frames her cheating husband for murder and falsely accusing two other men of rape. This is truly exceptional behaviour, Coslett claims, but she undermines her claim in the next sentence:

Amy is an exception, not a rule, an actor playing yet another part in a long line up of pre-written roles that have been foisted upon her against her will because she is a woman, and which she has decided to turn to her own advantage. She is bored, betrayed, fucked off, and furious. … She is not a female stereotype, but an unhinged, complex, flawed villain who has repeatedly been cast as one by others. And what could be more feminist than that?

My problem is not with the film or the book. It is with the third interpretation intolerance for objections to the violence to men, and how that violence will negatively impact on women who are vulnerable victims. Coslett argues that women can frame men to inflict violence and suffering on men because they are vulnerable victims. Yet men deserve their punishment because they see women as the stereotypical vulnerable victims. It is clear that men who support this form of feminism are fools for thinking that these feminists are vulnerable victims.

Coslett’s closing passage reads more like a definition of what a modern feminist should look like. It exhorts feminists to take Amy as an exception in the sense of being a model to follow. In so far as they are ‘bored, betrayed, fucked off, and furious’ the modern feminist is hard to distinguish from many men. However Coslett is claiming that Amy’s suffering is of a kind unique to women, and this bestows privileges on women that they have yet to realise. Amy is only an exception to the rule in so far as she has freed herself from sexist stereotypes by taking vengeance on men. The implication being that most women are content to be ruled by the patriarchy in a series of stereotypes.

It is worth pointing out that Amy returns to Nick in the end, seemingly of her own free will, and is thus content to live her life projecting the image of a stereotypical happy marriage. It is hard to tell what freedom Amy has won for herself apart from the privilege of vengeance in a life she will not take ownership of. Amy enjoys the privi-lege, a private law unto herself, of doing violence to men by having others do the violence for her, the vulnerable victim. There is no question of Amy being a hero. In this model of feminism, the punishment will not fit the crime, indeed those punished have not committed the crime they are condemned for. As a vulnerable victim women have the privilege to violence, we are told that this privilege is justified as their last and only resort in a life not of their chosing.

And now?

The cinema goer can forget the unique omnipotence of the cinematic experience and carry powerful moral emotions beyond the cinema foyer. This power is not to be lamented, per se. As long as we acknowledge how we can indulge ourselves in moral emotions in the cinema becasue we are indulging in omnipotence. This can be dangerous if it is carried beyond the cinema foyer where we are all fallible.

Even when the unreliable narrator is employed to play with our investment on the screen, we still experience an omnipotence that the characters portrayed there do not. Once Amy and Nick are revealed as unreliable narrators, we know their reciprocal folly better than anyone in the film, including the police and journalists on whom we rely in real life. This is important for the film. We know for sure that Nick has been cheating on his wife, and that his wife has made sacrifices for him, to the tune of investing the last of her money in his bar. As the third interpretations puts it,  he is an ‘unsympathetic, sexist scumbag’. This one certainty, amidst the unreliable narration, grounds our moral emotions in the film and allows us to share the anger that Amy feels. As the author says herself, it is this shared anger that connects many readers to Amy and the book.

The power to connect in this way with the character is regarded as the essential power of theatre by both Aristotle and Brecht. However, they differ categorically on how this power should be directed. A central component of Aristotle’s theory of theatre is that the audience should experience the emotions that the characters are experiencing on stage, as if they were their own. Both Gillian Flynn and the third interpretation claim that women feel the anger of Amy at the shortcomings of her life with her husband as their own. The second component of Aristotle’s theory is where Brecht differs. This experience of sharing the protagonist’s emotions, Aristotle claims, allows for the release of these emotions. In Aristotle’s words it cleanses, from the Greek kathairein meaning "to cleanse or purge", the audience of pent-up emotions. On this basis, Aristotle claims that theatre is good for the city-state because it helps the audience regulate emotions and moral emotions like anger and grief in particular.

Bertold Brecht agrees that the audience should connect with the protagonist, but their emotions should not find resolution in the play. Brecht claimed that ‘catharsis’ in the Aristotelian sense inhibited the spectator’s ability to think and judge for themselves. Brecht wanted audiences to leave the theatre with unresolved emotions so that they would need to resolve them in real life, by releasing them in real life. In this way, Brecht emphasized the ability to arouse emotions in an audience to encourage action. This brings Brecht’s theory closer to the rhetorician’s power of persuasion, than to Aristotle’s theory of catharsis. This may be why Amy returns to Nick, just as the female members of audience must return to their life and potentially a straying husband.

The problem is that in real life we do not have the omnipotence of the big screen that resolves us together against Nick with utter certainty. In the film we discover Amy accused her previous boyfriend of rape because he wanted to break off the relationship with her. This poses the question, can we trust Amy or the third feminist way to know when their boyfriends or husband do not appreciate them enough? Both of them advocate pretending to be the victim in order to frame men for things they did not do. This detracts from the efforts made to take reports of sexual assault seriously. I am concerned that by telling my story of a smear campaign, druggings and sexual assault, that the current good will towards feminism will be damaged. Worst of all by far, that it might damage the credibility of the female victims of sexual assault. I want to make clear therefore, that I have not heard of any women falsely claiming to have been sexually assaulted in order to take revenge on men. Given that I have been told so much, and experienced so much abuse already, I think I would have heard about such false accusations. I hope that this risk does not hold people back from demanding justice for the male victims of this campaign of abuse. They too deserve justice.

I have to tell people of the true violent nature of these hate groups who sexually harass, coerce, sexually assault, rob and drug men. They claim, and they could be genuinely convinced, that the man has cheated on a girlfriend. However, soon after arriving in Berlin, I heard British men being targeted fo rbeing British. In particular I heard from a close female friend who worked in gastronomy with women who boasted of what they do. This was before I was in relationship, my friend was warning me because I was British. Whether the man has ever cheated or not, the campaign is by definition motivated by a form of xenophobia. In my case, I had not cheated on my girlfriend. 

The Gone Girl ploy is developed from an older trick to take revenge on men, ‘the pretegnancy’. This is when a woman tells a man she is pregnant when he breaks up with her, or otherwise offends her. This is done with casualness now and this has been represented on screen as well, for example, in the second series of Love Life. The new trick is to convince a man that a woman has given birth to his child and that he will not be allowed to be a father to the child. This involves an elaborate series of dramatized scenes in which people in council offices, help centres, and family lawyers are employed. True to the film Gone Girl, this is a form of vengeance on a man who has allegedly cheated on his girlfriend. True to the film, he is framed for many other things- being racist and sexist among others.

However, the women have other reasons to carry out this form of harassment and the question of whether the man has cheated is beside the point. The women gain notoriety, prestige, and kudos for repeating this process on one British man after the other. They need not wait to find a man they know has cheated to maintain their prestige. They target innocent men, believing all men cheat. They offer a coherent feminist philosophy for their indiscriminate abuse. I summarise as succinctly as it was put to me by the two feminists who abused me in the bar in Berlin.

Sexism is not a problem with certain individuals in society. The problem is structural in a patriarchal society. What ever man you meet, you know that he will be either, a father, a husband, a boyfriend, an employer, or a landlord. As such he enjoys privileges of power over the women. So whatever you can do to them, you take vengeance for a woman who can’t.

Note that all the relationships that this man is presumed to have, in each case correlates with a stereotypical role for women as a vulnerable victim. The philosophy, whether consciously or not, mirrors the conception of Amy who justifies her abuse of men on the bases of all the humiliating stereotypes she is forced to live out like all the other women, ‘women with the endless stories that make people nod sympathetically and think: Poor dumb bitch.’. In other words, the group harassing drugging and sexually assaulted men need not wait for any further reason to abuse them than their existence. As they recounted their philosophy in the bar to me, I could not help but admire the irony of telling this to me, their latest victim, when I was one of the very few men who do not fill any of the criteria.

As the Substack progresses, you will learn that it is beside the point whether the victims have cheated on their girlfriend, because the dehumanizing abuse is beyond what you probably imagine. It goes well beyond tricking a man into thinking he has a child in the world. I doubt that the men and women in the bars who spoil my drink really comprehend what is being done to men in Berlin. They are only trying to show that they are not stupid, and they are not powerless, and they know that they are on the right sight of history. Little do they know that their good intentions have been twisted, and these women behind the hate group are not vulnerable victims run amok. The women behind this violence are the toxic racist, sexist, abusers that they project out in the world to displace what they cannot accept about themselves.