In Gone Girl, the curious
case of the missing wife has gone viral.
The story written by Gillian Flynn is premised on the corrosive
relationship between Nick Dunne and his beautiful wife, Amy who suddenly
disappears on their 5th wedding anniversary. Nick becomes the prime
suspect and his behaviour and movements are under the close scrutiny of the
police and the watchful news media. The story is narrated in a he said, she
said fashion and both narrators are unreliable in describing their versions of
the marriage which has become front line news to feed the insatiable media
frenzy. Nick’s parents are divorced while Amy’s parents are very much married to one another. In Amy’s diary entry, she describes her
parents:
‘ Soul mates. They really call
themselves that, which makes sense, because I guess they are. I can vouch for
it, having studied them, little lonely only child, for many years. They have no
harsh edges with each other, no spiny conflicts, they ride through life like
conjoined jellyfish – expanding and contracting instinctively, filling each
other’s spaces liquidly. Making it look easy, the soul-mate thing. People say
children from broken homes have it
hard, but the children of charmed marriages have their own particular
challenges.’
Neither Nick’s
parents’ bad marriage nor Amy’s parents’ strong marriage have
anything to do with the state of the young couple’s marriage. Amy writes in her diary:
‘Nick and I sometimes laugh,laugh out
loud, at the horrible things women make their husbands do to prove their love.
The pointless tasks ,the myriad sacrifices, the endless small surrenders. We
call these men the
dancing monkeys.’
The story begins
with Nick’s narration.
‘ I’d know
her head anywhere.
And what’s
inside it. I think of that , too : her mind. Her brain, all those coils, and
her thoughts shuttling through those coils like fast, frantic centipedes. Like
a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting through
it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts. What are you thinking Amy? The question I ‘ve asked most often
during our marriage, if not out loud , if not to the person who could answer. I
suppose these questions stormcloud over every marriage : What are you thinking ? How are
you feeling ? Who are you? What have we done to each other ? What will we do?'
In Gone Girl, Amy and
Nick face challenging times after they both have lost their writing jobs in New
York and Nick makes the decision of them moving back to his little Missouri
hometown. The harrowing story explores the respective psyche of a man and a woman who have loved and come to hate each
other as they become manipulative and deceitful to one another. It is a crime
thriller with many twists and
turns in a cleverly crafted story.
Relationships
are complicated. As a rule, partners or spouses have to negotiate and seek a
compromise to ensure that their partnership or marriage is sustainable. We like
to believe that love is unconditional but in reality, we are expected to be at
our best if we do not want any
relationship to go awry even if it is an intimate one. A healthy and thriving
relationship will bring out the best and not madness and definitely not the worst in each
other. In an ideal coupledom, there should not be a winner or a loser. Amy
becomes the heroine for the media when she goes missing and as the tabloid sensationalizes the story,
she is viewed as the victim quite by default. Nick has to work on his public
persona as people are generally quick to jump to their own judgments about his guilt rightly or wrongly.
Nick is hounded by news reporters and finds himself facing a public trial as
the television, journalists and social media try to put together a story which
is based on presumptions. Gone Girl is a fiction
that tells a story reminding us that it is quite impossible for anyone to learn
the truth about any news story.