GONE GIRL

Warning: There are many uses of explicit language.

 

……………….

 

Amy (37 years old) and Nick (34 years old) have been married for 5 years. For the first two years of marriage, everything seemed fine. Then Nick and Amy both lost their jobs to the Internet (Nick was a magazine writer, and Amy wrote personality quizzes). Then Amy got tired of pretending to be “Cool Girl” Amy, and Nick began putting less and less effort into the relationship. Then Nick’s mom got cancer, and so he and Amy moved from New York to middle-of-nowhere Missouri (which Amy hated) to be closer to Nick’s family. Nick now works as an adjunct college professor (for English) and runs a bar (creatively called “The Bar”) with his twin sister, Margo (Go).

 

Nick is an arrogant dude who hates all women (except his twin sister). Like his father, he finds women annoying and incapable. Yet, Nick desperately wants to be liked by everyone, so he’s willing to do whatever it takes to try to achieve this. We not only dislike Nick because of his attitude, but because for the last year, he’s been secretly cheating on Amy with one of his college students (Andie).

 

Amy appears likable at first, but that’s just because she can be a master at playing different roles. She’s used to growing up in the spotlight (since her parents wrote famous “Amazing Amy” books, where they not-so-discreetly compared Amy to her ideal fictional namesake, and she’s an only child, since her mother had 8 miscarriages before her). She is notorious for holding grudges. For example:

 

• In high school, Amy was jealous of how her best friend (Hilary Handy) had a slightly higher GPA than her, attracted more boys (since those boys found Amy intimidating), and knew Amy’s flaws. So, Amy gradually made it look like Hilary was obsessed with her. She convinced Hilary to dye her hair the same shade of blond as her hair, convinced Hilary to prank her parents by proclaiming that she was their new daughter now, and for the grand finale, injured herself and told the principal that Hilary had pushed her down a flight of stairs. 

 

• Amy used to date Tommy O’Hara, but when she found out that he had been cheating on her, she framed him for rape. She did this by seducing him, and then she tied handcuffs to the bed frame while he was in the bathroom, and then she went to the police.

 

• In college, Amy used to date Desi Collings, but then she “claimed” that he was obsessed with her and that he had attempted suicide in her dorm room by taking a bunch of sleeping pills and going to sleep on her bed. Desi never lost his feelings for Amy, though, and so he tried to remain in contact with Amy throughout the years via letters.

 

• When a truck once cut her off in traffic, she recorded the license plate and for months later, she would call the truck management service to complain about that driver (pretending like there were more instances of his “reckless driving”) to try to get that driver fired.

 

“My wife wasn’t Amazing Amy but Avenging Amy” (270).

 

“Amy likes to play God when she’s not happy. Old Testament God. // …She doles out punishment… Hard” (276).

 

Every year on their wedding anniversary, Amy arranges a scavenger hunt, where she leads Nick between different locations where they shared some of their fondest memories from that previous year. For the 5-year wedding anniversary, Amy decides to do something different. She makes the clues easier (since Nick always complained about them being too vague), but with a twist. She disappears the morning of and tries to frame Nick for murdering her.

 

• She invited her pregnant neighbor over and served lots of lemonade. She had previously trained her toilet so that when her neighbor peed in it, she could use it for a pregnancy test at the doctor’s office. She also “confessed” to the neighbor that she was scared of Nick. So, when news of her disappearance got out, this neighbor very adamantly was against Nick, and Amy was viewed as the innocent, vulnerable, pregnant wife.

 

• She poisoned herself with antifreeze and kept her vomit in the back of the freezer in case she ever wanted the police to test it.

 

• In the kitchen, Amy cuts her arm to spill blood and then sloppily wipes it up (so that the police can find traces of her blood and have it appear like Nick was covering his trail). (This draws an analogy to Amy’s earlier complaint that commercials that target women seem to only advertise menstrual products and cleaning products, as if all that housewives did was bleed and clean, 265).

 

• In the living room, Amy stages a suspiciously-staged scene for struggle (including tipping over a bottom-heavy ottoman).

 

• In the bedroom, she hides the first scavenger clue (so that the police would be there to urge Nick to begin the hunt, and Nick’s ego would force him to finish it).

 

• Each clue leads Nick to places where he had relations with Andie (e.g., his office at the college he worked at, his dad’s vacant house, etc.). Each clue (except the first one, which was clearly referencing Nick’s college office) referenced an inside joke that would make no sense to the police or anyone else when Nick later asserts that this scavenger hunt was Amy’s way of punishing him for cheating on her (e.g., “little brown house” = Nick’s dad’s blue house).

 

• Amy wrote a diary (writing seven-years-worth at once, researching current events at that time), pretending like Nick was abusive and that she was afraid that he might kill her. She even tried to purchase a gun to “protect herself”. She hid the diary in the furnace of Nick’s dad’s vacant house and changed the alarm code for the house so that when the scavenger hunt led him there, it was documented that he had recently been there (and presumably could have tried burning the diary then).

 

• Amy applied for a bunch of credit cards in Nick’s name, bought random stuff with it, put his fingerprints on the stuff while he was sleeping, and then hid the stuff in Go’s woodshed. This made it look like Nick was preparing for divorce by purchasing a bunch of stuff for himself while he still had access to Amy’s money.

 

• Amy watched the TV coverage of the story and called the anonymous tip line whenever the police were taking too slow.

 

Amy’s original plan was that when Nick officially got sentenced to jail (or the death row), she would catch up with where her body would’ve drifted to in the river and drown herself there. However, she realizes that she’s not ready to die, and she falls for Nick all over again when he repeatedly tells the camera in interviews that he wants Amy to come home so that he can finally give her “what she deserves”. But Amy has a problem: she’s out of cash and she doesn’t have an explanation if she returns. So, she calls Desi, who hides her in his lakehouse. 

 

Amy realizes how creepy Desi truly is. The lakehouse has an indoor greenhouse of tulips (Amy’s favorite flower in college; not freshly planted) and a girl’s guest room painted dusty rose (Amy’s favorite color in college; not freshly painted), as though he has been longing for Amy to leave Nick for him. Now that Amy is there, he “traps” her there (since the house is surrounded by a very tall fence and a gate that Amy doesn’t know the code to, and he refuses to give Amy more than $40 since he claims she doesn’t need money if he keeps visiting and having food delivered). He also disguises a threat as concern by telling her that if she were to ever escape, he would have to go to the police because he would be “afraid that she’s returning to her abuser, Nick, due to Stockholm’s syndrome”. So Amy seduces Desi and then pulls out a box cutter from under her pillow to stab him in the neck (thus killing him). When she returns home, she tells everyone that the reason why she disappeared was because Desi kidnapped her. 

 

As the police question Amy, whenever they get close to revealing something that doesn’t make sense in Amy’s version of events (“Didn’t you scream when Desi tried to kidnap you?”), Amy gets offensive to divert them (“I would have screamed louder if I would’ve known that you guys would have been so slow in the investigation, of which you were too busy trying to pin Nick instead of Desi”). The police close the case and move on to other cases.

 

Nick is afraid of his wife now, but Amy convinces him that they each know each other better than anyone else in the world and that their lives would be too dull without each other. Plus, she implies that if he were to leave her, she would try to implicate him in her attempted murder. Plus (as a backup plan for that backup plan), she goes to the fertility bank and impregnates herself with Nick’s saved sperm so that Nick feels obligated to look after their child together. Amy gets a book deal to tell her side of the story, and Nick begins a draft of his side of the story, but then Amy forces him to delete his draft. Fittingly, the book ends with Amy’s perspective since she always has to get the last say.