Gender Roles: Nick vs. Amy

Rating: 8/10 (22 February 2015)

Amy, the female lead of the movie, does not give up on her careless husband or kill him, but she decides to take matters into her own hands and forces him become a better spouse. Usually, the scorned woman's role in a movie is to abruptly plot to kill her filthy husband or to leave him to go create an alternative happy ending. Amy Dunne rewrites the role of women in this theme of movies because she takes control over her emotions and does not make the immediate decision to leave Nick or to divorce him. Instead, she makes Nick truly pay the cost for crossing her, and she even leaves it up to him to decide his own fate; he is left with the choice to possibly face the death penalty for something that he did not do or to live with an actual murderer who will never have to pay for her crime. Rather than to give up her perfect life, Amy finds a way to keep up her standard of living (and her standard of marriage); she coerces Nick into staying with her, and she ensures that the two will have a seemingly happy marriage because there will always be the threat of them exposing each other. Had her character been bound by her gender, Amy Dunne definitely would not have been able to pull of such a dark, clever plot against her macho husband.
Gone Girl's unassigned gender does not just extend to the female role; by the end of the movie, Nick has become the innocent victim of his ruthless wife which is uncommon in the movie world. Of course, Nick is not completely free of any wrongdoings, but, as Etkin puts it, compared to Amy having "wrongly accused a man of rape and ruined his life in the process, stole a neighbor's urine to fake a pregnancy, manipulated and murdered a man not in self-defense (and lied again about being raped), and faked her death in order to get her husband the death penalty" Nick is a poor shmuck by the end of the story ("Debating the Complicated Gender Roles in Gone Girl"). Most of the cheating husband characters that are prevalent in Western culture's movies are rarely ever redeemed by any acts of their own or justified by the actions of their wives. And surely, the average movie focuses on the husband's cheating as the main source of conflict in the marriage rather than alternative faults the wife might have. Similarly, Nick wants to have a baby, but Amy does not which goes against the normal expectation for American women ("Til Death Do Us Part': Marriage is the True Terror of Gone Girl"). The male character's desire for children adds to his innocence and softness, traits that usually are taken up by the female leads. Nick, like Amy, is not tied down by the cultural limits assigned to his gender.
The film also takes a huge step in bending gender stereotypes because it does not portray the "American Dream" ideal of a happily married couple that we are accustomed to seeing in Western film. While most movies focus on the success, closeness, and parenthood of married couples, Gone Girl expresses financial crises, "widening gaps in communication and baby drama" within the marriage of Nick and Amy ("Til Death Do Us Part': Marriage is the True Terror of Gone Girl"). The movie presents an alternative version of society's idea that women and men need each other, through marriage and personal relationships, to balance each other out or to complete each other. Obviously, in Gone Girl, Nick and Amy's relationship has taken such a toll on the two as individuals that she is willing to kill herself to get revenge on her husband, and he is willing to go to jail after finding out how sadistic and conniving his wife is. At the same time, the movie subtly suggests that the only way to make a marriage work is for one person, usually the woman, to lose herself and subdue her desires and needs to those of her husband in order to keep the peace which, obviously, should not be the goal of women or men. Traditional thoughts about marriage are redefined through Gone Girl's Nick and Amy. Gone Girl is impressive because its characters are just people; they do not follow typically assigned gender roles. Only until death will an American marriage part.