Was Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne psychotic or a victim of the cool girl conundrum?

“She’s crazy”.
“It’s all in her head”.
‘She’s easy”.
“She’s stuck-up”.
How many of these, among infinite more reductive generalisations, have you heard about a woman, from a man? Decades on, the hysteria and the assumption of a dismissible aura that plague women, unsurprisingly persists. Of course men are to blame. But sadly, so are women. What’s significantly upsetting about this very real state of affairs however, that more than a conscious progression, this reality is actually a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is where Amy Dunne comes in. Gone Girl is a crisp watch. We have Gillian Flynn — who penned Amy down — and David Fincher — who brought her to life for the reel, to thank for that. Smart, agile and a go-getter of the highest order, Amy had ‘that girl’ energy inked all over her aura. Does it not then, absolutely bum you out to find out how she used every last inch of it to keep a man — just a good, old man — criminally bounded to her? Sadly, being desperate in love (or for it), is not a foreign feeling to most. So you get the psychotic gameplay, carefully crafted by her. And at the end of the film, it’s easy to walk away thinking about how you just watched a very convincing crime thriller. But it is so much more deeper than that.
What drove Amy to reduce all her brilliance down to one, desperate attempt to hold onto a man? The answer to this lies in the iconic cool girl monologue, something which has only gathered more and more relevance with each passing season. So then, who is the cool girl? As Amy explains, cool girl is “fucking game”. All the time, overtime. She’s just right. She’s well manicured but doesn’t mind getting into the rough. She knows how to conduct herself with poise but will be ridiculously intuitive about when her man wants her to become the raucous life of the party. Most importantly, she doesn’t bother her man with the airs of being a high-maintenance girl. An In Style magazine piece draws a very interesting parallel between the social media trend where girls showcase the high-maintenance beauty and self-care rituals that “keep them low maintenance”, essentially being an extension of this manic mental fetish. Agreed, all women don’t throw themselves into meticulous self-curation routines, just to catch a man’s sustained fancy. But then again, can you really say that no women do this?
Coming back to the bit about not being a bother, cool girl will nearly never obstruct her man’s day, life or routine. She’ll be down for anything, causing no inconvenience to him whatsoever, even as she endlessly makes a disorder out of inconveniencing herself. She’s basically just the likeness of a person, nothing more, nothing less. Just right. Un-human. In-human.
She is so unique, one-of-a-kind. But is she her, or a psychotically constructed reflection of what the man in her life thinks he wants?
For your consideration, here’s a verbatim excerpt from the monologue, just to truly put things into perspective: “Cool girl is hot. Cool girl is game. Cool girl is fun. Cool girl never gets angry at her man. She only smiles in a chagrined, loving manner…she likes what he likes…When I met Nick Dunne, I knew he wanted cool girl. And for him, I’ll admit, I was willing to try…I drank canned beer watching Adam Sandler movies. I ate cold pizza and remained a size two…I lived in the moment…I cant say I didn’t enjoy some of it. Nick teased out of me things I didn’t know existed. A lightness, a humor, an ease. But I made him smarter. Sharper. I inspired him to rise to my level. I forged the man of my dreams. We were happy pretending to be other people”.
Criminal, isn’t it?