Before "grab 'em by the pussy,piston sex video" before the Harvey Weinstein exposé, before Time's Up and the Women's March and the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing, there was Amy Elliott Dunne.
Amy was one of the protagonists of Gone Girl, published in 2012 and adapted into a movie in 2014. The story seems familiar at first: A pretty young white woman goes missing, and every single clue points to her cheating husband as the likely killer. Case closed, just about.
Halfway through, however, we get the shocking reveal that Amy hasn't been murdered. She hasn't even really disappeared. Instead, she's faked her own death and planted phony evidence implicating Nick, in hopes of getting him sent to death row as revenge for an unremarkably disappointing marriage.
There's more. We learn that Nick isn't the only one of her lovers she's punished in this way; she previously retaliated against an ex-boyfriend for letting her down by having him falsely convicted of rape. Later in the film, she slits the throat of a high school sweetheart she's turned to for help, spinning a story of having been tied up and sexually abused so she can claim self-defense.
Amy, it turns out, is the real villain of the piece. False accusations of rape, abuse, and assault are her weapons, and her feminine vulnerability her shield.
In the context of the narrative, this comes as a stunning twist. Take a step back, however, and it starts to look awfully familiar. Gone Girlreveals itself as a retelling of an ancient tale, made fresh by reframing it from a new perspective — Amy's.
In this beautiful blond monster, Gone Girlgave form to a specter that has long stalked the darkest fantasies of men, and to the nebulous rage eating away at the corners of modern femininity, and revealed them to be one and the same.
We've known Amy since even before Gone Girlexisted, because Amy is the bogeyman invoked in every comments section under every news article about a rape allegation, in every legal defense for a "nice guy" who couldn't possiblyhave done what he's been accused of. Occasionally, Amy takes on a more specific face — she might be Amber Heard or Christine Blasey Ford or Wade Robson or James Safechuck, if you listen to their doubters.
Sometimes, to be sure, she is real: False accusations do happen, though they are vanishingly rare. Like killer clowns or satanic cults or axe-wielding hillbilly murderers in the woods, this is a monster that looms far larger in our culture's imagination than she ever has in our reality. She's a folk tale passed down from generation to generation to protect men from the consequences of their own actions, and to remind women not to step out of line.
The point of Gone Girl wasn't what Amy did to Nick, but what she represented to us: the perfect female villain, posing as the perfect female victim.
When Gone Girlwas released as a book, and again when it hit as a movie, it sparked a predictable debate over whether it was "good for women." Was Amy really the model of empowered womanhood we needed? Wasn't she just reinforcing stereotypes of women as evil liars crying rape? And wasn't that dangerous? Wasn't she giving misogynists exactly the fuel they needed?
Looking back now, those questions seem, if not entirely irrelevant, a little simplistic. The point of Gone Girlwasn't what Amy did to Nick, but what she represented to us: the perfect female villain, posing as the perfect female victim.
Amy was neither a realistic figure nor an aspirational one. (I doubt few, if any, Gone Girlfans harbor fantasies of having their husband executed.) Nor was she some avenging angel for the sisterhood; Amy expresses only contempt for other women. But at a time when the conversations about gendered violence and male privilege and microaggressions hadn't quite tipped over into the mainstream, and were often dismissed when they did manage to break through, Amy served as a cultural release valve, an expression of our extreme frustration.
Amy was a woman who saw all the maddening contradictions and unworkable expectations of contemporary womanhood and figured out how to play them to her advantage. In a world where women are constantly expected to underreact — to brush off a boss's advances, to laugh off a boyfriend's misogynistic remarks, to forgive their attackers and move on with their lives — Amy was a spectacular overreactor.
She struck fear into the hearts of men like Nick and Tommy by becoming the very thing male predators have accused their victims of being in real life, the very thing any woman knows she could be painted as the moment she decides to speak out: a psycho bitch who lies about abuse for personal gain, then watches with glee as an innocent man's life is destroyed.
Rosamund Pike as Amy Elliott Dunne in 'Gone Girl.' Credit: Moviestore / Shutterstock In the years since Amy was introduced, we've started, however imperfectly, to take seriously the accusations of sexual assault and abuse raised by women. We've stopped turning a blind eye to some of the monsters in our midst, like Weinstein or Bill Cosby or R. Kelly (even as we've continued dismissing the claims against others, like Kavanaugh or, you know, Donald Trump). We've started to wonder, from time to time, about the way these stories are portrayed, or have been portrayed in the past.
Here, too, Gone Girlwas ahead of the game. By letting us in on Amy's plan, the story also exposed just how improbable a figure she really was. Her machinations stretch the suspension of disbelief almost to their breaking point: In order to buy Gone Girlas a plausible scenario, you'd have to believe that a woman would fabricate hundreds of diary entries, insincerely befriend a woman she hates, lie for months about her husband's violent temper, fake a pregnancy, commit identity fraud, manipulate her husband into bumping up her life insurance, and convince him to go somewhere without an alibi on the morning of her disappearance.
It's a happy ending, if you're furious. And so many of us were.
You'd have to buy that she'd spill her own blood, hit her own face with a hammer, scar her own wrists, and bruise her own genitals with a wine bottle. You'd have to buy that she'd be willing to leave her family, friends, career, and money, and committing to spending the rest of her life in hiding. In short, you'd have to believe she could achieve the objectively unachievable, and you'd have to buy that she'd do it all just to get back at her husband for garden-variety disappointments.
In Amy's case, of course, this is exactly what she does, because she's a fictional villain mastermind. But we're regularly asked by abusive men and their defenders to believe stories that aren't much more plausible. They posit that the alleged victims gave themselves the bruises on their faces, that dozens of strangers would coordinate their stories to topple a man out of spite, even that a woman would be inspired by Gone Girlto fake her own disappearance.
In truth, the story Amy made up — that a woman was abused by her husband, and then discarded for monetary gain and a younger model — is the far likelier one. Variations of it happen every day.
But in a culture that keeps insisting we consider the far-fetched alternative, there's a savage satisfaction in watching the impossible be true, for once. Finally, here's a story about rape culture in which a woman isn'tbeaten and raped and murdered, but one in which she comes out on top because she was exactly as cruel and calculating as the accused have always wanted you to believe she was. It's a happy ending, if you're furious. And so many of us were.
Amy predated the decade's biggest shifts in our understanding of women. But in the same way that she lurked in our shadows long before Gone Girlgave her a form, she tapped into a sense of rage before it propelled us into the streets. Amy was our darkest nightmare and our wildest fantasy — and this decade, we finally started to see her for who she was.