Gone Girl, and the perfect relationship illusion

The phrase I heard the most after my friends watched Gone Girl (2014) was, "Well, I'm never getting married now."

It's not a surprising sentiment. The picture of marriage painted by screenwriter (and book writer) Gillian Flynn and director David Fincher ends up bleak and unforgiving. But it isn't all doom and gloom. Like all good love stories, they show us the beginning. The first few years of magic, when, even as you see the flaws in this person you love, you hardly care. Everything about that person captivates you, so you don't even have to try. They consume so much of your daily thoughts that it's hard to remember what even filled your head before they came along.

We watch as beautiful couple Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy (Rosamund Pike) float through their early years as a couple. We watch the romantic interludes meant to tug at the other's heartstrings. We understand their infatuation with one another. They are perfectly suited for each other. They understand each other's shortcomings, and they meet each other there. They believe in their love—that together, they can weather through every storm.

Then, life gets in the way.

Both of them face individual hardships, and they forget there's another person in the equation of their life. Communication is replaced by bickering, and, almost imperceptibly at first, their relationship begins to fracture.

It's a story we've seen too many times. It's a story we've maybe lived too many times. Nothing is meant to last forever, relationships notwithstanding, but we as a society put so much pressure on them to. Amy ends up putting even more pressure on her relationship because Nick serves as a refuge from her overbearing parents. He understands her like nobody else does. He makes her feel light and happy.

So it should come as no surprise, then, that when Amy realizes the degree to which their relationship has broken, she gets mad. And mad is a gross understatement. Here is a man for whom she gave up everything—her home, her money, her life—in the name of their perfect relationship, and he was willing to turn his back on all of that for a "newer, younger, bouncier Cool Girl." Not on her watch.

By the end of the film, it's clear that what matters most to Amy is getting to live the fantasy of a perfect relationship. All of her other relationships are broken, but this one doesn't get to be.

It stood as a reminder of how obsessed we've become with projecting an image of ourselves. In the age of information, all we see is our friends and even complete strangers living a glossy, edited version of their lives, and we want the same for ourselves. What we never get to see, though, is what's happening under the hood.

Amy has spent her entire life in the shadow of her parents' own perfect projection of their daughter in Amazing Amy—the ideal daughter who does everything her namesake can't accomplish.

Then, Nick comes to her rescue. The man she married is more than she could have dreamed: He is devoted to her; he sees her for the Amazing Amy that her parents dreamed up; he pushes her to be her best self. When it becomes clear that Nick is no longer interested in being that for her, Amy is willing, at first, to go to any length to destroy him as punishment. However, she quickly realizes something she wants something else. She wants to build her own illusion of the man she married, and she is willing to do anything to preserve it.

In a world where our projected image precedes most other interactions with our selves, that image becomes the altar upon which we worship. The inner self becomes a pestilence, a plague that sickens the polished, external image. It is a nuisance, and it is best ignored to achieve that goal.

The tragedy of Gone Girl is not only the breaking down of a marriage or the lengths to which Amy is willing to go. The tragedy of Gone Girl is that, in the end, two people choose to put their inner selves through a lifetime of turmoil to look happy and smile for the cameras.