Gone Girl, written by Gillian Flynn.
One hopes there are very few people in the world who are
actually like the characters Nick and Amy. Nick is a chameleon, attempting to
adapt to people and make them like him. He is a blank canvas waiting to be
painted. Amy is also a pretender, but she lives to paint the canvas that is
another person. You can see how they fit together.
Losing their jobs and then money problems shatters their
game of paint by the numbers. They fall into marriage problem clichés. Though,
Amy's action is definitely not a cliché. Let's just say their marriage is on
the outs.
At the beginning of Gone Girl, and at the end, Nick asks
himself the same questions about his wife: “What are you thinking? How are you
feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do?” In part he asks because she is hard to read,
but as a chameleon, looking to please others is his basis of operation. Nick
pretends to be what others want.
Amy the pretender: "I was pretending, the way I
often did, pretending to have a personality. I can't help it; it's what I have
always done." While you could argue Nick is a good-natured oaf, Amy is
pure Black Widow Spider. She has no qualms about tying you up and hanging you
out to dry.
Amy and Nick pretended and they were happy together. But,
"it's not a compromise if only one of you considers it such." What is
pretending except a form of compromise, or even capitulation? One stopped
pretending, then the other, to disastrous results. And then they begin to
pretend again.
Nick pretends so as save his own neck, and to save any
child of Amy's from Amy.
Amy pretends so she can consume, like a Venus fly trap.
"I'll turn to face him and press myself against him. I'll hold myself to
him like a climbing coiling vine until I have invaded every part of him and
make him mine."
In the end Nick realizes there are no answers to his
questions. He simply accepts his fate as a canvas being painted by Amy. "I
can feel her changing me again ... I can't imagine my story without Amy. She is
forever my antagonist."
As for Amy, she has exactly what she wants. "He is
learning to love me unconditionally, under all my conditions."
Much earlier in the book Nick laments, “It seemed to me
that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. We were the first human
beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at wonders of
the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State
Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes
erupting. I can’t recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I
didn’t immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You
know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I’ve literally seen it all,
and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is:
The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is
keener, the camera angle and soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality
can’t anymore.”
This is our modern state of existence. Our lives cannot
compete with the lives portrayed in movies and TV. Our lives cannot compete
with the perceived excitement of celebrities, packaged and fed to us by the
media. And neither can our
relationships. Real life romance pales in comparison. Real life sex is dull and
boring.
What do we do? We pretend. If you pretend long enough
then it might just feel real.
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