But She Really Was: Gone Girl and the False Accusation

When I was reading Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl—sometime in early October, right before the movie came out—there was this one plot twist I was scared of reading, and as I got further and further into the book I got more and more scared. It’s kind of the main plot twist, and I’d read spoilers, but that was before I had any interest in reading Gone Girl, so my understanding of how it was going to work was hazy. “This is fun so far, but I’m not sure I’m going to be able to handle it when that happens,” I worried early on. “Oh my God,” I thought to myself, about a third of the way through, “that’s who NPH plays, oh no.” Then I got to a point where I was like, “Wait, maybe this will be okay. Maybe I can bring myself to read it if this is what happens.” And then I was like, “Oh, wow, that’s how it’s going to happen.” I was glad it was going to happen. I was like, “Hooray for Amy Dunne! What a brilliant and accomplished young woman.”

I describe this process not to demonstrate how I developed Stockholm syndrome from drinking in too much of the brilliant prose of Gone Girl, like how you read Lolita and you’re like, “Ooh, I hope Humbert Humbert gets to make out with Lolita,” at least you are until he says something like, “You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.” I’m describing how my feelings about this plot twist shifted because that was how I realized that everyone had lied about it.

Well, they misrepresented it.

HERE IS WHERE I AM GOING TO SPOIL GONE GIRL:

Every spoiler-happy review I read of the book when it came out in 2012, and then of the movie when it came out in 2014, explained to me that Amy Dunne, the Gone Girl of the title, was a cold-blooded monster lady because, sure, she framed her husband Nick for her own murder, sure sure, that wasn’t so bad because Nick was a lout, but also she manipulated this poor sap of an ex-boyfriend, Desi, who was in love with her, into helping her frame Nick, and then just murdered him with a fucking box cutter just so that when she decided she wanted to go back to her lout husband after all, she could pretend that she hadn’t faked her own disappearance, but that instead she was a helpless victim who had been abducted and raped by poor-sap Desi.

But the thing is, she was.

She was abducted. She was raped, and most readers don’t seem to see that. I wonder what that tells us about our reactions as a culture—or even as part of any number of feminist subcultures—to recent allegations of assault and sexual abuse in literary communities, at UVA, on college campuses in general, on the part of Bill Cosby and Woody Allen. Gone Girl is fiction, and Amy Dunne isn’t real, and in discussing the public response to her non-experiences, I’m not implying that a fictional character deserves the respect and compassion that real-life victims of sexual assault deserve. And any smirking digs I make here at the expense of made-up Amy or her creator are not intended to trivialize the experiences of real women.  But I think the example of Gone Girl illuminates something about how we define a victim, how we define a crime, and the relationships we draw between those definitions.

Before and during and after reading Gone Girl, I read a lot of think pieces about whether Gone Girl was feminist or not, and a lot of the arguments that Gone Girl is anti-feminist hinge on the fact that Amy Dunne falsely accuses men of raping her. And she does seem to have made false accusations. Despite the many layers of (super annoying, clumsy prose-spouting, weirdly precious) unreliable narrators in the novel, the reader can be pretty sure that the diary Amy leaves for the police to find is fake, and that the diary accounts of Nick physically assaulting Amy are also not true. The reader also tends to believe the poor schlub who shows up and claims Amy carefully engineered a night of rough consensual sex to look like this schlub raped her, just because he didn’t like a tie she bought him. And Amy is definitely lying when she tells the police that Desi/NPH kidnapped her from her home, drove her in the trunk of his car to his lake house, and tied her to a bed.

But she is not lying when she says that he kidnapped and raped her.

This is what actually happens in the novel: At the beginning of Part 2, we find out that Amy plans to commit suicide when her vengeance on Nick is complete. But then she starts thinking life might be worth living after all; and then she gets mugged and loses all her cash, and suddenly she’s poor and friendless and has nowhere to go.

There’s a national search for her, so if she turns up anywhere, alive and with her own fingerprints and teeth, she’s in a lot of trouble. And then she remembers Desi, who used to be obsessed with her, so she calls him, thinking she can manipulate him into doing anything she wants, just like she manipulates everyone. Desi can be managed, she says, in the same bitchy narrative voice she’s been using since the first big plot twist, when we realized she hadn’t been kidnapped, wasn’t dead, was gone because of her own wicked-bitch cleverness. She begs Desi to give her some cash and help her make a new start somewhere. Instead, he’s like, “why not just come live in the lap of luxury at my remote secret lake house where no one except me will ever see you?” Amy protests; he doesn’t budge; she’s cornered; she goes with him. She tells us, “It has to seem like my decision.” Yes, Amy is kind of looking forward to the luxurious lake house; yes, Amy got herself into this situation; but like Lolita, Amy has absolutely nowhere else to go.

And when she goes there, Amy finds that she is indeed a prisoner: Desi fills the house with luxuries he thinks she’ll like, but he also controls what she wears, what she eats, makes sure she loses weight, that she dyes her hair back to its original blonde. He tells her, “If you ever left here and I didn’t know where you were, I’d have to go to the police… I’d need to make sure you were safe.” All of this is explicit in the novel: Amy, narrating, describes herself as a prisoner, describes this language as a threat. You could say that Amy’s an unreliable narrator, but the whole system of twists and shocks in Flynn’s novel depends upon the contrast between Amy’s false voice—the voice of the “cool girl” who initially seduced Nick, the voice of the fake diaries that Amy left for the police to find—and the uncensored, scary, real voice we hear when Amy takes over the  narrative. Amy is really trapped, and Desi is not going to let her leave, and the terms of her imprisonment include sex—decorous sex followed by a low-calorie luxury breakfast, sure, but sex that could never, never be consensual.

Amy decides when they will have sex—she “seduces” him. In the book, she feeds him a drugged martini, then kills him. In the movie, she just slashes his throat while he’s on top of her. She manipulates the forensic evidence—including her own body—to make it look like he had physically overpowered her many times. She uses this evidence to return to her old identity, without having to face legal repercussions for fraud. Sex with Desi allows her to escape from his clutches and not go to jail.

But it’s not consensual.

Why didn’t anyone notice that?

Most critics have focused on the falseness of Amy’s accusations. In The Guardian, Joan Smith argued that a “key theme” of the film “is the notion that it’s childishly easy to get away with making false allegations of rape and domestic violence.” Smith notes with disgust that the world of Gone Girl is “a parallel universe where the immediate reaction to a woman who says she’s been assaulted is one of chivalrous concern.” A narrative in which false rape accusations are made at all, let alone in which those claims are met with support and compassion, obscures the reality of sexual assault in our culture, in which false allegations are rare, and where the credibility of rape victims is often called into question by law enforcement, media, and even victims’ own friends and families.

This is true. “Crying rape” happens all the time in the movies and on TV, and it messes up our sense of reality. During the third season of Veronica Mars, victims of a serial rapist on Veronica’s college campus are roofied and their heads are shaved. I’ve been struggling for years to get my mind around the show’s strange representations of sexual assault; but one thing the image of the shaved head makes possible is for a woman to visibly perform a false allegation using her own body. A woman can shave her own head, and people believe her. The simplicity of the false accusation lets TV shows—and books and movies like Gone Girl—tap into a certain male cultural anxiety: what if I could really be destroyed by a woman? What if my sexual desire for women’s bodies makes me so vulnerable that even a woman, somebody I’m supposed to be able to have power over, is able to use it to hurt me?

That’s the kind of cultural anxiety that thrillers like Gone Girl are so good at exploiting; get at one of those anxieties, and you’ll get a delicious thrill out of your audience. But, you know, there are two sides to every story, so it usually turns out that the accused man on TV is a jerk, or a misogynist, or even a rapist. He just didn’t assault the woman who’s accusing him. She’s a liar, but she’s also a good friend, trying to get justice for the real victim. She’s a misguided feminist trying to get attention for a political cause. She’s a frustrated lover trying to get revenge on a cheating boyfriend. Girls are liars, but boys are also monsters. Everybody gets punished. Everybody is both a victim and a villain. It’s a fair and balanced account.

Barbara Stanwyck creeps up on a nice dad in the 1944 film Double Indemnity.

This is nothing new, of course; the false innocence of beautiful blonde white women has been a feature of the thriller as a genre since its earliest days. Lots of people have noticed how Amy Dunne is like the femmes fatales of film noir: blonde, gorgeous, vengeful, not nearly as innocent a victim as she first appears. There have been fewer discussions of Amy’s resemblance to an even earlier archetype: the blonde, beautiful, well-bred, brilliant, and crazy (like a fox?) foxes of Victorian sensation fiction. Like Amy Dunne, Lady Audley from Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1862 novel Lady Audley’s Secret is both victim and villain, driven to deception, violence, and/or madness by cultural constraints on women’s freedom. Like Gone Girl, sensation novels simultaneously exposed the gendered violence and oppression to which women were routinely subjected and exploited contemporary anxieties about the power of these victimized women’s sexuality and rage. Lady Audley feels entitled to wealth and respect and beautiful things, and she’ll commit bigamy and arson and murder to hold onto those things, exploiting her apparent vulnerability and delicacy and innocence to clear herself of suspicion. As good thriller readers, we’re thrilled by Lady Audley’s delicious wickedness, just as we’re thrilled by Amy’s. When I read Lady Audley’s Secret or Gone Girl, I can identify thrills of vicarious pleasure at the heroines’ righteous vengeance against the patriarchy, but I also feel thrills along the parts of myself that belong to, that are the patriarchy itself. There’s the white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchal part of me that wants to direct its male gaze upon an icily blonde white woman in devastatingly beautiful designer clothes; the bloodthirsty part of me that knows violence is the ultimate form of power, and that power is the ultimate desiderata, and that thrills, therefore, to the woman getting to wield the box cutter; not unrelated, the aesthete whose aesthetics come from this same violent history and culture, who thrills to red blood on a white slip; and surely a smaller part of me, an appendix that’s bigger and more important in someone else, that holds a real fear or belief that women can ruin men’s lives with lies, that the false accusation is a real threat, that the victim could always be the villain.

In Gone Girl, however, when Amy drives up covered in blood and tells those surprisingly sympathetic cops that she’s been kidnapped and raped, she isn’t lying. Not about that. She really was. And the fact that no one seems to notice that—not even feminist critics—is deeply disturbing.

I contend that we don’t notice because Amy’s bad. She’s a liar and, eventually, a killer. And she got herself into this situation. That’s important. She did something bad and now she’s stuck.

What has to happen for us woman-hating woman-lovers to understand what counts as consent? How good does a girl have to be before we acknowledge that she wasn’t asking for it? How much blood does the Luminol have to reveal?

Around the time I was reading Gone Girl, Sophia Katz published this essay in which she described being sexually abused by Stephen Tully Dierks.

Many members of the literary community reacted with horror. Some people wondered if you could call what Dierks did “rape.” As Natalie Eilbert pointed out, Katz herself did not call it “rape”; many women do not call their own experiences of nonconsensual sex “rape.” In her essay, Eilbert argues that that doesn’t mean we should not take those experiences seriously.

Eilbert was responding not directly to Katz, but to another essay: Elizabeth Ellen’s “Open Letter to the Internet.” In her open letter, Ellen explains that she asked her feminist mother to read Katz’s piece. She reprints her mother’s response because her mother’s thoughts are nearly identical to her own, as if being an older, wiser feminist makes her mother an expert witness, an outside authority on a younger generation’s sexual politics. Here’s part of her mother’s email:

Hummm. I wouldn’t call it rape. The Sophia female clearly tried to dissuade him but didn’t say no, didn’t get up and go in the other room, didn’t stop what was going on. I think we’ve all been in situations where we had sex that we really didn’t want to have as we didn’t want to ‘rock the boat’ or didn’t have the nerve to say no and just wanted to get it over with. Who knows what he would have done if she simply said, listen stan, I’m not doing this . . . Maybe the guy’s a scumbag as some of them say, but I wouldn’t call him a rapist . . . I think the Sophia character hasn’t taken responsibility for her part in the scenario. It’s almost like entrapment on one level: she stayed with him several days, had sex with him, never said I hate this or don’t do this, then turns around and writes a damning story about it. So he’s a jerk who used his position to press females into sex with him, yes. He admits as much. People will do what they can get away with . . . Sounds like a very young immature guy who capitalized on his literary position. But not a rapist.

I have a mother who would kill me if I traveled alone to a strange city and slept in a strange man’s room. I have a daughter now and I will kill her if she does that when she grows up.

My mother doesn’t know how many times I went up to a boy’s room, or invited a boy up to my room, when I had no intention of having sex with him. My mother doesn’t know how many times I’ve walked home alone at four in the morning. My mother doesn’t know about the time a professor said, over a beer, We don’t have to do anything. Maybe she has a vague idea.

When I say my mother would kill me I mean my mom would yell at me and hug me with relief that I had come home alive. I mean I would yell at my daughter and hug her with relief, with all the relief in the world. I mean that there are horrible people in the world and I feel like it’s my job to try to keep her safe from them, to give her whatever tools I can to keep her safe from them. But I know she’s not safe. I know I’m not safe. I know it’s not our fault that we’re not safe.

In November, Rolling Stone published “A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and a Struggle for Justice at UVA.” The assault described in this article was unambiguously rape. The victim, “Jackie,” was sober. She was restrained and beaten by several men. She screamed. She struggled. People were outraged. People also started talking more seriously about rape culture, about sexual assault on campus, about holding institutions accountable.

Then it turned out that the case had been badly reported, that there were inconsistencies in the victim’s testimony, that the fraternity implicated in the story deserved an apology. 

As Roxane Gay wrote in response to Rolling Stone‘s retraction, “A great number of people are gleefully celebrating… because now they can hold on to their fervent belief that rape is not epidemic, that such terrible things do not happen with alarming frequency.” In the same piece, Gay talked about “bad victims.” Bad victims have many qualities that contradict one another: “We went to his apartment… We didn’t say no. We said no, but we weren’t loud enough… We asked him to wear a condom. We didn’t ask him to wear a condom. We tried to bargain with him, offered this for that… We changed our story as we began to remember more details. We changed our story into something we could live with.”

For Elizabeth Ellen, Sophia Katz was a bad victim. In the original piece, “Jackie” was almost a good victim. The response to her story was by no means universally supportive—the Rolling Stone piece was about her “struggle for justice” at UVA—but many, many people were moved and outraged. Then the tide of public opinion turned. According to most media coverage, “Jackie” turned out to be a bad victim after all—somebody with no credibility. One of those women who makes false accusations, like Amy Dunne.

Amy Dunne is a bad victim because she is a bad, bad girl. Amy Dunne deserves what happens to her on a karmic level, because she has been so bad. Seeing her backed into a corner, trapped in a casino, armed only with a gin and tonic and a car with no gas, produced a thrill of schadenfreude for many readers, many of whom were really disappointed that she didn’t die at the end. But she “gets away with it” because she’s able to trick everyone into thinking that she’s really a good victim.

Gone Girl dramatizes the distance between a good victim and a bad victim. Our ability to understand Amy’s cleverness depends upon our ability to recognize that distance. Our ability to understand Amy’s wickedness depends, at least in part, upon our belief in that distance—our uncritical acceptance that not only does Amy use her privilege as a wealthy white woman to pretend to be a good victim, but that she really is a bad victim. If we accept not only that Amy is lying about being trapped in the back of a car and tied to a bed, but also that she is lying about being kidnapped and raped, we are admitting that we believe there can be bad victims. If we don’t believe in bad victims—if we believe that the definition of “rape” is “nonconsensual sex”—we have to accept that none of Amy’s wickedness—her crimes, her bad intentions, her miscalculations, her lies, her bad karma, the schadenfreude the reader might feel at seeing her cornered or outplayed by her dumb Ben Affleck husband or her silly Barney Stinson ex-boyfriend, the tricks she pulls to twist or amplify the facts of what happened to her—none of that changes the fact that a man coerced her into having sex with him when she didn’t want to have sex with him. All that stuff might make her more guilty of being a “psycho bitch,” a liar, a fraud, a forger, a perjurer, even a murderer. None of that makes Desi less guilty of rape.

So we’re back to Veronica Mars and the sensation novel and the idea that everybody is always a victim and a villain. That’s bad. I don’t like that equivalence. I don’t want every rape to have at least two victims. But isn’t it different that in Gone Girl it did happen? That she really was? She’s not taking the fall for a more timid sister. She’s not trying to take down someone she thinks is bad. She knows what he did, and he did it to her. We know, too; we were there, reading every word. Why, even when we know exactly what happened, are we such bad witnesses?