Gone Girl Part 2

Having returned from a blissful week in Jamaica (Wednesday), survived the tough re-entry into the frozen wasteland that is the D.C. metro area (ongoing), plunged back into the madness that is work these days (Thursday and Friday), and sailed through my academic presentation at the Georgetown University conference on “Passages” (yesterday), I am eager to pick up the thread I left hanging on “Gone Girl.”  As promised, while I was away I thought a lot about why this movie left me so angry.  (Well, I didn’t just think about it.  There was also plenty of reading and crocheting to be done on the patio of our room facing the cliffs overlooking the sea; doing daily yoga overlooking said cliffs and sea; eating healthy Jamaican food (largely prepared by that culinary goddess, Gwen, at Jackie’s on the Reef); connecting with old and new Jamaican and ex-pat friends in Negril; and surrendering completely to an awesome heated bamboo massage administered, in a little hut just a stone’s throw from the waves crashing into the cliffs, by the incredible Karen, at Jackie’s.)  Sigh.  Four days of arctic temperatures and a treacherous snowstorm yesterday make it all seem like a lifetime ago.  Okay, pity party over (not that I expect to garner any from the one or two friends who actually read this!) and down to some Sunday afternoon psychoanalysis. 

The view from our room at the Westender Inn

I admit it.  I, too, giddily rode the crest of one of the key opening scenes of “Gone Girl,” situated at a party in NYC (the Village?  Williamsburg?) where two beautiful, urbane hipsters meet and instantaneously recognize in each other not only the realization of their long-held fantasies of the perfect partner, but also their shared sense of superiority over other potential mates.  (Although I was more than slightly pained by then-future Husband’s sarcastic remark about an intellectual looking dude who he condemned as Proust-spouting.) But we have all been there—the moment or series of moments when we meet the person with whom we will fall in love and believe we will spend the rest of our days.  Whether it’s love at first sight, or love that unfolds over a more extended period of time, we recognize in this other precisely what we want, need, have been searching for.  So, now we have the “Once upon a time” opening for our story.

But even as any child reader of a fairy or folk tale knows, before you can get to the “And they lived happily ever after” ending, the protagonist must endure the daunting, often frightening, middle passage, where he or she must undergo a test and experience genuine suffering.  Having survived the test, the hero achieves redemption and, hopefully but not always, the story comes out right.  In short, fairy tales and folk tales depict allegorically the human condition. 

 

Why then do we, upon falling in love, assume that we can skip the middle passage and go directly from “Once upon a time” to “And they lived happily ever after?”  For those of us who have had any experience in long-term relationships—whether one that has stood the test of time and endured, for better or worse, or one that represents a second or third attempt to get it right—know, the heady, early stages are merely the opening scenes of the real story that has not yet begun to unfold.  Once the first or second flush of love has passed, we get to the “naming of the problem” stage.  I believe that this is the stage where we begin to see that, however many our partner’s virtues might be, he/she is neither the paragon we first envisioned, nor the answer to all of our own problems or shortcomings.  Even in the face of this recognition, however, in many, many relationships participants will go to extreme lengths, often lasting years or decades, not to name the problem. Indeed, some will construct a marriage lasting a lifetime without ever naming the problem, although I can guarantee you that in those cases, there’s a lot of strife and alienation existing in the royal realm.   If we are courageous enough to name the problem, then come the ups and downs of the story—the middle passage—where we try to negotiate the problem and see if we can maintain love, intimacy, and friendship, even as our boundaries have snapped back into place and we are no longer merged as one, amorphous blob of romantic love.  There is usually some climax, or decisive point, in the middle passage, where couples either:  (1) split up; (2) do the difficult, lengthy individuation work necessary to re-engage first with themselves, and then with the relationship, to move it to a higher, more sustaining level; or (3) petrify the relationship into something static and mostly dead that merely serves as a façade to erect before the extended family and community. 

And here’s where the movie comes back in.  Not having read the book, I could be either totally wrong about this or, alternatively, stating the obvious, but in my opinion the couple in “Gone Girl” pretty much parodied a marriage that had hit the “naming of the problem” stage and was too immature and underdeveloped to face that fact.  Not only are Husband and Wife unwilling and incapable of naming the problem, and thereby entering into the stage where the real work of a relationship begins (and the real treasures unearthed, I might add), but to avoid this step, Wife goes to psychotic ends in acting out her resistance.  Husband, on the other hand, enacts his resistance through the tedious affair-with-younger-woman syndrome and alcohol abuse approach.  My anger at this point in the movie stemmed, I think, from the collective’s more prevalent, misogynistic portrayal of the woman as the partner who will likely go homicidally berserk in a foundering relationship (think “Fatal Attraction”), whereas the man is more often portrayed as the sad-sack dunderhead who will just sleep with a much younger woman to avoid acknowledging the problem. 

But what really enraged me was the ending.  Prior to that, neither Husband nor Wife would name the problem.  Nonetheless, Wife’s psychosis more or less named it for them, and thrust them unconsciously into the middle passage.  In the middle passage, BOTH of them had opportunity after opportunity to consciously dive in and actually undertake the work on themselves, to submit to the test that the situation forcibly presented, but neither chose to do so.  Instead, at the culmination of a cascading series of more and more incredible events, Husband and Wife reunited and chose to return to the “Once upon a time” stage of the process.  WTF!!!   Not only did this hit me in the gut as just wrong, it left me with a story, to which I had just devoted two hours of my time, without a moral as a take-away.  I felt cheated.  But, more significantly, I was horrified.  And still more horrified, once I had time to cook it in my psychic cauldron and conclude that this parody of a marriage was just that:  a grotesque exaggeration of a tragic situation that many relationships and marriages return to over and over again and which, in the end, amounts to a life together. 

So people, start withdrawing those projections you’ve foisted onto your unwitting partner and start your journey into the middle passage.  Maybe that’s the moral of the story after all.