Why Amy Dunne is the best villain.

Beware SPOILERS

«Nick Dunne took my pride and my dignity and my hope and my money. He took and took from me until I no longer existed. That’s murder. Let the punishment fit the crime.»

– Amy Dunne (Gone Girl)

Let’s start with her past, Amy’s parents utilized her childhood to create a children’s book under her name calling it amazing Amy.

Ss expressed by Amy… «Amazing Amy has always been one step ahead of me», she did better in sports, she did better in life in general than Amy did and this contributed to the decline of Amy self-image and caused some early emotional issues. She later met Nick Dunne, and they began dating and later got married, but slowly their marriage collapsed in over five years tension anger disappointment and even physical abuse arose. The semblance that both NIck and Amy created reached it’s end when Nick cheated on her.

Amy represents a hyperbolized idea of society’s high expectations for women, she’s a classic overachiever who thinks she can succeed at anything that she sets her mind to even crime, however she can’t seem to have a happy marriage because Nick refuses to keep up with her, and when Amy expects as much from Nick as the world expects from her he feels unfairly targeted, when he is not even doing the bare minimum.

That brings us to her motive, she isn’t evil for the sake of being evil, she seeks vengeance giving us what I think is one of the best monologues in film and books.

The reason why it’s such a good monologue is because it displays a true social role some people do play in real life. Amy Dunne conformed to the needs of Nick, became the submissive wife catering and transforming herself for her husband into the «cool girl». In her mind Amy Dunne was the perfect partner and still managed to get cheated on and the fact that she transformed herself for five years of her life only to be cheated on, was the match in the powdered barrel that exploted in self-destruction and a loss of self that led to the need for vengeance.

Amy decides the only way she can win this game is by turning those stereotypical gender roles against Nick. Amy set out to ruin Nick Dunne’s life and her villainous tendencies began to flourish. Her genius mind was placed in the spotlight and her actions were all based off of the five-year knowledge she had of Nick, how he thinks and how he acts, cleaning her floor the way he would, tripping the alarm laying suspicious in her father’s house, little marks of blood on the walls. This was only the beginning and her successes lied in the way she manipulated the perception of Nick. She bumped up her insurance, countless credit-card purchases, faked her pregnancy, made it seem as though Nick hated children, she stated he had a temper and that he hit her in her fake diary confirming her fear of him. Amy was quick-witted and intelligent.

Amy Dunne was a sadistic twisted individual, but what was impressive is that she was so incredibly calculated. Amy Dunne planned ahead and was willing to harm herself in order to play the part that needed to be played in order to fool those against her. Amy Dunne was so obsessed with ruining Nick’s life, it took her to the point of hitting herself in the head with a hammer in order to look like she had been abused by him, Amy slid Desi Collings throat as soon as he climaxed as proof of her self-defense and bathing in his blood wearing it like a trophy to top the icing on the cake.

Amy’s extreme reaction calls attention to just how often we downplay these transgressions and it forces us to reckon with the disparity in how we expect men and women to behave.

What makes Amy Dunne and Gone Girl terrifying is just how normal Nick and Amy’s relationship seems, their marriage is slightly unbalanced and quietly dysfunctional like a lot of marriages and in these characters we can recognize exaggerated versions of the gendered roles we’re asked to play to keep those dynamics alive. Amy is a brilliant and disturbing character because she became all the stories and versions of herself that she created to the point were she’s nothing but the tropes she performs and she reveals that our culture is too inclined to see women in the victim’s role and showcases the lazy self-involved man-child archetype.

She is a criminal genious that could never have been a man, she’s purely female, Amy isn’t just brilliant, her character is actually defined by strengths like creativity, critical thinking and self-regulation. In the end Amy provides us with the ultimate revenge fantasy against entitled men.