Ten years after Rosamund Pike changed lives with her Oscar-nominated turn as Amy Dunne in Gone Girl – her ‘cool girl’ monologue remains an iconic moment in cinematic history.
An adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bestselling thriller, Gone Girl was always destined to become a box office success (grossing an impressive $370million worldwide) with Rosamund, Ben Affleck, producer Reese Witherspoon and David Fincher at the helm.
For those somehow not in the know, Gone Girl centres around our protagonist, Amy Dunne, a seemingly ideal wife to the achingly average narcissistic guy Nick (Ben) who fakes her own death with the hopes of pinning the blame on her husband.
Sweet, gory, vengeance ensues as we delve into Amy’s psyche to uncover the lengths run-of-the-mill misogyny and centuries of an oppressive patriarchy can drive a woman to.
She embodies the epitome of violent female rage, standing on the shoulders of giants from Euripides Medea to Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth to Stieg Larsson’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Amy is far from the first (or last) complex, morally grey female character to grace popular culture (see Harley Quinn, Killing Eve’s Eve, Fleabag and Annalise Keating to name a few).
Hell, it’s not even the only anti-hero Rosamund has played, starring as fraudster Marla Grayson in 2020’s I Care A Lot. But, Amy remains a well-earned pillar within female anti-hero discourse.
The premise perhaps seems basic for the new wave of Gen Z feminists who have long been aware of the failings of society and the boxes women are still shoved into.
But in 2014, a pre-Me Too era basking in the early days of social media discourse – Gone Girl became a prominent part of the movement to re-imagine the female anti-hero on screen.
From teen girls to women who had been married for decades – the ‘Cool Girl’ monologue became the moment, resonating across generations.
It put a voice to the frustration of a generation still bound by age-old patriarchal ideals despite the leaps and bounds in gender equality.
(Intersectionality and the differing lived experiences of women from various marginalised backgrounds were still a fledgling conversation. For all intents and purposes, most discourse started from the perspective of a white woman.)
‘Cool girl. Men always use that as their defining compliment, “she’s a cool girl”, Amy says in the movie as she raggedly chops her hair off in a gas station, smoking cigarettes slouched on a toilet seat.
‘Cool girl is hot. Cool girl is game. Cool girl is fun. Cool girl never gets angry at her man. She only smiles in a chagrined, loving manner, and then presents her mouth for f**king.’
The words rang particularly true for those who grew up in the era of the ‘manic pixie dream girl’ trope.
An eccentric young woman moulded in the male gaze to strike the perfect balance of unique and malleable to appease the modern man (examples are Sam in Garden State or Summer in 500 Days of Summer).
The monologue continues: ‘She likes what he likes. So evidently, he’s a vinyl hipster who loves fetish manga. If he likes girls gone wild, she’s a mall babe who talks football and endures buffalo wings at hooters.’
That is until she’s switched out for ‘a newer, younger, bouncier cool girl.’ Evidently, Amy’s last straw.
Perhaps Gone Girl’s most fascinating cultural result was the fierce discourse this monologue produced when it first came out.
Although it is now widely praised for its nail-on-the-head delivery, at the time it was slammed as ‘misandrist’ by men with bruised egos, lacking that certain edge from others and the subject to an unending cycle of think pieces on whether it was a bastion of 2014-era feminism or simply misogynistic in its execution.
It’s easy to count on one hand the number of singular movie scenes that have ingrained themselves into the cultural zeitgeist in such a way.
To not only coin a now-commonly used descriptor (albeit most often ironically) but be a significant spark in the ‘girl’ movement (think girl dinner, girl math, hot girl summer) – is quite the feat.
Whatever moral adjudication one attributes to this scene, and the film as a whole, its impact cannot be argued. On TikTok alone #coolgirl has 3.1million posts and modern monologues about womanhood (see America Ferrara’s divisive Barbie speech) are measured by cool girl’s yardstick.
And some are even drawing parallels today. Just this week BLACKPINK star Jennie launched her solo comeback with a ‘pretty girl mantra’ that fans immediately started connecting the dots to – whether intentional or not.
And earlier this year, Netflix fans sat in horror as they watched a disturbing documentary dubbed the ‘real life Gone Girl’, American Nightmare.
In 2019, Flynn reflected on the enduring appeal of the cool girl monologue in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
‘The fact that people have adapted the cool girl thing shows that there’s enough there that we actually do relate to a fair amount of what she was saying. Would we go to the extent she does? No, we would not. But she’s a relatable, not as soapy, bitchy sort of villainess. You can’t write her off,’ she explained.
And agreed that it kickstarted an influx of even more female anti-hero stories within mainstream media, as Gillian added: ‘It absolutely blew the doors off that old-fashioned, completely antiquated theory that was probably never there to begin with: That there’s no appetite.’
Even Rosamund reflected on the discourse the movie sparked shortly after its release, saying how parched the film landscape was for these kinds of characters.
‘We are in a culture that doesn’t really embrace female anger or allow an outlet for it without a woman seeming hysterical or shrill. What’s so great about Gone Girl is the conversations it provokes. It’s really exciting, more so than anything I’ve been a part of,’ she told Deadline at the time.
Whether it’s your first, fifth or 15th time watching Gone Girl, this conflict of personality and contradiction rests at the heart of it – even in a meta sense. It is at once timeless and a product of its time, that simply does not tire on a rewatch.
And a decade on, I’m not sure the film industry is yet to capture the same impact.
Gone Girl is available to watch on Disney+ now.
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