Gone Feminist Cliche

There is a specific joy to watching a pirated movie, filtered through the response of some anonymous audience. Much as I crave the clarity of special effects in my mostest RGB clarity (even if I lack an animal’s infrared vision abilities) there are times when a strange instinct combined with okay-I-just-can’t-wait makes me go for the cam print. Guess the latter is true for everybody who does this especially those nutjobs who seem to make a living out of trolling in caps and commenting on PirateBay torrents. FUCK *^% Y NO GRADING FOR VIDEO AND AUDIO? And some benign idiot actually does this grading on 10 once in a while. The gift economy ain’t polite, lets be very clear on that. (“Motherfucker, why are you being so rude. Its just a lousy cam print” was another ironic gem.)

I succumbed after reading Elif Batuman’s and another review of Gone Girl, perhaps Richard Brody and an Amanda Dobbins. It seems the white world and the white feminist world really care about this film and book, and so I got curious. Both sided with Rosamund Pike, whom I was sort of glad to see is not just a good girl but actually has a solid hefty evil side. One that seems just hazy and petty initially but becomes quite monstrous by the end. Batuman at least tries to say that the girl ain’t to blame because look how she put herself into this small box for love, marriage and a certain kind of life. Marriage itself is abduction. Are these girls, the successful girl played by Rosamund Pike who voluntarily gave up her career, sank her money into her husband’s bar, went to live with him in small town America, and the Emma Watsons who give speeches at a terribly young age to the UN assembly on women’s rights – are these feminism’s new mascots? I guess they were ushered in by the likes of Sheryl Sandberg.

Something about this is disconcerting. Its like a take-over within feminism itself, it was not and never had been about girls like this, I want to protest naively. I know that suddenly pretty girls, smart girls, all-rounder girls are the ones that we are supposed to also back, but it was more about the girls who buck the trend. Who seem relatable, who have problems like the rest of us. But then again, there was something about Obvious Child that turned me off in the first five minutes, so maybe the relatable girl is not the thing.

Maybe it is about the non-white girl and feminism was supposed to center around that, instead it went and settled on championing the rights of Pike and Watson. But against what and against who – possibly against celebrity stalkers and lives they had chosen themselves. In the first half hour of the hazy pirate print of Gone Girl, Affleck"s snarky twin sister (his feminine relatable side??) says first that even if she hates Pike she wouldn’t want something bad to happen to her. Within seconds of this she also says, but if someone has kidnapped Pike they would just bring her back.

I hear the audience’s first audible reaction then, their snorts echoing in the pirate print. I had been told by the New York Times that Pike is the heroine, that her voluntarily chosen stifling life in small town America should make me connect to her in the same way that Simone de Beavoir did to burkha clad women in the Islamic world, and it should make me want to save her. But it just isn’t the same as Virginia Woolf’s world sinking into itself, cinematically caught in that moment when the waters in the motel room rise and drown Julianne Moore in The Hours. Feminism seems to need to shake down their metaphorical heroines, the old ones can’t just be re-worn as a vintage dress. Pike left me cold, as much as Watson did. Oddly Affleck doesn’t seem so bad, when he is coming down the stairs, his beer belly hanging inside his shirt, and alongside him is his allegedly ordinary wife in what seems like a Chanel dress, who could make your eyes hurt with her physical perfection.

Sorry, this ain’t working. Even I want her to die and even I said fucking bitch when she came back from being gone.