This piece contains major spoilers for Gone Girl, Phantom Thread, and The Nest.
Towards the end of David Fincher’s gripping crime thriller Gone Girl, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) explains to his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) why they shouldn’t be together. “All we did was resent each other and try to control each other and cause each other pain,” he says. Without hesitation, Amy responds with a cold, cutting retort: “That’s marriage.”
This exchange acts as the darkly comic thesis of the film, but if you look closer, it also reads as a pretty scathing assessment of traditional, heterosexual matrimony and its hollow underbelly. While most real-life romances aren’t likely as depraved and extreme as Nick and Amy’s, their chaotic relationship represents a piercing deconstruction of marriage from the inside out. It strips away the rosy portrait of pure union that marriage is historically and culturally perceived as, revealing itself to be a fundamentally flawed social contract built on false promises and perfectionistic expectations.
Despite Amy’s psychopathic, sinister behavior, Nick decides to stay with her in the end, a startling choice that seems to be made more out of fear and guilt rather than genuine affection. His decision invites an important question: Why would anyone want to be with someone who’s ultimately bad for them?
Gone Girl isn’t the first movie to traverse this kind of thematic terrain — and it certainly won’t be the last. Over the past few years, toxic marriages have become quite the popular trend in American cinema. Dramatizations on the defects of monogamy are nothing new in fiction, but in a post #MeToo landscape — where the cultural language around sexual mores has dramatically evolved and altered our understanding of gender and power — they’ve taken on greater precedence than ever before. By “toxic,” I don’t necessarily mean stories that revolve around a turbulent divorce like Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story or a husband and wife in a crisis like Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Rather, these are narratives that focus on couples who are paradoxically devoted to and incensed by one another due to a shared urgency for control and stability.
In addition to Fincher’s Gone Girl, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Hitchcockian rom-com Phantom Thread and Sean Durkin’s recently released domestic drama The Nest fall into this category, centering their plots around spouses whose simultaneous pride and repression render them equally insufferable and inseparable. All the reckless emotional havoc and bitter verbal quarrels that unspool between these cursed romantic pairs make for deliciously intricate storytelling and suspenseful conflict-building. What is most striking, though, about these hapless sets of lovers are the thorny class and gender issues that dictate and sustain the power dynamics between them. Socioeconomic differences and rigid gender roles might not totally quell the frustration of watching these couples refuse to break up with each other, but they do clarify why codependent people stick together, especially under the oppressive reign of a capitalist, patriarchal system.
Of the three films, Gone Girl offers perhaps the most unsettling snapshot of an American marriage come undone. Nick and Amy begin the story as equals who happen to be the perfect couple, with Nick being the suave, hypermasculine groom and Amy his doting, hyperfeminine bride. When Amy vanishes on the day of their five-year anniversary, their relationship unravels and soon, everyone points to Nick as a suspect in her disappearance and possible murder.
Fincher and Gillian Flynn, the scribe of the Gone Girl book and its adaptation, do a phenomenal job in constantly playing with our perceptions about both characters and wisely challenging whose side we should be on. At first, there is strong speculation that Nick is hiding something, a reasonable doubt made believable thanks to Affleck’s perfectly calibrated performance. Interspersed flashbacks that are expressed visually through Amy’s unreliable narration further justify this skepticism. She speaks about their marital troubles, starting when the 2008 recession hit, and laments losing their jobs, leading to a migration from Amy’s hometown of New York City to Nick’s old stomping grounds in rural Missouri. This conflict of professional and material insecurity plays a significant role in contextualizing the friction that transpires between Nick and Amy. As the economy tanks, Amy loses her agency in the relationship and consequently, she’s reduced to an emotional provider and sexual object for Nick.
But as the film ventures into its twisty second half, it’s revealed that Amy is alive and well — and to our surprise, a pathological, calculating liar. From her perspective, spatial displacement and financial troubles caused Nick to regress into a lazy, unloving husband and Amy to devolve into the neglected, rejected American housewife. After witnessing Nick’s affair with one of his creative writing students (Emily Ratajowski), Amy hatched a disturbingly meticulous scheme to make him pay for his infidelity, fabricating diary entries littered with false confessions of spousal violence and planting damning evidence to frame Nick for her mysterious absence. Pike’s versatile acting layers this deception with nuance, illustrating her quest for vengeance as a stirring depiction of a woman fed up with the impossible standards imposed upon her. She oscillates with unnerving precision between the “cool girl” Nick perceived her to be and the terrifying, conniving person she actually is, further complicating our own judgments around her motivations and the institutional factors that contributed to her actions.
As it turns out, though, neither Nick nor Amy are all that trustworthy; they are simply two awful people who rightfully deserve each other. Of course, Amy’s motives are far more insidious and her attempts to mask her villainy through exploiting the sympathetic media narrative around her is next-level evil stuff. However, Nick is also culpable and warrants disparagement in not only being unfaithful toward Amy, but failing to meet her needs and confining her to be someone she didn’t want to be. When Amy returns home after seeing Nick take responsibility for his deceit in an on-air interview, the initial façade that defined their couplehood dissolves and takes on a new, more harrowing shape.
Rather than do what makes most sense to the average person and split, Nick and Amy reach an unexpected, if ill-advised compromise in the film’s chilling conclusion. Through weaponizing her femininity and reproductive labor, Amy reclaims some of the power Nick deprived her of and inseminates herself with his sperm, a move that somehow both embraces and subverts the very systemic practices that are used to disempower her. Feeling morally obligated to parent his future child, Nick decides to continue playing along with this performance of domestic bliss, if only to escape the potential backlash from the news outlets that once portrayed him to be a social pariah. Combined with Amy’s renewed sense of self and Nick’s stubbornness to leave his offspring, their perverse re-commitment to one another reinforces the notion that traditional marriage can be just as much about the sanctity of love as it is about the pursuit of and struggle for domination.
That knotty tension between loving someone and wanting to dominate them extends to Phantom Thread, an emotional counterpoint to Gone Girl that depicts a similarly inverted power dynamic between the sexes but concerns a working-class wife and an affluent husband who find an arguably more reasonable solution to their marital woes.
Waitress Alma (Vicky Krieps) first meets finicky dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day Lewis) by serving him breakfast, the order of which she is tasked to memorize by Reynolds. From the very beginning of their courtship, Alma’s position is rooted in subservience, a role she initially delights in but very quickly grows to begrudge as she learns more about Reynolds and his tendencies. A control freak with an impenetrable ego and a prickly disposition, Reynolds resists the intimacy that Alma so desperately wants to cultivate with him and instead uses her primarily to model his outfits. His demand for order and stability, made evident through the way he operates his fashion house and his strict breakfast etiquette, acts as a strong contrast to Alma’s desire for connection and vulnerability. To Alma, wanting to share a life with someone else is a gift, but to Reynolds, it’s a curse. Without having a say in how that shared life fits in with his own, his purpose ceases to exist.
Their clashing ideologies reach a devastating fever pitch at the film’s midpoint, where Reynolds criticizes Alma for preparing a candlelit dinner and affirms his intolerance towards deviations from his daily routines. His rebuke of Alma’s romantic gesture upsets Alma so much that she explodes all her suppressed rage toward him, rightfully calling out his cruelty and the absurdity of his stringent rules. Whether intentional or not, it seems as if Anderson took a note from Gone Girl’s match-up between a menacing anti-heroine and her selfish consort. Much like Amy, Alma has a few tricks up her sleeve, poisoning Reynolds’s tea and letting him feel the pain and discomfort she endured at his expense.
But there’s a more prominent class commentary here in how Reynolds and Alma seek to control one another, with Reynolds using his work to oppress and mold Alma into an artistic muse and Alma capitalizing on her skills as a servant to tame Reynolds’s impulses. The film’s critique around gender also has a uniquely subversive quality to it: Alma’s caretaking functions as a sort of maternal surrogacy in lieu of Reynolds’s own mother, whose presence is both spiritually stitched into the lining of his garments and visually apparent in one of his illness-induced hallucinations. By dispossessing Reynolds of his masculinity and rigorous work ethic, Alma can perform as his emotional and physical nurturer on her own terms.
Once Alma nurses Reynolds back to health, Alma’s yearning for domestic and romantic equity briefly comes true. Now pacified, Reynolds proposes marriage and Alma accepts, their devotion to each other recalibrating toward something more balanced and sensible. Of course, their joyful nuptials don’t last very long and the deep-seated issues that led to their dinner fight quickly resurface during their honeymoon. As their bickering intensifies, so do their anxieties about losing control. Reynolds in particular worries that his fashion designs are becoming obsolete — a subconscious sign that his unchecked bravado is also in jeopardy — and places much of the blame on Alma, who overhears his criticisms.
At this point in the movie, it would make the most logical sense for Alma to leave Reynolds. But Anderson instead provides a stunning twist that reorients the audience’s expectations around how one can manage and even remedy a toxic marriage. Seeking revenge once more, Alma poisons Reynolds’s breakfast and informs him of her subterfuge; she intends to make him weak so that she can take care of him again. Rather than protest, Reynolds finally fulfills what Alma wanted from him all along: he releases his ego and submits to her will.
Unlike Nick and Amy, who are more willing to settle than to separate in spite of their issues, Reynolds and Alma learn to communicate on each other’s wavelength and do so with disarming tenderness. Their new arrangement is transgressive and, as some reviewers have noted, borderline sadomasochistic, but one that ultimately feels triumphant in how it renegotiates the pre-existing conditions of their marriage. Alma can pose and stand for Reynolds’s outfits in order to nourish his hunger for perfection, so long as Reynolds willingly consumes Alma’s deadly meals in order to satisfy her quench for closeness. Ironically, what ends up curing the toxicity of their relationship is a literal toxin, the contaminant of Alma’s food and undying loyalty casting out the venom of Reynolds’s aloofness and hostility. This still might not be the most practical answer to addressing the emotional abuse Reynolds projected onto Alma, but an insightful truth nevertheless emerges: a couple can only be successful if they learn to sacrifice a little of themselves.
Although Phantom Thread favors cooperation and perseverance over an ugly defeat, The Nest makes a compelling case for the opposite, demonstrating how it’s okay to quit and that there are sometimes too many deeply ingrained problems in a relationship for even the slightest possibility of reconciliation.
Evoking the familial and marital dysfunction of Ang Lee’s frigid 1997 drama The Ice Storm, The Nest follows British equity trader Rory (Jude Law) and his American wife Allison (Carrie Coon) during the 1980s, a time governed by the heavy stronghold of consumerism culture and conservative politics. In addition to epitomizing the strong-willed, go-getting working man that defined that era, Rory acts almost like a personified elixir of Nick’s fraudulence and Reynolds’ rigidness. He uses his financial and professional ambition as an excuse to uproot his entire family from their mundane yet comfortable middle-class home in America to a beautiful yet vacuous mansion in Surrey.
Allison, on the other hand, resents Rory for prioritizing his upward social mobility over the needs of her and her children, as well as exaggerating their wealth in order to impress his colleagues. Instead of giving Rory a taste of his own medicine, though, she is forced to work as both an equestrian instructor and a farmhand to make up for the hoards of money Rory claims to have earned. Her suffering from the weight of her husband’s mistakes does trickle into a few withering, eloquent takedowns of his bullshit artistry during their fancy dinner outings together. But satisfying as it is to see her stand up for herself, Allison’s ego has its own damaging effect on the emotional well-being of her teenage daughter Sam (Oona Roche) and preteen son Benjamin (Charlie Shotwell), both of whom have difficulty adjusting to their new environment and internalize the wrath of their parents’s squabbles.
Durkin has a keen eye for examining families unable to reconnect amid unexpected life disruptions, a theme he captured beautifully in his haunting 2011 debut Martha Marcy May Marlene. In The Nest, he determines that marriage is the ultimate disruptor. It can protect and nurture just as easily as it can destroy and terrorize. No more is that sentiment apparent than during the movie’s depressive final act, which finds each member of the family drowning in their sorrows about the state of their reality. Rory and Allison realize how Rory’s professional grifting and financial self-preservation failed their marriage, while Sam and Benjamin suffocate from the loneliness brought on by their circumstances. In the end, they’ve each accepted that their familial unit is irreparably broken, the warm sheen of their once idyllic home life now diluted into a shallow, shadowy grave containing its ashes. The final scene’s lack of closure and catharsis makes this moment of mourning even more shattering, suggesting that no marriage is worth staying in if the emotional and financial cost is this great.
After exploring these three films, it’s clear why married people who are terrible for one another stay together. Other than the obvious being that divorce is messy and expensive, perhaps staying in these kinds of situations is meant to prove one’s resilience or better yet, one’s ability to hack the relationship. Perhaps it’s also because toxicity can be, well, intoxicating. For some, there’s a thrill to the game like in Phantom Thread. For others, the game is constructed out of necessity for one’s survival and optics like in Gone Girl. But for many I imagine, the game isn’t worth playing at all like in The Nest, only leading to an endless, vicious cycle of bitterness and trauma under the supposed guise of civility and normalcy. Capitalism and patriarchy work in tandem to ensure this unhealthy behavior stays intact, with marriage as their institutional end goal. There might not be one singular way to transcend the economic and gendered fetters of traditional matrimony, but if there is a way to rewrite the social contract that defines it, it’s likely both parties can truly relish in the holiness of finding a significant other to be with ‘til death do they part.
