Who’s going to see the Gone Girl movie on Friday?
I’m definitely going because the book it is based on represents an extremely important pop culture phenomenon that nobody (but me) is noticing.
You probably don’t know this (because you are an intellectual and way above such things) but Gone Girl is a megabestseller. It’s poorly written, it’s badly plotted, it’s clumsy in every single way.
Still. After decades of Bridget Jones, Sex and the City, Friends, Gilmore Girls, etc, the enormous commercial success of this book demonstrates that women have finally had it with reading about and watching these crowds of pathetic women who fixate on a pair of pants and worship at its altar.
Gone Girl offers a tiny little rebellion – and it is even successful to some minuscule degree – against this life scenario. This is a book of female rage, and that alone makes it an interesting phenomenon.
I’m also very curious how Hollywood will deal with the book’s lack of happy ending.
Clarissa's Blog 
The girl with the dragon tattoo is a much classier and more interesting depiction of female rage
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I tried reading the book and just couldn’t make myself. Tried watching the movie and fell asleep. There is something about it that I couldn’t process.
Still, I do remember that the c protagonist of the Dragon Tattoo had a very powerful reason to be angry, right? In Gone Girl, there is no reason. In this sense, Dragon Tattoo does what Thelma and Louise did 30 years ago. Gone Girl, however, is a very new phenomenon.
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Yeah, childhood sexual abuse.
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Like Clarissa, I tried reading the book and couldn’t make myself. The prose just bugged, the murder mystery was almost besides the point, I couldn’t stand the boring self insert reporter, and ALL of the violence felt like it was there just for the reader to wank to. To a certain extent, you could say that about most action movies, but it was especially glaring to me in this book. The main female character’s rage was almost incidental to the whole wanking off to her violation and her revenge that the writer seemed to expect of his readers.
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Well I didn’t read the book, but the movie was quite easy to follow. I imagine that the reason why many people do not appreciate books about female revenge is that they do still want women to be different from men.
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I only managed to get to about page 30 every time I tried reading it, so I didn’t get to the point where the female character would even appear. Maybe I should give it another try.
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Mike read the book, in two volumes, and got through most of it.
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I know. Gone Girl is such a phenomena that I keep thinking I ought to read it. But every time I pick up the book, I find it tedious. And I read Confessions of a Shopaholic and The Devil Wears Prada so I definitely can read trashy fiction! (Like you, I try to keep abreast of cultural phenomena.) But I can’t do Gone Girl for some reason. I’m not sure why.
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This happens to me, too. The phenomenon has no explanation. 🙂
Maybe watch the movie then and we’ll discuss it here? Although I’m sure the movie nixed the whole rage thing.
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I’m also very curious how Hollywood will deal with the book’s lack of happy ending.
Well, in other movies (e.g. Captian Correlli’s Mandolin = great book, horrendous movie), they dealt so that they just invented an unrelated happy ending and threw out the original one from the book…
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This is why I’m eager to see the movie. I really want to see what they have done with the ending.
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