The following story talks about Gone Girl in very frank detail. If you haven’t seen it yet, bail on this article immediately. It’s a good movie, and it’s worth seeing without being spoiled.
The box office is in, and it seems a ton of people saw Gone Girl. Given the popularity of the book and David Fincher’s involvement, I’m not totally surprised. That being said, I am a bit weirded out at that there’s so much conversation about how batshit crazy Amazing Amy is and not more conversation about how batshit crazy everyone else is. I mean, seriously. How many different people in Gone Girl do at least one thing that’s ridiculous? The answer is almost everyone.
The question isn’t whether other people are nuts in Gone Girl. The question is how nuts are they in comparison to each other. So, let’s go down that road. Here are, in my estimation, the 6 craziest people in Gone Girl, ranked by how much is mentally wrong with them.
6) Bill Dunne
We don’t get a ton from Nick’s dad in Gone Girl, mostly because he’s so out of it he’s not really a part of Nick’s life. What we do know is 1) he sucked as a parent, 2) Nick is like him during his worst moments, 3) he hates the nursing home/ assisted living facility he lives in. In fact, our main interaction with him is when he flees from the home, promptly gets arrested and has to be driven home by Nick, who is a weird combination of annoyed at his father and happy for the excuse to leave the police station.
Long story short, Bill sucked at life quite a bit before he got mental problems, and now he has too many mental problems to live on his own and care for himself. He’s not ranked higher though because the line between crazy and diseased is even more blurry when it comes to dementia. Also, because this is a stacked field of crazies he's up against.
5) Andie Hardy
Say what you will about Amazing Amy. She clearly has some eccentricities and unhealthy ways of coping, but at least she has a plan. Andie has nothing. She’s a pitching machine spitting out terrible decisions and impulsive emotions. Get past the fact that she slept with her teacher. Get past the fact that she continued sleeping with a man who may have murdered his wife. Instead, focus on the fact that she freaked out after said man had the nerve to say positive things about his missing wife at her vigil! God forbid.
From vowing to keep his secret to going public and dressing like a librarian while doing it, Andie is a dumb girl, willing to both be manipulated and manipulate, depending on her mood and/ or what seems like a temporarily good idea. On the bright side, her almost unfair levels of hotness will smooth out those rough edges for another few years.
4) Greta
If you’ve ever wondered the difference between Rednecks and White Trash, Greta is the perfect sample case. She has terrible tattoos, a good old boy boyfriend and a love of sensationalized reality television shows. All three of those things could go either way, but the fact that she’s also a thief and is probably an addict puts her firmly on the White Trash side. She’s not dumb and good natured. She’s dumb and recklessly selfish, and she proves that when she steals poor Amy’s money in the middle of the day and then scurries back to her residence next door.
It takes a straight up monster to befriend a girl, take her mini-golfing and then use your scumbag boyfriend to break into her house and steal her money. That’s exactly what Greta does and by all accounts, she has no remorse. For the record, she has terrible mini-golf form too.
3) Nick Dunne
Once we get the big reveal, we’re supposed to sympathize with Nick. He’s the normal one, at least in comparison to Amazing Amy. But is he really? He’s a serial cheater, an idiot who smiles next to missing posters of his wife and an emotionless goon who bottles everything inside. It’s hard to hold marrying a psycho against him, but we certainly can hold his decision to stay with her against him. He could have blown it up. He could have started over. Instead, he stays because part of him kind of likes it.
Yes, Amazing Amy is crazy. But so is the guy who sees every single one of those warts and thinks, "I can make this work." He gets a lot of bonus points too for thinking he could sleep with his mistress in his sister's house on the couch without getting caught. The bold play of a madman!
2) Desi Collings
There’s something wrong with Desi. He’s incapable of moving on. He’s horrible at reading the emotions of others. He has utterly bizarre expectations about how quickly people should move on from traumatic relationships. He has an outlandish number of security cameras in his house, purportedly for safety. He’s just off, though whether or not there’s more evil or more clueless about it is unclear. I’m sure Amazing Amy knows, but thanks to her quick little cut mid-sex, we won’t ever get any more evidence.
I prefer to think Desi is an obnoxiously confident, clueless idiot who always knew Amazing Amy would come back to him under weird circumstances and isn’t even remotely surprised when she calls him after faking her own death. It’s just been his plan all along.
1) Amazing Amy Dunne
Do you know how much anger and mental effort it takes to fake a pregnancy, befriend a dumb woman down the street, write 300 diary entries, collect your own blood, order thousands of dollars worth of dumb stuff to manufacture credit card debt, buy a car off Craigslist, fake your own murder and then hide out? That sounds utterly exhausting but not for Amazing Amy. She’s fueled by so much rage and self-obsession that she does it for fun. And that’s to say nothing about the murder she committed or the rape charges she trumped up against poor Scoot McNairy.
I was really hoping there was some way I could find to put anyone else on top of this list, but Amazing Amy is just too insane to be topped. God only knows what motherhood will do to her, but I really hope it involves writing out Post-It notes regarding ideal suicide dates.
