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Warning: This article contains plot spoilers for the film Gone Girl.
Erich Fromm, the psychoanalyst and social philosopher, presciently identified a character structure that by 2014 has become ubiquitous within Western society: the marketing personality. This is the person who lives his life feeling more like a commodity to be bought or sold than a living animal with initiative and vitality derived from a sense of subjective reality. Nowhere is this more apparent than on our Facebook profiles, Snapchat feeds, and Instagram photos, which act as self-generated attempts at packaging ourselves to look alive, enviable, and, most importantly, worth something.
For Amy (Rosamund Pike) in the film Gone Girl , the commodification comes not in the form of a social networking platform, but in the comparatively quaint premise of a children's book series written by her well-intentioned yet narcissistically inclined parents. The book series' titular character, Amazing Amy, is like Amy the real girl, only not. In short, Amazing Amy is perfect (read: perfectly marketable). She also represents the pseudoperson Amy's parents needed her to be in order for them to feel good about themselves. In this way, the books are the metaphorical translation of Amy from an authentic human into a commodity, meant solely for consumption and the gratification of others' needs.
It's no wonder that Amy, like so many of us, comes to see her felt needs and longings as nuisances to be suppressed in favor of taking on the carefully adapted personas most likely to attract the attention and purchasing power of those around her.
Amy's hyperattentiveness to the desires of others takes on an almost superpower quality. When she meets her eventual husband, Nick (Ben Affleck), it takes but one quick, flirty exchange for her to deduce what package to put herself in to attract him. For Nick, she will be the woman who pals around with the guys, who is never a “shrew,” and, most of all, who simply lets him be (the birthrig