20th Century Fox / Everett

The word “marriage” occurs about a hundred times in Gillian Flynn’s novel “Gone Girl”; there are sixty instances of “husband.” “Wife” maxes out the Kindle search feature at a hundred instances in the first hundred and forty-seven pages—that’s just thirty-seven per cent of the book. If there is some way of searching the remaining sixty-three per cent, I haven’t figured it out. I feel certain that she’s there, this “wife,” many more times—but I can’t find her. As sometimes happens, the limitations of the medium amplify the message: wives are people who disappear.

“Gone Girl” has sold over eight and a half million copies—a number sure to rise in the wake of the film adaptation, which topped the box office last weekend. The plot centers on the failed marriage of the beautiful, accomplished magazine writer Amy Elliott (whose childhood was immortalized by her parents in a creepy children’s book series, “Amazing Amy”) and Nick Dunne, a handsome aspiring novelist from Missouri. Their conjugal happiness is first interrupted by the financial crisis: Nick and Amy lose their magazine jobs, sell their brownstone, and buy a house in Missouri, where Nick can attend to his dying mother. The mother duly dies. The couple is haunted by Nick’s foul-mouthed, demented father, who periodically escapes from his care facility and runs around town shouting vile things at women. Nick uses the last of Amy’s trust fund to open a bar. He may or may not be having an affair. They may or may not be trying to have a baby. On the morning of the couple’s fifth wedding anniversary, Amy disappears in what looks like an abduction, and a nationwide manhunt begins.

Parallels may be drawn between “Gone Girl” and Lionel Shriver’s 2003 best-seller “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” which was adapted into a movie in 2011. Shriver’s novel tells the story of a woman whose husband talks her into having children; parenthood, he feels, is the only possible answer to the big existential questions. But she, through some horrific transference, passes her spiritual emptiness to her son, who eventually perpetrates a school massacre.

The central characters in both “Gone Girl” and “We Need to Talk About Kevin” are smart, acerbic New York women—successful writers, amazing cooks, lovers of European culture—who are somehow unable to find happiness with their apparent male counterparts. (This parade of weird, milquetoast intellectuals is best summed up in the character of the billionaire, Proust-reciting Scrabble buff played, in the “Gone Girl” adaptation, by Neil Patrick Harris.) Both women marry salt-of-the-earth, all-American types, manly men who know how to fuck a woman’s brains out and then take her to see the fence that Tom Sawyer whitewashed. Both are relocated by their strong, manly husbands from fantastic Manhattan apartments to suburban McMansions, where they are given to understand that the time has come to set aside frivolous pursuits and have children.

Both books restage marriage as a violent crime—an abduction. An independent, expressive single woman is taken from New York; her beautiful body is disfigured, or threatened with disfigurement; and her accomplishments are systematically taken away or negated, rendered worthless by comparison to that all-trumping colossus of meaning, childbirth. (Clearly, many women find happiness in much this way; but, equally clearly, many of them don’t and can’t.) These narratives speak less to the specific challenges of having a sociopath for a child or a spouse than to the pathology of the unstated assumptions that we all pass along and receive. They speak to the revelation lying in wait for women when they hit the ages of marriageability and childbirth: that their carefully created and manicured identities were never the point; the point was for it all to be sacrificed to children and to men.

“Gone Girl,” which doesn’t attempt the same wide-ranging and class-conscious social critique as “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” focusses with greater fury and purity on the betrayal of Amazing Amy. I read the book, when it came out, with great admiration; the movie is even better. Flynn’s script pares down the plot to a bare skeleton of menace, enhanced by a truly sickening score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. (Reznor, you again! I remember like it was yesterday my complicated mixture of high-school feelings, listening to your alarmingly sexy delivery of lines like “I want to fuck you like an animal” and “I will make you hurt.”)

In the role of Nick Dunne, Ben Affleck gamely takes on a few extra pounds and a hulking demeanor that doesn’t hide his handsomeness so much as give it a nasty edge. Slouching around like an overgrown frat boy, swilling bourbon before lunch and eating ice cream out of the carton, Affleck’s Nick is a visual reminder of the fact that men can live their lives, eat whatever it occurs to them to eat, get older, let their guts hang out, and still have gorgeous young girls falling into their laps.

You see the billing of the less famous female lead, Rosamund Pike, and you think, if you’re me, with a sinking feeling: Who’s the lovely young thing they found to play across from old Affleck this_ _time? In fact, Pike—a thirty-five-year-old Oxford graduate—is Amazing Amy in the flesh, and a creature of such ravishing beauty, radiance, and grace that it’s impossible to imagine any man deserving her. That’s the historical crux of the problem. There’s nothing new about lovely girls, expensively educated in how to become brilliant wives. But Amazing Amy stands for a newer creation: lovely girls, expensively educated to seize success for themselves (Amy has diplomas from Harvard and Yale), and yet still groomed for the dream of a beautiful dress and a white cake. As Nick puts it in the novel, “Of course Amy can cook French cuisine and speak fluent Spanish and garden and knit and run marathons and day-trade stocks and fly a plane and look like a runway model doing it.”

If no longer vital to a woman’s status as a human being, marriage is still understood as her crowning success, the event without which her life won’t be truly complete. When Amazing Amy grows up, she can’t not_ get married. The world is still no place for single women. They are regularly bombarded—and I say this, let’s face it, from experience—by both well- and ill-intentioned comments about their inability to find that special man. In “Gone Girl,” this hazing is presented particularly dramatically, at the book party for Amy’s parents’ latest effort, “Amazing Amy and the Big Day.” The parents bully Amy, who is thirty-something and still single, into talking to reporters, who predictably grill her about when she’s _going to get married. Nick saves the day by proposing to her, right in front of the journalists. That shuts them up—it’s the only thing that will. And for Nick, to “man up” in this way is to fulfill perhaps the greatest and most irrational responsibility left for men.

There are fewer situations today than ever before in which a woman needs a man’s protection, and this is something to celebrate and be grateful for. But the number of such situations is still significantly greater than zero. Although Amy is dangerous to men, although she ruins men’s lives and stages fake rape scenes, there is never a moment’s doubt that, as a woman, she needs their protection. The uncanny thing about “Gone Girl” is that the violations that Amy stages have a way of coming true. It’s as if she doesn’t invent abuse so much as anticipate it. At one point she hits herself in the face, to look like a battered wife—and a few scenes later a couple gangs up on her, beats her, flings her onto a motel bed, and steals the money she wears under her dress, leaving her howling into a pillow. Amy fakes a pregnancy—only to be required, by byzantine demands of the plot, to gain an absurd amount of weight, lose her looks, and plot her own suicide. None of her ruses are any worse than reality; she is only matching the world at its game.