Gone Girl is a film that centers around Nick and Amy's marriage. How they lost one another, began to use each other, betray one another in so many ways that Amy decides her only course of action is to stage her abduction and what seems like her murder. She does this in order to get back at Nick for what she describes as having already murdered her by how he's taken from her. Fincher's film based on Gillian Flynn's screenplay (from her novel) reveals how slowly over time Amy and Nick's relationship dissolved due to the economic market which forced them to leave their high status life in the big city and move to Nick's suburban midwest hometown where he has become lazy and apathetic in his career and marriage to Amy. This leads to him having an affair while not working.
Nick's relationship to Amy is then put through the scrutinizing lens of the media as he is dubbed a sociopath as he smiles while being photographed with a poster of his missing wife. As Nick's life is combed through over and over again we learn that Amy is alive and well and in desperation calls on an old friend whom stalked her earlier in her life, Desi. She manipulates him into believing that she loves him and asks him to protect her. The integral component of the film is the media. Once Amy sees Nick in his interview on tv she decides he is once again the man she married, and she wants to be with him again. In being able to see her husband reinvigorated she murders Desi and pins her abduction on him as she finds her way back to Nick. And through the media they rekindle their relationship openly.
But in private Nick is ready to come clean to the police about what Amy has done. But she tells him she's pregnant with his baby (she used his frozen sperm to get pregnant). And with that they remain together, locked into the hell their marriage has become. The film speaks on one level how we allow ourselves to dictate our decision making based off what the media tells us, and in this age of social media the "perfect relationship" can be had by anyone, as long as they are seen constantly "in love." This is an idealized state which society holds itself to believe is what they are after when they don't know the reality of the marriage. We also see the media's ability to demonize Nick as a sociopath with one photo, and ultimately redeem him to Amy through his interview. While this is occurring on the television we watch as Detective Boney makes no ground in her case, in a way the media has more power to indict than the police as proof isn't needed in the court of public opinion
In the end, the couple stays together "for the sake of the child." Amy is pregnant and Nick believes himself trapped. It sets up the ideas that a marriage cannot be saved by a marriage (the fight scene where Nick physically abuses Amy), and that it will keep two people who should not be together locked into their commitment, enduring one another for the sake of the kid. So the image of the perfect couple reuniting is exposed to be a gut-wrenching endured relationship that no one truly knows the reality of.
