Is Amy Elliot Dunne the Ultimate Karen?
by Hoda Mallone
2020 is a terrifying time for humanity. The United States of America faring far worse than most, it seems. Our beloved democracy is falling further and further into chaos. A worldwide pandemic is killing thousands of people a day and decimating our healthcare system. Our economy has plummeted to new lows. Almost 40 million people are unemployed. White supremacy and white privilege are taking on new life and vigor with the amplification of this ideology coming from leaders with very loud megaphones. Police brutality has become so fervent that killing Black men with impunity, on camera, has become a weekly occurrence, causing racial tensions to spill out into the streets, becoming a dangerous and bloody uprising. This, with a lack of leadership so deeply void, it’s become a vacuum. And it’s only May. This horrendous state of affairs is bleak. However, in times of great peril we are also given the opportunity for greater introspection. We can see things from a fresh perspective, are given new lenses. When we are turned upside down, we see things from new angles.
In light of what is happening, culturally in the world, I wanted to take a look at one specific aspect of White privilege: White female entitlement. White female entitlement had me thinking about one of my all time favorite protagonists, Amy Elliot Dunne, and the surprising way in which the novel Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn unintentionally showcased this behavior well before we all watched it so blatantly displayed in shaky camera phone videos.
We all know these women. We have always known these women. My own life is littered with encounters with them. This is not a new mindset that a certain set of women have suddenly adopted. It’s the way they have conducted themselves on a regular basis. But because of the heightened sensitivity to the way White people assert their privilege in this world, the accessibility of cameras to capture these assertions, and social media to magnify and analyze these assertions, we now have a nomenclature for this behavior. This behavior, perspective, or attitude, if you will, finally has a name: She is called, Karen.
A Karen is constantly aggrieved, uncontended, and travels through this world with a perpetual chip on her shoulder, that she has not earned but feels quite entitled to anyway. The key here is that a Karen takes all that out on others that are likely not deserving of her wrathful ire.
According to Wikipedia, the slang definition is:
Karen is a pejorative term for a person perceived to be entitled or demanding beyond the scope of what is considered appropriate or necessary. A common stereotype is that of a white American middle-aged woman who displays aggressive behavior when prevented from getting her way; such women are often depicted as demanding to "speak to the manager", and of having a particular bob cut hairstyle.
Now, I would argue that the bob hairstyle and the restriction on age are not necessarily representative of all Karens. They come in all ages and sizes, and with all manner of bad haircuts. All gratuitously grumpy White women are welcome in their tribe. And although the term, or phenomenon, is tinged with racial prejudices, it is not limited to those racial inclinations. This attitude stretches well beyond its racist roots. The, “Can I speak to your manager?” posture goes further than race and into socioeconomic standing, religious demographics, as well as political leanings. If a Karen feels that someone is in any way is beneath her and inconveniencing her, she sets her sights on retribution.
As a thinking person, I understand that this is a reaction. A counteraction that is based on the fear of white superiority slipping away. Over this past Memorial Day weekend, this was evidenced by Amy Cooper, a woman who called the police and threatened the life of Christian Cooper (no relation), a Black man who was bird watching in New York and asked her to put her dog on its leash because it was the rule. Amy was so enraged at the simple request, she immediately got on the phone to the authorities. She feigned panic and even changed the inflection in her voice when she spoke to the 911 operator. Her intention was to convey she was being harmed and her life was being threatened. This was in no way the case. Mr. Cooper, a Harvard alumnus and accomplished comic book writer and editor, filmed the encounter and likely saved himself a lot of trouble and potentially his own life by documenting their interaction. This shameful overreaction, let’s call it, sparked a national conversation about Karens and their behavior.
Toni Morrison says, “If you can only be tall because somebody is on their knees, then you have a serious problem.”
This is where Karens find their purpose, with others on their knees. They get their agency from depriving others of theirs. And this point is what led me to Amy Elliot Dunne, the pinnacle of modern, complicated female protagonists, from the novel, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. Amy is inarguably a sociopath and a murderer. She does things in this book that are so destructively manipulative, you couldn’t help reading with some level of admiration, despite your moral leanings. Amy felt tall in intellect, social standing, and in her own uniqueness. And when she felt most tall was when she put people who crossed her on their knees.
I found the similarities to the way society deals with aggrieved White women and the way this novel presented Amy and her many aggrievements to be very similar. Amy was nothing if not aggrieved. Flynn seemed to follow a pretty standard format for making someone demonstrably awful, likable; make her relatable, make her vulnerable, and make her justified. The parallels to how society, and certainly the media, handles White women follow much of the same pattern. Ms. Cooper was out walking her dog; just like you do. She was alone in a remote area of Central Park; isn’t that scary? That man offered her dog a treat and started filming her; wouldn’t you do the same thing? In Gone Girl, the tones are the same.
Amy was very smart, ivy league educated. She was generous, moving with her husband back to his tiny Missouri hometown, from NYC, to take care of his dying mother. Amy sacrificed and compromised for her marriage. And after all that, her husband, Nick, still cheated on her. For a lot of the novel, you are cheering for her. In fact, even after it is revealed that she, as the main narrator, had been lying to the reader for the entire first half of the book, you still felt like you understood where she was coming from. Even through her deception, you were on her side.
In a highly sophisticated plan, Amy writes hundreds of pages of fake diary entries. She takes out a life insurance policy on herself in her husband’s name. Pretends to buy a gun. Plants elaborate abuse stories about Nick, taking advantage of her dim-witted but kind neighbor. She sets up a fake crime scene. Bleeds herself and plants her blood as evidence. Fakes her own pregnancy. Then Amy disappears. She even plans her own suicide all to frame her husband for her murder. According to Amy, this was not just because Nick cheated on her in the most utterly cliché way – with a young co-ed from the writing class he was teacing – it’s because he “took and took from her.” He took her money, took her away from her family, away from the city she loved, and selfishly took her love without fulfilling the promises of a certain life that he had passionately made to her. It makes you wonder why she didn’t just move back in with her parents in New York and get a messy divorce like half of married people do? Now, I leave it to each reader to form their own moral judgements on if the punishment fits the crime, but I can tell you that by the standards of the law, it does not.
When Nick meets with his lawyer, Tanner Bolt, for the first time, Nick must make the case that Amy is framing him. Nick gives Tanner two crucial pieces of information about Amy. Nick explains, “Before we start, you have to understand one very key thing about Amy: She is fucking brilliant.” And the next thing he tells Tanner is vitally important to Amy, and all Karens: “The second thing you need to know about Amy is she is righteous. She is one of those people who is never wrong, and she loves to teach lessons, dole out punishment.” This is the point where you see how this behavior is perceived by others. How the entitlement and manipulation is manifested in real life consequences. It is clear that Amy is the leader of all Karens.
The next paragraph, Flynn writes a story about Amy that I believe perfectly encapsulates the type of behavior we are commonly seeing from this group of women. When I came upon this, it was all too familiar and glowed with undertones of what occurred with Ms. Cooper and Christian, the birdwatcher, among other similar situations. Nick goes on to tell Tanner this story about Amy:
“Let me tell you a story, one quick story. About three years ago, we were driving up to Massachusetts. It was awful, road-rage traffic, and this trucker flipped Amy off – she wouldn’t let him in – and then he zoomed up and cut her off. Nothing dangerous, but scary for a second. You know those signs on the back of trucks: How Am I Driving? She had me call and give them the license plate. I thought that was the end of it. Two months later – two months later – I walked into our bedroom, and Amy was on the phone, repeating that license plate. She had a whole story: She was traveling with her two-year-old, and the driver had nearly run her off the road. She said it was her fourth call. She said she’d even researched the company’s routes so she could pick the correct highways for her fake near-accidents. She thought of everything. She was really proud. She was going to get that guy fired.”
This is a masterclass in Karendry. Amy Elliot Dunne did everything at the top of her class. But this story rings true. I have heard things like this anecdotally from people. I have talked friends out of behavior like this. And this is exactly what Ms. Cooper was doing in the park. She was taking out her righteous entitlement on someone who is perceived to be inflicting a personal grievance against her, no matter how minor it may have been.
Rereading this novel in 2020 in the current climate, racially, politically, economically, made Amy, as a character seem almost silly. Gone Girl was published in 2012 and obviously written before that, and when analyzing our female protagonist now, you feel every one of those years. We live in an almost unrecognizable world from the one Gillian Flynn wrote this in. Then, one could look at this phycological thriller’s main character as a female icon, a smasher of the patriarchy, a harbinger of justice for the wronged wife. But now, although those tones are still very prevalent, you can’t help but also fixate on her lesser, more petty qualities. What jumps out now is that she is vapid, self-absorbed, and altogether clueless. You just want to scream out to her, “Read the room, Amy!”