An It Couple whose mythical love story implodes on their anniversary: Is this the plotline of Gone Girl, which turns 10 on Oct. 3rd, or the latest installment of the Bennifer saga? It’s both.
Gone Girl, directed by David Fincher and adapted by Gillian Flynn from her 2012 bestseller of the same name that changed publishing and launched a thousand imitations, follows the perfectly blonde magazine columnist Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike), who disappears on her fifth wedding anniversary to Nice Guy™ Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck).
Amy finds out Nick has been cheating with one of his college students, played by Emily Ratajkowski, fresh off the “Blurred Lines” video… Pardon me, I just had a flashback to the mid-aughts when we tried to make Robin Thicke happen. Where was I? Oh right, instead of asking for a divorce or trying to make it work, Amy is hellbent on revenge and frames Nick for her murder, while she drives off into the anonymous middle American sunset, gorging herself on the junk food she wouldn’t let herself consume while reciting the infamous “Cool Girl screed.” You know how it goes: The Cool Girl is up for anything and pretends to like everything her male love interest likes, all while remaining generically hot.
I’m sure you don’t need a refresher of the two-decade saga that is the on-again off-again relationship between Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, but in case you’ve been clobbered by a Punch and Judy doll (one of the many clues Amy has laid out for Nick as part of their anniversary scavenger hunt which doubles as a piece of evidence to frame him with), Bennifer reunited in 2021, almost 20 years since they first got together on the set of their ill-fated movie Gigli, became engaged for a second time in 2022 and actually pulled the trigger this time, marrying later that year.
Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike
Merrick Morton/20th Century Fox
The gossip magazines and your older co-workers were bursting with second-hand happiness, extolling the possibilities of rekindled romance. But, living up to her Elizabeth Taylor-esque penchant for falling hard and quick, on their second anniversary this August, Lopez filed for divorce from Affleck. When you can’t surpass even the Dunne’s wooden anniversary, you know your marriage reeks with toxicity.
Unfortunately, the writing was on the wall for Ben and J.Lo after the latter’s attempt at a musical comeback earlier this year. Lopez released a triptych of content themed around her and Affleck’s love story.
First there was the album, This is Me… Now, a companion piece to her 2002 album entitled This is Me… Then, which chronicled her first go around with Affleck. That was accompanied by the visual album, This is Me… Now: A Love Story, which dropped on Prime Video and dramatized Lopez’s aforementioned reputation for being unlucky in love. But she wasn’t done yet. Two weeks later, a documentary following the making of the audio and visual albums entitled The Greatest Love Story Never Told also aired on Prime Video and proved to be not only the nail in the coffin of Lopez’s public perception, causing the populous to turn against her like clockwork (people who act brand new about Lopez’s reputation obviously haven’t been paying much attention), but also in her relationship.
Affleck who, in addition to his reputation as a serious actor (again, I refer to Gigli…) and director, has gained notoriety as a walking depression meme. His Dunkin’ Donuts and assorted fast food runs coupled with his extremely bothered expression at all times might make him a relatable celebrity on the other side of a chasm of increasingly untouchable megastars like his own wife, who pointedly drinks her Dunkin’ coffee (or is it orange drink? If you know you know), but it probably doesn’t make him a very pleasant partner.
We see this in the way he tries to undercut Lopez’s ideas in The Greatest Love Story Never Told—hell, he even takes aim at the title. “If you’re making a record about it, that seems kind of like telling it,” he snipes in the doco. “I’m sorry I’m not an award winning director,” she placates him in a later scene in which she’s expressing uncertainty about whether the project will be any good.
What does this all have to do with Gone Girl? Well, look at the relationship between Nick and Amy: two artists—in this case writers—whose initial courtship is the stuff of fairytales. While Amy’s success is in flashy women’s magazines, Nick is a serious writer. But it’s Amy’s faux diary entries that make up the first half of the book before we find out what she really thinks of her husband and what she plans to put him through that portray a love story that should have never been told and leaves the audience questioning how much was even real to begin with.
Merrick Morton/20th Century Fox
And who could forget that iconic scene of Affleck as Nick fake smiling at the news cameras next to the missing poster for his wife at a press conference pleading for information? It was the precursor to the Sad Affleck meme before Batman ever had to sit through a DC press junket.
Despite their resentment curdling to hatred toward one another, Gone Girl ultimately ends with the titular woman returning to the marital home covered in the blood of Neil Patrick Harris when her plans to disappear go awry, and she subsequently entraps Nick with a clandestine pregnancy using banked sperm he thought they let expire. While I’m in no way equating the Dunne’s abusive marriage to the doomed Affleck union, it is uncanny that Bennifer were spotted together again a couple of weeks ago in an instance of life imitating art.
