David Fincher's 'Gone Girl'

I’ve been watching this trend for over a decade now, and I can’t understand why Medea is produced far more frequently than Antigone, or why Hedda Gabler is favored over Saint Joan, or why we’ve been bewitched by six Lady Macbeths over the past three seasons. Why do spellbound audiences watch in horror while Medea, driven to madness by her husband’s rejection, slaughters her own children? Why are audiences fascinated by a frigid housewife like Hedda, trapped in a repressive society and driven to suicide by sexual frustration and boredom? Why are we mesmerized by the maniacally ambitious Lady Macbeth, who cries “Unsex me here!” and goads her husband into becoming a serial killer?

Wouldn’t audiences rather cheer on the courageous daughter of Oedipus who buries her brother at the cost of her own life? Or marvel at the frail young girl who leads an army in a righteous crusade?

Apparently not. They’d rather watch the neurotic, self-destructive protagonist of Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine — inspired by Ruth Madoff and played by a brilliant Cate Blanchett — go down in defeat and humiliation.

Don’t blame it on the producers — they’re only taking an accurate reading of the zeitgeist and giving audiences what they want.

Standing on her own two feet

True, there are a few female mavericks who take justice into their own hands, and we admire them for it, like Lisbeth Salander, the vengeful protagonist of Stieg Larsson’s “Dragon Tattoo” trilogy. Traumatized as a teenager by an abusive father and raped by her guardian, the Aspergerish Lisbeth exacts her revenge against men by becoming more aggressive and violent than they are. Then there’s Carrie Mathison in the TV series Homeland (played by Claire Danes), the bipolar, lone wolf CIA agent who has spent three self-destructive seasons defending our country against terrorism.

But these characters are either fanatical, unpredictable — or they wear mohawk hairdos and nose rings and ride around on motorcycles.

I was thinking about all these women, some violent, others mad, as I stumbled out of Gone Girl, the latest film to offer a deranged, homicidal female protagonist. Gillian Flynn turned her sensational novel into the screenplay for a full-length movie, directed by David Fincher, starring Ben Affleck as a phlegmatic, philandering husband and Rosamund Pike as his beautiful wife, who decides to enact her revenge on their fifth wedding anniversary. Gone Girl is a lurid, self-indulgent film noir, so I won’t take away its easy thrills by revealing the outcome of its convoluted plot, other than to say that “Amazing Amy” (Pike) and her unfortunate husband Nick (Affleck) had kept up their seemingly picture-perfect marriage for as long as they could, until it started to unravel. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” would be putting it mildly.

“You bitch!” Nick keeps exclaiming throughout the film, watching in amazement as his psychopathic wife gets away with murder. I cringe at the frequent use of the word — it’s cheap and demeaning — and have never adjusted to its place in our current lexicon. Be that as it may, it’s consistently used to describe many of the popular female protagonists of today.

What a dame

Happily, there are a few heroines on the horizon, or rather, the stage and screen. Katniss, the intrepid archer of The Hunger Games films played by Jennifer Lawrence, is back for a third round this season. Claire (beautiful Caitriona Balfe), the tough-minded nurse in the TV series Outlander who is thrown back in time from 1945 England to mid-18th-century Scotland and captured by male-chauvinist highlanders, continues on her courageous crusade to return to the present and her long-suffering husband. But these positive female figures are few and far between.

Meanwhile, I'm afraid we’ll have to suffer through another Medea this season (starring the frightening Helen McCrory) in the lurid Royal National Theatre production just released on HD worldwide. At the same time, we live in hope that maybe one of these days, when the world is full of free, empowered women and happy marriages, a resourceful adapter will rewrite that horrifying story, and give it an upbeat ending.

Till that unlikely day, we’ll have to accept the reality that, for today’s audiences, “gone girls” are far more interesting than good girls.