Gone Girl

Have you ever won­dered what Fight Club would’ve been like had Brad Pitt and Edward Nor­ton been a dar­ling mar­ried cou­ple? It would be nice to chime in with the old, ​“well won­der no more!” punch­line, but that would only be half true with Gone Girl, David Fincher’s box-cut­ter autop­sy of a mar­riage which is forcibly dis­man­tled and then forcibly reforged in the cobalt blue flames of ignominy, arro­gance and decep­tion. So, so much deception.

The film is a neat­ly abridged and large­ly faith­ful adap­ta­tion of Gillian Flynn’s mul­ti-direc­tion­al thriller nov­el (penned by Fly­nn her­self) which atom­ised a storm-tossed het­ero­sex­u­al rela­tion­ship with page flip­ping brio. The key dif­fer­ence between the book and the film is less a ques­tion of con­tent and more a ques­tion of weight­ing. While the mys­te­ri­ous where­abouts of butter-wouldn’t‑melt sweet­heart Amy Elliott Dunne (the ​“Girl”, played by Rosamund Pike) was, to an extent, the cen­tral dra­mat­ic gam­bit in the book, it seems like Finch­er sees it as more of a dis­trac­tion, a flac­cid out­er mem­brane that shrouds the real gore of the matter.

Writer and direc­tor find more com­mon ground in the self-con­scious and extreme­ly skil­ful use of quo­ta­tion marks: is this trash, or is this ​“trash”? Gone Girl may even be con­sid­ered the né plus ultra of meta trash fic­tion, every frame oper­at­ing on some treach­er­ous duel lev­el of sin­cer­i­ty ver­sus cyn­i­cism. One of the ear­ly scenes shows the ini­tial courtship of dash­ing alpha dude-bro Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy at a Man­hat­tan soirée, where she’s look­ing like a lit­tle lost fawn, and so he swoops in and res­cues her from a rogues gallery of indie-sch­mindie douchebags.

So pre-acquaint­ed are they with the for­mu­la­tions of banal par­ty pat­ter that their vig­or­ous avoid­ance of roman­tic can­dour offers the view­er a pre­mo­ni­tion of the road bumps ahead. But then Finch­er clear­ly feels that this mode, this anti-earnest­ness, is in fact the new norm – being aware of the clichés is in itself a cliché. And so he duly pumps up Trent Reznor and Atti­cus Ross’ ambi­ent dot-and-loopy sound­track so their words are bare­ly audi­ble. We don’t need to hear them. We know them. We know how this plays out.

The veneer of socia­bil­i­ty and ami­ca­bil­i­ty faked by so many (if not all?) of the char­ac­ters in this movie is a pos­ture that Finch­er him­self assumes, come-hith­er coax­ing with one hand and bounc­ing your head off the wall with the oth­er. To some extent, Fly­nn and Finch­er are them­selves bond­ed in a shot­gun mar­riage of con­ve­nience where you sense that, artis­ti­cal­ly speak­ing, both par­ties see, or at least present them­selves as some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent to what they actu­al­ly are. Masks under masks under masks… Even as Fly­nn has nobly and bril­liant­ly repur­posed her nov­el for the screen, Finch­er has then repur­posed her screen­play fur­ther to meet his own nefar­i­ous ends.

Though much of the basic plot remains, the bulk of the book’s attempts at con­tex­tu­al­is­ing the cen­tral rela­tion­ship and plac­ing it with­in the Amer­i­can polit­i­cal now are large­ly muf­fled, as Finch­er is a film­mak­er who always seems more inter­est­ed in the pass­ing of time as an abstract rather than a lit­er­al con­cept. In the book, char­ac­ters had clear(er) moti­va­tions for their actions, and the film only gains access to tru­ly dan­ger­ous ter­ri­to­ry by recog­nis­ing that it makes for much, much scari­er and philo­soph­i­cal­ly rich view­ing if we don’t com­pre­hend why these peo­ple are doing what they are doing. Or, to look at it anoth­er way, that what they are doing is com­plete­ly nor­mal and doesn’t need explaining.

In an inter­view with Film Com­ment mag­a­zine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go is brought up as an obvi­ous com­par­i­son piece, though it feels like more of a kin­dred spir­it to Otto Preminger’s Lau­ra (struc­tural­ly) and Ing­mar Bergman’s Scenes From a Mar­riage (the­mat­i­cal­ly). Via the Badala­men­ti-ish score, there may even be a con­nec­tion to be made with David Lynch’s Blue Vel­vet, a film which itself tran­scends mere pick­et-fence satire once you dare to ask, who actu­al­ly is the bad guy here?

Its pre­sen­ta­tion of sub­ur­bia, the south of Amer­i­ca (as com­pared to the lib­er­al, enlight­ened north) and the fes­ter­ing hor­ror which lurks inside pris­tine mini-man­sions cer­tain­ly sug­gests more that a tac­it link. Fincher’s rar­i­fied, crys­talline direc­to­r­i­al mode fits this sto­ry like a glove, mak­ing the rot behind the sheen all the more putrefying.

But, first and fore­most, this is a Finch­er joint to its core, and while grand guig­nol set pieces are all very wel­come, the real plea­sure of this movie derives from its exhaus­tive exam­i­na­tion into the very fibres of a mod­ern rela­tion­ship and the pre­sen­ta­tion of its find­ings as a cat­a­logue of com­pro­mis­es, decep­tions and dere­lic­tions of duty.

His pre­vi­ous fea­ture, The Girl with the Drag­on Tat­too, looked into ideas of the essen­tial unknowa­bil­i­ty of oth­er peo­ple and the flu­id nature of trust with­in the frame­work of a twisty pot­boil­er. These were the film’s ulti­mate rev­e­la­tions. With Gone Girl, these ideas form the basis of the entire movie, the lifeblood rather than the byprod­uct. It uses them as an engine for its nar­ra­tive con­vul­sions, but also as a way to say some­thing pro­found about where we are as a race.

This is where the 24-hour TV news cycle comes in, and even sug­gests that this could be the clos­ing chap­ter of a tril­o­gy of films about life and love in the dig­i­tal age which began with The Social Net­work. As events in the film play out, pan­el shows, news pun­dits and twit­ter feeds are swift to offer their unique spin on things, spout­ing wild con­jec­ture as if it’s cop­per-bot­tomed fact. Nick goes on to a chat show to pro­fess his inno­cence and dis­cov­ers that he’s been accept­ed back into the nations arms just sec­onds after the broad­cast has end­ed. From shit­bag to sweet­heart in the bat of an eye.

The man­ner in which Finch­er stages the rolling news cov­er­age is bald­ly con­temp­tu­ous, but it plugs the movie into the mod­ern age. Maybe Gone Girl is a movie about the death of process, Fincher’s lamen­ta­tion for a time when sto­ries and ideas could play out as sin­gle, com­plete enti­ties rather than micro-sized pack­ages of spec­u­la­tion and heav­i­ly-caveat­ed bursts of infor­ma­tion. Detec­tive Rhon­da Boney (Kim Dick­ens) car­ries our her inves­ti­ga­tion with a list­less­ness which sug­gests she’s pal­pa­bly aware that cold hard case­work isn’t what gets a job done these days.

It’s about pop psy­chol­o­gy and how the facts float on the ocean of fick­le pub­lic back­wash. Piece­meal snip­pets are taint­ed by sub­jec­tive thought, and the col­lec­tive hunger to say some­thing, any­thing, will, in the end, pre­vent jus­tice from pre­vail­ing. The film itself almost feels cus­tom-built for the Twit­ter age, con­stant­ly demand­ing that you form an opin­ion before it stealthy under­cuts every­thing that’s come before it. Twit­ter and movie mon­tage are the same thing.

Even its themes appear to be play­ing direct­ly into the hands of think-piece cul­ture. To make a bina­ry judge­ment call on whether the mate­r­i­al – or the empha­sis Fincher/​Flynn places on aspects of it – pro­motes a misog­y­nist agen­da would be fool­hardy, but that’s not to say the pair don’t take things very close to the edge. The man­ner in which Amy uses preg­nan­cy as a bar­gain­ing chip in her mar­riage, or women shown using rape as a revenge tac­tic, or even the title’s some­what glib and loaded deci­sion to refer to Amy as a ​“girl” (alter­nate title: Way­ward Woman?) all seem primed to incite out­rage and poi­son-penned inter­net screeds.

Even that time­worn crit­i­cal get-out clause, ​“it’s not misog­y­nist because it’s about misog­y­ny,” feels unwar­rant­ed in this case, so slip­pery is the way it deals with time and per­cep­tion, what’s the truth, what’s not, what hap­pened, what didn’t, where are we, what time is it, who’s night­mare are we in now, is any of this god­damn thing real.