GONE GIRL

Gone Girl is an unusually wrenching film, even for David Fincher, and a hard specimen to classify. What starts out as a psychological thriller (did an unhappy husband kill his wife and then report her missing to throw the police off track?) turns into a mind game, shifting gears about half-way through. Had this been simply a case study of a doomed marriage spiraling into darkness the game change would have been a weakness and a stronger case could be made for the big revelation to be interpreted as a vilification of women. However, when it turns the table, Gone Girl creates a new villain; the media. Both the media and the public that feeds it take over the role of monsters so thoroughly in the movie that the direction of the tragedy between Nick and Amy Dunne (Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike), if there even was one, is beside the point.

This, it should be said, it truer of the film than the book. In the book, Gillian Flynn devotes at least as much time to the mechanisms of Nick and Amy’s relationship and to what extent love existed between them. In their dynamics, love, at least in the common sense, is not only unnecessary but may also be misguided. It’s a marriage built on conditions between two people who have reason to fear each other and, as Amy argues in the novel, it works all the more secure for it. When she wrote the screenplay, Flynn pushed Amy’s relationship ideology to the peripheral side and centered the script to the ills of the media. For the purposes of the film this was a smart choice, making for a concise, focused, and terse adaptation.

In the movie, almost every move the Dunnes make is motivated by a foreknowledge of the media and concern for public perception. That leads to the ultimate horror of the story. What they actually do to each other is, to use one of Amy’s choice terms, background noise. They act first and foremost as fodder for TV.

“In today’s media landscape every human emotion is packaged for someone else to consume, whether it’s social media or a true-crime TV show,” Flynn said. “People in the public eye are all taking turns packaging themselves for consumption by others or being packaged by others. We can’t control how we’re being viewed or how people perceive us.Fact is, in this era of the 24-hour news cycle, we’re consuming other people’s tragedies as entertainment.”

At first there is nothing inherently strange about Nick and Amy. They meet like a lot of couples, among hip circles at a New York bar, marry, and then move to a small Missouri town to care for Nick’s mother in her final years. This is when and where the tension seems to begin. There were earlier signs of disaccord, but the nearby presence of Nick’s family seems to distance Amy. Things get worse when Nick’s habit of spending continues after his lay-off and Amy allows her parents to take from her trust fund. These quarrels are common to many married couples but Nick’s image seems to get uglier fast upon their move to the suburbs and he shuts his wife off emotionally, even turning violent when she pleads to have a baby.   

But Fincher is pulling the carpet out beneath us and in time will incriminate us with the same locals who bought Amy’s story uncritically. Everything we know of their marriage comes from Amy’s diary, told in flashback. We accept what she tells us without ever questioning her reliability as a narrator. There is, Fincher says, no excuse for us buying Amy’s story as easily as the locals who assume Nick murdered his wife. If the media and the movies themselves haven’t given us enough precedent as to the dangers of fast assumptions, Gone Girl gives us plenty.

The first thing to strike us about the flashbacks is the dreamy quality; the heightened music, dark tones, and fake sounding dialogue. Amy (in both voice-over and in person) sounds especially phony, meaning her words have been rehearsed and faked. It is, after all, based on how she recorded her own words in her journal, where she polished her image into the character she wanted the public to see.

Both in and out of the flashbacks those around her speak more naturally, but the scenes set in the present, when Amy is “gone”, seem far closer to the real world. Of course, flashbacks often have dreamy feels as memory is, indeed, a foggy thing but, in Gone Girl, they are deliberately staged that way by their narrator and so the haziness of recollection has little to do with the matter.

Only in the intervals between the flashbacks does a different picture of Nick and Amy begin to form. Amy had at least two previous turbulent relationships with men and one ended in a near suicide for her lover. Suggesting there are at least other sides to her story.

Nick, likewise, doesn’t seem to be quite the monster Amy paints him as. He acts genuinely concerned about his wife and, if anything, he seems a bit of a sap. Still, we follow what Amy’s diary tells us until the movie reveals the truth about both Amy and her diary, when we tend to feel more relieved than unsurprised.

Fincher and Flynn thrust it on us as “see, don’t jump to conclusion” twist. Had Nick been executed for Amy’s murder (unlikely, anyhow, as the officer investigating the case reminds us how difficult it is to get a conviction without a body) we are just as guilty as the locals suckered in by Amy and her use of the media.

Of course, David Fincher is not one to offer easy answers. If movies and the media itself are reason to take Amy’s account with a grain of salt, Fincher also points to a number of reason in favor of her credibility. The strongest case for Amy’s story is that her account of her relationship with Desi, the suicidal millionaire played by Neil Patrick Harris, is proven at least partially true when she reconnects with him after her plan is thwarted. Everything we learn about Desi is consistent with Amy’s description; mostly

his emotional imbalance and need to control.  But this disturbing vibe comes not from Harris’s performance in the movie itself but, of all places, evocations of his performance in A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, where he spoofed his own public image while also using women’s vulnerability, feigning empathy with them, to gain control of their actions. If Harold & Kumar presented the darkest depths of his persona, Gone Girl uses it as a very bleak glimpse into Amy’s past and a possible motive for his distrust of men.

            A lot of what Amy says about Nick could also well be true. He is bound to fits of rage (he smashes a glass when a police interrogation cuts too deep) and has not been entirely honest with his own family about his infidelity. The truth, finally, is somewhere in the middle. That is Fincher’s ultimate stance. We shouldn’t dismiss Amy’s story entirely. Even after the half-way point when its climax is revealed to have been staged.

            If we ever lost sympathy for Nick, after the big reveal we want Amy to fail. She almost does when she underestimates a couple she takes into her confidence, but whenever her plan begins to crumble she is always one step ahead because she knows the media so well. When her original plan fails, she moves to plan B which, because the viewing public likes happy endings, succeeds (is there a suggestion that television audiences dictate news story outcomes?) Amy’s triumph, however, is not just a result of her own savviness but also of Nick’s and that is the final sad irony. Through the whole ordeal, Nick has learned enough about the media and what its audience wants to know his options are predetermined. He knows who his wife is, what she’s doing, and how the public will react, and so he knows his chance for getting out is becoming smaller, given the influence of the media in making or breaking a person, especially when a baby is involved. Gone Girl is a tragedy about a man who gets to know the media so well only to get trapped by it into a life of misery. He is, finally, as much a sell-out to it as the people who condemned him.

            Stylistically and emotively, Gone Girl is another triumph for David Fincher who can’t seem to make a wrong turn. Yes, the film runs a bit too long but it knows how to sprawl itself. The flashbacks, which start coming before we even know what kind of film this is ultimately going to be, offer him the greatest canvas for what he does best; creating suspense within ordinary settings and drab infrastructure. He likely saw a great opportunity in Flynn’s third novel and joined the wagon after 20^th-Century-Fox purchased the rights to the novel in the summer of 2012 for $1.5 million, with $500,00 going to Flynn for writing the screenplay. Fincher has still not signed on, however, by the time Fincher submitted the first draft in December. The hard part for Flynn was largely done, though she thought it a positive experience.

            “It was thrilling to see it all come together,” she said. “As someone who has covered movies for many years, I know that most of the time it doesn’t turn out so well for the original author. What was different this time around was that I had a great director who really liked the book and didn’t want to turn it into something other than what it already was.”

            From the start, Fincher and Flynn worked well together and the finished product has the polished feel of a great minds working in perfect harmony.

            “David Fincher liked the same things in the book that I liked. He wanted a faithful screen adaptation, not a whole new thing,” Flynn added.

            When the book started making waves in Hollywood (before even hitting shelves), Fincher was thought of as the best, if only, director capable of bringing the psychological depths of the work to the surface. Even Flynn came to realize that her novel would not easily lend itself to film.

            “Of course once I got into it I realized I was dealing with some complicated ideas,” she said. “It’s an internal story, centering on the characters’ thoughts. There’s lots of jumping back and forth in time. The diary stuff. And the plotting is very dense. So I knew from the beginning it wasn’t going to be easy. I knew I would have to concentrate on pacing and rearranging the order of some scenes. And with this story, tone is hugely important. It’s a thriller but with some dark humor — deep and dark.”

            As well as Flynn and Fincher worked together, it is unlikely that either one imagined how much the cast would bring to understanding of the book, even from critically shunned names like Tyler Perry as an attorney with an ability to play the media at its own game and come out ahead.

            “I’ve said all along that Amy is the showy role, but that the actor playing Nick has to be simply great,” Flynn said. “If he doesn’t work, the movie doesn’t work. And the great thing about Ben’s performance is that he makes you care even when you’re thinking he might be a murderer. You want to hang out with him and tell him it’s going to be OK … but you also want to punch him in the mouth. And Rosamund really blooms in her role. She gets to show so many emotions and sides to a human being. She was constantly asking me about Amy’s background, her friends, what kind of party she would enjoy. She had a copy of the book filled with notes.”

            Appropriately so for such a unique film, Gone Girl is one of the very few times in Hollywood (especially when the author of the original work was directly involved) that many cooks from many different circles created something wonderful, in this case the most atmospheric and provocative film of 2014. The media is a frequent and easy target for its own spawn, the film industry, but few movies have had the nerve to make their audience complicit in its corruption. Gone Girl’s makes its most powerful statement by making us gawkers into a personal tragedy before we even understand it, much like the locals in the film we think we are above.