A thread for David Fincher's adaptation of GONE GIRL

the book is brazenly silly start to finish

excellent dust jacket blurb

I've seen Flynn posing with a Patricia Highsmith novel in publicity photos, and in some ways Fincher has directed the movie as if it were actually a Highsmith story. But in fact both the novel and screenplay are far less 'cool' than peak Highsmith - they better suit De Palma's sensibilities, or Argento's - so the film never really embraces or succumbs to the full brazen silliness of the whole set up (even if there is a great pleasure in watching the way Fincher stages scenes, moves his camera, lights his sets - he's definitely a consistent visual stylist, often a beautiful one).

ryan can i just say how much i enjoy reading your posts on movies/tv/etc.?

npr piece that approaches the topic of treating the film within the sphere of feminism at all:

What has always kept Amy from troubling me in this particular sense is that she does the things she does not because they are in her nature as a woman, but because they are in her nature as a psychopath. One of the problems with the relative paucity of interesting female characters is that they become responsible for representing all women, for speaking to What Women Are Like. The more scantly represented any demographic group is, the more each person seems to reflect upon everyone. But here, it has always been perfectly clear that Amy is an aberration. She is a woman, but she is not only a woman. She is also a monster, and the second half of Fincher's film is, in many ways, a horror movie about the great difficulty — and eventually the impossibility — of defeating her. She is the rare monster in a monster movie who wins at the end. Whatever she has to do, however offensive, however distasteful, however horrifying. Whatever.

the big thing that really got my attention wrt all this was one little bit, when amy returns covered in blood and affleck whispers in her ear "you crazy bitch" or "you fucking bitch", one of those. there's a habit i've noticed among dudez, esp when i spent like a year hatereading reddit, where they're upstanding enough to understand that "bitch" is a misogynistic word and it shouldn't be used against women ... . .. . . ... unless they deserve it! ex-girlfriends who cheated or otherwise just broke their heart or did something cruel or even heinous, the rules are allowed to be broken in those cases, and when those cases arise you can tell there's a certain weight around that word -- a subtext of "i'm a nice guy so it's a big deal that i'm using this word... psychobitch! oh wow that was exhilarating". "i'm allowed to access misogyny if a woman doesn't behave, there's a spectrum of acceptability and if she falls on the wrong end just look out" etc. and then he whispered that in her ear a great deal of the theater erupted in applause. in that moment he was seen as a hero, and it just makes me think there's got to be something in that back half that got lost in translation, cause it really doesn't sound like the book is so simple. this paragraph is a lot bigger than i'd hoped.

xpost

"she's a fictional character created by an author who is not, as far as i know, a psychotic narcissist, so i dont think considering the character can really end there."

this was really interesting, and it reminded of how I felt when I read the book, which was to trampoline from the book to the author and wonder "how could someone who wrote this book actually be in a marriage with someone if their vision of partnership is this bitter, this relentlessly skeptical about every possible way of doing male-ness and femeale-ness in America in this century?". Read in the cold and misanthropic / bleakly funny light of the novel, the author's fawning dedication to her irl husband (how could I ever know if it was sincere?) started to look indistinguishable from the very "good life fantasies" being put forward by the "fake" diary within the first half of the novel and held up to withering scorn by its second half.

And that brings us to the basic spatial mystery of sociopathy/psychopathy, that you can never know for sure who is behind the smile, who is behind the sincere tone, who is speaking- in any human interaction there's a basic block or gap that is covered or by trust, speculated about, but essentially un-verifiable. Characters like this one make you paranoid about that gap.

[Highsmith had many relationships over the years, so it's not like you can't be misanthropic in general and loving in specific. But I don't like that one of my reactions to reading "Gone Girl" was to think to myself "man I could never be in a relationship with whoever would write this book because I just couldn't trust her", since I don't like to think that such authorial speculations are important. ]

That NPR quote is super, super OTM.

on another note, not that i've read much about this, but i haven't read anything that's mentioned amy's fucked up childhood as "amazing amy" and the seeming implication that her parents were probably horrible, which at the very least strikes me as a "partial root of the villain's evil" explanation beyond just "she's a psychopath." it's a simple thing but ignored, and interesting because it's such a unique fuckedupness.

But I don't like that one of my reactions to reading "Gone Girl" was to think to myself "man I could never be in a relationship with whoever would write this book because I just couldn't trust her",

the only writer I'd have married was Wallace Stevens.

That NPR quote is sharp. I don't agree with the writer's review of Pike's blank performance.

xpost to zachlyon search "amazing" in this thread but agreed it hasn't been discussed much

Not sure if the movie's anti-feminist (or what extent it matters), but it is pretty anti-marriage, so there's one mark in its corner.

I actually think it has kind of a positive view of marriage - insofar as it keeps toxic personalities aiming their weapons squarely at each other.

said monologue is from the perspective of a psychopathic narcissist.

Even a cuckoo clock etc.

ryan can i just say how much i enjoy reading your posts on movies/tv/etc.?

hey thanks! seeing movie in question in about 15 mins.

Slate piece on what it 'borrows from Psycho'
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/10/07/gone_girl_david_fincher_and_alfred_hitchcock_how_movies_like_psycho_and.html

it's always hard to figure out what you think about a movie adapted from you already admire...the experience of watching it seems to boil down to assessing the adaptation more than the thing itself. if that makes sense. all i could really focus on was were flynn's attempts at condensation, and a few helpful underlinings for a movie audience.

I think maybe they ruined one of the better bits of the novel when they make explicit that, no, it's not really expected that you know your S.O.'s blood type. i remember anxiously turning to my girlfriend while reading the novel and asking what her's was. there was a lot like that, but i suppose that goes with the territory of a big movie adaptation.

anyway, i liked this, more or less. weirdly, im not sure fincher was the best possible choice of director. weird because i thought he'd be a slam dunk because i think there were a lot of formal similarities with fight club--even some thematic similarities: amy as the female tyler durden? someone write that thinkpiece!

from a book you already admire...that is.

i don't know my blood type

i think my mom might know mine.

****CRAZY SPOILERS IN THIS POST****

a lot of thoughts on this. i found it very rewarding to watch, though I'm not sure "how I feel about it" afterward. it's a tribute to the care Fincher et al put into the film and its plotting that I found it gripping despite knowing the major plot twist already. I imagine that much if not most of the audience has been in a similar boat and the filmmakers could count on that. that said, I do think that seeing the film without knowing the twist would have been a markedly different experience, especially in terms of my judgment of the two main characters. in particular, knowing the twist made me more sympathetic to Affleck's character, since I know all along that he's been framed. partly as a result, I never worked up much animosity toward him. his main crime, it seems, was being a cheating husband. in the hierarchy of wrong actions, that has to be significantly less odious than having a man (nearly) killed for a murder that was never committed, much less killing a man in cold blood.

in other words, the fact that I knew that affleck's character was a framed man made me fundamentally sympathetic to him despite the apparent efforts of affleck and fincher et al to make him dislikable. though even had i not known, the aforementioned hierarchy would ensure that almost any audience member would come away thinking much better of affleck than of pike. as a result the ending becomes less about two fucked-up people who deserve each other being locked together in a loveless marriage, and more about one (flawed, even asshole-ish, but still human) man suffering an eternity of pain for the infraction of infidelity. my understanding is that the book works harder to make the husband an unfeeling, unsympathetic creep and thus there's a kind of perverse appropriateness to the way it resolves.

i hope i am making some sense. i should obv. read the book, if for no other reason than to see how it deals differently (or not) with the husband.

let me try to explain this better. if i hadn't known that pike's tale of their marriage gone sour was a fabrication meant to frame affleck, i might have worked up more animosity toward affleck, animosity that might have lingered even after the rug was pulled out. and that would have created a more ambivalent ending.

i appreciate that the film suggested that affleck might actually be deriving some kind of pleasure from the arrangement he ends up in, but that suggestion is fleeting and overwhelmed by (1) his insistence that he is only staying in the marriage for the kid (exactly what pike is betting on) and (2) his despondent look at the end of the TV interview. this suggests that he is trapped, and not a willing participant in the slightest.

i don't know if i am lamenting something that is present in the book but not really made salient enough in the film (though perhaps it is faintly present)--or if i was just imagining a more interesting or ambivalent ending than the one i got.

on a separate note, the biggest problem i had with the film's plotting and characterizations was this: the pike character was almost supernaturally brilliant and prescient in one moment, and utterly foolish and naive the next. i suppose you could imagine that the truth is a kind of combination or average of those, and/or her foolishness can be explained in a number of ways, but it still reeked of plot contrivance to me and made the conceit of her character even harder to buy into. but these are things i mostly thought about after the film was over, since the grace and focus of fincher's filmmaking didn't give me much opportunity to think about them while it was playing....

I think that it's def possible that one of the reasons I liked the movie more than most here is that I didn't have any foreknowledge of the plot whatsoever. In retrospect, I liked how Fincher and Affleck let the audience share the subjectivity of everyone's increasingly worsening opinion of him.

Tho a documentary about Affleck's career in movies could've probably accomplished the same thing.

i think people parsing this film (and possibly the book) for insights into or even an interesting/twisted perspective on the institution of marriage are probably barking up the wrong tree. i do think it's likely that (for book and film) this is a "hook" that the author/filmmakers counted on--that this would lend the project some notoriety and thinkpiece charge. but the character of Amy is drawn too broadly as a villain (and at in the least, Affleck drawn too clearly as a victim, despite his infidelities) for the film to have any pretensions to universal relevance, even as some kind out outlandish allegory. in that respect the film is not much different from the blockbuster novels and films (e.g. The Dark Knight) that sort through these Social Issues against the wall in a kind of haphazard fashion, in a way that lends them an appearance of Relevance that they don't really earn (or in this case, need).

To be fair, the movie does lead everyone by the nose to those conclusions (dumb as they are) for the last half hour.

god, I can't type today.

I meant to write that "in that respect the film is not much different from the blockbuster novels and films (e.g. The Dark Knight) that throw references to Social Issues against the wall in a kind of haphazard fashion, in a way that lends them an appearance of Relevance that they don't really earn (or in this case, need)."

To be fair, the movie does lead everyone by the nose to those conclusions (dumb as they are) for the last half hour.

― Eric H., Wednesday, October 8, 2014 12:12 PM (2 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes, I think it does. esp. when Pike says something like, "well, that's marriage" to Affleck. a number of people have pointed out that this statement comes from the mouth of a psychopath who essentially can only mimic human feeling, and thus should not be taken at face value. that's certainly true, but of course the author/filmmakers put such a line in knowing that it will be read, by some at least, as some kind of statement about marraige. that's what i mean by the film tossing this stuff against the wall without really committing to it. i suppose that's a part of mainstream filmmaking since forever. it doesn't really bother me that much in Gone Girl... though it does bother me with The Dark Knight, since the latter film doesn't really seem to have much going on other than its huffy-puffy "intensity" and pretensions to significance. Gone Girl is at least a gripping and very precisely made thriller.

loved the part (and I think this is in the book too) where the detectives are reading especially damning passages of Amy's diary to Nick and confirms that most of them are true.

btw in the book it's made very clear that nick is a habitual liar.

Nick confirms they are true, that is.

loved the part (and I think this is in the book too) where the detectives are reading especially damning passages of Amy's diary to Nick and confirms that most of them are true.

most of the stuff that he confirms as true is fairly harmless, at least in the film. the most damning stuff--that he pushed/hit her, that he threatened to kill her--he denies, and at least retrospectively we have no reason to believe he was lying.

This movie had next to no insights about marriage; the attempts to turn Amy and Nick into Addison and Eve are particularly hamhanded.

btw in the book it's made very clear that nick is a habitual liar.

― ryan,

My problem with the movie is the usual Hollywood attempt to sanitize leads – and Flynn wrote the script! Affleck plays him as written: a lumpen ox with loves his sister and plays video games.

well, ONE of my problems

another question

pike played it pretty broad throughout the scenes with NPH. i'm not sure if she was telegraphing her character's reaction to the audience or if the character was telegraphing her "reactions" to NPH. i supposed I'd have to see it again but that whole subplot had an even broader/pulpier quality than the rest of the film.

This movie had next to no insights about marriage; the attempts to turn Amy and Nick into Addison and Eve are particularly hamhanded.

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, October 8, 2014 12:28 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah it's my sense that flynn and fincher want to have their cake and eat it too w/r/t this stuff. they want the frisson of the film sort-of being "about marriage" but they have plausible deniability when they are accused of any particular attitude vis-a-vis that institution.

i.e. same thing with The Dark Knight being "about" terrorism or the surveillance state or GW Bush or whatever

most of the stuff that he confirms as true is fairly harmless, at least in the film. the most damning stuff--that he pushed/hit her, that he threatened to kill her--he denies, and at least retrospectively we have no reason to believe he was lying.

― I dunno. (amateurist), Wednesday, October 8, 2014 1:27 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he denies it and then pushes her at the end of the movie!

Affleck plays him as written: a lumpen ox with loves his sister and plays video games.

don't really get this; the movie comes down on him pretty hard for being such a mediocre person--occasionally charming, a complete nonagent in his own life, and with a few too many echos of his father.

"insight" is probably too loaded and specific a word, but yeah I think it says some things about marriage. maybe even some dworkin-esque things about how violence is built into heterosexual relationships as construed by patriarchy. tho I wouldn't say this is an especially new or shocking idea. one thing I like about how the story is constructed (more so in the book) is the momentary disappointment I felt (and other readers I know) when Amy hijacks the narrative halfway through. we didn't get the lurid husband kills wife story we didn't even especially know we were craving. on some weird level the story withholds satisfaction.

don't really get this; the movie comes down on him pretty hard for being such a mediocre person--occasionally charming, a complete nonagent in his own life, and with a few too many echos of his father.

the movie tells us this, but it's still Ben Affleck – mediocre and un-charming to me, a dreamy movie star to the public.

whatever Nick's faults, i think they pale in comparison to what Amy does. (that effect is exacerbated by casting Affleck, who while not as charismatic as other big actors, still retains a basically likability from most of his previous roles.) I think that hierarchy is definitive.

he denies it and then pushes her at the end of the movie!

right, that's an interesting and troubling moment. I think it could be interpreted two ways. in one, he really is, somehow, the guy the fake diary made him out to be -- he just hadn't revealed it yet. in the other reading, she's just a horrible bitch who now really deserves the violence that she had previously falsified. unfortunately i think the latter reading is going to be the most common one, not least because the scenes surrounding this event make Nick out to be very much the victim.

i think a film made differently could sustain the idea that even though Amy was using the diary to frame Nick for murder, much of it was true--that he really was an abusive fuck of a husband. i think that the choices the film makes--casting, editing, acting--all sort of mitigate against this reading. i think there is a moment in the film where we really might wonder--when it's revealed that he's been lying to his sister about the affair he's having. but everything that happens subsequently in the film (save for that last aggressive shove) works to close down this possibility.

I don't know that it's the point, but other than the robber, there really aren't any bad guys in the movie, just not-bad guys framed for rape and murder.

xxp i guess? i'm not really into forecasting how anyone other than me is going to react to these things (and i have at best neutral feelings about affleck) but i felt like the movie made it clear nick got the partner he deserved.

xpost

in other words the film's moral polarities are drawn to be far too Manichean for the film to really function as a critique of patriarchy or the institution of marriage

that film could have been made, but i don't think it's the one we've got. don't know about the book.

made it clear nick got the partner he deserved.

to risk repeating myself: i think Amy's villainy is far too outsized for that to fit. really? this guy who cheated on his wife and is kind of uncaring and selfish deserves... a psychopathic murderer for a wife?

the film has all kinds of signposts that Nick is not really an asshole. his sister is devoted to him and he to her, he seems to have loved his mother deeply, he interacts in a not-implausible and recognizably human and confused way to what's happening to him.... in other words he's a flawed but basically sympathetic character. he activates our structures of sympathy, to be a bit pretentious about it. Amy, at least once the main twist is divulged, does no such thing, except perhaps in fleeting and ambiguous moments. even before the twist is revealed, her line readings have a pointedly artificial quality that probably sets a lot of viewers on edge even before they learn her true nature.

yea its interesting that one can get to that conclusion re: nick getting the partner he deserved. this is a spouse who elaborately plotted to have him receive the death penalty in response to his affair (and possible other neglect and/or minor abuse). and i obv say that not condoning that behavior by nick but think abt it in retrospect w/ what we know abt Amy. plus, he was ready to ask her for a divorce the morning she disappeared which is self-serving but also the grown-up thing to finally do

i also forgot that the detail of amy stealing casey wilsons urine to feign pregnancy recollected to me the roth novel 'my life as a man' which i read recently & would be p interesting to contrast the relationship there w/ that of nick & amy, to a point

i STILL don't know if he ever pushed her nor if he really wanted a baby or wanted to get divorced and i've read a million views this way and that on the subject. no-one who hasn't read the book seems to know one way or the other! have to see this again.

yeah obv on the surface their crimes are disproportionate, which is sort of why you can read it is a dark comedy. the man is schlubby, passive, unfaithful, probably harmless (but with the lurking thread of violence)--basically an everyman, only useful as the dancing bear referenced by the v/o. the woman is a ridiculously controlling, active agent, willing to kill to propel herself to the best situation she can reasonably get to, total psycho--and the movie is basically arguing that they deserve each other.

the fact that he's nice to his mom and sister is arguably more damning--he can respect women if they're not his actual partner.

i guess i just did not have nearly as much sympathy for nick as you guys--he's a loser, decent in his 20s but backsliding hard, senses only coming alive for booze and outside pussy.

and outside pussy.

cmon he asked the detective to make sure and feed his cat