A thread for David Fincher's adaptation of GONE GIRL

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

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.

pretty common experience

re: whether or not he was everviolent, the way he throttles her near the end of the movie added a nice jolt of queasy ambiguity to that question

pretty common experience

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, October 8, 2014 3:19 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah for sure.

re: whether or not he was everviolent, the way he throttles her near the end of the movie added a nice jolt of queasy ambiguity to that question

― Simon H., Wednesday, October 8, 2014 2:22 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

right, but like i said i think most of the rest of the film mitigates against you thinking of him as the kind of person the diary made him out to be... or even close.

i think Nick's sister is a key character, at least in the film. her unswerving devotion to her brother, even though at times it seems undeserved, still is a strong pointer to the audience that Nick is not, at bottom, the sort of person who "deserves" the trap that Amy has set for him. her warm presence in the film—and she's in a lot of it—is kind of like Affleck's evident devotion to his cat: it's a moral signifier, an indication that Nick is a human being, a flawed one, but someone who basically doesn't deserve the trap he's fallen into. and the trap itself, once it's revealed, unlocks a very Hitchcockian response, I think. I think most of us empathize with his situation, even if we don't admire or "identify with" his character—we still experience anxiety and fear and, eventually, anger on his behalf.

I think it's key, though, that someone going into this movie "blind" might experience a similar empathy for Amy, at least up to the point when it's revealed she wasn't killed after all. and perhaps that empathy—and the corresponding antipathy with or questions about Nick—carries through, to some extent, to the film's conclusion, leaving the ending more ambiguous. but since I knew from the beginning that she was a manipulative psycho, my empathy was with Nick all the way.

how much respect is due to a partner who is a manipulative sociopath? i think its v hard to reliably know much definitively abt their marriage, really, and i do like that ambiguity. we do learn independently that amy got her former bf brought up on rape charges seemingly at no fault of that dudes so idk it's hard to see a huge percentage of nick's complicity in amy's plan

xp yea & margot from the outset dislikes amy we're told, sez something like just cuz i don't ever want to be around her doesn't mean i want her missing, etc

nick did bring to the relationship being a maxim or GQ writer or w/e he had done in nyc so you know what maybe he is deserving of all this

margo's dislike of Amy—which long preceded the events depicted in the film—is a strong signal that Something Is Wrong With Amy, even before we know that for sure.

his being a writer for "men's magazines" is surely one of those topic allusions that the film throws out as bait for thinkpiece writers etc.

topicAL

I saw the preview and the whole thing was like OH MY GOD he's being ACCUSED of KILLING HIS WIFE and IT SURE SEEMS LIKE HE DID IT, and there is only one resolution to that question - either he didn't do it, and it's a colossal mistake by the cops, or he actually did and he's a psychopath, and neither one seem very interesting

I can't ruin it for you but Oswald is involved.

I saw the preview and the whole thing was like OH MY GOD he's being ACCUSED of KILLING HIS WIFE and IT SURE SEEMS LIKE HE DID IT, and there is only one resolution to that question - either he didn't do it, and it's a colossal mistake by the cops, or he actually did and he's a psychopath, and neither one seem very interesting

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, October 8, 2014 3:53 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wrong

also it seems so weird to dismiss a film on that basis. there are good procedurals and bad procedurals. and this movie, for what it's worth, is a lot loopier than either.

i love the idea that because he loves his cat Nick's an alright guy

http://fecktv.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/blofeld1.jpg

I'm sure the cat was meant to symbolize something but I'll be damned if I know what it is

HEY GUYS I SAW THE TRAILER FOR THIS AND SOLVED THE ENDING AND THE ENDING WAS DUMB

damn there are so many movies with cliched pat endings out there, especially when i dream them up after watching the trailer

The sequel will be about Tyler Perry's next case.

PLEASE MAKE IT SO

I'd so watch TANNER BOLT'S MURDER MYSTERIES

yeah, tyler perry was pretty charismatic in this

Not to undermine his achievement, but the movie sets up him to walk away with it.

The Gummi Bear scene might be the movie's best.