It’s impossible to say much about the movie “Gone Girl” without giving away elements of the plot that are widely considered surprises. On the one hand, the popularity of the novel ought to make surprises beside the point; on the other hand, for those who have read the novel, the movie offers the meta-mystery of whether it will keep or change the book’s twists. I’ll write about these plot points vaguely, but I doubt that the hints will be completely opaque. So those who want to preserve the full jolt of surprise should stop here.
“Gone Girl” is David Fincher’s “Eyes Wide Shut.” As Stanley Kubrick did in his final film, Fincher lifts the lid off the black box of marriage. He reveals the core of unredressed resentment, unfulfilled desire, inescapable duplicity, unrelieved anger, unresolved doubts, unrevealed secrets, and relentless self-abnegation on which the life of a couple depends. But “Gone Girl” goes a step beyond Kubrick’s film, by rooting the action in the particulars of the digital age. The new public realm—the intentional representation of private life in public view and the way that those representations quickly get out of hand—is at the center of Fincher’s movie. And it’s from here that the movie’s modernity, immediacy, and urgency arise.
Fincher is the exemplary digital artist of the contemporary cinema. For him, the world of modern media is far more than a source of information. It’s a new realm of mind, and it comes with its own myths and symbols, angels and demons. The power of “Gone Girl” isn’t in its plot alone. Though I started out warning about spoilers, there isn’t much temptation to analyze the movie’s plot in detail. This is no mere avoidance of spoilers; it's a reflection of the movie itself, in which the plot quickly melts into the ideas that sustain it.
In its simplest form, “Gone Girl” is a story of revenge. The marriage of Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) and Amy Elliott Dunne (Rosamund Pike) is a troubled one. The sources of conflict are simple and clear: money difficulties; a sexual cooling-off; unease with the in-laws; Amy’s sacrifice of city life for Nick’s home town in Missouri, where they move so that Nick can care for his ailing mother. But there’s worse: Nick is an adulterer, and has been violent to Amy, not with weapons or fists, but crossing the line nonetheless, breaching her trust and instilling fear with the implicit threat of worse to come. The law doesn’t get involved with adultery, and in this case it doesn’t get involved with assault, either. What’s left is personal vengeance and divine or karmic retribution.
Nick is no angel, but the revenge that follows seems somewhat disproportionate to his offenses. Fresh from a screening, I mentioned on Twitter that I saw equal measures of misogyny and misandry in the film, and that they join in a “tender misanthropy.” It takes a jaundiced view of the human condition to judge the institution of marriage on the behavior of its inmates. If Fincher’s view of marriage seems similar to that of “Eyes Wide Shut,” his view of Nick seems derived from Alfred Hitchcock’s vision of the amiable family man as played by Henry Fonda in “The Wrong Man”: he’s certainly guilty of something, and it will come out if his life is scrutinized—which it is, when Amy disappears and he’s accused of her murder.
But the hidden crime would also come out if Nick looked deeply or closely enough at himself—if he subjected himself to the infamous Jimmy Carter standard of candor. (It's oddly apt that “Gone Girl” is opening on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.) Ultimately, the evils that are being redressed in "Gone Girl" aren't one husband’s indifference or cruelty but all men's crimes through the ages. What could easily have devolved into a bunny-boiling melodrama turns into the ultimate #YesAllMen drama, a version of “Medea” and “The Bacchae” dressed in the shopping-mall garb of uneasy and struggling suburbanites. In the course of Nick's travails—his subjection to televised character assassination, police interrogation, and street harassment—he speaks the movie’s key line, with its Euripidean wink: “I’m so sick of being picked apart by women.”
Fincher's not offering an essentialist view of gender but rather slicing and stretching Nick and Amy at their particular points of sensitivity. What's gendered isn't the world at large but the life that Nick and Amy have chosen. And it’s that life, not the biology of gender but their chosen social roles, that erupts with a violent mythological force through the neutrality of the media. With a digital prestidigitator’s swiftness, Fincher keeps the action moving forward even as the real action is happening offscreen—in the past or in the future, in memory or fantasy or fear, somewhere else or even, for that matter, nowhere. (That’s the moral essence of the digital age: people staring at their screens, for whom whatever is in their presence is less important than what is happening somewhere else.) "Gone Girl" is as much of a revelation and an artifact of digital life as “Zodiac,” “Benjamin Button,” and “The Social Network.”
But where "The Social Network" is a film of portraiture, a physicalization of the wizard behind the curtain, "Gone Girl" is the opposite. It turns the weighty, ruddy Affleck nearly diaphanous, thinning him out into the image of an image. The porcelain Pike is reminiscent of Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock's "Marnie," both in a scene involving disguise and in the eerie, personality-chilled glow that both give off. Fincher appears to be more pessimistic about love than Kubrick was. “Eyes Wide Shut,” a post-Freudian work, takes sexual desire very seriously as a realm where the revelation of inner monsters makes it possible to live with them, with ourselves, and with each other. “Gone Girl” takes identity very seriously; it subordinates sex to power and love to pride, and suggests that the revelation of monstrosities brings knowledge without wisdom, adds pain to pain, covers masks with masks, and shows screens behind screens.
Kubrick and other key directors whose careers overlapped with his (such as Hitchcock and Howard Hawks) put their sense of style to the test with violent emotions and violent actions. They found ways to expand their style to reveal what was latent in that style all along; they infused the frippery of society with the wild content that it already concealed. Fincher’s style is a strange and modern fusion of sincerity and cynicism. It’s a destylized style that arises from the movie's subject, the style of someone who knows he’s being watched. His cinematic manner reveals an intense, almost unbearable self-consciousness, an awareness (one that's found in the story as well) of the ubiquity of media and of life lived in perpetual performance, on a permanent stage. At a time when every image is at risk of flying out onto the Internet, attaching to a celebrity, and both gaining a life of its own and becoming a part of that celebrity’s image (a phenomenon that's central to the story of "Gone Girl"), Fincher's images seem to neutralize themselves, to become even colder and less expressive than the blank, voracious media gaze that they represent.
The movie's script, by Gillian Flynn, who also wrote the novel, pares down both the discursive and expressive rhetoric of the book as well as its psychology. I suspect that part of the book's appeal is its underlying mythic power. Fincher unleashes that primordial, archetypal fury along with its cosmic irony, making a movie that is a tragedy of our time.
