Gone Girl, or, Sisters Are Doing It To Themselves

I came home the other night to find my living room in disarray and the entire moral and intellectual core of Gone Girl had gone missing.

Gone Girl came out in 2014, and over the years since I’ve seen and heard it referenced enough to establish it as some kind of cultural touchstone. Any movie with a Big Secret Twist is going to develop an aura around it, and this had the bonus of being an additional two and a half hours of David Fincher-directed footage for devotees to make video essays out of. Plus there were all the reviews and thinkpieces that talked about how it’s an assault on feminism, but to reveal exactly how would ruin its various mysteries.

I’ll give the movie this much: it took me until the day after watching for me to really appreciate how much it’s garbage. Of all the reviews I’ve read, I think I most appreciate Christy Lemire’s description: “…this is the most elegant, exquisitely made trash.” She liked it better than I did.

But several days after I saw it, and several years after it was released, I’m still thinking about it. It’s filmed thoughtfully and often beautifully, and it has a few genuinely clever passages — like Amy’s “bleed and clean, bleed and clean” monologue — that tricked my cinema studies-corrupted mind into thinking it was an art film. Much like when I eat a doughnut in the morning and my body splurts out a wave of insulin in anticipation of protein that will never come, my brain is stuck mulling over this trashy movie to figure out what it means.

I have made a pledge to be less reductive with works of art, letting them speak for themselves instead of trying to clumsily reiterate the more nuanced points and wrapping the whole thing into a convenient “This Is What It All Means.” But I’m making an exception for Gone Girl, which seems almost Lassie-like in its eagerness for me to figure out what it’s trying to say.

I don’t think I can go into much more detail without spoiling everything, so consider this a spoiler for Gone Girl, and please don’t read it until you’ve either seen the movie or read the book.

My first guess was that this was over-the-top antihero-driven satire, like American Psycho. The plot wasn’t to be taken literally, but instead intended to be an absurd extrapolation of the grossest aspects of a period in time or a particular noxious mindset. But if that’s the case, then who’s the subject of the satire in Gone Girl? Beautiful couples? Type-A people? A particular type of woman? All women?

The movie doesn’t give the audience a chance to empathize with any character other than the two leads, one of whom is a murderous sociopath and the other of whom is a dim-witted, whiny adulterer. But it won’t commit to showing disdain for both its characters, making it a War of the Roses style dark comedy. (I’ve been told that the book does a better job of making them both awful). Instead, it just spends a couple of hours gradually shifting the audience’s sympathy from Amy to Nick. By the end of the movie, he’s all but redeemed, while she’s been revealed to be a ruthlessly manipulative villain.

I read a review that claimed the story was about a marriage disintegrating over years of lies and inattention, but third act plot developments make that interpretation impossible. Amy was framing her ex-boyfriends for rape long before she met Nick. Perhaps we’re supposed to extrapolate that she was driven to such behavior by a lifetime of perfectionist parents comparing her to “Amazing Amy,” or just shrug and conclude that she was just a regular old psychopath. So instead of having any sense of universality, it’s just like one of the suspense thrillers from the 80s, cautionary tales targeted at men, warning them to resist their natural impulse to cat around. Fatal Attraction 2: Bitches Still Be Crazy.

So what if we try to take its opening and closing shots at face value? (No pun intended). The movie starts with Rosamund Pike looking beguilingly into the camera, while a voice-over from Ben Affleck talks about wanting to crack her skull open to find out what’s inside her brain. That’s kind of a pulpy thriller take on the same key idea in the Steven Soderbergh version of Solaris: the tragedy that our individual identity guarantees our isolation; humans can never truly know and completely understand another person, even those with whom we’re the most intimate.

But this isn’t really a couple who are hiding their inner lives from each other. Nick is deceptive about his affair, but it’s not as if he’s some complex mystery waiting to be untangled. He’s just a horny buffoon who’s tired of people criticizing him all the time, and he just wants to play his video games. And Amy isn’t just inscrutable; she’s an actual sociopath. It’s not so much Soderbergh as Lifetime Television for Women: I Married a Stranger: The Nick And Amy Dunne Story.

So maybe that’s the overriding theme, the idea that all our relationships are inherently performative. That idea is made explicit at the end, as Nick and Amy make television appearances to present the illusion of a stable and loving family. But pretty much every scene in the second and third acts is somehow related to the idea of presenting a false self: Nick’s becoming less beholden to the truth and more concerned in how he’s perceived by the public; and Amy actually having to juggle false identities.

Amy’s monologue at the end of the first act says it outright. She’s driving, making her escape, and she looks at each woman in a passing car, naming the role she’s assumed in order to please a man. She calls it the “cool girl,” but it’s an idea that I think Inside Amy Schumer handled a lot better, calling it “a chick who can hang.” The way Amy (Dunne) describes it, she had to subsume any of her own desires to become an ideal man’s woman who never nags, never judges, never gains weight or gets out of shape, and is always super horny. And the various other identities she assumes are different roles that women are expected to play: mommy blogger, abuse victim, unattainable goddess, ravenous sexpot.

One of the genuinely clever things the screenplay does is make that theme carry retroactively through the first act. Nick and Amy’s first meeting — and I honestly have no idea whether their first meeting is intended to be read as charming or insufferable — is all about the kind of stereotypes New York City writers encounter, and how much each of them does or doesn’t conform to those stereotypes. Nick’s marriage proposal isn’t a personal moment, but is instead a show put on for the benefit of a group of judgmental bloggers. Nick’s resentment doesn’t seem to be rooted in his own self-worth, but in how other people perceive him and pick on him. And Amy’s descriptions of the arguments that she and Nick had leading up to her disappearance are rooted in how people are supposed to act; she tells Nick not to make her into the nagging wife that she’s not, or she complains that they’re starting to act like “the couples we hate.”

As far as I can make out, that’s the only theme that Gone Girl commits to: the idea that we lose ourselves when we try to appear to be something we’re not. I started to wonder if the movie adaptation were adding an extra layer of meta-text to that: it was a lurid suspense thriller that was just presenting itself as a thoughtful artistic character study.

And that’s when I finally gave up. I can appreciate a movie that’s open to interpretation, but there are only so many layers you can try to peel back before you realize there’s nothing left.

I tried to read as little as possible about the book and the movie before watching it or before even forming a solid opinion of it, because I didn’t want any of my own prejudices to ruin it for me. (I’m not a big fan of David Fincher, except for Fight Club, and if I’m honest, I’m probably still holding a grudge against him because of Alien 3). I did read an interview with Gillian Flynn in the New York Times, though, as well as some additional quotes from her talking about Gone Girl, and I wish I hadn’t. When asked about criticisms of the book and movie, Flynn came across as so glib that I found myself wanting to throw gummy bears at her head.

She says outright that she wanted to look at how couples put forward the best versions of themselves at the beginning of a relationship, going on to call marriage a “long con.” She says she doesn’t feel the story is anti-feminist or misogynist due to Amy’s being revealed as a murderous, manipulative villain, since writers create despicable male characters all the time, but they get called “antiheroes.”

I’m presuming that at least some of that is intended to be wry, or at least an affected cynicism. But it really just comes across as a kind of empty, pointless nastiness that would’ve been tiresome in 2014. Now in 2018, the era of the Bullshit Reality Show Administration, the moral vacuum at its core just echoes. I realize that it’s beyond cliche to interpret every single thing as a reflection of Our Idiot President, but this is a story whose “big twist” is literally the very first thing I imagined when I heard it had a big twist, so I can’t imagine that we’re all that concerned about originality.

Gone Girl‘s theme of putting forward false identities has nothing universal that I can identify with. And before anyone says that I’m not supposed to identify with it because it’s a message for women that a white male can’t understand, I’ll play my gay card and point out that living in the closet for decades means you’re always putting forward a false self. But even that isn’t as manipulative or self-destructive as Gone Girl makes it out to be. Sometimes hiding yourself is self-defense, sometimes it’s aspirational, sometimes it’s just as harmlessly experimental as trying on new clothes or a new hairstyle.

Plus, the “cool girl” monologue reads as a “You go, girl!” type speech while Amy has just won her freedom, but it’s an inherently male-centric viewpoint. She dismissively reduces the women in passing cars to stereotypes and concludes they’re playing out those stereotypes in order to win a man, without considering that maybe they’re just into different stuff. It’s like criticizing a woman for wearing a hijab because it’s a symbol of oppression, without considering that she might simply like wearing it.

And more obviously, it’s all quickly revealed to be a rationalization for Amy’s own psychosis. So is it supposed to be a Fight Club style fake-out; ha ha, the joke’s on you for identifying with this character? I sure as heck don’t know, because the movie’s so muddled in its allegiances, sympathies, and characterizations. I do know that Amy’s not an “antihero,” as much as Flynn might want her to be, since the story does nothing to signal it and in fact spends too much time making her out to be just a plain old villain.

Theoretically, the movie should be able to do whatever it wants with Amy, since there’s such diverse female representation that no one character has to represent all women. But really, the movie only gives actual agency to two women (Amy and the motel thief), and it makes everyone else a cipher or a shallow stereotype. It doesn’t even pass the Bechdel test, since as far as I can remember, Amy and the motel thief are the only two women who talk to each other, and all their conversations are about abusive exes or abusive currents. (I’m guessing that the thief’s assertion that she’s the one who coerced the man into robbing Amy, instead of the other way around, is supposed to be read as some kind of lowest-common-denominator empowerment?)

The whole story seems to take place in a world of Everybody Loves Raymond-style, late 1990s gender dynamics, where all the women are judgmental, manipulative ball-busters, and all the men are hapless fuckwits. (The only exception to this is Tyler Perry, who plays the dual role of High-Profile Defense Attorney, and The Only Black Person In the Entire World). Of the women who are presented as the most sympathetic, Margo has no actual agency or life of her own; she only exists to enable or support Nick. Her one unique characteristic is Owns A Woodshed. And the detective… feels like the detective in every detective story written by someone who’s watched a lot of detective stories on television. She makes no advances in the case, and in fact the only moment I liked in the last act of the movie was when Amy accused her of being incompetent. The rest are a condescending mother-in-law, an idiotic nosy neighbor, a seductive ingenue, a hard-edged Oprah Winfrey-type media personality, and a shrill Nancy Grace surrogate.

In fact, because the characters are so broad (no pun intended), and because they’re played by comedic actors like Casey Wilson and Missy Pyle, I wondered if maybe that were the whole point, and maybe it’s presenting this world in which women are so driven by society to conform to stereotypes that they only exist as stereotypes. But again, that feels like a reach. If it’s that difficult to tell the difference between making fun of stereotypes and simply being lazy stereotypes, then there is no difference.

The “Cool Girl” speech is the closest the movie has to a manifesto, but having it delivered by a psycho villain is the ultimate cop-out: maybe that’s the message, or maybe not. We’re not going to hold your hand and make it explicit for you. Meanwhile, whether it’s intentional or not, the movie as a whole takes on the voice of the ultimate “Cool Girl.” Margo’s the most “normal” and sympathetic character, but she exists only to support Nick (“I was with you before we were even born!”), and she’s one of the first characters to point out how much she hates Amy. The movie ends up asking, don’t we all hate stuck-up bitches like that, those judgmental ball-busters? Aren’t they so phony? Wouldn’t you rather hang with a chick who loves you unconditionally and will do shots with you at 10 in the morning?

None of it reads to me as dark comedy, or even as cynical. It’s just a lazy nihilism that says not only does none of it matters, but that anyone who suggests otherwise is either naive or lying.

There’s one scene in Gone Girl that pretty much sums up the entire movie for me. It’s the one in which Amy has tipped off the Detective to investigate the woodshed, so they show up and open the doors, and there on display is all the stuff that Amy has bought to incriminate Nick. And instead of laughing, or asking “what the hell is this supposed to be?”, the Detective nods and then says to Nick that this looks like all the stuff he’d need to make a “man cave.”

It sums up the movie because it’s the one moment where absolutely everybody involved — Nick, Detective Boney, Amy, David Fincher, the art director, some set dresser, Gillian Flynn, the editor, all of the actors, the book’s editor, the producers who saw the dailies and greenlit them — everybody just stopped caring.

It would be kind of like having a story whose plot hinges on the contents of a woman’s purse, so while preparing for the scene, you stop random guys on the street and ask them what kinds of things they think women keep in their purses. Then the scene finally plays out in the movie: A police officer dumps the contents of the purse onto the table, and there’s like 500 tampons; 25 pounds of lipsticks and mascaras and compacts; two Jane Austen novels; some loose bills; and a scented candle. And the detective looks at all of it, and nods as if to say “Yep, this all checks out.” And then he looks at our protagonist, rolls his eyes, and says “must’ve been her time of the month!”

I mean the boys they love their gadgets, am I right?

At this point in the story, Nick’s already found the contents of the woodshed, and he’s deduced that it was left by Amy in order to incriminate him. But he’s done nothing to move or hide any of it. The detective sees a mountain of all new evidence, provided by an anonymous tip, and it’s not hidden away in boxes, but opened and spread out like a Price Is Right Showcase Showdown, and she isn’t the least bit suspicious. The case against Nick, apparently, is that he really wanted a man cave to escape from his wife, so he killed his wife to pay for it, and he didn’t have enough self control to wait until he got the insurance money, but he did somehow have enough self control to open almost everything and then store it unused but carefully arranged in a shed on the other side of town. And keep in mind that the detective had found the first two clues in a treasure hunt that Amy had been conducting on the day of her disappearance, and which could help definitively establish her whereabouts, but she didn’t bother pursuing it, leaving it instead for Nick to figure out.

And while Amy was enacting her diabolical I’m-always-two-steps-ahead-of-you plan, she was presumably ordering stuff and storing it hidden in the house completely unbeknownst to Nick, and either making frequent trips to her sister-in-law’s woodshed to sneak in and stash stuff like a big-screen TV or a giant amp, or she delivered it in one big go, all without attracting any unwanted attention.

Plus there’s a “robot dog,” which presumably was supposed to be a Sony AIBO, which in 2012 was already a long-dated reference that symbolized “something ridiculously expensive and useless that only clueless rich guys would buy.” It’s a reference as specific as ordering a Fresca, but for some reason the one in the movie isn’t quite an AIBO, implying that there was just a huge market for robot dogs among bored upper-middle-class men, and it fits right in along with a guitar and a video game playing machine like the Xboxes or the Intendoes. (Also, she was trying to run up a huge credit card debt, Brewster’s Millions-style, but she bought a Parrot drone instead of DJI? Amy, Amy, Amy. Please see me after class).

But my favorite detail of any of this is right in the center. It’s a copy of Dominion, a popular but still extremely niche and nerdy deck-building card game. (I didn’t see it in the movie, but the screenshot reveals the other game was Race for the Galaxy, which hilariously is an even nerdier and more obscure game). It conjures up the delightful image of a dude who looks like Ben Affleck murdering his wife so that he can get his drinking buddies together to do bro stuff like play Dominion. And magically, it also conjures up an image of Amy being in the middle of a scheme so devious and complicated that it involves weeks befriending a neighbor for the purpose of stealing her urine, and as she’s purchasing all the signifiers of a Dude’s Mid-Life Crisis Fun Kit, she thinks to frame her adulterous husband using a nerdy card game about building castles.

It’s all completely bonkers absurd, but not like the harmless absurdity of when a TV show gets computer hacking wrong for the sake of advancing the plot quickly, or gets geography wrong for the sake of making more attractive shots. It feels like everyone involved on every level just shrugged and said, “Whatever.” Over the years I’ve read descriptions of the movie and the book that call it “dark” or “biting” or “nasty” or “sick,” but I think ultimately, the overriding description I’d use is just “lazy.”