Op-Ed Writers Deepening Conversation on Gone Girl

Awards season can ruin every great thing about movies because films are set up to succeed or fail based on criteria.  Ratings and scores, rumblings from Academy members, opening weekend – we’re all a Greek chorus of judgmental experts deciding on the success or failure of a film to either be a success with audiences (at best) or an Oscar frontrunner, which is supposed to be defined as: one of the best films of the year.

But beyond that, beyond the silliness, there are real conversations to be had. Both the New York Times and especially The New Yorker are bringing those conversations to hungry film fans eager to read something beyond the thumbs up, thumbs down mentality that grew like a weed and is killing its host.  No one can really believe the amount of in depth think pieces on David Fincher’s Gone Girl except that it points to how few adult movies there are to talk about at all. How many think pieces can a person write about Guardians of the Galaxy?

Gone Girl has tapped into something – even if there are those who just don’t bother to go looking. It, like Boyhood, like Birdman, like Foxcatcher feels very right now. There is something to be said for the whir of modern life and how artists respond to what’s happening around us, as opposed to the safer reflections backwards, the comforting nostalgia of the past.

In case you missed them, the New Yorker rises to the top of the pile with in depth think pieces on Gone Girl. While their critic on record, Anthony Lane, did what Manohla Dargis and Todd McCarthy did at first — express a measure of disappointment in what they perceived as Gone Girls pop sensibility and pulp roots. You might never dig deeper and read Richard Brody’s review of the film:

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 next piece by Joshua Rothman, What Gone Girl is Really About:

As in many postmodern narratives, the heroes and villains in Fincher’s “Gone Girl” aren’t people but stories. We hope that the familiar, reassuring ones will win out (they don’t). In fact, the film is so self-aware that none of the stories it tells can be taken at face value. As my colleague Richard Brody has written, the movie’s drama and characters have been streamlined so as to reveal their “underlying mythic power.” But “Gone Girl” is also anti-myth. When Amy (Rosamund Pike) says, of her plot against her husband, Nick (Ben Affleck), “That’s marriage,” you’re not supposed to believe her. If the myth of the perfect marriage is poisonous, then so is the myth of the continual “war of the sexes.” The question the movie asks is: Are there any stories that we can tell ourselves about marriage that ring true?

If that question sounds familiar, that’s because, in some ways, with “Gone Girl,” Fincher has returned to the structures of “Fight Club,” substituting a married couple for Tyler Durden and his gaggle of disenchanted bros. In both stories, the characters rebel against the unbearable myth of attainable perfection, substituting for it an alternative one of transcendent, authentic, freedom-giving destruction. “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need,” Tyler Durden says. “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won’t.” Durden’s response to his disillusionment with contemporary masculinity is to embrace a seductive, violent, and supposedly more genuine idea of “real” manliness—but that alternative turns out to be a disastrous illusion. In “Gone Girl,” it’s the mythos of coupledom, not the mythos of masculinity, that’s oppressive. But the imagined solution is the same: “We’re so cute I want to punch us in the face,” Amy says.

And if two brilliant essays weren’t enough, the New Yorker brings a third piece, Marriage is an Abduction by Elif Batuman:

But perhaps “Gone Girl” ’s greatest insight is that the men aren’t mere brutish exploiters. Where a more simplistic narrative would posit that every loss for women is a gain for men, Flynn shows again and again that nobody is a winner—everyone is a dupe. Girls are set up for a horrific disappointment, but boys are set up to be horrifically disappointing. Boys are taught to protect, but how do you protect someone who has the same basic rights as you do, and from whom you are also demanding a huge sacrifice? How do you protect someone who is too good for you—not too pure or too lofty but actually better than you at day trading, running marathons, and looking like a million bucks?

Before a TV interview, Nick, the most hated man in America, is instructed, “You have to admit you’re a jerk and that everything was all your fault.” “So, like, what men are supposed to do in general,” he replies. This line got a lot of rueful laughs at the screening I attended. “Gone Girl” is as much about the near impossibility of being a good husband as it is about the anguish of being a good wife. The bat-shit preposterousness of the marital “accord” ultimately reached by Nick and Amy is an indictment of the state of marriage, and of heterosexual relations more broadly.