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Prologue
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The Vulnerable Spectators POV before and after the screening at the NYFF press premiere of Gone Girl.
Photos courtesy of Amelie Hastie.
film offers clues that might lead the viewer to the same conclusion. His behavior is stilted, after allits impossible not
to ask initially if this is a case of a stars bad acting or if it
is Nick who is acting badlyas he attempts to disprove
something that he himself finds inherently unbelievable.
Like Nicks acting, something is just a little off about
this film from its very beginning: its rhythm is too crafted,
its dialogue too perky, its scenes just a little too staged. Nick
carries clues on his own body even before the mystery opens:
he walks into The Bar with the board-game Mastermind
in his arms and then sets it atop Lets Make a Deal! and
Emergency! The flashbacks that soon follow also seem
overly rehearsed. When Nick and Amy meet, their dialogue
seems scripted from a 1940s noir, with a little screwball
thrown in for good measure. One might wonder: have these
two seen a lot of movies? What roles are they playing exactly? Of course, that question is at the very heart of their
insistencesaffectionate, ironicthat they wont become
that sort of married couple: the nagging wife, the recalcitrant
husband. But theres more to a viewers growing sense of suspicion than bad acting on the part of husband and wife.
Finchers visual rhythm includes pauses that last just long
enough to engender uncertainty before moving on. The
camera holds on a close-up, then moves away, shifting direction ever so slightly, throwing the spectators point-of-view
into question. Is Amy gaslighting Nick? Or is Fincher gaslighting his audience?
Dont forget Se7en (1995), the camera seems to suggest. Or
Fight Club (1999). Or Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011). Or
those countless music videos. Or, of course, the combination
thereof. Think of the credit sequence cum music-video for
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Scenes from a marriage: Finchers camera pauses just long enough to engender audience suspicion in Gone Girl.
Photos by Merrick Morton.
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second viewing), I begin to watch in a state not only of uncertainty (about plot, about what it is that I am actually seeing)
but also of ambivalence (about my own culpability in desiring
her comeuppance). Amy is, after all, I tell myself, offset as a
symbol of womanhood by Nicks twin sister (the films Go,
girl rather than the girl-be-gone), albeit arguably a borderline
misogynist herself, and by the female lead detective (Kim
Dickens, who, as my stand-in, flip-flops along with me over
Nick and Amy, though shes at least one step behind, as she is
set up to not see quite as much as the viewer does.)
If this is where Hitchcock comes in, can Freud be far
behind? Through Flynns/Finchers ambivalent narration,
there emerges an ambivalent reading. To watch the film is
potentially to hold two opposing states at once: suspicion and
certainty. But are these states not inherently dependent on
one another? Is this film not a demonstration of an uncanny
state of viewership, the feeling of being haunted by something familiar? After all, when Freud traces the etymological origins of heimlich and unheimlich (homely and
unhomely, or canny and uncanny), he ultimately claims that
the former becomes increasingly ambivalent, until it
finally merges with its antonym.3
To produce a Freudian reading, though, is already to follow the direction plotted for the reader/viewer in advance.
Both Flynns book/screenplay and Finchers film merge
antonyms from the get-go. In all of its rehearsals, stagings,
generic shifts, and reorientations, Gone Girl reveals the
haunted house of marriage. Love is hate. Comfort is control.
In the case of Nick and Amy, it is easy to see how thoroughly
women and men are the creations of each other; they are, in
filmic and psychoanalytic terms, projections. After all, says
Amy, confiding the secret to her dear diary, We were happy
pretending to be other people.
Act Three
There are other plays at work here as well, and other convergences. Certainly David Fincher loves a good book. For proof,
see Fight Club and The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, but also
Zodiac and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Gillian
Flynn, a former writer on television for Entertainment Weekly,
also loves a good movie; she is the child, she would tell you, of a
film professor.4 Avowedly writing with films in mindeven
director Fincher in mindshe destined her book to become
a film.
And is that not, after all, the dream of the contemporary
novelist? To have Hollywood come calling? Like The Bar,
this work is so very meta. It is a novel that wants to be a film.
In turn, it is a film that wants to prove its superiority to other
F ILM QU A RTE RL Y
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