i saw gone girl at a preview screening. scattered thoughts inside.
(n.b: if you’ve read the novel this contains no spoilers unless you want to be in the dark about how certain scenes are executed. if you haven’t read the novel this contains major spoilers.)
gone girl is pulp of the most hypnotic kind. there’s neurosis and deceit in every inch of it. america’s midwest as suburban hellscape, breeding canny devils. and it’s funny: it’s a grotesque comedy, the blackest kind of gallows-humour. a shot of nick kissing amy after he proposes to her fades into nick having his mouth swabbed for DNA by the police. when amy and nick walk through the cloud of powdered sugar and nick presses her against a wall, the pallid dusting of it on her face makes it look as if he’s kissing a corpse. tanner bolt’s comment as they marvel at the web amy’s spun around nick: “you two are the most fucked up people i ever met, and i specialise in fucked up people.”
if desire is about lack, the commodification of desire makes love a void, in which hollow people absent from their own lives slowly kill one another with desire for what was never there. there’s an emblematic shot of nick pressing amy against a mirror as they have sex—feigned intimacy between reflected (unreal) images; fake upon fake. everyone is gone. this is love as a crimescene, marriage as murder. intimacy’s interior spaces hollowed out and replaced with smashed glass and spatters of blood and concealed evidence and absence, surrounded on all sides by film-cameras. every frame is full of negative space where something substantial, something real capital r, should be.
somehow, it feels like gone girl was meant to be filmed. as a film the medium becomes the message: a story about the unreality and voyeuristic greed and prepackaged narratives and hypocrisy of our twenty-four-hour visual media culture plays out on a screen as you watch actors play fictional roles and speak words that aren’t theirs. the novel’s timelines are interwoven: you hear amy’s false narrative as her planted evidence is uncovered and you’re that rapt TV audience, transfixed and poring over both performances, dissecting every word and gesture for signs of virtue and vice and innocence and guilt and emotion and duplicity, weighing up which narrative is more palatable and then eating yourself sick.
the meta-casting of affleck is perfect: deconstructing his public image and persona, trading on the rotting effect of media scrutiny to make you see a glib self-satisfaction in his charm, something smug and sinister and predatory in his chiselled jaw and chin (pivotal in his casting as a superhero), a plastered hollow-eyed leer in his winning all-american fratboy smile. what gives him back a part of his soul is his exchanges with his twin margo, who’s canny and droll and funny and frank. her last scene with him is her best: when nick tells her that he has to stay with amy, she sobs and rages and speaks the ugly truth—he doesn’t want to leave amy. he’s addicted. the horror in her voice is nauseating.
the casting is uniformly great, actually: amy’s mother and father, complacent and entitled and oblivious to how they’ve made their daughter a pretender to her own life; tanner bolt (tyler perry), suave and savvy and making a fortune out of misery; kim dickens as detective rhonda boney, weary and smart, lifted right from a neo-noir thriller.
but rosamund pike is fucking extraordinary. in the beginning she is inhumanly beautiful, her face held like a mask, her smile carved and bright, her movement through every frame like a soignée ghost that’s only visible as long as it’s looked at. amazing amy, an assemblage of mimicked behaviours and words calculated to be most desirable, self-creating, self-objectifying, self-scrutinising, internally and externally a hall of mirrors. her voiceover diary-entries are so honey-sweet and wholesome, but if you’re listening for it there’s venom and irony biting beneath.
and then the sucker-punch reveal, when suddenly she comes alive, breaking out of the frozen past-tense, self-resurrected from her own narrative death to narrate in a colder deeper voice how to frame your husband for murder. (reading a magazine, bored, as blood is drawn from her arm so that she can splash it all over the kitchen floor and then badly mop it up.) brittle-sharp and desperate and watchful and calculating and vengeful and delighted, throwing her fluffy pink-ink biros onto the highway, hacking off her hair, lying sprawled on a pool lounger as she eats junk food with vicious relish, spitting in the soda of the woman who dares to call amazing amy an “uppity bitch”, gloating over nick’s ruin like a vulture, waiting, planning, a chameleon before your eyes.
(when she’s robbed at the motel by two fellow residents, she hunches over on the bed and muffles her scream with a pillow. her fury, when you glimpse it, is unearthly.)
neil patrick harris is deeply unpleasant as desi collings: oblivious and cloying and possessive, using amy’s vulnerability to trap and objectify her. the climactic moment when she gives him what he wants only to destroy him—fucks him and slits his throat and keeps riding him as she’s soaked with spurting arcs of his blood—is an outrageous gruesome orgasmic apotheosis, followed by the giddy perverse physical comedy as she lurches off his corpse and drives home to her husband in her ruined dress.
the overarching structure of both film and novel conspires with amy: she controls the story from the start. but film makes the characters exterior and opaque, makes them into objects for your gaze, turns the narrative into it’s a sleekly suggestive surface onto which you project your biases and desires. this film about narcissism is itself a mirror, a rorschach blot.
you spend the lion’s share of the film with your eyes on nick, but he tells you little. he’s more opaque than any other character. for me all of gone girl’s missteps are to do with nick: the film downplays his violent misogyny: his resentment and scorn toward women, his objectification of them, his relationship with his woman-hating father, and his agression toward amy in the final confrontation. he’s more passive and complacent, less intelligent and neurotic and dangerous; he’s not of a kind with his wife. in the novel, this is a marriage is between two terrible people; here, nick gets off lightly. still, there wasn’t any danger that i’d find him too sympathetic: his opacity and glib charm had a slow corrosive effect, until i relished every sick act amy committed, every time she wrong-foots him.
i’ve watched so many films in which male anti-heroes are amoral and depraved and brutal, and still we’re urged to root for them, to feel satisfied when they win. i want female anti-heroes who are as ferocious and implacable and demonic as that. who will do anything to get what they want.
it’s her ferocious will that makes amy so compelling and horrifying. her lack of restraint and the depth of her ability to mimic and perform creates some of the film’s most sickening moments. trapped inside desi’s house, amy waits for him to leave. then she tears her lingerie and pours alcohol between her legs. cut to the exterior camera: she hurls herself against one of the doors, screaming and clawing at the glass, clutching at herself, screaming and screaming. there’s no sound. on the monochrome camera the alcohol looks like blood. there’s nothing she won’t do in pursuit of revenge. nothing she can’t do, as she shapeshifts before your eyes. if the first half of the film is amy at her most consumable, palatable, desirable, the second half is amy who refuses all of it, refuses to be that safe and comfortable object, refuses to seek your regard.
amy is more than human, less than human, an unknowable creature of excess and lack and desire and merciless intellect. this isn’t just “weaponised femininity”, a woman exercising the illusion of power permitted to her by patriarchy to become even more completely inscribed by that ideological trap. this is a woman who sees and exploits every weakness and failing in the people around her, their misogyny and laziness and pettiness and entitlement and narcissism, and ruins them. a woman who uses the trite shallow mass-marketed tales of childhood and femininity and motherhood and victimhood by which she was made to literally get away with murder. amy outwits everyone, effortlessly.
in the beginning it seems like a game—nick gives his sister mastermind in the very first scene—a puzzle to be solved. it isn’t. when all of the deception has unravelled, all illusions are shed, and they see each other naked and new and terrible, you know that nick’s agency or power was always limited. he cheats and lies and seeks to write his own story (although the film omits both his memoir and amy’s, a change i take issue with) but he’s always within amy’s story, roaming a maze of her design, overwritten by her desires and purposes as she moves and transmutes to trip and trap him. even in the novel, where these two characters are on more even footing, amy is more clever and more ruthless; she is always a half-step ahead. for once, the narrative of a male character is completely subsumed to that of a female character. this is amy’s story; she is the story. the text, like russian nesting dolls, plots within plots, is also amy, a woman-labyrinth of nested personae, selves within selves, endless, fathomless, in her depth of shallows.
nick and amy’s marriage is a horror story, and she’s the better monster.
#gone girl #gone girl spoilers #abuse tw #sexual violence tw #rape tw #gore tw #misogyny #wrote 90% of this last night so it’s probably v. disjointed #this film is messed up #i laughed so much more than i should have #i’m still parsing my thoughts on some of it #meta #a razorwire knot daring me to unloop her
