Gone but not forgotten...

Smile!

Just eight years after its release, and despite being his most financially successful project by a wide margin, it feels like David Fincher's Gone Girl has been largely forgotten even as many of his less enthusiastically received films continue to attain some measure of cultural significance. Alien 3 has been released multiple times, to great applause from its dedicated cult audience, in an "assembly cut" edition that more closely represents his original vision. The Game, nobody's favorite film, has been re-scanned, restored and released by fine folks over at Arrow and Criterion. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button received 13 Academy Award nominations, including Fincher's first as a director. Yet after a rapturous initial reception, enthusiasm for Gone Girl quickly faded and, by 2022 appears to have mostly subsided. This is a shame as it is one of his most fascinating films: one that proudly embraces the middlebrow sensibilities of your average Lifetime Network domestic thriller in order to twist them into something considerably more perverse. It is also a case study on narrative construction, visual storytelling and how seemingly minor decisions about when to reveal key pieces of information to the audience can have a profound effect on the picture. 

When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. I picture cracking her lovely skull, unspooling her brains, trying to get answers. The primal questions of any marriage: What are you thinking? How are you feeling? What have we done to each other? What will we do?

 

Gone Girl opens and closes with what is essentially the same shot: Nick stroking Amy's hair while she rests her head on his chest. The first shot is at night and the second one is during the day so it is safe to say that these bookends fit chronologically at the beginning and at the end of the film, as befits a circular narrative. This is a pretty common structure for domestic thrillers, many of which open with a one scene of martial bliss and close with another to indicate that a return to normalcy has followed the resolution of the dramatic conflict. Yet the narration that accompanies the opening shot here generates a feeling of unease. Nick may be expressing a universal sentiment but the specific and violent imagery he invokes as he caresses his wife's head is disconcerting enough to raise questions. The way Amy is framed, and the possibly concerned look she gives her husband evokes the feeling that she is at his mercy. It would appear that normalcy in this marriage is anything but blissful. Of course, by the time the film's narrative concludes by circling back to this image, the preceding events have completely re-contextualized it. The power, we are now aware, resides primarily with Amy.

Not quite podunk but well on its way

Establishing shots are overused to the point that they have become a visual cliche but Fincher generally uses them sparingly and with intent. The credit sequence in Gone Girl, which consists of a montage of establishing shots of North Carthage, serves a double purpose. On the surface it provides a great deal of information about the setting in an economic (if rather commonplace) way: a Midwestern town on the shores of the Mississippi that has seen better days. On a deeper level, it provides key information about both Nick and Amy before they've even been properly introduced. Because of the way the film is structured, everything the audience is shown about the couple's relationship history is filtered through Amy's unreliable narration. As a result, a great deal of information about who these people really are, and what actually happened, needs to be visually inferred. Through this opening montage we can see everything Nick would love (the picturesque location, the blue collar aesthetic) and everything Amy would hate (the fading, sickly nature, how profoundly uninteresting it is) about the place they inhabit, and why it would prove to be a source of conflict for the couple. By the time we are informed that this was Nick's hometown and that it was his idea to move back, we have been prepared to accept him as a vapid, unambitious little man who is most comfortable as a big fish in a little pond. And by the time we learn that what Amy most values in life is social capital, image awareness and being perceived as an extraordinary success, we can easily understand why she perceived the move as an absolute betrayal. A lot of what these two people treasure and despise is revealed through their feelings about the North Carthage despite the fact that these feelings are never directly addressed through dialogue. They never have to be.

Cool girl. Men always use that, don't they? As their defining compliment: She's a cool girl. Cool girl is hot. Cool girl is game. Cool girl is fun. Cool girl never gets angry at her man. She only smiles in a chagrined, loving manner and then presents her mouth for fucking. She likes what he likes, so evidently he's a vinyl hipster who loves fetish Manga. If he likes girls gone wild, she's a mall babe who talks for football and endures buffalo wings at Hooters. 

The screenplay for Gone Girl is very wordy, likely a consequence of an author adapting her own novel which also happened to be narrated entirely in the first person. The film could easily have turned into a stagey, uncinematic talkfest but, thankfully, Fincher has never been part of the point-and-shoot school of film-making. He is uncommonly shot conscious: aware of the narrative purpose of every shot in his films and both selective and pragmatic about they way they are framed. When he can deliver information through purely visual means, he does. Should this proves impossible, he chooses shots that will highlight, complement or contextualize the information being provided through other methods. The film's big twist, for example, is delivered through a 7 minute long expository soliloquy. This is the kind of sequence that would ordinarily bring a film to a screeching halt, but Fincher turns it into a genuine highlight. He uses Amy's vivid diatribe as an opportunity to at once replay the details of how she framed her husband, portray how she is assuming a new identity, set up her future plans, all the while depicting her state of mind through the carefully selected images that accompany her monologue. The stand-out moment of the sequence comes during Amy's "cool girl" tirade. Not content with the crackling writing and the searing delivery, Fincher goes so far as to provide glimpses of very specific women to further illustrate the broader types Amy is denouncing. This is a most elegant and cinematic way to handle that most inelegant and least cinematic of tropes: the information dump. That the entire sequence is briskly paced is just the icing on the cake

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players..

At other points, Fincher uses framing to establish visual themes that will pay off later. From the very beginning, much of the film is structured as a series of performances: time and time again characters find themselves tasked with performing specific roles (the loving husband, the grieving parents, the perfect victim) for a camera, captivated spectators or even an audience of one. The progression of the plot is predicated upon how convincingly they are able to portray their roles. Fincher consistently frames these characters as if they were literally on a stage with rapt patrons hanging on their every word. It isn't until the halfway point of the picture that we are told through monologue that this is how Amy views marriage: a lifelong performance where each person must pretend to be their companion's ideal partner. This bit of information, and the already established visual motif, come into play during the movie's most audacious moment. 

Having supposedly escaped the clutches of her abusive captor, a bloodied Amy finds her way back home and runs to her husband, collapsing in his arms. This entire sequence is a joke and the way it concludes, with the camera pulling away from the reunited couple, is the punchline. Amy is performing for the cameras and her audience is entranced. The conspicuous framing and the visual cliche of that particular crane shot are in direct opposition to the style employed in the rest of the film. They cannot help but call attention to themselves, further highlighting the artifice of the moment. Fincher is referencing these techniques in jest and relying on the audience's knowledge of their overuse to get his point across. The rubes have bought her act hook, line and sinker. He himself would never stoop so low as to use these techniques in earnest, of course, though the way he employed them here might reveal how he feels about those who do. 

If that is not genuine surprise, then who is he performing for?

When it comes to narrative construction and information, there is a very subtle reveal early in the film with profound consequences for the way the audience will experience the rest of it. Having been alerted by a neighbor that his front door is open and his cat is outside, Nick heads home. He walks inside, finds a table smashed in the living room, and calls out to his wife. The following scene, the police arrives. Given that the first half of the film casts a great deal of suspicion on Nick for the disappearance of his wife, we could view the open doors and signs of violence as Nick's attempt to stage a home invasion and his seemingly oblivious return as him embracing the role of the clueless husband. Fincher, however, opts to do something rather curious: he culminates the scene with a quick shot of Nick as he enters the living room, his face is registering a genuine look of surprise. The film quickly cuts back to the neighbor as we hear him calling loudly to his wife, a clever bit of sleight of hand teasing the idea that he might be yelling for the neighbor's benefit, but the question has already been raised: Nick is alone in the house and, as we will later find out, there are no security cameras. If he is not genuinely surprised at what he finds then who, exactly, would he be performing for? This is not a carelessly selected shot. It could have been eliminated and the scene would have played out mostly the same. Fincher could even have opted not to follow Nick inside at all. This suggestion of innocence is subtle enough so as not to call attention to itself, particularly when followed with that bit of misdirection, but it fundamentally alters the way the rest of the . To viewers who missed it, the reveal midway through was probably very surprising. To viewers who caught it, the impact of the reveal may have been lessened but the first half of the film would have been more fascinating: if Nick is (likely) innocent of murdering his wife then all we can do is watch helplessly, with ever increasing dread, as he belligerently digs himself into a hole.

From some angles, the resemblance is eerie

One major reason Nick remains such an interesting character in the first half, despite the fact Fincher reveals his (likely) innocence so early, is because of who plays him. Ben Affleck's limited range, smugness and superficial charm are characteristics which have made him unconvincing in so many of his roles but they work very much to his advantage in Gone Girl, as does his more than passing resemblance to Scott Peterson. Nick Dunne is glib, struggles to project sincerity and appears to be pathologically unable to convincingly play the part of the grieving husband. His demeanor seems a bit off, his reactions appear slightly rehearsed and when he says the right thing he somehow manages to say it the wrong way. In fact, one of the running jokes of the film is how his sister, his lawyer and his wife are constantly' directing' him in order to improve the quality of his performances. The cumulative effect is such that even as we believe him to be innocent we may begin to question our own perceptions. It is likely that part of the reason Fincher felt comfortable revealing Nick's surprise at finding his wife missing so early on is because he knew that Affleck's performance would re-instill that measure of doubt in the audience. The film certainly would not have worked nearly as well without it.

Find Amy signs at a water tower by the Walmart, the local KFC and a dilapidated nowhere street. Amy would hate everything about this.

Whether Gone Girl is a masterpiece or a competent piece of fluff is debatable and, frankly, uninteresting. What is fascinating is how an integral approach to form, style and structure can maximize an already promising screenplay's cinematic potential. However one may feel about his choice of source material, it is undeniable that Fincher's economic, shot-conscious approach to mainstream film-making reflects visual acuity and technical competence that are becoming increasingly rare. His craftsmanship ensures that his films, successful or not, are never less than watchable and there are not a lot of directors about whom the same claim can be made. It will be interesting to see how Gone Girl is remembered in a decade or two, or if it is even remembered at all. It is one of the most accomplished films of Fincher's career, and one well worth returning to, so I can only hope that it will be rediscovered in the future.