The Best Writing About ‘Gone Girl’ Across The Web

Can’t get scenes from David Fincher‘s thrilling Gone Girl out of your head? Are you infuriated that your coworkers stop you in the middle of sentences, screeching about spoilers because they didn’t make an effort to see the movie opening weekend? Are you desperate to engage with the movie, which is proving itself to be quite a conversation starter with its study of gender dynamics, media culture, and interpersonal relationships? Well, surely you’ve already checked out Decider’s coverage — we’ve published pieces lauding its ingenious use of nudity and sexuality and reading the film as a perfect media satire. But there’s plenty of chatter across the web. Here’s the best writing devoted to Gone Girl and all of its contradictions. [Warning! Spoilers ahead.]

Lauren Bans for Salon: “Gone Girl Didn’t Botch The ‘Cool Girl’ Speech — It Clarified It”

“…Amy’s neither a feminist nor a heroine. She’s the villain. This isn’t to say that her husband Nick is by default the good guy. As he says himself in the movie, ‘I didn’t murder my wife, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a bad person.’ Still, it’s almost as if there’s such a cultural dearth of female ‘bad guys’ that we have trouble recognizing one on the screen in front of us for close to two and a half hours.

Dunne’s maligned-wife routine seems to resonate with women in a way that is not dissimilar from the way a character from another Fincher movie, Tyler Durden, resonated with men. I’m sorry to ask you to remember this, but do you remember the way dudes glorified Fight Club? There were those hand-on-foaming-soap posters in every dorm room. Frat boys made their entire ‘About Me’ sections on Facebook a compendium of Durden koans: ‘You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.’ ‘It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.’ And of course: ‘I want you to punch me as hard as you can.’ (Okay! No problem!)” [Read more]

Elisabeth Donnelly for Flavorwire: “The ‘Cool Girl’ Speech May Be a Meme, But It’s Not the Point of Gone Girl“

“Amy is cool throughout the film, as a sociopath and as somebody who has no actual personality underneath the veneer, as somebody who can be whatever you need from a beautiful blonde. Yet the movie doesn’t always do right by her — the idea that she’s a life ruiner, the sort who will come up with a fake rape accusation just to get revenge on boyfriends, makes her look simply crazy, as the two men who have suffered at Amy’s hands, Neil Patrick Harris’ Desi and Scoot McNairy, in a cameo, are just wimpy chumps. Book Desi is far more of a threat and a stalker, an equal match for Amy’s machinations.

In the hands of Fincher, Amy’s cool is of the femme fatale variety — icy, blonde, ready to become whoever she needs to be in order to win. Because if life is a game, and she needs to come out on top. ‘That’s marriage,’ she sneers, towards the end of the movie, where twist after twist has led to the ultimate in mutual misery. She gave Nick everything he needed and he still wanted something else — to veer back to the Midwest, back to a 20-year-old coed with amazing boobs.”

Eliana Dockterman for TIME: “Is Gone Girl Feminist or Misogynist?”

“It makes us squirm to agree with someone who just might be a psychopath. Even if her assertions are true — women shouldn’t allow themselves to be trampled — her rationale is harder to endorse: ‘I don’t get it: If you let a man cancel plans or decline to do things for you, you lose.’ Does the fact that Amy gives the Cool Girl speech turn her ideas into the mere rantings of a lunatic? If so, it’s easy to cast Flynn as a misogynist who sees women as bitter and vengeful. The takedown of the Cool Girl then becomes not a feminist piece of criticism but evidence for those who think all feminists are angry and crazy.”

Scott Tobias for The Dissolve: “Understanding Gone Girl Through An Even Nastier Cinematic Precedent”

“I think we should turn to the true cinematic precedent to Gone Girl: Takashi Miike’s Audition. Audition is one of the great gearshift movies, starting as a domestic melodrama about Shigeharu (Ryo Ishibashi), a middle-aged widower seeking a new mate, and the mysterious young woman, Asami (Eihi Shiina), whom he literally ‘auditions’ for the part. Shigeharu is much sweeter than Nick Dunne. We don’t know what his marriage to his late wife was like, but we can assume, based on the evidence, that it was a harmonious one: They have a nice home, a cheery 17-year-old son and a dog, and we see Shigeharu faithfully sitting at his wife’s death bed as she passes. But with the encouragement of a film-producer friend, Shigeharu looks for a new woman by inviting a couple dozen young prospects to a fake casting call. He settles on Asami because she’s quiet and demure. She responds to his deception by injecting him with an agent that paralyzes his body while keeping his nerves alert, torturing him with needles, and severing off his foot above the shin with piano wire.”

Jessica Coen for Jezebel: “Gone Girl‘s Biggest Villain Is Marriage Itself”

“…what interests me is the primary vehicle for the plot: marriage. Gone Girl twists and turns around the story of two very unlikable people trapped in a profoundly dysfunctional marriage, but the role of marriage—not necessarily specific to Nick and Amy, but as an institution, a character in and of itself—is easy to overlook. (To be fair, who wants to think aboutrelationships when you’ve got Fincher happily distracting you with his tense-n-moody magic tricks?) Yet so many of Gone Girl’s smaller details touch on the nature of Marriage™ itself: the everyday conflicts that, if unaddressed, can add up to a meltdown.”

Donnie Darko writer/director Richard Kelly: “Gone Girl and Eyes Wide Shut: A Study of Psychopathy in the Heteronormative Patriarchal Occult

“Having read Gillian Flynn’s novel before seeing the film it became clear to me that the filmed version of Gone Girl would become — in Fincher’s deft hands—some kind of kindred spirit to the misunderstood [Stanley] Kubrick sexual odyssey released fifteen years ago. The blindfold is now off and the ugliness is there in plain sight.

Both Gone Girl and Eyes Wide Shut are deeply twisted, satirical and borderline maniacal erotic thrillers that seem to be made my a snickering auteur—well aware that the institution of marriage itself is being bathed in a hot dose of Tyler Durden’s corrosive lye soap from Fight Club.

Both films show broken marriages that can only be repaired by ritualistic, meticulously calculated blood sacrifices.

Both films deconstruct the patriarchal, heteronormative surface world with the introduction of a dangerous psychopath intent on preserving it.”

 

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Photos: 20th Century Fox; Courtesy Everett Collection