Gone Girl — Page 5

No I don't WANT feminism. I don't want explicit anti-feminism. She's a crazy psycho bitch who is NOT so smart… and her motivations change… I'll kill myself and THEN he'll go to prison and I'll be dead so I win no wait a minute I won't kill myself and blah blah blah let me go fake ANOTHER rape…

A well-written 100% bad girl through and through is able to make some sort of logical sense in the world in which she exists.

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Updated On: 11/8/14 at 01:20 AM

I don't know what you're asking.

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There is a great deal of satyrical social comment in Gone Girl. An attack on public sensibilities and knee-jerk conclusions, on a lack of critical thinking, on the smug way Americans love to choose sides, on our fickleness in choosing those sides, on how easily we can be swayed by the most inconsequential facts, on the media's role in manipulating public opinion. As well as a deft Strindbergian look at how people falsely create for themselves the personas of their husbands, wives and partners.

But an anti-feminist tract? A sexist exploration of sexual politics? Why? Why is this particular villain anti-feminist as opposed to other female villains? What do the dimensions of this particular individual story have to do with an attack on feminism?

If merely creating a clearly individualized woman who fabricates terrible accusations about people, including false allegations of rape, is going to lead Americans to conclude that Amy is in that respect a typical woman, then we are far more screwed up as a nation that even the most cynical might contend.

I don't see anyone reading or seeing Gone Girl and thinking that Amy is in any respect typical, let alone standard issue in her manipulation and mendacity. All the other women in the story (and they are many, grounding and, most importantly, real - as archetypes, they are neither established saints nor sinners, neither established archetypal Madonnas nor established archetypal whores (much as Go - the novel's ingenious grounding factor - might see Andy as a whore or Amy as a bitch, Go's too smart, good-hearted and imperfect to treat either as monolithic types beneath her biting contempt) are recognizable women (and for all their faults the men are recognizable men). But Amy is no ordinary archetype. She's not presented as an Everywoman. (Neither are Albee's fascinatingly insufferable but clearly her-own-gal Martha, or de Laclos's exquisitely depraved Marquise de Merteuil.) And much less presented as an archetype of the female monster than Lyne's hell-hath-no-fury-playbook Alex Forrest. Amy's character and motivations are light years more individuated than Alex's (a woman we hardly know anything about other than that she has had an affair, perseverated on it and won't let it go).

She's Amazing Amy.

Updated On: 11/9/14 at 10:50 AM

The entire narrative is also structured to show us that she is more amazing than the Amy of her parents' imaginations.

Totally with Namo here. I was so put off by this preposterous film -- which I saw the first day it opened -- I trolled the blogosphere looking for places to bitch in public about it, and did, repeatedly. A woman-hating amalgam of lurid melodrama, arbitrary plotting (the central conceit used by every soap opera since LOVE OF LIFE, by the way), shallow character work (Neil Patrick Harris doing Boo Radley with money, eliciting giggles at every turn at the screening I attended), all adorned with bald, one-dimensional satiric trappings (Tyler Perry doing, well, a Tyler Perry film; a Nancy Grace impersonation! Cutting edge!) And then contextualized with Edward Hopper-worthy shots of economic downturn in the Midwest and even an excursion into an abandoned neo-Dickensian shopping mall at night, as if any of that has a damned thing to do with the inane folderol at the center. By the time we reach the SAW-like denouement, and the SWEENEY TODD shower scene, we're deep into a morass of mean-spiritedness and misogyny, with the feckless Affleck left to shake and quiver. It's REBECCA, with Max De Winter forced to live with the title character. Only Hitch wouldn't have touched it.

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Or it could be that novels with unreliable narrators tell stories that can be seen as metaphorical. You literalize the ridiculousness with moving pictures onscreen and what you get is the author's awful motives stripped naked in front of you. And there you have it.

Oh, and THANK YOU, Auggie, for reminding me of Tyler Perry. Who ELSE to have in this mess than the moralistic auteur who creates cardboard women characters who undermine the good Christians of the world? Can't you just see him suggesting, "Hey, you know what would be fun? If Amy gives Ben AIDS!".

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Updated On: 11/9/14 at 12:49 PM

Everyone is impotent in the wake of Amy's calculation.

Once it's revealed that Amy's original plan was to culminate in suicide, which the film treats with glib stakes-removing detachment (kill myself, er, no, move on to Plan B; why not!) the entire premise detonates, as Namo expertly deconstructs. Has no one noted that this was the original ending of FATAL ATTRACTION that audiences rebelled again in test screenings? It's on the DVD, and it was so unsatisfying -- self-destructive impulses generally don't make for delicious entertainment -- that an entirely new denouement had to be created and shot. In GONE GIRL, such bad plotting is built into the architecture of the story. But it makes no possible sense, and places a black hole in the center of the story: a woman who is so miserable she will take her life to destroy the lives of those around her. I've talked to several actor friends about the impossibility of playing this non-character. How can anything in the reconstructed flashbacks make a bit of sense to Pike, as she played the scenes? How could a woman hell-bent on ending her life, which Fincher dwells on with perverse fantasy shots, so quickly "recover" and become a monster? Her behavior doesn't even have logic in a traditional horror film sense. And when and where did she acquire the cold-bloodedness to take on the Harris character like Jeffrey Dahmer? She's not like any human being who ever lived, the plot machinery grinds her up and leaves everyone, mostly the audience, in its wake. The Rotten Tomatoes ratings and general agreement that this is satisfactory entertainment baffle me.

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"Amy doesn't feel it is her who should suffer..." You do realize that this revelation, such as it is, only underscores the ludicrousness of the motivation for this character. The issue isn't smoothing out or explicating the about face, the issue is the suicide as a plot-driving motive, and the substitution of cold-blooded murder as some sort of satisfying storytelling alternative. Mainly, what the hell does an audience invest in? If the bravura calculation driving the story was built at first on self-destruction, what is root for in this cartoon character?

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Auggie, I'm just the messenger here I'm not in Gone Girl PR. What part of "I too think the plot has some major problems" didn't you understand?

I posted on this subject to shoot no messenger, so I apologize for seemingly doing so in my over-zealous condemnation of this movie. I thought I was through with my rant in the dark about this about two and a half weeks ago. Namo's posts fired me up. Part of my response is to the audience and the critical embrace, particularly among women. I am baffled, and will remain so during awards season, when GONE GIRL turns up on many best lists and garners nominations. I suspect we'll all get screeners soon (WGA for me), for the preliminary voting. I just don't get it. Not for the first time, but this one's reception just perplexes me.

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I don't even have a clue what this discussion is about anymore.