A thread for David Fincher's adaptation of GONE GIRL

This was entertaining as a thriller and satisfied my need to see Ben Affleck being punished, but it (and the book) seemed like a mess, morally. It's "straw woman: the movie".

thank you for illustrating what i mean by 'misunderstood'

lmao

great movie, tho tbh I kinda wish it didn't include the Scoot McNairy scene

So what did I misunderstand? I had the feeling I was misreading it, but I don't think the film's very clear about what it's trying to say.

the author quote immediately before the "one year passes" marker above seems to get at it

Thought of Gone Girl yesterday after seeing Phantom Thread.

And honestly thought Phantom Thread, while astonishing in acting and design, would have benefitted from Woodcock's livelihood being threatened at some point by his actions (wrong thread to go any further on that).

xpost

Right, obviously that makes sense - but I don't think the movie does a good job of making Amy much more than a (Flynn's words) "motiveless psycho"

i hated this movie but not as much as i’ve hated all the books trying to be “the next GONE GIRL”

This, moreorless:

But there are moments, several of them, in which Nick’s unsavory feelings about his complicated missing wife and about women in general—feelings that might be charitably summed up as “bitches be crazy”—seem indistinguishable from the filmmaker’s own vision of Amy as a black hole of ineffable female needs, moods, and desires

(From here.)

Thought of Gone Girl yesterday after seeing Phantom Thread.

I would not have, ever.

if you watched this movie and thinks Fincher likes, respects or agrees with the Nick character then idk what to say

if you're not cheering for Amy by the end of it you're doing it wrong

You shouldn't be cheering for anyone by the end of it! (Maybe Margo.)

still amazed they created an entire universe where no one has heard of a divorce

Yeah my impression was that they were both horrible people.

of course they are! but one is just an asshole and the other is charming and diabolically insane

i'm amazed y'all remember the plot of this thing

Why does it matter if the woman is actually a psychopath? This is total respectability politics bs for what the movie is about: men’s fear of losing preferred status in a system that rewards our own dehumanizing selfishness

The reaction of people being to her violent and extreme response to which acts as if this systemic inequity is then justified .... idk I think this movie is one of those times when it’s already about the things you guys are trying to bring to bear in critique of it

Rewording that first sentence: that ppl act like her violent and extreme response is a justification of this inequity ....

Losing preferred status is less it maybe than being about losing *control.* I can’t think of anything more resonant in all the insecure responses from men to “the current moment”

Also @ chuck Tatum how is she “motiveless”????? She explains her entire purpose!

I was gonna say, I seem to remember a key monologue.

affleck is a failed writer; she's shown to be the more successful writer. seems like the point of the odd ending is to show affleck being written into a reversed version of an archetypal 'woman's story' of marriage, one that was itself echoed in her fabrication of their story in her diary entries. now he goes about the house in fear for his life, unable to penetrate her inscrutable thoughts or read her emotions accurately. and now (inescapably?) he is trapped in a joyless performance that denies him any possibility of authentic human development through knowing and being known by another, intimately. it would be bonkers to have her return and have BOTH the detective and his lawyer (both reality-principle characters) believe that she had framed him, in a movie whose ultimate aims were in some sense realistic or whose genre were in some sense 'straight'. but they do because that serves to reinforce the sense in which affleck and pike are bound together in confinement from the world - she has trapped him. not with the baby, exactly, but with her revision of the myth of marriage, for which the baby is the dumb conventional social sanction, as validated by the performance for the media and the nancy grace or whoever knockoff. so the genre is one in which she must play out 'psycho' desires, out of vengeance, to magnify some version of the desires at play in 'realistic' analogues of the underlying plot of love and happy married life. if i quite had a read of the fantasy projection it is articulating, what i'd want to suggest is that it does it despite the risk of seeming to court MRA appeal because the MRA fantasy about women and men is one that it must activate to reject. not sure if it does that, though.

interesting that it goes to the trouble of having both their parents figure in the story, presumably in order to back-stop the interpretation of their roles in the marriage or in the roles of their self-scripted performances. they make a big deal out of her parents (mom, but dad somehow wholly on board with it?) stealing, or not stealing, but improving upon her childhood and life by writing her into a fictional character. affleck gets a sick mom and a mentally ill dad (who forgets himself, his family, apparently becomes just a font of vile misogyny). in her case at least, that makes the reclamation of the authority of 'writer' a clear goal. not as sure about him.

curious too that when he's conferring with his sister at the end, and she's wrecked by the news that he might stay because of the baby or whatever, she says 'i knew you before we were born', which sounds to me like the movie's somehow sanctioning the hilarious rumors the nancy grace knockoff feeds about the twins being too close (in the airport, the other passenger glares at affleck and says 'twin sister' in total disgust). not as literally true, but as one of the elements in the movie's myth-rewriting work. with his sister, his twin, there's a claim to knowledge of each other that somehow prefigures their birth into the world, i.e. society, into their social and gender roles as formed by that society. but as pike underscores after she has returned and they've had it out, perfection of the knowledge they have of one another is one of the key things at stake in their marriage, as marriage, too. so (as is already the case in real life) marriage is in competition with other forms of relationship in which people can find fulfillment. (this probably has something to do with why they make his affair be with a student, and him be a teacher: then we're on the same ground, life of the mind turning unplatonic, or over-poetic, sketched in just enough to allude to that cliche).

Interesting

wtf?

There are still tickets available to join me on the Avalon Waterways GONE GIRL CRUISE this September 15 - 22.

Details, deals, and full itinerary at the link below!https://t.co/Ct6KKnOGYO pic.twitter.com/KjRTe7RDkE

— Gillian Flynn (@TheGillianFlynn) July 23, 2022

this was one of the worst pieces of shit i've ever seen

lol

9 years old today (total classic, my fav fincher)

how was the cruise?

i need to rewatch this, i think i would enjoy it more now than i did at the time