"Gone Girl" (Spoiler Alert)

Last night my husband and I finally got around to watching the much vaunted new film by David Fincher, “Gone Girl.”  I had a vague idea that the film, based on the 2012 novel by Gillian Flynn, was about a wife who has mysteriously gone missing.  With that tiniest of kernels, I was somehow expecting a more updated version of Ann Tyler’s 1997 novel, “Ladder of Years,” about a wife and mother who, in the midst of a family beach vacation, leaves the rental cottage one day, disappears, and starts a new, anonymous life in a small town.  Boy was I disabused of that feminist fantasy in short order.  I clearly had not read the fine print and noted that this was a Fincher film.  I won’t go into the similarities in psychology and tone with “Fight Club,” but trust me, they’re there. 

For the first part of the movie, I was lulled into that place where I was mentally raising a feminist fist (several times I’m ashamed to admit) at the specter of a dissatisfied wife, married to a somewhat loutish (albeit hot) guy, who finally takes matters into her own hands and, without warning, leaves her husband to embark on an independent, more meaningful life.  Yes, I was thinking, you go girl!  Shortly thereafter, as it appeared this might be a case of murder at the hands of said loutish husband, I dredged from the murky shoals of my memory the Scott and Laci Peterson case from 10 or 12 years ago.  You remember that particular non-stop media circus:  hunky, sociopath husband murders beautiful, sweet, 9-month pregnant wife in cold blood.  I even turned to John and smugly stated that I knew exactly where this was going, based as it clearly was on that case.   

The next turn of the screw, once I had a handle on what was going down, left me infuriated.  What I thought was the ultimate feminist fantasy, had turned into a misogynist screed.  We women all know this script well.  Yes, she may have had good, or even compelling or life-threatening, reasons to abandon husband and hearth, but she will be punished for doing so.  I prematurely concluded, at this point in the film, that the patriarchal collective social, economic, and moral systems had stepped in and begun to dole out the comeuppance the wayward female was owed for her subversive actions.  I was pissed, to put it mildly.    

The next turn of the screw (knife, to be more apt), definitely required a suspension of disbelief, but I did not get too hung up on that problem because of the creepiness and gore that now took over.  Still clinging to the notion that there might be some type of redemption for the wife, who I was desperately hoping was still a victim of the patriarchy, I had to surrender that much too easy panacea and begin to wrap my head around the reality that what we were dealing with, in the character of the wife, was an outright psychopath. 

The final scenes of the movie returned all the characters to what passes for normalcy in a Fincher film.  However, to enter into those scenes fully, the viewer had to accept that, for all of them, insanity was the new normal.  Or maybe insanity was the old, persistent normal, and it was merely a case of events that temporarily pierced the veil of normalcy.  This, I think, might be the crux of the film. 

My reaction as the movie ended was:  “I hate this movie.”  I went to bed hating it and I woke up hating it.  It’s not unusual that I dislike a lot of films I see.  In fact, I am one of those grouchy viewers who thinks nothing of walking away from a movie mid-way through if it’s poorly done, uninteresting, banal, or overly formulaic.  But this movie, I HATED.  Which led me to think about Jung’s statement that “[t]he events which do not awaken any strong emotions have little influence on our thoughts or actions, whereas those which provoke strong emotional reactions are of great importance for our subsequent psychological development.”  So what, exactly, has this film stirred up in me that my reaction is so strong?  In the spirit of keeping each blog entry a readable length, I am going to postpone this particular cogitation for a later posting.  Hopefully, a week in Jamaica will shed some light into that dark cauldron of my psyche where all this stuff is brewing, if not boiling over.