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

I read Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl when it was the big pop culture item everyone was talking about. Found it at a flea market for one dollar only a few months after it came out. That I got it for such a pittance while it could still be found brand new in stores not only speaks to its lack of enduring quality, but also underscores the bleak reality that popular taste is absolutely dreadful. I don’t want to spend my precious time picking apart Flynn’s book—not least because it’s been a minute since I read it and only recall my general feelings about it, and so cannot be totally fair to it—but I must necessarily contend with the author because the film adaptation of her book is based on her own screenplay.

While the book can be relegated to the bargain bin of lowest common denominator fiction (and once there, be forgotten), the movie cannot be quite so easily dismissed. That’s because it’s directed by David Fincher, a highly talented craftsman who is capable of elevating middling material like Flynn’s trashy murder mystery story. Unfortunately, there seems to be a debilitating tension between the writer and the filmmaker. On the one hand, you have Flynn, obviously in love with her prose, filling her character’s mouths with all sorts of silly lines but taking herself utterly seriously. You get the sense that the writer is trying to tackle big ideas and thinks she is succeeding, and indeed, some have tried reading it through various academic lenses, but there’s very little depth here and the characters are not coherently written. Neither is the swiss cheese plot. On the other hand, you’ve got Fincher, who, wisely, realizes the only way to translate this story as a blockbuster is to make it a satire of itself. It’s just too shallow and corny to be presented in earnest.

And so it plays out with a curious mix of styles. One moment Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) is coming home to find his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) has been abducted and escorting the police through his house, the next she is narrating a clichéd daytime soap opera scene from their past. It bounces back and forth between these incompatible modes of storytelling for the first half or so of its 2.5 hours. Some tension is occasionally generated as the townspeople and Amy’s parents (Lisa Banes, David Clennon) rally around the Dunne family and circumstantial evidence leads Detective Boney (Kim Dickens) to hone in on Nick as the prime suspect in his wife’s murder. But there’s a sterile, procedural quality to the proceedings that prevents the audience from ever really believing that Nick is the culprit. Even when his twin sister Margo (Carrie Coon) discovers that he has a mistress (Emily Ratajkowski), it doesn’t strike the viewer as incriminating. Rather, it merely indicates that Nick is a scumbag. Whether it’s Affleck’s sheepishness, Pike’s cold narration, the sequencing of events, or some combination thereof, the buildup to the big rug-pull is weak and renders the plot twist pretty much weightless.¹

When the twist does come, it’s delivered to the audience firehose-style. Not only do we learn that Amy is alive and well—physically, at least—we also learn that she orchestrated her own disappearance and framed Nick for her murder so that he would be arrested and then killed (because Missouri has the death penalty). In just a few minutes, we become privy to every step of the process, not delivered via clue-finding like the wicked anniversary scavenger hunt she played to incriminate Nick, but via cheap narration. This protracted montage overstays its welcome long before Amy has finished telling us how she’s written a fake diary, befriended a “neighborhood idiot,” stolen a pregnant woman’s pee to increase the public’s sympathy for her and thus hatred for Nick, upped her life insurance, bought a bunch of toys on Nick’s credit card, drawn her own blood, staged the evidence of a home invasion, and so on and so forth. But not only is this revealing episode chintzy, it also destroys the murder-mystery arc. We are now forced to disregard the plot and focus on the psyche of a deranged woman who is nothing more than a ragtag collection of unlikeable traits hellbent on vengeance for past events that may or may not have happened. That’s fine for a preposterous thriller, but Gone Girl holds itself as if it is something more than that.

If we must dig deeper—and I’m willing to try for Fincher’s sake—we can try to overlook the unengaging plot and consider the film’s metatext. We can examine how so much of what we see is performance: Nick pretending to be someone he is not to woo Amy; the unhappy couple presenting an image of their shared life that is not true to conform to social expectations; Amy befriending Noelle (Casey Wilson) under false pretenses, then putting on a fake accent when she’s hiding out at a cheap motel, then putting on a show for her former boyfriend (Neil Patrick Harris) before slitting his throat and framing him for rape (which, after all this rigamirole tracking Amy down, the police decide not to investigate); Nick speaking publicly at vigils or on Ellen Abbot’s (Missi Pyle) cable television news program; Amy pretending that everything is hunky dory for years on end so that she can get back at Nick for cheating on her with a teenager instead of just divorcing him. Is it worth it to double back and approach from this angle, or to look at it as a parable of gender relations or a portrait of marriage, or to recognize the half-hearted stabs at consumerism or cable news hysteria, or to read it as a deconstruction of its genre, or whatever? I think there’s merit to the idea that Gone Girl is an extreme illustration of how those who choose a lifelong spouse eventually come to conform to their partner’s idea of who they are. That so many people who see the film identify with Amy’s resentment of that role (and the resulting psychopathy) speaks to how spiritually unhealthy our society has become. Otherwise, I don’t think the material justifies much more attention.²

Fincher would have been better off just treating Gone Girl as a pure genre picture, stripping it of its shallow social commentaries, and making it a slickly produced thriller. There’s an ample amount of technical virtuosity on display on both sides of the camera that it’s a shame all of the talent was wasted on such a lame screenplay.

1. Of course, I read the book all those years ago. I was pretty sure I knew the twist, but tried my best to approach the film as if I didn’t know it. In any case, knowing the twist shouldn’t sap all the tension from the thing, or else films like The Prestige and The Usual Suspects wouldn’t be enjoyable to rewatch; and they are.

2. Well, I’ll probably give Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score a few more listens.