With Gone Girl now in theaters, BuzzFeed’s Senior Film Reporter Adam B. Vary and Deputy Entertainment Editor Jaimie Etkin have very different feelings about the movie, and what it’s trying to say about men and women. They agreed on one thing. Maybe two. Warning: MAJOR SPOILERS ahead!
20th Century Fox
Adam B. Vary: Here we are, Jaimie, two people who have seen — and have had quite different reactions to — Gone Girl. In our first meeting about the movie, in fact, one of us may have been moved to speak at quite an elevated volume about the other's opinion about the film. Which, for the record, I think is pretty exciting — it is all too rare anymore that a movie can evoke this kind of raw feeling! And I do think that is something director David Fincher and novelist-turned-screenwriter Gillian Flynn have engineered Gone Girl to do from the very first shot. (I should acknowledge here that Flynn and I both worked at Entertainment Weekly at the same time for a few years, and we were friendly with each other, though I haven't seen or spoken with her since her book tour for her second novel, Dark Places.)
When Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) looks down at the blonde head of his wife, Amy, (Rosamund Pike) resting on his chest and wonders in voice-over what it would be like to crack open her skull to discover what she is thinking, it is at once a horrifying and, I feel, searingly honest sentiment. I think most every person in a relationship has had similar (if perhaps tamer) thoughts pop into their head in the heat of the moment about their loved one. Where those thoughts lead Nick and Amy, however — and what their behavior reveals about how we feel about men and women and how they relate to each other, in private and in our culture at large — is how I think Fincher and Flynn did mean to cause such heated debate among, for example, colleagues who are otherwise good friends.
Jaimie Etkin: Well, seeing as Gone Girl has made me angrier than any movie I've seen in recent history, I guess they were successful in that regard. I think the most important dialogue the movie inspires is something you alluded to in saying it examines "how we feel about men and women and how they relate to each other." Nick's violent prose about wanting to unspool Amy's brains is perhaps the most violent thing he says in the whole film (though not the most violent thing he does), and it seems to be motivated by the fact that he cannot understand his wife in a Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus sort of way. That voice-over sets the tone to me that Nick's motivation is pure, even if his outward appearance (smashing glasses in front of detectives, smiling in front a poster of his missing wife for the media, etc.) says otherwise — it says that he is the one trying and Amy, with her bitterly cold glare, is the frosty bitch who won't let him in.
Besides, after that scene, the camera, which had shown said glare through Nick's eyes, moved away from his first-person perspective to an omniscient, non-voice-over one, which to me, showed the filmmaker's partiality to Nick's side of the story. We never get to see the story from his perspective again and instead, it appeared to me that what we see of Nick from there on out is the but-this-is-what-really-happened version of the story.
Rosamund Pike
Merrick Morton / 20th Century Fox
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