“AMAZING DAVID”
David Fincher’s film version of “Gone Girl” has turned into a coronation of himself – not breakout star Rosamund Pike. What happened?
(Extensive Spoilers throughout)
Reading and listening to how people react to “Gone Girl” has been a far more stimulating activity than actually seeing “Gone Girl”, at least for me. In particular, I’m fascinated by how people have chosen to “watch” the film.
Obviously films are intended to be “watched”, but there’s a crucial difference between “watching” and “viewing”, and “Gone Girl” was never meant to be “viewed”, never meant to be passively consumed, especially on a formal level; this is a movie all about looking, be it for physical clues, or through the surveillance eye.
But, and most pertinent, it’s the first film I can remember — in my lifetime at least — that arrived with such precise instructions, rigid embargo’s, discussion points, and reams of articles highlighting director David Fincher’s obsessive, pain-staking process. The film itself may be about the ambiguity between “looking” and “watching”, sometimes split along gender lines, but the accompanying media blitz has definitive instructions as to exactly where your gaze, your mind, and your post-cinema coffee discussion should be directed.
And everyone seems to be happily marching along.
But why happily?
THE INNER TENSION BETWEEN RECEPTION AND MANAGEMENT
Critics, filmmakers and social commentators as diverse as Elif Batuman, Richard Kelly, Richard Brody, and Maureen Dowd have placed “Gone Girl” in the same genre subset as “Eyes Wide Shut” and “Scenes From A Marriage”, while singling it out for emitting an earth-shattering riot-call of girl power, and providing a mordant satire on the dissolution of “modern” marriage wrapped up in the sheen of a mass-market thriller.
But very little of that appears on-screen — at least not to me and how I “watched” it.
In the film, Rosamund Pike plays Amy Elliott-Dunne, a thirty-something whose psychiatrist parents have made millions by re-writing her childhood – the way they thought it should have turned out – in a series of books starring “Amazing Amy”, a character who could do everything their flesh-and-blood daughter couldn’t. As the film progresses, and we watch Amy stage-manage her kidnapping and the ensuing media onslaught, the joke is on her husband and parents: She’s far more “amazing” than the wish-fulfillment character they’ve crafted in lieu of the real thing.
Amy may be “amazing”, but she’s nothing compared to David Fincher, who in an act of delirious meta-commentary has stage-managed the film’s unveiling and reception in a manner as calculated as his female lead. The bulk of the ink spilled on “Gone Girl” seems to be involved in a dialogue with Fincher’s interpretation of the material and talking points, which are not necessarily in the film he shot.
And that’s where the difference between “watching” and “viewing” comes in.
Everyone is “watching” for what Fincher calls his discussion of “marriage as a narcissistic extension”, but if you just “view” the film, that sentiment exists as a fluttering pulse amidst endless sequences of police procedural, melodrama, and gradual descent into potboiler madness.
So how did we get here? How did Fincher pull off this sleight-of-hand convincing everyone there’s a there here?
FINCHER HAS MADE MOVIES WITH A THERE THERE BEFORE
There’s a historical trend where society-at-large has missed the boat on a certain filmmaker and caught up after they’ve done the bulk of their most interesting work. It’s probably too early to call a period “Late Fincher”, he’s only 52, but the reception of “Gone Girl” reminds me of what happened to Michael Mann, David Cronenberg, and Kathryn Bigelow. Some of their least interesting work has been rapturously received as a belated atonement. We finally caught up to them, when they slowed down enough to let us on board. For Mann this would be “Collateral”. For Cronenberg “A History of Violence” and “Eastern Promises. And for Bigelow it would be “The Hurt Locker”. Fine films for sure, but nothing compared to their respective earlier works like “Manhunter”, “Videodrome” or “Strange Days”. Those were radical films, experimental both in content and presentation.
David Fincher has made masterpieces, both minor and major. “Seven”, “Fight Club”, and “The Social Network” deserve singling out. For me “Zodiac” is his magnum opus. It was the best film I saw last decade. But “Social Network” is the film that crossed him over into the mainstream embrace and everyone’s been waiting to canonize him since.
THE MOVIE FEELS LIKE THERE HAS TO BE A THERE THERE
Could the director of “Zodiac” and “Fight Club” be responsible for such a technically supple but empty film such as “Gone Girl”? Sure he can. “Gone Girl” is a blank canvas, cinematic white noise; an ambient envelope of technique so void of content that anything can be projected onto it. But are people projecting what they want onto it – or what they’re told they’re seeing?
Look closer and the movie is a mess. It’s at least a half-hour too long. There’s tons of narrative trailing wires. It simultaneously feels over-and-under explained. The novel’s narrative conceit of a falsified diary leading us astray works wonderfully on the page and falls dead on film. A neighbor from a beginning scene could likely have exonerated Ben Affleck’s character Nick Dunne. There’s a scene with Nick’s Father — who suffers from both Alzheimer’s and terminal misogyny — which seems to portend more and goes nowhere. The extended mid-section of Amy on the run is dull as dirt. And most of the satire – at the tabloid-murder media’s expense, a target softened up by Oliver Stone twenty years ago – lands flat. “Gone Girl” takes as long as “Zodiac” to get a third of the work done.
But we keep reading article after article on Fincher’s pain-staking technique. Up to fifty takes of a single scene. Months editing just the first act. Close collaboration with the actors to the point it sounds like a theatrical troupe rehearsing in a Gulag. Draft after draft with Gillian Flynn to distill her book to its filmic essence. You almost feel bad for wondering – could all that work have gone into creating something that feels so lifeless? And that’s where Fincher’s prior track record proves essential, if the film wasn’t his, we wouldn’t be looking in the first place.
Flynn’s novel – and I say this as someone who got a kick out of it – is so lurid, so over-the-top, so berserk bat-shit insane that it cried out for someone with less artfulness, someone who wouldn’t try and add a semi-gloss of prestige to it. It called out for Paul Verhoeven or Brian De Palma at the peak of their powers. De Palma, a known control-freak as well, never let his own obsessive tendencies get in the way of a single-minded pursuit of sleaze and misanthropy. And Verhoeven, what can one say of Verhoeven? Part of the joy of “Basic Instinct”, which has aged surprisingly well, is watching Michael Douglas get dragged around by his dick by every woman he comes into contact with. There’s no joy in watching Affleck’s Nick Dunne get dragged around by the women in “Gone Girl”. Douglas, unlike Affleck, seems to be enjoying his time in Hell, seems to be actively courting the icepick. You can’t enjoy watching a character squirm if they’re not enjoying it – even a little. And Fincher’s approach suffocates the joy in his gray-and-mustard Missouri color palette.
FINCHER AND BOTH FILMIC AND CAREER NARRATIVE (WITH A BRIEF DETOUR INTO VON STERNBERG)
Is there another modern director so mistrustful of conventional narrative? Steven Soderbergh is hell-bent on deconstructing it, but almost out of sympathy for the audience. He seems desperate to know why we need it? Why do we need our stories to conform? Fincher, on the other hand, seems to have an active contempt for closure. He views it as a lie, as medicinal, and it sickens him to serve it. Good for him.
“The Game” – a film Fincher recently disowned because he “never solved the third act” – actually has the third act “Gone Girl” screams out for, a full-throttle open-armed embrace of the insanity promised by the first two acts. The third act of “The Game” might not have “worked” in the traditional sense, but it “worked” quite well for that film. And on that point, has there been a more unreliable narrator in cinematic history than in “Fight Club”? “Zodiac” is a benchmark in narrative perversity. 162 minutes of continued blockage and ultimate denial of closure.
What do all these films have in common? They were either box-office flops or disappointments that met with critical indifference. They had their odd champions, but none loud enough to rescue them. Thankfully, time is taking care of that.
Yet it seems that after Fincher lost his deserved Oscar for “Social Network” — for not being camera-ready and Academy-friendly — that he decided to control not only the narrative on film, but also the narrative once the film is released publically. He seemed sick of being misunderstood, of waiting for the audience to get on his page. However, he wasn’t ready to come out as the public face of the operation.
He needed a surrogate; a star he would build from the ground up: Rooney Mara.
After the Oscar fallout, Fincher signed on to direct “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”, whereupon he set out on a quest for his Marlene Dietrich to place alongside his newly self-anointed Von Sternberg status. After breaking down months of studio resistance, he got relative unknown, and “Social Network” alumnus, Rooney Mara cast to play the mythic Elisabeth Salander. On top of which, Fincher wrested unheard of marketing control from the studio, including coming up with the tagline: “The Feel Bad Movie for Christmas”, and shooting many of Ms. Mara’s most provocative promotional photos.
Fincher bet heavily on Mara, and was intent on guarding his investment, and his behavior, instead of appearing acceptably libidinal, came off to many – including co-star Daniel Craig – as “creepy”. In an interview with “Vogue” featuring both Fincher and Mara, Fincher came off less as a director in love with his creation, than a nervous parent hoping his child would perform.
The end result wasn’t what Fincher hoped for. No one really took to his surrogate. Mara, an excellent actress, disappeared into her character, and wasn’t much more camera-ready than Fincher. Plus “Dragon Tattoo” fatigue had set in, and the film underperformed. But Fincher clearly learned a valuable lesson. The public is fickle. You can’t just construct a star to do your bidding. So he took the next logical step.
FINCHER: THE INTERVIEW VAGABOND
For “Gone Girl”, Fincher has decided to forego another Rooney Mara, and become both Von Sternberg and Dietrich. He’s the star of his own movie. This move represents the apex of Fincher’s post-Oscar branding campaign, the crescendo on his road to becoming this generation’s Hitchcock. In the future you will know a Fincher movie – because Fincher tells you so.
Although allow a moment to pity poor Rosamund Pike. “Gone Girl” was supposed to be her coming-out, her canonization. Unfortunately, “Amazing David” scooped it up, and I’ll say this much: He plays it as well as Pike played “Amazing Amy”.
Fincher has always been a reticent interview, rarely offering his promotional services, particularly after the disastrous “Social Network” campaign; however, these days, you can’t seem to get him to stop. And he’s a totally different Fincher. He’s not combative. He’s willing to talk. He’s loose; he’s funny. He even talks about his past relationships and how they relate to his handling of “Gone Girl”. He’s practically garrulous. You’d be hard pressed to find a magazine, newspaper or website — he even showed up at a BAFTA event — without his picture and accompanying interview: Playboy, Details, The Independent, The Guardian, New York Magazine, Film Comment – to name the tip of the iceberg.
What’s he doing in all these interviews? He’s telling us all how to “watch” his movie. Act one – is a conventional thriller. Act two – is an absurdist thriller. Act three – plunges into pure satire.
“Amazing Amy”, in the film, places anonymous calls to talk shows and tip-lines to lead detectives and volunteers according to her plan; she signs onto the Internet to watch her husband squirm in the chaos she’s stirred up. Whenever Fincher wants to steer the conversation, he drops bon mots into interviews like —
“This movie could end three hundred marriages.”
“I don’t want to make audiences angry. It’s just always seemed the right thing to do.”
This is why he’s “Amazing David”, because like “Amazing Amy”, he’s obliterated the line between perception and reception, and both Fincher and his filmic creation have the sheer force of will and audacity to demand we play by their rules.
FINCHER’S TALKING POINTS ARE TOPICS PEOPLE REALLY WANT TO TALK ABOUT…
But the most intriguing aspect of the “Gone Girl” reception is that all of Fincher’s control would have come to naught had his questions and comments not struck a deep chord. People want to talk about what they see in “Gone Girl”. They like Fincher’s talking points; they’re using them as springboards, and their varied responses prove the essential validity of his theses.
“Marriage is an agreement between two people to be what the other wants…well what if one of them decides to stop trying.”
Salient point, Mr. Fincher, and one well worth discussing. Although I’m not sure it’s entirely present in the movie, but people sure want it to be.
They also want to talk about how marriage can be infuriating, controlling, and yet still empowering. They want to talk about the terrible bargains society forces women to make with themselves to be accepted by men, to not be seen as a “psycho-bitch”. They want to talk about how the person who once made you want to be a better version of yourself can move from being your best friend to a shrew. They want to talk about how plain exhausting and lonely it can be to be married. “Gone Girl” is functioning as a prism for people to let out their own inner Nick and Amy. That’s why the total blankness emitting from the film is acceptable, it’s a container for our collective angst; it doesn’t need to embody it. In fact, embodying it might get in the way.
What we have here is nothing less than a blissful confluence, a sort of willfully shared delusion between filmmaker and audience, which sounds a lot like what Fincher thinks keeps most marriages humming along. So what started off as a process of “meta” viewing has morphed into pure “metaphor”. Director and audience locked in a successful engagement. Even Fincher probably couldn’t have predicted that response, just like “Amazing Amy” couldn’t have predicted her husband’s reaction to her disappearance.
David Fincher may have directed the first fifty million dollar coffee-table book, a product to be displayed and discussed — cracking the spine and investigating the actual content is secondary.
The movie is irrelevant; the conversation is everything.
