In the Flesh: Gone Girl

Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike) can’t see herself. Or, rather, she sees something, some shadow on the wall — perfect, vulnerable, desirable, beloved — but there is no stable self to cast that shadow. It’s a projection. A story she tells others, and one she can’t stop telling. She’s not a person, she’s just a compulsion with a face. In a Laura Palmer-esque scenario, the entirety of Gone Girl takes place around the structuring absence of her, even once she returns, first to the screen and then to her husband, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck). Even to her own parents, she’s less than real, a shadow of the children’s book character they claim she inspired, The Amazing Amy, a resource to be plundered where profitable and written over where inconvenient. Everyone can tell there’s something missing. As Nick’s twin sister, Margo “Go” Dunne (Carrie Coon) puts it in a moment of tearful despair, “I can’t spend eighteen years watching you play house with that thing.” 

It’s no accident that the Dunnes’ house is so devoid of character, a lifeless suburban void where night after night Amy waited for Nick to come home, radiating dissatisfaction with their stagnant life in Missouri. No art on the walls. No character in the decor. Everything a cool, neutral color with nothing to break the visual monotony. It’s kind of a perfect field of play for director David Fincher, whose cold, alienating eye and lack of interest in recognizably human behavior has often left me feeling nonplussed. In this instance it meshes perfectly with the material in Gillian Flynn’s best-selling novel, imparting a reptilian quality to characters and locations, a sense of joyless emptiness underpinning their lives. It’s the same coldly materialistic dissatisfaction at the heart of the American Dream, a dream Amy uses to claw her way back into Nick’s life and bring him to heel.

Pike is fantastic in the role, her stark, almost alien beauty perfectly molded to this predatory organism, a woman who uses her own vulnerability to prey on the upper-class men around her, who inverts everything we know about violence in the home and in the bedroom in order to control and punish. It’s fascinating how quickly her scheme unravels when confronted by the poor and working class, people who by necessity are used to looking twice at what’s around them. They have neither pity for her performance of victimhood nor fear of her status. It’s only in a world as vacuous as she is, a world where her broken husband submits to her demented power play and subsides placidly back into their domestic life, where her value is a given and her wild confabulations aren’t questioned, that Amy can function. She’s a specialized predator, a blandly perfect orchid mantis, waiting for someone to mistake her for a flower.