“I think people are perverts. I’ve maintained that. That’s the foundation of my career.” – David Fincher, And the Other Way is Wrong
In the 5 hours of television per day that the average American watches (that’s roughly 35 hours a week, 140 hours each month, and 1,680 hours every year), I’ve immersed myself for many of them in the sordid stories of CSI, Law and Order: SVU, and Criminal Minds long enough to be left peering around corners awaiting to be attacked or, if I’m honest, to be the witness of a crime. In an age of multiple 24-hour news stations and innumerable crime procedurals (fiction and documentary), the American television screen has emitted images of the heinous and shocking for years, and we have all sat transfixed in front of them because these are the stories we have come to desire.
I say these things about us because something has been twisted inside of me. After watching enough of this brand of television and cinema, I, unfortunately, desire to become a part of these kinds of stories. David Foster Wallace said that television is a medium of desire. Slavoj Žižek called cinema the ultimate pervert art, telling its viewers how to desire. I confess, I concede to the claim of one character in David Fincher’s new film Gone Girl: “I go where the stories go.”
I think my fellow reviewers at Reel Spirituality are accurate in saying that Gone Girl is a film examining humanity’s selfish bent via its most sacred of unions. I also agree with them in saying that its cynicism is cranked up to near-deafening levels with Fincher layering on the darkness and deceit, no redemption in sight. I wholeheartedly support Elijah’s assessment that this is ”a sensationalistic exaggeration of the human proclivity to assume and assign roles in any given situation rather than act and interact genuinely.” But, allow me to take a left turn: I think these themes of marriage, selfishness, deception, roles, etc. are all outliers used to support what Fincher and screenwriter Gillian Flynn are revealing under a familiar suburban surface.
Gone Girl is a tale very aware of the cinema of Hitchcock. In Rear Window, voyeurism is put to task; Vertigo is the story of a man’s dark obsession; and in Psycho, a tormented man preys upon a beautiful blonde. Gone Girl is the tale of a suburban marriage imagined by French-pressing these Hitchcockian themes through 21st century cultural obsessions, the world Hitchcock depicted taken to its logical conclusion.
Televisions, cameras, reporters, newspapers, and billboards riddle many of the meticulous and precise frames of this film where Amy Dunne has gone missing from a small, suburban Missourian town, and it seems that her husband Nick may have had something to do with it.
Sound familiar? It should, because stories like this pervade our media. They and the fictional stories patterned after them have invaded America’s households for decades. Thus, the themes of Hitchcock’s cinema have now occupied almost every American living room, a place where our voyeurism and obsession can be satiated on demand with each new program. To witness a crime taking place, I can just flip on channel 4 or randomly click through YouTube videos.
Hitchcock and Fincher have made it a point to explore the perversity of their audiences. Fincher takes it to the next level by not just making us view heinous things, but by calling our viewing habits into question as this film twists and unfolds, never staying within the confines of its whodunit shell. Who is the villain and who is our hero? Fincher answers with a calculatingly precise, “Exactly.”
We cannot remove our gaze, and this fixation is blatant by the end of Gone Girl when a television interview is blown up to consume the whole of the theater screen, with our characters having come out of the other side of their obsessions fully formed by them. Fincher is warning us about the power of the media and our most beloved stories.
In his review, Kevin makes a point about practice leading to habits of true selflessness. On the flip side, I will assert that practices put us in the position to become what Amy and Nick eventually become: inhabited voyeurs. Our habits shape our fantasies and have transformed suburbia into a petri dish of latent malice and thrill. What happens when the reality-TV obsessives nestled within the safety of suburbia take to the screen and become what they’ve been primed to desire?
Redemption may not be explicit within Gone Girl, but this is clearly a cinema of groaning for a world in birth pangs, awaiting the finality of the Savior’s return. Though his brand is a perverse and nihilistic cinema, with one hand on the audience’s pulse and the other with knife (or box-cutter) to its throat, Fincher seems to be directing us to interact with a different variety of story.
Gone Girl revealed that the stories which satisfy me most have disfigured me. I am a monster wallowing in the darkness. My gnarled cravings are exposed. I have become what I desire. So, maybe it’s best that Fincher leaves me in theater alone with no redemption. I am left groping in the obscurity, searching for hope. I am given the chance to find it on my way home.
You might also enjoy these reviews of Gone Girl:
Christianity Today
Hollywood Jesus
Larsen on Film
Reel World Theology
Think Christian
Tinsel