Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel Gone Girl was a genuine literary blockbuster, one that delivered considerable reading pleasure through its delivery of sordid (and not always consistent or believable) material through a complex and deftly fabricated narrative structure. In short, it was perfect material for film noir, a phenomenon that, as we have seen, was marked from the beginning by a sort of confrontation between modernist art and pop culture, while maintaining an uneasy relationship to both. It is not surprising that the book was adapted to film so quickly or that the resultant adaptation had so many of the characteristics that are normally associated with film noir. Nor is it surprising that the adaptation attracted an A-list director in David Fincher, noted for his own combination of high cinematic style with grim and violent content. At the same time, the film’s noir characteristics are installed with a self-consciousness so extreme that the film becomes patently artificial, asking viewers to question every move in the process of the film’s construction. Meanwhile, such questioning seems absolutely appropriate in a film whose characters self-consciously behave in artificial ways, constructing all sorts of narratives about themselves that are either questionable or patently untrue. In a film that so patently draws upon the noir tradition, such fundamental questioning inevitably asks us to re-evaluate the use of the film’s noir characteristics in the original noir cycle. Most centrally, the femme fatale in this film ultimately triumphs, gaining full control of her husband, thus calling attention to the fact that the original femmes fatales, however formidable, were typically punished, usually winding up dead or otherwise defeated.
Meanwhile, Gone Girl was on the cutting edge of a new form of literature that has come to be known as “chick noir,” in which the tropes of “chick lit” are reformulated via the darker logic of film noir, now aimed first and foremost at a female audience. Flynn herself had already moved in this direction with her first two novels, Sharp Objects (2006) and Dark Places (2009), and Gone Girl was quickly followed by such chick noir novels as Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies (2014) and Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train (2015). Significantly, all of these novels have been adapted, either to film or to television mini-series. Gone Girl was the first of these novels to be adapted, its significant box-office success helping to encourage the adaptation of other chick noir novels[1].
Flynn’s novel flaunts its sources in film noir by mentioning noir several times, as in an exchange between writer/teacher/bar owner Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck in the film) and his young girlfriend (and student) Andie Fitzgerald (Emily Ratajkowski in the film) discussing their secret relationship in the light of the highly publicized disappearance of Nick’s wife Amy (Rosamunde Pike in the film): “God, it’s like some bad noir movie,” says Andie[2]. In response, Nick smiles to himself: “I’d introduced Andie to noir—to Bogart and The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, all the classics. It was one of the things I liked best about us, that I could show her things” (206). A close reading of this passage shows that one of the attractions of Andie for Nick is that he feels empowered in their relationship, something he has never quite felt with the richer and better educated Amy. Meanwhile, the noir roots of the film are obvious as well, and the film as a whole is a faithful adaptation that maintains much of the feel of the novel, no doubt partly because it was scripted by Flynn herself.
Perhaps the most obvious noir aspect of Gone Girl is its presentation of Amy as a new sort of femme fatale. However, both the novel and the film (but especially the film) drew some criticism for the ways in which Amy’s deceitful and manipulative behavior seemed to run against the grain of the “believe-women” ethos of the then-emergent #MeToo movement[3]. However, virtually everyone in this novel and film is deceitful and manipulative. Moreover, by centering Amy, this film breaks new ground with the agency of its femme fatale. Lota notes that the original noir films tended to be built around male alienation, however powerful their femmes fatales, but he argues that Gone Girl focuses on female alienation, resulting in the “use the figure of the femme-fatale to critique, not women themselves, but noir’s own gender logic, and by extension that of American society in general” (168, his italics).
The striking opening scene of the novel is carried over directly (though slightly condensed) into the film in a brief opening scene (taken directly from the opening of the novel) that also suggests Nick’s sense of disempowerment in relation to Amy. The scene features Nick’s voiceover narration (a common noir characteristic), which introduces motifs that will dominate the entire film. A dark screen gradually lightens until we see Amy’s head, Nick’s hand stroking her neatly combed blonde hair. “When I think of my wife, I always think of her head,” says Nick in voiceover. His surprising next sentence, though, alerts us that all is not right in their household: “I picture cracking her lovely skull, unspooling her brains.” Before we have time to digest the violent image that Nick has just given us, Amy turns her head to look up at him as he continues, revising his initial violent imagery to suggest that, by saying that he wants to “crack her skull,” he really just means that he is curious about her thoughts: “Trying to get answers. The primal questions of any marriage. What are you thinking? How are you feeling? What have we done to each other?”
The questions Nick poses her are the ones that drive the entire film, though they remain unanswered as we loop back to a repetition of this scene at the end, with the added question “What will we do?” suggesting that the two spouses will continue to be enigmas to each other as they move into the future. We can’t really tell if this scene is an actual repetition of the scene at the beginning or whether it’s the same scene and the rest of the film has been an extended flashback (with other flashbacks within that flashback), which would be a classic noir plot structure. It really doesn’t matter, though: this is a film that can’t be bothered with such details, which are often left hanging. Events in this film are presented for effect, not for verisimilitude. There are numerous points at which the plot is not terribly believable or when contrivances work suspiciously well, as when Amy fakes her kidnapping and rape at the hands of her old boyfriend Desi Collings (Neil Patrick Harris), then murders Collings and returns to Nick, the police buying her story absolutely without question. When Nick actually points out to one of the cops that some aspects of her story seem a bit fishy, he is simply told “Can’t you just be happy that your wife is home and safe?” And this moment, one of so many self-reflexive moments within the film, pretty much sums up the film’s own attitude toward problematic aspects of its narrative: it’s fiction, anyway; just go with it.
This initial voiceover immediately centers Nick as the apparent main character of the film, something that will be reinforced by the quick disappearance of Amy from the present time of the film, initially leaving the central place in the film to Nick. Meanwhile, police suspicions about Amy’s fate naturally and inevitably center on Nick as well, and much of the first half of the film involves their investigation, which gradually uncovers more and more evidence of Nick’s apparent guilt. The film’s plot is full of twists, turns, and surprises, however, and things are often (another typical noir characteristic) not what they appear to be. Just short of the halfway point, we find that Amy has, in fact, staged her own disappearance, and from here it quickly becomes clear that she has also carefully (and over an extended period) planted evidence suggesting that Nick has murdered her.
Thus, the “big reveal” in this mystery film occurs less than halfway through its runtime, leaving a segment as long as many noir films still remaining. That remaining segment, meanwhile, contains its own twists and turns, some of them quite shocking, as we follow Amy as she continues on the run, then commits a murder of her own (while framing her victim as her assailant), then returns to Nick (not, of course, to a happy reunion but to a battle of wills). By the end of the film, we have seen something that is part lost-man noir and part detective noir, driven mostly by the machinations of a chillingly crafty and cold-blooded femme fatale. In short, it combines all three of the major sub-categories of film noir we have been discussing—and it does so quite self-consciously.
Gone Girl includes bits and pieces of other genres as well, as in the early flashback sequence in which we see (at least as she represents it in the fake diary she has left behind to implicate Nick in her “murder”) the early courtship of Nick and Amy, neither apparently minding how unconvincing and insincere the other’s snappy banter during this courtship really is. Such banter is typical of film noir as well; in this case, though, it is probably reminiscent more of romantic comedy (more chick lit than chick noir), and one gets the feeling that both Nick and Amy are acting out the roles of new lovers that they might have seen enacted in romantic comedy films (and perhaps not even good ones). The scene of their first kiss (amid a cloud of sugar), is just a bit too, well, sweet—not to mention wholly contrived[4]. Indeed, the actions of both characters have an inauthentic and calculated quality throughout film, as if they are empty people with no real core personalities, simply performing personalities that they might have learned from fiction or film.
The Characters of Gone Girl
However contrived the plot of Gone Girl might be, its most overt artificiality occurs in its characterization. Its two principal characters, Nick and Amy, are constantly acting, constantly playing roles, constantly constructing narratives. This behavior, to an extent, merely makes them products of the environment in which they live, in which the media are also constantly attempting to construct stories that will draw audiences. The media, especially television, is depicted as a tawdry and venal institution that values sensation and profit more than truth in reporting, continuing a war between film and television that dates back to the period of the original noir cycle[5]. In addition, Nick is an aspiring fiction writer, and Amy’s whole life has been conditioned by the fact that her parents used (and improved upon) her childhood to produce a popular children’s book series, giving her life a fictional feel from the very beginning. This fact perhaps also makes Amy especially self-conscious in her role-playing, as when she admits to having played the role of the “Cool Girl” during her original courtship with Nick, just as Nick admits in one of his television interviews that he originally won Amy over by pretending to be a better man than he really was.
Some of the other characters are much the same, as when Andie packages herself as a sweet innocent young girl for the televised reveal of her relationship with Nick. Desi fits this pattern even better; acting as Amy’s savior (and ultimately serving as her victim), he consistently displays a creepy affect that suggests a possible sinister side to his feelings for Amy[6]. And, of course, there is the white trash couple (played by Lola Kirke and Boyd Holbrook) who turn out essentially to be con artists who seem a bit simple-minded but then outflank the conniving Amy and rob her of all her cash. It is also significant that Kirke’s character is very much the leader of this pair, echoing Amy’s ultimate power over Nick. In addition, even the characters who seem relatively genuine, such as Nick’s loyal twin sister Margo (Carrie Coon) and police detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens), are more like stock characters lifted from popular culture than like authentic human beings, though they also reconfigure the “good girl” character from the original noir films. Finally, Tanner Bolt, Tyler Perry’s showboat celebrity lawyer character (he likes to call himself Elvis), is also something of a stock character, yet he is also someone who is playing a highly theatrical role, working as much in the media as in the courtroom.
Archer suggests that the characters in this film are simply meant to serve a narrative function, not to be believable as human beings. For him, such characterization joins with the film’s “self-conscious plot contortions” to “acknowledge its continuity with a cinematic narrative tradition: “the icy femme fatales and framed wrong-man stories in noirs and neo-noirs such as Double Indemnity (1944) and The Last Seduction (1994),” as well as the “ambiguities and machinations of a film like Basic Instinct (1992).” One could name any number of cinematic predecessors, of course, and part of Archer’s point is that Gone Girl seems to have been consciously constructed from familiar cinematic tropes, especially the tropes of noir.
Cultural Commentary in Gone Girl
Archer notes that Gone Girl (in both the novel and the film) is “quite jokey about its own structure,” which is something that it shares with many noir films. However, the many self-reflexive gestures in Gone Girl go beyond those in the original noir cycle, while doing much more than adding entertainment value (though they do that). They can actually be taken as a key element of the film’s considerable social commentary, which goes well beyond the obvious commentary on gender politics. In particular, the patent artificiality of the film and its structure serves as a commentary on late capitalist society itself. Overtly created in the image of the society within which it was produced, Gone Girl becomes a sort of overt demonstration of Jameson’s dictum that postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism, at the same time critiquing its own logic.
The original noir cycle grew out of anxieties related to memories of the Great Depression, then to World War II, and later to a postwar world informed by the threat of nuclear extinction in the midst of the rapid transformation of American society, including changes in the roles that both men and women were expected to play in this new society. Gender roles are still in question in Gone Girl, in which women are depicted as prominent and powerful members of the media and police, while masculinity is threatened and embattled. More specifically, the main action of Gone Girl specifically takes place amid the anxieties following the economic collapse of 2008, which is specified to have placed significant economic pressure on the Dunnes—even though (in point of fact) they seem to be living very comfortable lives in their nice suburban home. Indeed, the clearest sign of their financial difficulty is their large credit card debt, which was intentionally engineered by Amy to cast suspicion on Nick. Indeed, in this film, real economic pressures are mostly stipulated to add atmosphere, rather than represented in a realistic way, so that their inclusion in this film is as patently artificial as everything else.
This artificiality, however, does not necessarily lessen the impact of the film’s social commentary. In fact, it might increase that impact. Among other things, it joins with the film’s overall negative treatment of the media to suggest the way in which even something like this financial crisis, which ruined the lives of many and damaged the lives of many more, was essentially turned into a spectacle for (and by) the news media, especially television news. And yet, just by acknowledging the historical reality of the 2008 crisis, the film plants a seed that reminds us that the shiny surface of late capitalism obscures some very dark economic realities underneath. Meanwhile, the overtly metafictional construction of Gone Girl asks us to re-examine the often artificial structure of the original noir films, suggesting that they were telling us something very important about their contemporary American society through their own metafictional gestures.
Gone Girl revises our understanding of the original film noir cycle primarily through its centering of its femme fatale character, who emerges triumphant at the end, rather than being punished for her transgressions against masculine power. In addition, its patently metafictional structure, clearly meant as a commentary on late capitalist society in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, also calls attention to the artificiality of the original noir films, themselves made amid the transformation of the consumer capitalist culture into its late form. This aspect of Gone Girl suggests that we should more carefully examine the dialogue of the original noir films with consumer capitalism and with capitalism as a whole, while also suggesting that the treatment of gender in film noir might be entangled with the treatment of capitalism. In this sense, the emergence of the original femme fatale can be taken as a cry of protest against the reification/objectification of women as an aspect of the commodification of everything under late consumer capitalism. However, the limited success of the original femmes fatales in carrying out their schemes (in relation to that of Amy Dunne) also suggests that Hollywood film, in the 1940s and 1950s, was quite limited in the extent to which it was willing and able to take on either capitalism or patriarchy as an object of direct critique.
Works Cited
Archer, Neil. “Gone Girl (2012/2014) and the Uses of Culture.” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 45, no. 3, Summer 2017, no pagination. (Available on-line at https://lfq.salisbury.edu/_issues/45_3/gone_girl.html. Accessed 5 October 2023).
Dobbins, Amanda. “Yes, Gone Girl Has a Woman Problem.’” Vulture, 3 October 2014, http:// http://www.vulture.com/2014/10/yes-gone-girl-has-a -woman-problem.html. Accessed 6 October 2023.
Lota, Kenneth. “Cool Girls and Bad Girls: Reinventing the Femme Fatale in Contemporary American Fiction.” Interdisciplinary Humanities, vol. 33, no. 1, Spring 2016, pp. 150–70.
Thoma, Pamela. “Chick Noir: Surveilling Femininity and the Affects of Loss in Gone Girl.” Noir Affect. Edited by Christopher Breu and Elizabeth A. Hatmaker, Fordham University Press, 2020, pp. 197–221.
Notes
[1] See Thoma for a discussion of Gone Girl within the context of chick noir.
[2] Ironically, in the novel, the Amazing Amy book series gives Amy a boyfriend whose name is Andy. Andy, though, is a very secondary character, essentially playing Ken to Amy’s Barbie.
[3] For example, Dobbins argues that the novel’s Amy has more depth, while the film’s Amy is simply “a real Grade-A bitch. Horrible.”
[4] When Nick leads Amy into the cloud of sugar, it is hard not to suspect that he has made this same move before, a suspicion that is potentially reinforced when we see Nick (now married to Amy) essentially re-enact the same move with his girlfriend Andie, though now with a snowstorm instead of sugar, while Amy (seemingly always a step ahead of her husband) secretly looks on in disgust. On the other hand, we only see this re-enactment as part of one of Amy’s later accounts, which might well have been fabricated by her, as (for that matter) might the sugar scene and many other scenes that appear on the screen via Amy’s highly unreliable narration.
[5] There is perhaps a special irony here in the fact that, before becoming a novelist, Flynn served as the television critic for Entertainment Weekly.
[6] Archer notes the potentially homophobic implications of the casting of the openly gay Harris in this role.