In Fight Club (1999), David Fincher dishes out a mockery at male machoism, the sweat-soiled, hyperbole manliness manifest through smug violence and Brad Pitt's swagger. What happened, however, was that Fincher's stylish film somehow became a trophy movie for those he aimed his sarcasm at — the macho type adores the film, which isn't that surprising given how cool it is. Flash forward to what we have this week in cinemas worldwide, Gone Girl, a thriller that's probably replicating that curious logic in pop-culture destiny. The film about the absurdity of married life, a dark warning against the cost of domestic bliss, is perhaps a perfect date movie for happy or unhappy couples, since the film's extreme satire takes cover under the sharp, highly engaging narrative and storytelling heft. It's a film worth showing at every wedding anniversary, for entertainment, yes, and to remind the participants of their parts in their own personal movies.
Rosamund Pike in a scene from Gone Girl.
Fincher is a director with a heat-seeking missile precision. His ability to turn what looks like cold subjects into hot property — for instance, The Social Network, which is basically a life of a spurned geek — is matched by his knack for inspiring dread from mundane setting (a meeting room, a kitchen). The uber-text of his material — the banality of evil in Seven, the antisocial syndrome in The Social Network, the grand theatre that we call marriage in Gone Girl — is often upstaged by his efficiency to pump thrill. He's not out to steal the show, but the show often belongs to him, even when he has Gillian Flynn adapting her own book into this substantially repackaged screenplay, and when he has Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike battling out a bloodied, egomaniacal psycho-war.
The gender debate will surely accompany every discussion of Gone Girl (the movie more than the book I believe) in which a wife goes missing and her husband accused of kill her, setting off a frantic search for the body and a long trail of seediness and deception. From the honeymoon seat at the back row, we can imagine an old one-two from the spectators: Who's the real victim? Who's to be blamed? Is Affleck's Nick coming out more sympathetic than Pike's Amy? Or vice versa? Who set off the whole chain of events, the increasingly grotesque events that either came from the weaknesses of men or the shortcomings of women — or actually, the human foible kicked into high (or low) gear by the crumbled castle of a golden marriage?
What makes Gone Girl a 150-minute delight — of course I can't reveal too much for those who haven't read the book — is its sublime blend between marital horror and social satire, between its missing-woman thriller and its absurd theatre. The film opens with Nick's voice-over, describing the beautiful blond head of his wife, adding that he wants so much to crack it open to see what's inside. Nasty. The he-said-she-said structure of the book has been much taunted for being hard to film, but Flynn and Fincher came up with a sly plan: for the most parts, Nic tells his story in the present tense, no matter how unreliable he is, while Amy's voice and point of view, to a certain point, come in a flashback. She, too, isn't entirely reliable in her voice-over, and while it's easy to generalise and slap her down with the label of a neurotic (that's a mild term) woman, it's a mark of the film's nasty braininess that at a closer look, everyone is an actor in this murderous, narcissistic, man-made stage play.
To avoid the risk of giving away too much (though I'm sure half of the population have savoured the book), Gone Girl the movie is about masks and images — the personal image and the socially-sanctioned image that we, drugged by our own fantasy or habit, create for ourselves. Nick's fault lies in his inability (or laziness) to keep the mask propped up, and Affleck isn't afraid to make this guy look like a loser-in-chief; Amy, meanwhile, knows exactly the role she has chosen to play and that only fools, like her husband, would pretend not to be playing it for everyone to see. There's a saying in Thai, khee lang sua, which means once you're riding on a tiger's back, you can't get off, or the tiger eats you. Likewise, once you star in your own play, you can't call it quits and lower the curtain, or the audience eats you.
There have been many fine films about a disintegrating couple. Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Asghar Fahardi's A Separation (2011), and my favourite, Ingmar Bergman's 1973 film Scenes From A Marriage, which is a cerebral look at the love-hate relationship that's the basis of every relationship. Gone Girl, with its pop-allure, somehow carries that theme into the new century in which the private is the public, and vice versa. The Bergman film is a tragedy, the Fincher one is a heavyweight irony, a matter-of-life-and-death irony.
