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The Vulnerable Spectator

Author(s): Amelie Hastie


Source: Film Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 2 (Winter 2014), pp. 52-56
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2014.68.2.52 .
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THE VULNERABLE SPECTATOR

Rhythm and Clues


Amelie Hastie

Prologue

In the first year of this column I have given myself over to


contemporary film. In allowing myself to be vulnerable at the
movies, I have tried to investigate what it means to feel and to
believe, albeit in the controlled space of the theater and the time
spent therein. I have sought to explore how the very sensation
of belief propels a sense of possibilityof thinking and feeling
togetherin and out of the movies. And I have asked: how
does feeling vulnerable actually enable a sense of compassion?
Ive suggested that much contemporary film theory and
textual analysis, such as the symptomatic reading (a method
I love, too), locks the viewer in a struggle with the images on
the screen. Viewing, reading, and writing, in this process, become acts of control. Given what sorts of films actually control the mainstream screens today, this response is both
inevitable and necessary. But I have tried also to seek alternative moving imagesor alternative modes of beingwhich
themselves beget and allow other modes of writing and critical practices.
Now I want to ask another question: what does one do
when the very center of a film is suspicion and disbelief?
That is most certainly the experience of the thriller. If films,
like their very images, move us, then thrillers move us a little
faster, a little jerkier. Like a ride at an amusement park
think of the spinning wheel in Francois Truffauts The 400
Blows (1959)the thriller at once contains and controls the
very direction of feeling. It charts the direction of thought.
The thrillers spectators are oriented, disoriented, reoriented
all over again. This experience is a kind of thrill, however
contained, but it is one that delimits vulnerability.
David Finchers adaptation of Gillian Flynns Gone Girl is
a sort of thriller, known already for its narrative twists. And
at its heart is a sense of disbelief. After all, its opening and
closing lines ask: What are you thinking? How are you
feeling? What have we done to each other? In these lines
themselves and in their place as bookendsparticularly
Film Quarterly, Vol. 68, Number 2, pp. 5256, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630.
2014 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please
direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through
the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website, http://www.
ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2014.68.2.52.

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with a final question added at the end: What will we


do?they demonstrate how suspicion pervades the film at
the levels of both narrative and style. Thus, even at the close
of the plot the audience is left still asking the same questions,
still committed to its stance of suspicion.
As a dominant sensibility of the thriller, suspicion itself
begets investigation, by its characters, of course, but also by
the viewers.1 To turn that suspicion back onto the filmto
ask, for instance, how does it make me feel, what exactly is
it doing to me, or, perhaps, what has it doneis inevitably
also to fight for control, to return to a test and contest of
wills.
Act One

Such a contest is at the very heart of Gone Girls narrative.


Told through a double narrationmoving between the voices of husband and wife Nick and Amy as well as between
the unfolding present day and flashbacks of the pastit is
awash with twists and turns. So much so that even after the
audience had watched the premiere at the New York Film
Festival, Fincher repeatedly blurted out spoiler alert! in
the midst of the Q&A that followed the press screening. (He
continued to do even after star Rosamund Pike reminded
him that his audience actually had already seen it.)
What is there to spoil exactly? First, in the spirit of
Flynns book, there is the institution of marriage itself, the
clichd goal of classical narrative films. Gone Girl is a cynical
take on marriage, particularly the staged pretenses that partners produce and endure for themselves and one another.
Opening on the morning of its characters fifth anniversary,
the film presents present-day weary husband Nick in contrast to perky flashback Amy. He heads to the ironically
named The Bar, which he owns with his twin sister Margo,
where they drink bourbon, play board games, and turn curious and snarky over the clues Amy will leave for her annual
anniversary treasure hunt, her traditional passive-aggressive
gift to her husband. When hes called home from the bar by
a neighbor who has spotted their cat outside, Nick finds the
living room in disarray, a glass table smashed, and his wife
Amy missing. Suspicion for the disappearance inevitably
falls on her husband. And as with Amys treasure hunt, the

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The Vulnerable Spectators POV before and after the screening at the NYFF press premiere of Gone Girl.
Photos courtesy of Amelie Hastie.

film offers clues that might lead the viewer to the same conclusion. His behavior is stilted, after allits impossible not
to ask initially if this is a case of a stars bad acting or if it
is Nick who is acting badlyas he attempts to disprove
something that he himself finds inherently unbelievable.
Like Nicks acting, something is just a little off about
this film from its very beginning: its rhythm is too crafted,
its dialogue too perky, its scenes just a little too staged. Nick
carries clues on his own body even before the mystery opens:
he walks into The Bar with the board-game Mastermind
in his arms and then sets it atop Lets Make a Deal! and
Emergency! The flashbacks that soon follow also seem
overly rehearsed. When Nick and Amy meet, their dialogue
seems scripted from a 1940s noir, with a little screwball
thrown in for good measure. One might wonder: have these
two seen a lot of movies? What roles are they playing exactly? Of course, that question is at the very heart of their
insistencesaffectionate, ironicthat they wont become
that sort of married couple: the nagging wife, the recalcitrant
husband. But theres more to a viewers growing sense of suspicion than bad acting on the part of husband and wife.
Finchers visual rhythm includes pauses that last just long
enough to engender uncertainty before moving on. The
camera holds on a close-up, then moves away, shifting direction ever so slightly, throwing the spectators point-of-view
into question. Is Amy gaslighting Nick? Or is Fincher gaslighting his audience?
Dont forget Se7en (1995), the camera seems to suggest. Or
Fight Club (1999). Or Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011). Or
those countless music videos. Or, of course, the combination
thereof. Think of the credit sequence cum music-video for

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, in which the material elements


of technology strangle, burn, and drown two cyborg dolls
(just recognizable enough as stars Daniel Craig and Rooney
Mara). This sequence is followed immediately by a less apocalyptic scene that manages to maintain a similar violent energy and a similar attention to media technologies, as
journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Craig) picks up a sandwich, a
cup of coffee, and a pack of cigarettes, each gesture punctuated by a cut and a bang (whether the sound of his files hitting the counter or the tossing of his cigarette pack into the
garbage), and always with ever-present screens behind or before him. This energy, inevitably, will turn on Blomkvist and
his partner-in-detection Lisbeth Salander (Mara) before they
turn it back on itself.
Such is the hallmark of this director: energy turning in on
itself. Such a turnthat is, against oneselfdefines Fight
Club, while The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) takes
that idea a step further, when the main character progresses
from old age to infancy. Inward and explosive folds of energy organize his films. Fincher has got rhythm, and his
dance is, now predictably, the twist. The plot of Gone Girl is
similarly calculated, its style unswervingly deliberate. The
film, in essence, is very specifically directed, particularly in its
series of disorientations and reorientations. There is, in other
words, a precision in the uncertainty it constructs.
Like Amys anniversary gifts to Nick, Gone Girl is a kind
of treasure hunt. It makes a demand of its audience: Here
are the clues. Read me. But to read the film is to follow its
very logic; to read against it, on the other hand, is to set oneself up for a kind of fight for control with it. At the same
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53

Scenes from a marriage: Finchers camera pauses just long enough to engender audience suspicion in Gone Girl.
Photos by Merrick Morton.

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time, even reading against its grain is a way of going along


with it, for its rhythm is fickle, its narration unreliable.
What is a critic to do?
Spoiler alert: Amy is not dead. She has staged her own
murder and disappearance as a means of punishing Nick for
his betrayal of herthat is, by sleeping with one of his college students (I thought writers didnt like clichs, fumes
Margo). The revelation that Amy is still alive occurs halfway
through the film, even if there have been plenty of clues suggesting it for the knowing viewer. Upon this revelation,
though, the film changes course: the mystery becomes a
chase, a contest of wits. Who can best discredit whom? Here
is where its tone of suspicion and disbelief shifts to a certain
degree. At least, suspicion can be paired with a sense of certainty. The two seemingly oppositional modes complement
one another: the victim becomes a villain, the suspect becomes an avenger. And at the heart of these shifts, one thing
becomes certain: Amy is a psycho-bitch.
Act Two

Whats a feminist to do?


In an interview about her novel and her subsequent
screenplay, self-identified feminist Flynn asserts that she
does not write psycho bitches.2 She suggests, mourning the
lack of female villains in film and literature, that instead,
women like Amy are at once more complex and more evil.
Utilizing her storys own elements, one might make the case
that Amys own complexity is based on the fact that she was
both model and foil for the fictional character her parents
created in a series of childrens books, Amazing Amy. This
early doublea standard of the thriller as well as the
uncannyis always one step ahead of the flesh-and-blood
version. Compared to Amy, she is a better musician, a more
tenacious athlete, an earlier bride. The real Amy cant live
up to the fiction, or so an argument for complexity might
suggest. In response, like Hitchcocks Marnie, she goes on to
double herself, projecting and fictionalizing a new persona.
In so doing she, too, finds herself imprisoned by marriage,
though with a man who is a dupe rather than the violent
blackmailing predator represented by Mr. Marnie.
While Ive always disliked Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock,
1964) far more than Ive disliked Marnie, in this instantiation,
I dislike Amy far more than I dislike Gone Girl. In fact, Id go
so far as to agree with the title, hoping from the reveal at its
midpoint onward that Amy would just be gone already.
Interrogating my own apparent hatred of her, a question
arises: does liking this film make me a masochist? As this idea
occurs in the midst of my first viewing (to be tempered by a

second viewing), I begin to watch in a state not only of uncertainty (about plot, about what it is that I am actually seeing)
but also of ambivalence (about my own culpability in desiring
her comeuppance). Amy is, after all, I tell myself, offset as a
symbol of womanhood by Nicks twin sister (the films Go,
girl rather than the girl-be-gone), albeit arguably a borderline
misogynist herself, and by the female lead detective (Kim
Dickens, who, as my stand-in, flip-flops along with me over
Nick and Amy, though shes at least one step behind, as she is
set up to not see quite as much as the viewer does.)
If this is where Hitchcock comes in, can Freud be far
behind? Through Flynns/Finchers ambivalent narration,
there emerges an ambivalent reading. To watch the film is
potentially to hold two opposing states at once: suspicion and
certainty. But are these states not inherently dependent on
one another? Is this film not a demonstration of an uncanny
state of viewership, the feeling of being haunted by something familiar? After all, when Freud traces the etymological origins of heimlich and unheimlich (homely and
unhomely, or canny and uncanny), he ultimately claims that
the former becomes increasingly ambivalent, until it
finally merges with its antonym.3
To produce a Freudian reading, though, is already to follow the direction plotted for the reader/viewer in advance.
Both Flynns book/screenplay and Finchers film merge
antonyms from the get-go. In all of its rehearsals, stagings,
generic shifts, and reorientations, Gone Girl reveals the
haunted house of marriage. Love is hate. Comfort is control.
In the case of Nick and Amy, it is easy to see how thoroughly
women and men are the creations of each other; they are, in
filmic and psychoanalytic terms, projections. After all, says
Amy, confiding the secret to her dear diary, We were happy
pretending to be other people.
Act Three

There are other plays at work here as well, and other convergences. Certainly David Fincher loves a good book. For proof,
see Fight Club and The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, but also
Zodiac and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Gillian
Flynn, a former writer on television for Entertainment Weekly,
also loves a good movie; she is the child, she would tell you, of a
film professor.4 Avowedly writing with films in mindeven
director Fincher in mindshe destined her book to become
a film.
And is that not, after all, the dream of the contemporary
novelist? To have Hollywood come calling? Like The Bar,
this work is so very meta. It is a novel that wants to be a film.
In turn, it is a film that wants to prove its superiority to other
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media forms, but especially to lowbrow television. Gone Girl


is a novel/film that is also about the mode of trauma vampirism, as Fincher has termed it, in television and social media; in this way, the high art of Fincher is playing with and
against the low art of Lifetime movies, the Bravo Network,
and twenty-four-hour television news. To love this mainstream movie is to love/hate other forms of contemporary
mainstream media, perhaps most notably the very medium
(television) about which Flynn used to write.
These meta-convergences contain other forms of calculation: not just banking on what kind of novel can make a good
movie, but also implicitly anticipating criticism of the film itself. A woman detectivekeen observer, pretty good strategist, but in the end helplessis part of that calculated risk,
as is the cool girl Margo (ultimately left crying on the floor in
the penultimate scene). So is the films very critique of trauma
vampirism. Yet, is Gone Girl as a calculated blockbuster (one
that opened the New York Film Festival, one that carried its
opening weekend, and one that directs two actor-directors apparently to show them how its done) really the place for an
actual critique to reside? Is this film cannier than most, or is it
just a better looking form of hypocrisy? After all, alongside its
release, Fincher and Flynn announced that they are collaborating on an HBO television adaptation of the British series
Utopia together. Thats right: television, which is not TV.

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These two have seen a lot of movies. Might this fact in


part account for Gone Girls own energy turning in on itself?
After all, with Finchers thrills comes also a chill that is not so
much the excitement of a spine-tingler as a feeling of being
left cold. His films are so carefully wrought, so deeply controlled, that they leave their audiences almost nowhere to
turn except in the directions he has pointed. Like Flynns
book, Finchers Gone Girl follows the recipe for a good
frame-up. Ironically or predictably (you choose), this makes
an easy target for the critic.
But then I dont want a target, and Im tired of this particular fight. Instead of vying for control, I would rather feel
and think with the films I see. Thats the act of the body;
thats the act of the imagination.
Notes
1. D. A. Miller makes this comparison between character and
reader in his work on the nineteenth-century sensation novel,
The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988).
2. Oliver Burkeman, Gillian Flynn on Her Bestseller Gone Girl
and Accusations of Misogyny, The Guardian, May 1, 2013.
See http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/01/gillianflynn-bestseller-gone-girl-misogyny.
3. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (New
York: Penguin, 2003), 134.
4. See her own website for the details: gillian-flynn.com/aboutgillian.

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