Henry on Gone Girl

Having dedicated enough time to read Gone Girl the novel (Gillian Flynn) as well as watch its film adaptation (David Fincher) that released this weekend, I thought it apt to spend a little more time writing my thoughts on this whopper of a thriller about a seemingly perfect woman’s disappearance and its aftermath. Right from the beginning, Gone Girl explodes with a cool sense of style and attitude, laced with pop culture reference and meta humor, and in-the-know characters who appreciate such humor (Nick Dunne’s bar is named ‘The Bar’, and the police officer, investigating his wife’s disappearance, loves the name for being very ‘meta’). Nick Dunne even happens to be a journalist who writes about pop culture, on subjects like male grooming, how to act/dress like a gentleman (ironic, since Nick himself is a laid back, T-shirt and Jeans kind of guy which tells you how much he believes in his profession), and Amy is a Psychology Major, and a Personality Quiz writer whose quizzes, we learn, dig deeper than your usual internet personality quizzes. The point is quickly established that they are not your typical accountant and engineer types.

The story is told through alternating diary entries from the husband and wife duo, Nick Dunne and Amy Elliott Dunne, her Victorian middle name betraying the New York upper class upbringing. Not just well-heeled, Amy is the ideal girl, coy yet seductive, meticulous yet adventurous, great in bed and very easy to fall in love with (and hate as we discover throughout the story) and let’s just say Nick is not her equal, middle class, self-satisfied and indifferent to becoming a better ‘man’ except for Amy it seems. The only way their being together made sense to me was from an ‘opposites attract’ point of view. The diary entries, written in a voyeuristic, conversational tone, switching between present and past, reveal the now and then of their marriage with shocking directness. The very sentence of the book and the movie, is Nick Dunne, wondering what he would find inside his wife’s head if he were to crack it open, and that’s just the beginning.

In the first chapters we see their love developing rapidly in an almost dreamlike New York social scene, quickly followed by the onset of reality troubles, recession in this case, leading to both losing their jobs, that rupture a marriage which I felt would have disintegrated anyway.

Darkly satirical, edgy and cynical, Gone Girl is the perfect novel (and movie) for the i-Generation or anyone looking for constant shock-and-awe to keep them engaged. I found it difficult to resist its easy (devilish) pleasures – a tale of warring husband and wife that is an absolute blast to watch but would be terrifying to be a part of. Critics of the institution of marriage would go home even more convinced about the needlessness and worse, the nightmare that modern marriages can be.

David Fincher (Fight Club, Zodiac, The Social Network) is the perfect match for material this edgy and stylish. The film version is less complex and less layered than the book, but more fast paced, precise and shocking – one major sequence was so brutal that I began to wonder what really goes on inside David Fincher’s and Flynn’s heads.