“Oh, look. He’s being a good guy, so everybody can see him being a good guy.”
– Officer James Gilpin observing Nick Dunne in Gone Girl (2014)
There are many good men, but women cannot easily tell who they are, and women cannot easily avoid the ones who are not. Some are strangers; others are guys at work, friends or relatives. Some are creepy, and some you would never suspect.
The lives of women are different from the lives of men. We live with this extra layer of anxiety that men do not experience.
– Patricia Hunt, “Women Understand in Their Bones Why They Need to Be Wary of Men” (2018)
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The marriage-as-fiction and marriage-as-showdown thriller Gone Girl, released in October 2014 (three years before #MeToo took off), begins with a male threat overstated and visually implied. We see the hand of Amy Dunne’s husband stroking the blonde hair of his white wife1 as he says, in voice-over, “I picture cracking her lovely skull, unspooling her brains, trying to get answers.” Then, as the credits roll and we move, cut after cut, through North Carthage (ironically recasting the shade of Dido, who killed herself after Aeneas left her), we see Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) for the first time, near his driveway.2 On the big screen, especially, what catches the eye in this medium shot of Nick looking out, from the curb in front of the Dunnes’ leased McMansion, next to their roll-out garbage cans, is his bulk. His shoulders seem broad and his arms muscular, powerful; his body’s a potential weapon. This man looms large and will loom even larger in the eyes of investigators and ours – from his flashes of physically expressed frustration and anger to his deceptions and evasions (he is having an affair with 20-year-old student Andie) – climaxing in Amy’s voice-over, a little over an hour later, as she declares (in her diary), “this man of mine may kill me. He may truly kill me.”
Nick’s voice-over, as he caresses his wife’s hair, seems not only quizzical but menacing and violent: “I picture cracking her lovely skull, unspooling her brains, 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?” These can also be the questions of a murder investigation, an inquiry into an O. J. Simpson-like case – did the husband murder his wife? In Gone Girl, matrimony is a Punch-and-Judy show (the wooden puppets are Amy’s nasty little fifth-anniversary gift to Nick), a brutal, role-playing, self-serving game3 to the near-death: “no fucking way – he doesn’t get to win” (says Amy).
That first shot is from the point-of-view of Nick, it seems, as he strokes his wife’s hair. But during his voice-over, it is Amy (Rosamund Pike) who turns and looks at him, at us, her stare piercing back. She is refusing to be a mere object of study, a passive body to be touched and acted on. And it is with those two crucial opening shots – Amy’s look back at him during that haunting voice-over but also at us, drawing us in; the shot of Nick so large, looming, and brooding outside their home – that Nick is framed, from the start, as a possible suspect. The key look of the film, then, not only undermines the typical male gaze but is a male-wary, female-sympathetic gaze.4 That gaze is continued by the lead investigator, Detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens), who scans and scrutinizes the house for points of interest, then marks them with yellow sticky notes. It is a consideration of one man as a suspect, of the husband as potentially violent – the enemy within the home. (And, soon, “it is no longer the woman’s body that is so carefully judged and scrutinized under the dominant gaze of the media, but Nick’s” [Calloway].) But it is the first person we see (and who seems to see us), Amy, who has crafted that consideration. It is Amy, that child model for her parents’ best-selling kids’ book series Amazing Amy, who – it is revealed, seconds after that chilling line “He may truly kill me” – icily, contemptuously authors her own disappearance, writing the mystery (Nick’s lawyer: “She is telling the perfect story”) so that her writer-husband is in the frame for it. And David Fincher’s film, from Gillian Flynn’s script (adapting her own novel), plays right along. Its cool, distanced tone and Kubrickian, neo-noir look (furthered by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s sinister synth-and-orchestra score and by Jeff Cronenweth’s eerie, shadow-rich cinematography) and looks from other women in Nick’s life only deepen, in early scene after early scene, the male-as-object-of-suspicion gaze.
So, for instance, when Nick talks to Detective Boney, she wonders aloud why he does not seem to know what his wife does most days or what her blood type is. Then he discovers that his senile father, wandered off from his nursing home, is at the station; while his father utters misogynist curses at the desk sergeant (“Bitch”; “Stupid, dumb, ugly bitch”), Nick is flustered and becomes a little upset as she questions why he did not answer their calls, raising his voice and bringing down the counter hatch too hard. He looks up to see Detective Boney, in sudden close-up, staring at him. The female gaze has us viewing the man as possible suspect: did Nick’s father have a misogynistic anger that his son inherited?5 is his frustration with the female desk sergeant a sign that he was violent with his wife and did away with her? Soon, we follow Detective Boney, again, around the house-as-crime-scene. Soon after that, we follow her follow Nick as he tries to trace Amy’s movements before her disappearance by solving their anniversary treasure hunt, rhyming-riddle clue by rhyming-riddle clue . . . and we watch as she watches Nick, the detective looking suspiciously after him driving away, just after he has hidden the third clue from her. Then, as Nick reads that clue in the privacy of his car, we alone see him hit the horn, angrily, and exclaim, “Bitch!” And when Nick shows up at the volunteer headquarters, we see his in-laws, Detective Boney, and a group of local wives giving him a long look, a second look, or a look that is not only sympathy. (Their looks are backed up by Boney’s underling, Officer Gilpin [Patrick Fugit], so suspicious, skeptical, and wary of Nick that he sees his politeness and courtesy as an act: “Oh, look. He’s being a good guy, so everybody can see him being a good guy.”) Even Nick’s twin sister Margo (Carrie Coon), in her home, looking intently at Nick, asks him, “Hey, have you told me everything? . . . Everything?”
Again and again and again, then, Gone Girl draws us, especially through the looks of women other than Amy, into a male-wary gaze, seeing Nick as Possible Perpetrator. That worry about the menacing male lingers long and hard.6 (The film’s midway revelation sequence [Amy is alive and framed Nick for murder!], which breezily deconstructs Amy’s magic trick of her disappearance, does not undermine the male-wary look but suddenly, thrillingly reinterprets and solves her missing-ness so that we know all, are confidingly in on her scheme, admire scornful Amy’s craftiness [Nick’s sister: “She’s good”; Nick’s lawyer: “You gotta have a grudging respect {for her} at this point”], and puzzle over how feminist, pseudo-feminist, and/or psychopathic her vengeance is on Nick7 for moving to Missouri, getting lazy, and having an affair with “a newer, younger, bouncier ‘Cool Girl.’” The flashback, as snow falls, when she sees Nick with Andie and so realizes that he is cheating on her, is made the film’s Citizen Kane snowglobe-like moment crystallizing her “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” turn to vengeance.) So, even after deviously cunning Amy returns home – having murdered, in bed, an ex-boyfriend, Desi Collings (Neil Patrick Harris), whom she dazingly claims kidnapped her and held her as his sex-slave (he had not) – tells Nick in the front hallway of their home that the persona he performed for TV was “the Nick I fell in love with,” and Nick demands that she come clean about “exactly what happened,” there is a sense of menace when she says that she will only talk to him in the shower (to ensure that he is not wearing a wire), and then he approaches, naked. And it is here that Gone Girl reminds us, in its flash of male nudity as threat, of how the long, hard look at (often naked) women on film has been so cold and so cutting . . . only for the film to immediately rework that gaze.
Fincher and his editor Kirk Baxter cut from Nick, so bulky and hulking there in the front hallway, looking up at his wife as she ascends to the bathroom, to Nick’s naked, muscular back as he moves in toward the shower. He is unsure, even wary, himself, as he approaches the glass-walled shower – where Amy is unclothed but not objectifiable or sexualized, especially because reflections on the glass obscure her nudity – but the medium shot of him as he is just outside the shower door emphasizes his chest, arm muscles, and neck. As he enters the shower, the camera pans down his muscled back. Closing the door behind him, he is ominously containing them, his body filling up the entirety of the left side of the frame, as if he is closing in on Amy, and the camera watches as the door, with its solid metal handles, is just about to shut close while Nick turns, his penis shown as he is facing his wife. “You’re a murderer,” he reminds her, but he is still in the frame, the man who could be the lethal weapon . . . indeed, he is so angry at her soon afterward (when she reveals that she is pregnant, to convince him to stay with her) that he slams her head against a wall and grips her just above her neck, glaring at her. It was Nick’s twin sister Margo who startlingly, disturbingly “joked” about Nick’s potential for sexual violence when he told her that he did not know what to get Amy for wood, the traditional fifth-year wedding anniversary gift: “I know! Go home, fuck her brains out, slap her with your penis. ‘There’s some wood for you, bitch.’” (When Nick manipulates the cudgel wielded by Punch, part of Amy’s fifth-year anniversary gift, the action is done and shot so that the wood looks even more phallus-like, rising up from and coming back down to where the puppet’s groin could be.) And now, with that weaponizable object between his legs (and Amy has framed the penis as a weapon, falsely accusing one ex-boyfriend of rape and posthumously painting Collings as a rapist), Nick stands there, hulking. We are reminded of their sex difference, their size difference, his looming-ness, of Amy’s narrative of sex slavery, of the all-too-common, usually true story of the man who raped the woman. But even as we are reminded of male-member-as-weapon, it is the non-ogled woman who slices into him with her cold logic, penetrating his “marrow” with her words of strategy. Amy, blood running off her into the drain – echoing Psycho, but here the still-alive blonde is the one with all the power – tells Nick why he has to follow the script of happily-reunited-again, why they have to be, as he later says, “partners in crime” (as if one is as bad as the other). It is her gaze – cold, calculating, sizing up and cutting down – that is a reversal of that male gaze, for so many years in so many films, which has stripped the fantasy-female down to her sexy bits, her mere objects of desire. Here, Amy’s is a cold, hard female gaze – objectifying the male, exposed to her there in the shower – as she assesses and explains his usability for her needs, demanding what he do: “You went on national television and begged for me to save your life. . . . I want that Nick.” She knows the narrative and directs him not to leave her but to stay and play his part, on pain of social death: “‘Wounded, raped wife battles her way back to her husband, and he deserts her.’ They’ll destroy you. Neighbors will shun you. And I’ll make sure that no one forgets the pain you caused me.”
Gone Girl is an acerbic, playful, darkly comic thriller-ride through marriage as a war of acting, image perception, and show; Fincher and Flynn’s film is always aware, with much postmodern irony and winking dialogue about narratives, of itself as a fiction film. But its one constant, atmospheric link to off-screen reality – from its ominous opening, framing Nick as potential threat, to one of its last scenes, where he slams her head against a wall – is the threat of male violence. The film’s male-wary look, channeled through Detective Boney (and her male underling) and other women, even Nick’s sister, is heightened by the sense of Nick’s physical threat which the camera emphasizes at key moments, especially early on. But that male-wary look is superseded, in the end, by Amy’s chilling, calculating look, a female gaze that objectifies her husband, pins him down and pens him in, and ensures that he plays along with her marriage game. It is the final look of the film – when we return to that opening moment on the bed, with Nick’s hand on his wife’s head, as he is asking those questions of his in voice-over, she turns and looks at him, and us . . . only this time she turns quickly, her look is unromantic, cold, hard, and utterly hers alone, and he pulls his hand away. Then, as he puts his hand back, she gives a sly, all-knowing smile and lays her head back down. She closes her eyes and, with the shuttering of her female gaze, the film ends. The Cool Girl, who went from Miss-ing to Mrs.-ing, is gone (was she ever truly there?); the cold, hard woman remains.
Works Cited
Burkeman, Oliver. “Gillian Flynn on Her Bestseller Gone Girl and Accusations of Misogyny.” The Guardian, 1 May 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/01/gillian-flynn-bestseller-gone-girl-misogyny
Calloway, Mariel. “Gone Girl [sic]: Media Gaze and the Feminine Spectacle.” MarielCalloway.com, 1 November 2014. https://marielcalloway.com/2014/11/01/gone-girl-media-gaze-and-the-feminine-spectacle/
Fincher, David. Director’s commentary. Gone Girl, Twentieth Century Fox, 2014.
Flynn, Gillian. Gone Girl final shooting script. 29 August 2013, revised 15 & 27 September 2013. https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/GoneGirl_Final_Shooting_Script.pdf
Gone Girl. Directed by David Fincher, Twentieth Century Fox, 2014.
Gregory, Drew. “I Didn’t Understand Gone Girl Until I Was a Woman.” Bright Wall/Dark Room, no. 77, 26 November 2019. https://www.brightwalldarkroom.com/2019/11/26/gone-girl-david-fincher-2014/
Hunt, Patricia. “Women Understand in Their Bones Why They Need to Be Wary of Men.” The [Staunton, Virginia] News Leader, 20 Sept. 2018. https://www.newsleader.com/story/opinion/columnists/2018/09/20/kavanaugh-confirmation-women-understand-their-bones-why-they-need-wary-men/1367078002/
Rothman, Joshua. “What ‘Gone Girl’ Is Really About.” The New Yorker, 8 October 2014. https://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/gone-girl-really
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All images are screenshots from the film.
- Amy’s blondeness and whiteness – Nick’s lawyer notes that she is being seen as “America’s sweetheart” – is of particularly charged significance in relation to American media stories and to one Hollywood storyteller. First, from the film’s title to the news coverage of Amy’s (self-created) disappearance, Gone Girl and its gone girl expose “missing white woman syndrome,” where the disappearance of a young(ish) middle-class white woman, often blonde, gets disproportionate attention – a bias particularly noted after the Natalee Holloway case in 2005 and during the Gabby Petito case in 2021. Second, Amy is an elaborate riff on Hitchcock’s icy blonde femme fatale, especially Maddalena Anna Paradine (Alida Valli) in The Paradine Case, Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) in Vertigo, Marion Crane (Vivien Leigh) in Psycho, and Marnie Edgar (Tippi Hedren) in Marnie.
Nick’s puzzling, threatening voice-over troubles his male gaze at his wife, so that viewers may become wary of and even disapproving of him. For more on the typically sexualizing, objectifying male gaze in film, see Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) and Nina Menkes’s Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power (2022), with examples of the gaze as coercing, subjugating, and violating (thus normalizing rape culture). [↩] - Before we see Nick, there is a shot of a deer standing in a driveway and a shot of a raccoon slinking along a lawn outside a house. We are asked to wonder what primal instinct, then, lies in this suburban animal, Nick, lurking outside his home?
Nick’s last name and position outside the home, at the start of a film riddled with deceptions, echo the murder of actress Dominique Dunne, strangled to death by her ex-boyfriend on her driveway in October 1982 (he defended himself in court, claimed to have no clear recollection of his murderous act, and was convicted by the jury of a lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter). [↩] - From the start, Gone Girl, which can be seen as a fantasy “farce” about marriage (Rothman), is rife with games and a sly, ludic tone: Nick brings the board game Mastermind to his sister’s bar; there is a flashback to the teasing, flirtatious game of seduction and counter-seduction when Nick and Amy first met each other and slept together in New York City; and then we return to Nick playing the board game Life with Margo (nicknamed “Go,” which is also a game) and talking about Amy’s anniversary treasure hunts. In the film’s first half-hour, the flashbacks are full of Nick and Amy’s ironic, playful repartee, but because they are framed by and follow Appalling Amy’s carefully concocted diary entries (soon found by the police and used against Nick), and are contrasted with the estranged couple and her disappearance in the present, they seem faintly hollow, not-quite-real, and unreliable, even on first viewing, thereby adding to the viewer’s wariness and unease.
Fincher, in his director’s commentary, notes that he felt the marketing – where the trailer included the shot of Amy (imagining herself) sinking to her death in the Mississippi – made the “audience . . . very resistant to the idea of liking either of these characters” early on, when they meet-cute in a flashback, because Amy could die and Nick could be her killer; a more general wariness, then, may have been built in for first-time viewers of Gone Girl. [↩] - The male-wary gaze is all too familiar to most women in America and elsewhere. It can come out of “that little tug of fear that women know so well. Am I going to be all right? Will I be the victim of a man who can do me harm? This fear is so much a part of us that even we don’t realize how ever present it is. We simply cannot imagine a world in which it does not exist” (Hunt). [↩]
- In the final shooting script, Nick tells Detective Boney that his father has “always been a misogynist asshole,” and she “gives him a pat” after he tells her that he has not seen his father “since I was 10 and my mom finally divorced his ass” (Flynn 25, 26). That scene, which renders Nick more aware, more sympathetic, and so less of a suspect in Boney’s (and the viewer’s) eyes, was not included in the film; its absence deepens the mysterious uncertainty around Nick as a suspect and sharpens the film’s male-wary gaze. [↩]
- Even when Amy goes on the lam, having altered her appearance, and is lying low in a motel, there is an implied threat of male violence. After Greta (Lola Kirke) befriends Amy, Greta and Jeff (Boyd Holbrook) notice Amy’s bills-stuffed fanny pack, and Greta convinces Jeff to help her steal Amy’s money. They barge into her cabin one morning, and the camera, especially in a few slightly low-angle shots, emphasizes his height and threat on entry – “Let us give you a hand [cleaning up]” – and his cowing presence, size, and movement through Amy’s cabin. In close-up, he asks, with menacing politeness, “Where is the money, sweetheart?” The threat and robbery culminate in Jeff – after Greta has hit Amy, the pair has pinned her against the wall, and Greta rips the fanny-pack off her – throwing Amy onto the bed. “There are a lot of people out there a lot worse than we are,” advises Greta, and then they are gone. [↩]
- Flynn is a self-identified feminist and remarked, in an interview about the novel Gone Girl, that feminism in her writing should “‘also [be] the ability to have women who are bad characters . . . pragmatically evil, bad and selfish . . . I don’t write psycho bitches . . . [who are] just crazy’” (Burkeman). And if the film’s most resoundingly (or even only) realistic reflection of our world lies in its sense of patriarchal violence, then Amy’s “actions [may] feel rational and satisfying, not to mention downright impressive, set against the backdrop of patriarchy” (Gregory). The male-wary gaze in the win-or-lose-world of Gone Girl suggests that Amy could well have been a victim, like so many women, but she is glaringly determined to never be a victim . . . even using certain tropes of victimhood to her advantage, to come out on top. [↩]
