Gone Girl: CALL Discussion Notes

     Nick and Amy Dunne meet as NYC editorial successes and marry. The recession costs them both their jobs and creates marital tensions. When Nick’s mother contracts cancer they move to his Missouri home town to help her. She dies. One day Nick arrives home to find his wife suspiciously missing. He first tells police that they had an excellent marriage, but this pretence crumbles. He was a philanderer, in an 18-monthj affair with a former creative writing student. His twin sister hated Amy. The police — and we — begin to suspect he may have killed her. However, it turns out Amy set up the whole situation to frame him. Indeed she is a serial man-framer. Her especially incriminating diary was a fake. Nick’s heart-rending TV appearance prompts her to return to her husband, even if she has to kill someone to save him from the murder rap.

Here are some questions to consider:

1. Because the film does not present Amy’s perspective as fully as Nick’s — or as fully as in the novel, where both told full, conflicting stories — the film has been accused of losing the original’s feminism. It may seem to play into Hollywood’s vision of the nut bar dangerous woman (aka independent and self-assertive). What’s your view? Is Amy empowered with her ingenious planning and strong, assertive will, or is she the male nightmare of female empowerment?
2. What jarring elements may make the film feminist? e.g., a woman receiving oral sex; our brief and shadowed but unprecedented view of Affleck’s Little Ben, Amy’s sexual aggression, etc.
3. On the subject of Woman/Feminism, Amy is only one woman on a wide range. The spectrum runs from Amy and the divorcee “friend” who persuades the camp rough to rob her, through the glamorous bitch TV interviewers, to Nick’s twin sister and the policewoman. The latter two may represent the film’s moral centre because the women are smart, in positions of authority, do not exploit their womanly charms and take no bullshit from anyone. The latter they don’t need a chin-rub to announce.
4. The film opens and closes with Nick caressing Amy’s head. In the first scene he talks about splitting it open and “unspooling” the brain. Why “unspooling” for the brain, which can’t be unspooled. What is unspooled here?
5. What’s the significance of the last lines: “What are you thinking? What are you feeling? What have we done to each other? What will we do?”
6. Why are the couple characterized as New York magazine stars who retreated to small-town Missouri? Why the fictitious “North Carthage”?
7. Why is Nick a creative writing teacher?
8. What do Affleck’s face, bearing and persona (e.g., honest dupe?) bring to the role?
9. How does Fincher tend to show Nick here? How is he framed or defined by his surroundings?
10. How does the film relate to or advance director Fincher’s previous films: Alien 3, Se7en, The Game, Fight Club, Panic Room, Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?
11. How does the film relate to the traditional Hollywood melodrama of marriage? To the Hitchcock system of an innocent man being caught up between police and criminals?
12. What is the point of Amy’s parents — in the novel identified as exploitative psychologists — having made their fortune fictionalizing their daughter in the Amazing Amy series? Amazing Amy was always one step ahead of Amy. Consider this on the levels of (i) her psychology, and (ii) the film’s themes.
13. Describe Amy’s tone in her voice-over diary entries. Do you trust her? Is Fincher cheating by presenting her diary entries on the same level of “event” as we receive Nick’s experience? What’s the effect?
14. Nick’s father is helplessly, incompetently delusional. Does his example modify Nick’s charge that Amy is delusional?
15. Is there any validity to Amy’s claim she is avenging all the women who are claimed, abused then abandoned by exploitative men?
16. What is the point of the sensation-hungry media, the fascinated and fickle media audiences, the references to Elvis, reality TV shows, The Real Wives of…, etc., and all the references to performance? Why is Amy’s saviour and final (for now) sacrifice named Desi?
17. The title. Clearly a girl is gone, as in vanished. But she’s also gone as round the bend. And the girl is gone from the woman (“That’s marriage”?). What the woman loses is how “cool” she was — until some younger cool chick bopped by — and “gone” meant “cool” back in our 50’s beatnik days. Ah yes. 
18. What’s the point with the cat?

Consider the implications of the following dialogue:

1. Tanner Bolt: You two are the most fucked up people I've ever met and I deal with fucked up people for a living.

2. Amy: What's the laptop for?

    Nick: Laptopping! 

3:Amy: I will practice believing my husband loves me but I could be wrong.

4.Margo Dunne: Whoever took her is bound to bring her back.

5.Officer Jim Gilpin: You ever hear the expression the simplest answer is often the correct one?

Detective Rhonda Boney: Actually, I have never found that to be true.

6.Tanner Bolt: Whatever they found, I think it's safe to assume that it is very bad.

7.Sharon Schieber: Nick Dunne. You're probably the most hated man in American right now. Did you kill your wife Nick?

8.Margo: [discussing what kind of wood item Nick is going to give to Amy for their 5th wedding anniversary, the "wood" anniversary] So what are you going to give her?

Nick: I don't know, there's nothing good for wood.

Margo: I know what you can do. You go home and fuck her brains out. Then you take your penis and smack her in the face with it, and you say, "There's some wood, bitch!"

9.Nick: You fucking cunt!

   Amy: I'm the cunt you married. The only time you liked yourself was when you were trying to be someone this cunt might like. I'm not a quitter, I'm that cunt. I killed for you; who else can say that? You think you'd be happy with a nice Midwestern girl? No way, baby! I'm it.

   Nick: Fuck. You're delusional. I mean, you're insane, why would you even want this? Yes, I loved you and then all we did was resent each other, try to control each other. We caused each other pain.

   Amy:That’s marriage.

10.Desi Collings: Octopus and scrabble.

11 Nick: All I'm trying to do is being nice to the people who are volunteering to help find Amy.

12. Nick: You. Fucking. Bitch.

13. Desi: I don’t want to lose you again.