Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

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mfunk9786
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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#151 Post by mfunk9786 » Mon Jul 06, 2015 11:34 pm

It's typically something that's in the filmmaker's deal with the studio (or isn't, in which case HBO or whoever else would have the right to do whatever they want). Usually wouldn't be there if the filmmaker didn't have the ability to pull their weight the way someone like Fincher can.

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#152 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Tue Jul 07, 2015 5:22 am

I think it may have something to do with the cards that appear throughout with the date and "days gone", placed usually close to either corner in the bottom of the frame. I imagine it would be difficult to pan around that, and probably quite annoying to see it switch from OAR to full-screen every time it pops up.

Then again Fincher does have projects in the works for HBO, so it wouldn't be too big a leap to assume he asked them for this.

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#153 Post by mfunk9786 » Tue Jul 07, 2015 7:16 am

Has little to do with HBO, believe it or not filmmakers aren't picking up the phone to discuss their movies with premium cable channels. The studio would've very likely needed to include this as a provision with whatever channel they sold the film to.

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#154 Post by Roger Ryan » Tue Jul 07, 2015 1:20 pm

I believe all of Fincher's films are shown in the correct aspect ratio on HBO so that must be in his contract. I believe there are a few other directors afforded this "treatment" (both Andersons - P.T. and Wes?), but most widescreen fare is cropped on the channel with only credit sequences allowed to play in the original aspect ratio.

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#155 Post by warren oates » Tue Jul 07, 2015 1:36 pm

Woody Allen had it pretty locked up, too, for every version of Manhattan that's ever appeared on TV or home video in the U.S.

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#156 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Tue Jul 07, 2015 1:47 pm

Roger Ryan wrote:I believe all of Fincher's films are shown in the correct aspect ratio on HBO so that must be in his contract. I believe there are a few other directors afforded this "treatment" (both Andersons - P.T. and Wes?), but most widescreen fare is cropped on the channel with only credit sequences allowed to play in the original aspect ratio.
I've seen his 90's movies stretched out on most cable networks. Starz had Girl With The Dragon Tattoo in the correct ratio, but they were also showing a lot of other Sony movies in widescreen too.

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#157 Post by mfunk9786 » Tue Jul 07, 2015 2:41 pm

There's a distinction between basic and premium cable in these sorts of contracts, believe it or not. It's all so ridiculous, of course, but that's literally what it can come down to. I once saw The Royal Tenenbaums being aired in 1.33:1 pan & scan, then stretched to 16:9 on Comedy Central - it wasn't pretty.

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#158 Post by cdnchris » Tue Jul 07, 2015 3:06 pm

warren oates wrote:Woody Allen had it pretty locked up, too, for every version of Manhattan that's ever appeared on TV or home video in the U.S.
Even the RCA selecta vision disc was in widescreen, which was almost unheard of for that format, especially for 2.35:1.

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#159 Post by copen » Mon Jul 13, 2015 9:33 pm

Rosamund Pike gives a great performance as the lead in the new Return to Sender (2015 Fouad Mikati). Everything that I think didn't work with her character in Gone Girl works here. I can see why Fincher hired her.
Return to SenderShow
And it's a nice little revenge movie.

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#160 Post by oh yeah » Sun Aug 30, 2015 9:11 pm

I found this extremely riveting when I saw it in the theater, but I had some doubts about whether it would hold up to multiple viewings or whether it's one of those flash-in-the-pan flicks which uses up all its juice on the first go-round. No matter. Watching it again now I find it even better than the first time: brilliantly constructed, seductive yet coolly composed, darkly funny and endlessly entertaining, and finally very troubling. It kind of plays as Fincher's answer to not so much Basic Instinct but films like Bitter Moon and Eyes Wide Shut, which probe the concept of marriage and relationships, the possibility of ever really "knowing" the Other. Except Fincher's film is even more cynical; as previous posters suggested, it is definitely in line with film noir in its depiction of world as some diabolical machinery which inevitably clicks into place, step by step, fatally entrapping you with each movement.

As pure craftsmanship, this is possibly Fincher's greatest work; what makes it especially interesting is how tender and warm the flashbacks of Nick and Amy's courtship are (helped by the lovely score), this is a quality rare in Fincher and it contrasts brilliantly with the pessimism of the rest of the film. Ultimately I think this is a film about storytelling, or constructing fictions -- whether it be via words or images. Not necessarily, or not only, a satire of the mainstream-media-mindset, but a winking look at how easy it is to create and edit reality -- one's own as well as that of others. Of course the film isn't shooting for dry realism and shouldn't be judged on that basis; actually, it most resembles The Game in this abundance of fabricated realities, and overall sense that both the character and the viewer is like a ball in a pinball machine, being bounced around for no some inscrutable purpose. That's in a nutshell why this film is essentially a neo-noir more than a run-of-the-mill thriller.

All in all, I'd put this only second to Zodiac, which will always have the edge for me in Fincher's oeuvre, and ahead of The Game, all three films being the only Fincher I'd comfortably call "great" (I also like The Social Network but I don't know if it leaves me with much to chew on besides an aesthetic thrill). It seems to me he is at the top of his game now, and the style he's evolved into since Zodiac is more interesting and accomplished than the more scattershot earlier works.

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#161 Post by Mr Sausage » Wed Oct 03, 2018 3:45 pm

I've been thinking about the parody of the media that so many seem to've disliked and found unnecessary in this movie, and I think the detractors are wrong. That parody, as people see it, is necessary context for what this movie is doing; it provides a larger contextual world to understand the behaviours of the characters against. This is a movie about a world constructed around surfaces, codes, and personae.

What people take to be the broad, satirical edge of those Nancy Grace style tv clips is the astonishing gulf between how the characters and events are described on the tv and how they actually appear to us, the viewer. There is a barrage of innocent decisions and motivations that are persistently and maliciously misconstrued into something mean and ugly but nevertheless coherent. Yes, sometimes the tv's deliberate bad faith is so outrageous it becomes hard to believe even a sympathetic viewership is going to take it seriously, like the baseless speculation that Nick and Margo are in an incestuous relationship. But overall the tv is presenting a consistent and persuasively argued case for "Nick Dunn, murderer", using as its evidence our wider social ability to typecast human beings based on how we interpret social signals. Gone Girl is not the typical detective or murder story because it is not about the private attempt to reconstruct the truth (the truth of the matter is dismissed from the equation in the mid-point reveal) and then reveal it to the public. The movie is about construction rather than reconstruction: it's the battle for Nick and Amy Dunn's public identities.

Most of Nick's actions in the movie to clear his name do not involve finding out the truth and handing it over to the police or media; they involve finding the proper personae to convince everyone else that he is innocent, whatever the evidence. From the moment Amy goes missing, everyone in the movie scrutinizes Nick, and not with disinterest. They're looking to figure out what he's done by figuring out not who he is, but what type of person he is: the type of person who would lie, cheat, steal, and most importantly, murder. They're trying to slot him into pre-made boxes using pretty narrow and petty criteria. So the big question is not so much did he do it, but does he show the right behaviours. Is he the right type. The tv provides the largest and most perceptible context for this. It goes wide and broad so we can see the process clearly and unambiguously, and, because it's flattened and itself stereotyped, lets us assume it stands in for the wider tv-viewing audience. It is, in effect, the world: the world as gossipy, superficial, and mean-spirited, ready to tear into others over how well or ill they perform their social gestures. That is to say, a world ready to pounce on those who demonstrate less than perfect control of themselves (and what shows less than perfect control than a man who can't keep his home in order, can't even keep track of his own wife for god's sake!).

The above is only the wider social context. The rest of the movie is made of characters doing the exact same thing, to greater or smaller extents. Everyone seems to be judging Nick not just on what he does, but even how his actions or gestures are suspicious because they could contribute to a persona. When Nick wants to get a closer look at Desi Collings at one of the functions early on, he walks up to a supporter to thank her for her sympathies as a pretext for moving closer to Desi. In another movie, that would be merely clever problem-solving. Here, a police officer is watching the charade, and comments derisively to the lead detective how Nick is 'playing' the concerned and grieving husband. Later on that same police officer will admit he disliked Nick from the jump and had decided his guilt from that (something we can feel is not specific to to the officer). Most are content to judge Nick on whether he smiled the right smile, looked the right degree of sad, or payed them the proper degree of attention when they brought him their baking and asked for a selfie. But police go even further and judge him contemptuously on how effective his personae are. You get the sense the problem for the police officer is not that Nick is playing a role, it's that he's playing the role clumsily and without skill, a transparency of action that someone in a profession built around judging personae would find contemptible. The police can respect a skilled operator.

The rest of the movie is given over to Nick's varied attempts to find the right persona as others compete to undermine him by cultivating counter personae (eg. his mistress showing up on tv as the saintly school girl), culminating in Nick's television interview in which he gives a performance whose perfection is rivaled only by its cynicism. His most skillful public expression of concern, fear, and grief for his wife comes when he no longer feels any of those things. And yet it is this coldly calculated, empty approximation of human emotion that even Amy knows to be a performance (when he covers his chin, it's a sign between them that he knows what she's done) that convinces her to go back. Why would someone as clever as her fall for a persona. Well, for Amy, it's precisely because it is a persona. When she sees Nick deliver his performance, she exclaims that this is the Nick she's always wanted, ie. he's finally shown himself capable of playing the role she'd dreamed of him playing. Of course this would appeal to someone who's spent a lifetime playing roles. In a world of quick, superficial judgements and typecasting, Amy is the master of control. She knows exactly how to manipulate the reactions around her to fashion a narrative (another kind of damning filmmaker analogy in Fincher's work). When we finally hear her real voice half way through, it's to express frustration over how much effort she put into playing the ideal wife--groomed, supportive, sexual, cool, not naggy--only for Nick to fail to hold up his end and play the perfect husband back. It's the frustration of someone whose superficial gestures weren't rewarded with equivalent superficial gestures rather than that of someone whose emotional investment wasn't reciprocated. So in her frustration she parlays her skill and experience at creating personae to create the ultimate persona for the world: happy, naive, weak, abused Amy, and to exploit her understanding of people's capacity for typecasting to create Nick Dunn, angry, abusive, cheating, selfish-spending murderer.

The interesting question is why Amy is so good at creating personae and manipulating people's capacity for superficial judgement. It seems to be because she herself has precisely this capacity, and she has rightly judged the world to be just like her. From the stupidity and neediness of the pregnant woman, to the mistress with the "cum on me" tits, Amy knows exactly how to coldly and derisively sum up everyone. She is the ultimate stereotyper, and unlike all those psychopaths who fail to see how the world is not just an extension of themselves, Amy got the world right. Her badness is the world's badness. She's just ahead of the curve. Her only failure is a lack of knowledge: she had no real experience with poor or working class people, people used to being wary of other's intentions, practised in sniffing out inconsistencies and using violence and confrontation to get what they want. So she wasn't able to find a convincing persona for the pair who eventually steal her money, but given enough time in that milieu she'd no doubt become more competent. Gone Girl gives us back our world as only a psychopath would see it, and it is uncomfortably close to reality in many of its features.

There is a black, festering centre to this movie, and it is not the fact that Amy wins. It's that those genuine, thoughtful people who are who they present themselves to be, who try to be thoughtful and nuanced and not stereotype, lose. The lead detective, the only outsider who stayed disinterested, who made judgements only on concrete evidence, is rewarded for her competence with a reputation for bungling a huge case and a likely demotion. Margo? She's losing her brother, and spends her final scene curled on the floor, hopeless and devastated. Nick's end? It's not tragic, but it is it is pathetic and ugly: he is coopted. This goofy, naive, but basically decent loser is coerced into joining an empty, superficial world of typecasting and reductiveness, forever playing a persona for the adulation of the world. He saves his body at the cost of his soul. His life as a genuine human being is over. Perfect husband, doting father, pillar of the community, and nothing on the inside: the epitome of the American suburban nightmare. The only people who thrive in this world are skilled manipulators of social codes, the emptier the better.

If the tv segments seem unreal, they are meant to. They are the world Amy and eventually Nick inhabit: broad, reductive, judgemental stereotyping without any genuine reality to instantiate it. Those segments give necessary context to all of Nick and Amy's decisions. They are the world as Amy sees it. And because it's all so rigid and reductive, these performances are rendered meaningless. There is no growth, only contraction. People reducing to snap judgements not just others, but themselves as well.

I think Mary Gaitskill sums it up perfectly in her essay on Fynn's book: "[Amy's] meanness--and the unfeeling, appraising way she types everyone she meets--just seems an extreme version of a norm or an accepted cultural language; that hyperfast hive brain that very nearly precludes seeing beyond a coded surface." The tv broadcasts are the movie's representation of that "accepted cultural language"; they are the only context in which we can properly measure and understand the significance of the rest of the movie.

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#162 Post by domino harvey » Thu Oct 04, 2018 12:52 am

Well, for Amy, it's precisely because it is a persona. When she sees Nick deliver his performance, she exclaims that this is the Nick she's always wanted, ie. he's finally shown himself capable of playing the role she'd dreamed of him playing.
I think this is an interesting reading, as I've always thought it was more of her willingness to believe, a common noir trope ("The liar isn't lying because I don't want them to be lying"). Good read, thanks for posting!

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#163 Post by nitin » Thu Oct 04, 2018 1:56 am

I think Mr Sausage is on the right track about that point, Affleck’s character even says to her at one point something to the effect of “you know I was just saying what you wanted to hear”.

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#164 Post by tenia » Thu Oct 04, 2018 4:39 am

I'm very much in line with Mr Sausage's analysis of the movie.
There is an artificiality in its main couple that, to me, IS the core of the movie, and one of the side-treatment of these 2 people wearing masks is how they're treated in the media. It's all masks and shows and pretends, and the take of the movie is that, actually, we don't know. We are not judging based on the facts, but judging based on the images projected by people and all this is going obviously to bias our views on each side of the story.

And when you think about it, what the movie shows isn't so far away from reality, and I think that's why some people were so easy to dismiss it : because when translated on the screen, reality looks like a mascarade. But it actually is, and the characters understand that this mascarade is a very efficient tool to use, maybe even more than facts and truth.

No one cares if Nick is innocent. They don't even care about him proven to be innocent. Believing he is is enough, and it might be quicker to do and more powerful in swaying the general opinion. Looking trustworthy might be enough. Making the wrong smile at the wrong time might be enough in the other direction.

Because humans as a whole ARE biased towards finding patterns everywhere, even if it means overblowing noise to some kind of signal and then finding patterns when there is none. "He smiled there while he shouldn't have, it means he is grieving, so he did it".

That's how people works and that's probably what the movie is about, because Amy is exactly exploiting that more than anything else. She knows, indeed, how things work. She knows it perfectly. She just gives it the right push and see how all the other people are doing all the work for her. She barely has to do anything after all. Actually, she almost trips over the one time she actively does something, and have to massively over-compensate to get it back on tracks.

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#165 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed Jul 29, 2020 1:07 am

This is still Fincher’s second best film, but on a second watch it was easier to forgive some of the contrivances (really just the camera system stuff bothered me to no end on a first watch). Tyler Perry’s unexpected response to Affleck’s case is entirely appropriate in summarizing how we’re supposed to feel by this point as the audience. Neo-noirs like these that draw on spite-inflicted sociopathy (itself an absurd oxymoron; maybe realistic for a personality disorder, but this is a case of wholly implausible psychological behavior in how specifically it's portrayed) deserve a suspension of belief. I still love the middle section sideplot at the apartment complex that others tend to dislike, because it refuses to alienate (and, dare I say even earns a bit of respect and sympathy for) a character we should wholly detest.

I get the satirical readings (especially in the end), but I interpret the film as one with much broader interests. The film is primarily preoccupied with subjective narratives that leave nobody innocent, using a very extreme example to overemphasize this cold objectivity. The media’s relentlessly skewering offenses in drawing “objective” narratives on people with subjective impulses, hopping between culprits with the same definitiveness, is a macro-point to the film’s already dense dual-micro narrative ping pong (though Carrie Coon’s devoted sister becomes a curious audience surrogate in having her own relatively impartial perception of an imperfect marriage yet still obstructed from the true shades, no matter her intimacy to the lives of the central dyad).

The emotional highs and lows from disturbing social games are exploited as ridiculous but also a sick kind of ‘natural’ at their core. Even the impeccable plotter is subject to repetitive fallibility that gets her into deep trouble, in that wild middle section that reveals how humanity’s weaknesses show no discrimination across personality types. Fincher cheekily demonstrates how resilience and self-preservation can be subjectively defined to match one’s egocentricity. Solipsism reigns in ironically accounting for how the rest of the world sees each subject- they care about how things look to the public as a primary interest above any moral ones. The self is what matters but that 'role' can only be established and given meaning through involving others. If the film is a satire, it’s on more than marriage; it’s on life itself. The late line “That’s marriage” could be expanded to a broader “that’s our social existence,” and it’d be the same thing.

[Edit: Fincher’s entire career has involved exploring the limitations of perspective, the obsession with following a subjective narrative to unlocking an objective one, and he’s even adapted a scathing novel on solipsism before. But, like in this film (and following Sausage’s excellent post above) they can also serve as projective truths to our world, especially when Fincher exposes his objective overlap between the subjective points of view. It’s worth noting that the collaboration of multiple narratives as a base is something he thrives on, where even The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo involves two specialist protagonists with unique perspectives tackling a narrative (same happens in Se7en and Zodiac as they clash and complement one another against an enigmatic objective narrative of extra abnormal perspective).]

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