“Gone Girl” is a fantastic film. The level of technical craft on display is top-notch, and the actors deliver some powerhouse performances. However, what stood out to me the most was neither how gorgeous the film’s shots were, nor was it the way that veteran actors, like Ben Affleck or Rosamund Pike, delivered their lines with chilling restraint.
Instead, what stuck out in my head after leaving the theater was just how brutal David Fincher’s characterization of modern media was. The film as a whole is a ruthless send-up of today’s 24-hour news cycle, and aside from being beautifully crafted, the sharp satire of this film is one of the reasons I expect it to be remembered for years to come.
I didn’t expect to laugh much when going into this film. Having never even heard of the novel before I saw the trailer for the movie, I was expecting nothing more than a dark, stylish murder mystery punctuated with some solid acting from Affleck and Pike.
To my surprise, the film quickly began to focus less on actually solving the mystery and instead shifted its focus onto how modern media can bend public perception to a hilarious degree. Affleck’s character, Nick Dunne, simply doesn’t know how to act during these dire times. He awkwardly smiles at the cameras during the search for his missing wife, not knowing what to do with a camera in his face.
The media’s reaction to Nick’s strange behavior is virtually instantaneous, with news anchors and talk show hosts making judgments about Nick’s character based entirely off of one picture. They claim that nobody in their right mind would be so composed during a dire time like this.
The media sensationalizes his story while diagnosing Nick as a sociopathic murderer all thanks to a few photos and a selfie that leaked onto the Internet. The story is sold to the public like a murder-mystery gift basket, complete with flashy news graphics and a theme song.
Eventually, the media itself becomes a character. It’s shallow, it doesn’t actually care about the facts, and all it wants is to raise its viewing numbers. It can be used to both help and hinder the protagonist, and by the end of the film, manipulation of the public’s perception has become a powerful tool for the film’s characters.
It is difficult to talk about how the film handles the 24-hour news cycle without spoiling major plot details, but suffice it to say, “Gone Girl” essentially revolves around the stories we project onto people we see on the news and not the story behind the newscasts.
The film highlights just how susceptible the general public is to a little bit of charisma and high production values. A man in a nice suit is always more credible than the investigators actually doing the dirty work, and a pretty woman yelling into a news camera will always be more influential than a dull, uneventful press conference. Fincher coaxes laughs out of the audience by showing us a mockery of talking heads, the most notable of which is a parody of Nancy Grace, satirizing the armada of armchair lawyers and investigators who make a living off implications they make on the air for a massive audience to see.
By the end of the film, Fincher’s (and novel author Gillian Flynn’s) disdain for tabloid-style “reporting” is pretty evident. The law isn’t what actually matters in the news anymore. Reporting on crime stories is no longer about what the situation looks like in the eyes of the law or is it about the facts. These days, crafting a strong news segment is about creating a narrative with whatever pictures and audio clips the field reporters were able to nab, regardless of the truth. The only angle that matters is the emotional angle. People don’t care about the outcome of the case, they care about what the talking heads have to say about it.
And that, as this film so eloquently points out, is the problem.
