Spoiler Alert: Don't read this unless you have already read the book Gone Girl or seen the movie adaptation, or plan never to expose yourself to either.
I have been hearing about this book for a couple of years. Friends and members of my family read it and mostly loved it. The advance reviews of the David Fincher film starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike were almost universally positive. The only thing I knew about the story was that it concerned a man suspected of killing his wife and that the story contained a great plot twist.
Now having seen the film, I have to say that I just don't get it. Let's start with the big twist. I am not particularly good at seeing elaborately disguised plot twists in advance. I don't know, maybe I am just gullible. The big reveals in Sleuth, The Crying Game, and The Sixth Sense, to name but three examples, left hairs standing up on the back of my neck I was so surprised and exhilarated.
By way of comparison I saw the plot twist in Gone Girl coming a mile away. I wasn't the least bit surprised when the big reveal occurred. Why? I can think of several reasons. First, Amy was portrayed as friendless, loathed by Nick's down-to-earth sister Margo, and as very intelligent, but somewhat manipulative and who loved to play elaborate games.
Second, Ben Affleck's Nick just didn't seem particularly menacing. I had no trouble believing that he would screw an undergrad. The fact that the undergrad was the gorgeously sexy Emily Ratajkowski--the topless, prancing star of last summer's Blurred Lines video--made it even more believable. Affleck was easy to see as a cad, but not as a murderer.
Finally, and most importantly, the big plot twist was, frankly, not very clever. The person who fakes their own death to serve some ulterior purpose is a shopworn literary device almost to the point of cliché. It has been used over and over going back at least as far as Agatha Christie's 1939 novel And Then There Were None. More recent uses of this trope in film can be found in You Only Live Twice (1967), The Sting (1974), Body Heat (1981), The Usual Suspects (1995), and Double Jeopardy (1999). There is even an original Star Trek episode (Court Martial, 1967) in which Captain Kirk is framed for a murder by man who fakes his own death as a way of getting revenge, much like in Gone Girl.
My point is that--unlike The Crying Game and The Sixth Sense, who's surprises were both shocking and shockingly original--Gone Girl relies on a plot twist that is almost absurdly familiar.
OK, once you get past the plot twist, what's left? The best part of Gone Girl is the winking satire on the modern media's exploitation and sensationalistic approach to crime stories. One of the characters is a very thinly disguised version of Nancy Grace who bloviates on national television about case she knows very little about. This is good stuff, but it occupies only a relatively small space within the larger story. The bulk of the narrative stays with the consequences of the act of a manipulative, psychopathic femme fatale.
Been there, done that.
