GONE GIRL

GONE GIRL gave us something different... or did it?

When the movie Gone Girl came out, there was a lot of talk about it on the Internet. I was excited by reading all the reviews and discussion forums of the film and book, because I haven’t seen that much dialog between women about contemporary media issues before. I was really excited that there were so many women commenting, and many different viewpoints, and most importantly, that it was bringing to light feminist discussion and dialog about something we all can see and relate to: portrayals of women in media that surround us all, and the impacts it all has.  Gone Girl got us talking, and that was what interested me. So I went to see the film.

Immediately following the film, I bought and read the book.

The biggest problem I have with the book and the film, both, are that they contribute, yet again, to the already heaping pile of sexual/misogynistic norms present in media and daily life that women already always have to face whenever we want to engage in any form of media entertainment. I get so tired of having to read about or look at women’s breasts, in all varied shapes and sizes, and yep, we’ve seen them all.  God forbid a type of female breast exist that men don’t get to be fully aware of and rate on their scale of preference! Thank heavens visual media exists to let men see them all.  But that’s just only one beef I have about the film Gone Girl.

I tried to reconcile the author’s feminist point of view, which was apparent in the novel, with the misogynistic media-contributions that her book’s language and the adapted screenplay further added to media landscape of hand-slap degradation of women in general, and female viewers and readers.  But then I finally realized the big truth:

Gillian Flynn was acting as “the messenger,” reflecting our own selves and our own lives of present-state USA, men and women, what we’ve become or are becoming.  She wasn’t trying to contribute to media misogyny per se, but rather, to expose it to us – by pushing aside the sheer veneer that covers ‘ordinary’ day-to-day life, and revealing a darker truth, where attitudes of misogyny and misandry exist.

What did truly bother me about the movie version of this story was the aggressive, gratuitous, and shocking physical violence depicted onto the woman in the film (the wife, Amy). None of those scenes of graphic violence were in the book, only in the film.  And the gratuitous, done-on-purpose-to-show naked erotic, young, almost impossibly sexy female breasts (the kind that are so rare that hardly any girls have them, and hardly any guys would normally ever get to see them), which was then further misogynized by adding a line from the book that was totally bastardized and taken in a completely different context, becoming very misogynistic, where it wasn’t before, in the novel.

Case in point:  In the film, Amy makes the comment about this gal’s “come-on-me tits" – a pornographic, misogynistic image of female sexuality. And although that phrase was referred to in the original the novel, it was not spoken in this same context, nor even by the same character. In the book it was empowering: the young girl, mad and sad that she is being dumped and ignored, whines:  “I even let you come on my tits.” That’s a very different scene from the titty-porn shot in the film, and the porn-line spoken by the voice-over narrative of Amy, the wife, calling that girls breasts we all just witnessed, “come-on-me-tits.”  This use of the scene with her exposed breasts (which was also in the book) and the use of that phrase were totally done in the film for the pleasures and appeasement of men, in my opinion, and to make women have to sit through more of the same damn shame that we always do: that we simply have to put up with female erotic, nude images in films because men can’t even make it through a two-hour film without some erotic stimulation, lest we lose their interest.  Geesh! 

The book Gone Girl is well-written and a well-woven story. It is an interesting read, an enjoyable guilty pleasure, although it ever further reinforces that language which women are already far-too-oft referred to in our daily lives now:  Bitch. You Bitch. Those Bitches.  The book lays that on very heavily.

Meanwhile, the film has several blatant messages of misogyny.  The porn tits and porn references to a girl’s body.  The shocking, sudden bursts of violence done to Amy, there only for the movie’s sake. The same old Hollywood crap we get fed every time.  Yeah, at least there is a glimpse of two different penises, and one is even combined with an act of violence on a naked man in a sexual situation. So I felt like that was Flynn’s feminist concession in return for allowing the director, David Fincher, to bastardize and misogynize the titty scene.  I guess that’s progress, in some respect.  I do have new respect for Neil Patrick Harris, though!  (Thanks, for being cool, Neil). 

However, personally, I am very offended by nudity in film that is combined with violence, humiliation, heinous acts and murder.  It’s like a Pavlov’s Dog training: get people aroused by the nudity, titillated by the scene in front of them, and then throw in the anxiety of violence and abuse. It links those two emotions in our physiology to see that, especially if it’s repeated over and over to us in our media.

I like the beauty of humanity. I love naked male bodies in films. But having a super-quick, don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it side shot of a penis in a shower, while still fun, is rather ridiculous (no pun intended), and I don’t enjoy seeing blood and death and violence done to any beautiful human being, especially when they are naked. Still, I am glad they sneaked a couple penis shots into the film. Thank you for that contribution to media. It’s a step, anyway.

My three main points about Gone Girl:

A) That this was a reflection, a mirror, and life-imitating art, to show us who we are.

B)  That the film in particular, but also the book, CONTRIBUTED to even more media misogyny, same old same old. That was my biggest criticism of the book.

C) That the film was very misogynistic, and added tons of horrific violence to woman (self-inflicted and by men) on a woman (who, incidentally, we all learned, “deserved it”).  These are very misogynistic undertones that became full-frontal in the film.  And no women were talking about that in the discussion forums I read on line. Those scenes of knock-out punches to the face weren’t even in the book. So why were they there in the film? And the book’s author wrote the screenplay, so how did this happen?

It did occur to me that the violence may have been added as a trade-off for what was left out of the film, but which was in the book. And that is the inner mantra, repeated over-and-over again, by father and son, that underlying rage against women: “bitchbitchyoubitch.”  It permeates the pages of the novel but was relatively removed from the film.  Perhaps they needed a way to cinema-graphically depict his inner, seething rage/frustration/misogyny against his wife, but wanted to leave the dialog free of that many uses of the word. So maybe, the violence was that tradeoff.  I can’t really comment further about it; it was there, it was what it was.

That’s my review and analysis of the film Gone Girl.  I welcome your responses.

by Femblogger   11-18-2014