Skip to main content

Thoughts on "Gone Girl"

Christopher Robin Milne.jpg

SPOILER ALERT.

I'm about to discuss a movie still in theatres. I will do so without regard for whether you want the various twists and turns to come as a surprise. So if you're going to this movie, and you do want to be surprised, stop reading now.

It isn't that I'll spoil all the twists, but I'll simply write in a way indifferent to what I spoil. Clear? Good.

Still with me? Better. Here's the thing. The central female character in the movie is famous, in a way she does not welcome. She is named "Amy," and is the daughter of a husband/wife writing team who have created a successful series of books collectively entitled Amazing Amy. The fictional "amazing" character's life is a somewhat fictionalized version of the actual Amy's life growing up.

The police detective who first investigates Amy's disappearance buys into this confusion, at least early on. She recognizes "Amazing Amy" related materials around the house and says, "Oooh, you're married to Amazing Amy!" The viewer wants to say, "no he isn't." After all, Christopher Milne wasn't "Christopher Robin."

Now you, dear reader, presumably get my choice of illustration above.

Anyway, one comes to discover as the movie unfolds that the real-world Amy is deeply, even amazingly, psychotic woman. She is a "gone" girl in at least two senses, and her metaphorical gone-ness is the cause of her physical gone-ness. The underlying theme, I gather, is that her confusion of reality and fantasy began early and was never remedied. She acts like someone who believes she can re-create reality at will, and has some success at doing so.

It is a good movie. It felt a bit long to me. [The length came, I gather, from a desire on the part of the filmmakers to keep all the twists and turns of the book faithfully.]

Those are my thoughts. I'll wrap this up with the names of the leading members of the cast: 

Ben Affleck (Nick), Rosamund Pike (Amy), Kim Dickens (Rhonda Boney, the abovementioned detective) , Patrick Fugit as Boney's side kick, Officer James Gilpin.

Finally, here's a shout out to Missi Pyle, who plays a TV talk-shot host who distorts and defines the case for her large audience -- a character named Ellen Abbott but plainly a parody of Nancy Grace. Wonderful scene-stealing stuff.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more