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I brought back the ol’ spoiler sled because this is a movie that employs a lot of ellipsis and misdirection, so I can’t say much about it without giving away many of the twists.  A man discovers that his home has been broken into and his wife is missing.  He calls the police.  The investigation is interspersed with passages from the missing wife’s diary, illustrated by flashbacks detailing their idyllic courtship and marriage.  Twist one: as the first hour unspools, we discover that things aren’t so idyllic⁠—we learn about troubles in their relationship (for instance, she complains that he unilaterally moved them from New York to Missouri), and it is revealed out of the blue that he’s had a mistress for the past fifteen months.  Twist two: all those diary entries turn out to be fabricated, so the flashbacks we’ve been watching are fictions.  Yes, things were good at first, and yes, she’s been dissatisfied lately (especially since she knows about the mistress), but she wrote the diary as part of a scheme to frame her husband for murdering her.  Initially this seems to add another interesting wrinkle to the story, but ultimately it makes the story less interesting, since as the movie progresses, she becomes more and more of a cartoon psychopath.  For instance, we learn that this frame-up is not a once-in-a-lifetime gambit for this woman.  On the contrary, one of her go-to moves against men who have fallen afoul of her is to inflict the appropriate wounds on herself and accuse the men of rape.

To a great extent Gone Girl is about tabloid TV, with Nancy Grace clones opining about the case on every channel, but I don’t have a TV and therefore don’t know too much about that world.  But I do know a bit about how this sort of thing works online.  An allegation of rape (or something rape-adjacent) makes the news, and then you get a rehash of the usual argument: on the one side, “That story sounds fishy! Innocent until proven guilty!”, and on the other, “We must believe accusers! Over ninety percent of these allegations are true!”  But ninety percent isn’t a hundred percent, meaning that every so often the case ends with an exoneration or retraction, as in the Duke lacrosse case, or the Virgina frat case, or the more recent story about the boys accused of holding a girl down and cutting off her dreadlocks.  The make-believe defense attorneys on Twitter crow that they were right, and the make-believe prosecutors on the blogs grumble that statistically they’re right nine times as often and lament that false accusers make it that much harder for all the real victims out there.  So I had to wonder what they thought about an author who made her big bestseller revolve around a woman who has made false rape allegations her calling card.  It’s a fictional data point, but multiply it by fifteen million copies sold and another fifteen million tickets sold and you’ve probably shaped the national conversation a bit.  Apparently the author has argued that a desire for strong female characters has to include villains as well, saying that the notion that “women are innately good” limits women in fiction to being either “spunky ‘girl power’ heroines” or else “dismissably bad” “psycho bitches”.  She considers it a blow on behalf of feminism to write books featuring women who are “pragmatically evil” and therefore genuinely scary.  Okay, sure⁠—though thinking in terms of “heroes” and “villains” also seems like it would be inherently limiting, and if the goal was to create a villain with more depth than “dang, she crazy”, I’m not convinced that the author succeeded with this one.  I admit that her backstory is interesting: her parents got rich and famous writing a series of children’s books about a fictionalized version of her that was more accomplished than she was in real life and had the interests they wanted her to have.  I love that, and I love that it’s presented really early on and isn’t unveiled later as some sort of revelatory key to understanding her.  But it’s a piece that feels imported from a better movie.

I had the same sense when I considered a sequence that I saw a number of articles about Gone Girl single out: the “cool girl” monologue, in which the villain growls about how she had tailored her appearance and personality to fit her husband’s preferences, only to nevertheless be passed over.  It went the other way, too, she confides: “I forged the man of my dreams. We were happy pretending to be other people.”  But then, she explains, her husband “got lazy. He became someone I did not agree to marry.”  This left me scratching my head a bit.  Yes, the couple’s banter during their courtship could be construed as performative: it’s so consciously clever that it feels scripted… but it is clever, so I initially assumed that it was just the product of a writer deliberately deciding to rack up rom-com points at the expense of authenticity.  Now it seems the movie wanted us to believe that (as was the case for the opening conversation of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) what initially seemed like less than stellar writing was actually meant to be a clue.  I.e., look, they’re clearly putting on performances for each other, and the central conflict is that the wife wants that to go on forever, while the husband wants to eventually let his guard down!  The problem with this is that if this is performative cleverness for the sake of courtship, why do we also see it in the husband’s banter with his twin sister?  Heck, we even see it to a certain extent in the “letting himself go” phase of the marriage.  So, again, the “cool girl” monologue feels like a piece imported from another movie.  She’s complaining about having made herself blue-collar (drinking canned beer, eating cold pizza, and watching Adam Sandler movies) in order to appeal to her blue-collar husband, but we haven’t seen any of that⁠—what we’ve seen is them sipping wine at fancy events, buying high-thread-count sheets, and trading repartee about Jane Austen.  Even if we posit that the self-editing happened offscreen, that very fact means that the monologue doesn’t land.

But it’s easy to see why the filmmakers would still try to shoehorn it in: it does speak to a tension at the heart of a lot of relationships.  Because while “I love you, you’re perfect, now change” is a sentiment with enough resonance to have spawned a musical back in the day, the “cool girl” monologue strikes me as more on the money.  That is, my guess is that relationships in which one partner goes the full Shape of Things and demands a raft of changes are rarer than those in which a partner makes those changes unilaterally and ends up complaining, “I’ve altered my appearance to fit your idea of what’s attractive, I’ve taken an interest in your interests even when I find them boring, I’ve changed my habits and even suppressed elements of my personality in response to your disapproval, I’ve been pleasant to your friends and family members even when I disliked them, I’ve accompanied you to events I didn’t want to go to, I’ve catered to you sexually⁠—what is it going to take for you to do the same for me / make a deeper commitment / etc.?”  From there the argument might continue: “Hey, I never asked you to change!”  “But if I hadn’t, would we still be together?”  “Maybe not! But wouldn’t it be better for you to just be yourself, and find someone more compatible with the real you? And let me try to find someone who is genuinely compatible with me instead of playing a role and resenting it the whole time?”

Not so very long ago that would have seemed to me like the last word in this sort of dispute.  But I have come to find a number of counterarguments convincing enough that I find myself torn on the issue.  One is that the whole concept of a “real you” is a lot more problematic than I once thought.  There are elements of personality that can’t be dismissed⁠—introversion vs. extraversion does seem to be an actual thing, for instance⁠—but a lot of behavior is situational and social.  We are different when we are with different people, and they are different when they’re with us, even without any conscious play-acting.  Put people together long enough, though, as in a family or a couple, and they start to mold to each other’s shape for longer than the moment at hand.  Which brings me to counterpoint two, something I would love to go back in time and tell my past self: history is its own compatibility.  Those extra few percentage points of similarity on a personality test or that one additional shared hobby don’t outweigh years of good memories (assuming the memories are in fact good).  And then counterpoint three is, where exactly are you going to find that person with the extra compatibility points?  It’s one thing when you’re in college, surrounded by thousands of people of roughly your age and intellectual caliber, very few of whom are already permanently attached: you actually can decide that your current partner isn’t working out and expect that a prospect as good or better will come along without your having to make too exhaustive an effort to meet someone.  It’s another when you’re an adult.  The couple in Gone Girl meets at a party; even if you’re a social butterfly and make a habit of going to these, chatting with a handful of randos every week seems like a good way to, y’know, meet a handful of randos.  Not a super efficient way to find your soulmate.  In theory online dating should be far superior⁠—or at least it should have been, back in the days when it was based on written profiles and questionnaires rather than selfies⁠—but while I hear it’s worked for some people, in practice it hasn’t really been as revolutionary as people expected in the punch card days.  The idea was that by the 21st century everyone who was still single would be in the system, and whiz-bang computers the size of a room would match up brain patterns and announce, correctly, that the love of your life was currently living in South Dakota.  Failing that, it seems a little blithe to suggest that people in relationships that aren’t entirely perfect should venture back into the great unknown rather than making some compromises.  Of course, there’s a difference between “not entirely perfect” and “my wife is a psychopath who tried to get me executed and personally slashed a guy’s throat”.

And so when the movie ends with central couple re-committed to working things out, it would be a darkly comic note… except that one of the concluding scenes focuses on the emotional toll this decision takes on the husband’s twin sister, and that’s not funny.  I loved the twin sister.  She was the best thing about the movie.  I mean, she wasn’t the deepest character I’ve ever run into; I’ve heard it said that in a good story every supporting character should be written as if she were the protagonist of another story we happen not to be reading, and that’s not what we have here.  We never get any real hint of her having a life beyond her relationship to the protagonist.  He even goes so far as to articulate her role in the story: “You’re my voice of reason.”  And in that capacity, wow⁠—I mean, soulmates are an appealing fantasy, but the notion of having someone in your life who knows you intimately, has that lifetime of shared memories and that shared language that develops in a pair bond, and is clear-eyed enough and unafraid enough to call you out on your stupid behavior⁠—but still says flat out, even when she’s shouting at you, that she is on your side no matter what⁠—and all without the complications of romance, which can end up going south and ending the relationship… that’s a fantasy that puts the manic pixie dream girls to shame.  She’s the real hero of the story, as the filmmakers indicate, in time-honored cinematic shorthand, by having her pause for a split second while storming out of the house to give the cat a quick pet on the head.  (The cat is the second-best thing about the movie.)

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