Gone Girl (2014)

"When I think of my wife, I always think of the back of her head. I picture cracking her lovely skull, unspooling her brain, trying to get answers. The primal questions of a marriage: What are you thinking? How are you feeling? What have we done to each other? What will we do?"

In 1999's 'Fight Club', Fincher explored a secret society of men who aimed to tear down the capitalistic world built on consumerism, and every once in awhile they'd fight each other for fun. This group was started by a man named Tyler Durden. 'Gone Girl' is a film that exists in the same vein as 'Fight Club.' Amy Dunn is our female Tyler Durden. Instead of tearing down capitalism she wants to destroy her own marriage in the most insane way possible. In both stories, the characters rebel against the American ideal of attainable perfection, substituting for it an alternative one of ethereal, freedom-giving destruction. Gone Girl simply substitutes addictive and suppressive consumerism for coupledom, which hits closer to home for your average american citizen. Unlike Fincher's other films Se7en or The Social network, which are grounded in reality, Gone Girl and Fight Club don't really exist in this plane of reality. They're purposefully stylized and constructed in a kafkaesque manor. It's actually reliving that not all of Gone Girl is plausible. This isn't to say that our actors don't deliver powerful and believable performances. They do. But when you watch Gone Girl, or Fight Club, and notice the specific framing of the shots, the positing of it's characters. It's a surreal imitation of the world we exist in everyday.

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