The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
David Fincher · a film · 2014 · 149 minutes · written by Gillian Flynn, from her novel
Mode
Wrongful-suspect thriller turned at its midpoint into a black comedy of marriage; procedural, satire of television justice and domestic noir in one film
Mythos
The Punch and Judy show reversed; the self replaced by its idealised double; Bluebeard inverted, the secret room the wife’s; the femme fatale given her own voice
Phase
The days after a fifth wedding anniversary, counted on screen, cross-cut with a diary of the marriage from New York to Missouri
Presentation
Feature film in colour and widescreen, 149 minutes, in English; the theatrical release; a diary in voiceover for the first half and a change of narrator at the turn
Register
Cool and even, from a lawyer’s comedy of jelly beans to a throat cut in white sheets; a score soft as a spa and wrong underneath
Scale
One marriage, one Missouri river town, and a nation watching on television
Governing Proposition
On the morning of their fifth anniversary a wife disappears, and the country decides her husband killed her; halfway through, the film shows her alive and the diary it has been illustrating a fabrication. The wager of the film is that a marriage is a pair of performances each partner stages for the other, that when the audience widens to a nation the same performance becomes a trial, and that the film’s own images can be made one of the performances.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins on a woman’s head. Amy Elliott Dunne lies with her head on a pillow and turns to look up, and her husband’s voice says that he wants to know what is inside it. Then the day: the morning of the Dunnes’ fifth wedding anniversary, in North Carthage, Missouri. Nick Dunne is at The Bar with his twin sister, Margo. A neighbour calls. At home he finds the glass table overturned and his wife gone.
The police come: Detective Rhonda Boney, played by Kim Dickens, and Officer Gilpin, played by Patrick Fugit. From here the present is marked by cards that count the days. Ben Affleck plays Nick as an affable man with a ready smile, and the smile is the first thing the film turns against him. Carrie Coon’s Margo and Dickens’s Boney give the film its ordinary decency.
David Fincher made the film from Gillian Flynn’s screenplay of her own novel of 2012. It opened the New York Film Festival in late September 2014, and 20th Century Fox released it in October. Jeff Cronenweth photographed it, Kirk Baxter edited it, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross wrote the music. Rosamund Pike plays Amy; Tyler Perry plays the lawyer Tanner Bolt, Neil Patrick Harris plays Desi Collings, and Missi Pyle the cable anchor Ellen Abbott. The film runs 149 minutes, in colour and widescreen. It closes on the shot it opened with.
Movement II
The search becomes a siege. Volunteers and onlookers gather, and a vigil is held. Nick smiles at the first press conference and is evasive with Boney, and on cable Ellen Abbott tries the case each night as a story with its verdict already in. The anniversary brings a treasure hunt Amy has laid for her husband, and Nick follows it clue by clue.
Against the investigation the film cuts Amy’s diary, in her voice. They meet in New York; he kisses her in an alley as sugar falls around them like snow; he proposes. Then both writers lose their jobs, and the couple move to Missouri for Nick’s dying mother. The diary turns to money, and then to fear. The first hour builds the case against Nick in the audience exactly as the police and the press build it in the town.
Amy’s parents, played by David Clennon and Lisa Banes, made her childhood into a series of children’s books, Amazing Amy, in which an idealised Amy improved upon the girl they had. Nick’s father is lost to dementia and to his contempt for women. Behind the families is the recession: two layoffs, a dead mall in which the dispossessed sleep, a move from Manhattan to a river town. Everything the film will need is in place, and the audience has been made a jury.
Movement III
Then Amy is shown alive, driving south, eating, and her voice tells what she has done. The diary was written to be found, a fabrication made for the police, and the scenes the film has shown as memory were her authored record. The kiss in the falling sugar is still beautiful, and it is now known to be a document.
In the same voice comes the “Cool Girl” monologue, which names the femininity a woman performs in order to be loved. Her plan is laid out piece by piece as the image of the perfect wife comes apart on the road. The disappearance was staged, and Nick is to be framed for her murder.
The change of narrator is a change of genre. The wrongful-suspect thriller becomes a black comedy of marriage, and the film’s own images are among the things it has lied with. From here the story runs on two lines, two descents in parallel: a husband learning to perform his innocence, and a wife whose performance must survive the world.
Movement IV
Nick hires the lawyer Tanner Bolt. Bolt’s first lesson is that the trial is on television. He drills Nick for an interview, and jelly beans are thrown at him for every wrong note, every smirk, every sign of the man the country has decided he is. Perry plays it as precise comedy, and the comedy is the argument: innocence is a performance, and Nick must learn it.
He learns it. In a television interview with Sharon Schieber he performs, on camera, the husband the country wants. Boney goes on suspecting. Left in the woodshed is a pair of Punch and Judy puppets: the husband who beats, the wife who is beaten, and the baby between them.
Amy, meanwhile, hides at a group of cabins in the Ozarks. There Greta and Jeff, played by Lola Kirke and Boyd Holbrook, rob her of her money. With nothing left, she takes refuge with Desi Collings in his lake house, a house watched by his own cameras.
Movement V
She kills him. Before his own cameras she stages a rape and an escape, and in his bed, in white sheets, she cuts his throat. The film holds the stillness after. Then she returns, and in the night she comes up the lawn soaked in his blood and falls into Nick’s arms before the cameras. The story she gives the country is the one the cameras have shown.
The inquiry is closed. Boney’s suspicion and the FBI’s questions are dropped rather than resolved, and the marriage resumes on Amy’s terms. She is pregnant. The puppet show from the woodshed is completed reversed: the baby between them is the wife’s weapon, and the husband stays.
In the last scene the couple face the cameras together, and the performance has no end in view. The film returns to its first shot. Amy’s head on the pillow turns and looks up, and Nick’s voice asks again what is inside it, “What have we done” among the questions. Nothing has been answered. What the film has shown is a marriage in which every image is staged for someone, and a camera that has staged its images for us.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure, the spine holds: the first half builds the case against Nick in the audience as the police and the press build it, the second takes it apart, and neither could be cut. The diary is required to make the audience a jury that can be lied to. The Ozarks interlude looks removable and is not: the robbery at the cabins strips Amy of her money and sends her to Desi, without whom there is no murder to use. The give is weighed in full, and it lies in length as much as at the edges. Andie is a function more than a part, the clue hunt runs a station longer than it needs, and the closing stretch, from the return to the pregnancy, takes several codas to arrive where its first already pointed. At 149 minutes the film is long for its argument: its parts are required in kind more than in length.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: a marriage is a pair of performances each partner stages for the other, and when the audience widens to a nation the same performance becomes a trial. The film shows it at three scales under one law. The “Cool Girl” monologue names the femininity performed to be loved; Nick learns on camera to perform the husband the country wants; the cable anchor Ellen Abbott runs the case as story and verdict before evidence. Beneath it lies the recession: two writers laid off, a dead mall where the dispossessed sleep. The route is weighed heavily. The account of marriage leans on a near-omnipotent planner to make its point, so the general condition is partly hidden behind the singular case, and the false accusations she stages press the film toward a fantasy it partly satirises and partly indulges. What it discloses holds; how far it holds is narrowed.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The film is pitched low by design, cool and even, and its elevation is dread rather than beauty. It rises in a few places: the sugar falling in the alley as Nick kisses Amy, a lit moment later shown to be her record of it; Amy driving south, eating, as her voice lays out the plan and the perfect wife comes apart; the murder of Desi, the white sheets, the blade, the long stillness after; Amy at night on the lawn, soaked in blood, falling into Nick’s arms before the cameras; the last image, her face turned up from the pillow. The score keeps dread under every room. What holds the axis among the lowest is weighed heavily: the rises are few, and the chosen key, sleek satire, keeps the height deliberately short, so that between them dread is kept level rather than raised.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Myth is partly built. The Punch and Judy puppets left in the woodshed are the pattern made literal: the husband who beats, the wife who is beaten, and the baby between them, which the ending turns into the wife’s weapon; the last turn of the plot is the puppet show reversed. Amazing Amy, the children’s-book double whom her parents improved upon her life, is a real device: the self replaced by its idealised image, the woman who becomes the story told about her. Under them run Bluebeard inverted, the secret room the wife’s, and the femme fatale of noir given her own voice. The limits are weighed heavily. The puppets are one built pattern among patterns quoted; the archetypes stay small and mostly ironic, quoted with a wink; and the marriage, for all its scale in the press, does not become every couple’s.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The inheritance is the erotic and domestic thriller of the 1980s and 1990s, Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct, Hitchcock’s suspected husbands behind them in Suspicion and Rebecca, and the studio adaptation of a bestseller. The turns are real: a studio picture that changes protagonist and genre at its midpoint; flashbacks the camera shows as true and later disowns; a satire of television justice inside a thriller; an ending in which the killer wins and the marriage goes on. What holds the axis among the lowest is the stake, and it is weighed heavily. The midpoint and the ending belonged to a novel already read by millions, and the film was a major-studio release with a star and an established director at the height of his command. The swerve is the source’s, made filmic with skill; the film wagered nothing of its own on it.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The form carries what the film knows. Told in order, this is the story of a woman framing her husband. Told as a diary the audience trusts and then learns to distrust, it makes the viewer one of the people taken in, and puts the film’s own images among the lies: the flashbacks are photographed as memory and turn out to be Amy’s authored record, so the camera itself has performed for us, as the press and the couple perform. The day counts give the procedural its clock, and the change of narrator at the turn is the change of genre. One shot opens and closes the film, framing all of it as Nick’s question about what is inside her head. The costs are counted in full: the structure is the novel’s transposed, and in the second half the form loosens into a more ordinary cross-cut thriller, carrying the plot after its knowledge has been delivered.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Twelve years of evidence, so the axis is largely forecast, and forecast is credited sparingly. The film does yield on return. Amy’s diary scenes read as performed once one knows; Nick’s smile at the first press conference and his evasions to Boney are guilt of another kind, which the film never clears; the twin’s knowledge and the parents’ use of their daughter look different the second time. The critical record is substantial for its age: a lasting dispute over whether the film is misogynist or feminist, the “Cool Girl” monologue taken up far beyond film, and Fincher’s craft studied as a model of digital precision. What limits it weighs heavily: much of the return is the return of a well-made puzzle, whose secret is given up once, and the long rereading the axis credits has not had the years to show itself.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Released in 2014, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of the 2010s. Intrinsic force: a studio thriller made into a satire of marriage and of trial by television, with a female villain given the film’s argument and its most quoted speech. It perfected a manner, the glossy adult thriller of Fincher’s maturity, more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide in audience; the “Cool Girl” monologue in common speech; the film a reference point in the domestic noir that followed in film and television, The Girl on the Train (2016), Big Little Lies (2017) and Flynn’s own Sharp Objects (2018). What holds the axis among the lowest: much of that wave answers the novel as much as the film, and that share is discounted; the reach that remains lies within its genre, and a manner perfected is not a field redirected.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Weighed on form, presence, then fabric, across twelve years. The form survives whole: the theatrical release is complete and in circulation, and nothing is lost. Presence has been continuous and wide since 2014, in theatres, on home video and in streaming. The fabric charges a little. The recession, the cable anchor, the camera phones and the media apparatus of 2014 are the film’s subject and fix it to its moment, though its satire of televised true crime has so far grown more pertinent rather than less. Survival is credited for what elapsed time has shown, and twelve years show little. The span is short and the surface is topical by design, and the figure takes both.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Read to the anchors of the elder arts. Command of the medium is high and short of complete. Jeff Cronenweth’s digital photography, low-lit, greenish and amber, keeps every room exact and slightly sick; Kirk Baxter’s cutting of the first hour, present against diary, holds two clocks and two voices without strain; the score of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is placed as a mood of false calm, sparingly and exactly. Rosamund Pike gives two women in one body, the diarist and the author, and the shift between them is the performance; Ben Affleck’s affability and opacity are used as evidence against him; Tyler Perry’s Bolt is precise comedy. The costs hold the figure, those of the third act most of all: Desi is a mannered sketch, Andie a prop, the closing legal turns hurried, with Boney’s suspicion and the FBI interview dropped rather than resolved, and Amy’s plan rests on a competence the film asks us to accept rather than shows.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Tanner Bolt drilling Nick for television with jelly beans thrown at every wrong note, and Amy cutting Desi’s throat in his bed. One law governs both: the self made for an audience. Bolt trains a performance; Amy stages the murder before Desi’s own cameras as a rape and an escape. The diary, the treasure hunt, the vigil, the television interview and the last scene of the couple facing the press obey the same law, and the range is wide: comedy of manners, procedural, horror and satire held together. The strain is weighed in full, and it is in plausibility. The police and legal world of the second half bends to the plot, and the investigation that shaped the first half is all but switched off once Amy returns. The law holds in theme; in the world it slackens, and the film lets it.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The orders held: marriage at the centre; the family, in the twins, in Amy’s parents who sold her childhood as a book series, in Nick’s dying mother and his father lost to dementia and to contempt for women; the economy, in two layoffs, a dead mall and the move from Manhattan to a Missouri river town; the press as judge; the law, in Boney, Gilpin and Bolt; gender, as the performance the film is about. They are integrated: the recession breaks the marriage, the marriage becomes a media case, and the case is decided by gender. What holds the axis among the lowest weighs heavily: consciousness is two people and only one is entered, the town is a backdrop of volunteers and onlookers, the sacred is absent except as a vigil, and the state stops at a county police department. The orders are many, and each is held only as far as the case needs it.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.3, then The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.1. A making in which deceiving flashbacks, two clocks cut against each other and a double performance at the centre carry the design, short of complete in a hurried third act; a form that makes the viewer one of those taken in and puts the camera among the liars, though it loosens once its knowledge is delivered; and one law, the self made for an audience, that governs a lawyer’s comedy and a murder in white sheets, while the world of the second half bends to the plot.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime, The Swerve, Pressure on Tradition and The Encompassed at 7.4. A cool key that rises only a few times; turns that were real but belonged to a bestseller already read, made by a major studio at no risk; a manner perfected rather than a field reorganised, with a reach that lies within its genre and is shared with the novel; and orders held together by the case, with consciousness entered in one of its two people, a town of onlookers and a state that stops at a county police department.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.1, The Made at 8.3, The Inner Law at 8.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Unconcealment at 7.9, The Imperishable at 7.9, The Archetypal Deep at 7.6, The Swerve at 7.4 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.4 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.4, The Swerve, 7.4, and Pressure on Tradition, 7.4, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.4. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.7, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Gone Girl in its theatrical release, 149 minutes, in colour and widescreen, as released by 20th Century Fox in October 2014 after opening the New York Film Festival in late September 2014, from the first shot of Amy’s head on the pillow to its return at the close: directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by Gillian Flynn, after her novel of 2012, photographed by Jeff Cronenweth, edited by Kirk Baxter, with music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The unit is the film; the novel is its source, and the film is judged on what it achieves in its own medium, neither capped by the novel nor charged for what it inherits, and credited with what it carries over and makes its own. No print, screenplay or subtitle file was consulted. Dialogue is described rather than quoted, except for two short phrases whose words are certain. Figures and details that could not be verified, among them the time at which the turn falls, the dates of the diary entries, the number of day cards, awards and box-office returns, are not given.