Traversing the Class Boundary: Gone Girl (2014) as Failed Remake

David Fincher's 2014 film adaptation of Gillian Flynn's wildly popular 2012 novel Gone Girl is clearly (though not always explicitly) an inverted adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925). Rather than following the movement from the Middle West to the sophistication and prestige of the New York City scene of the Jazz Age, however, Gone Girl begins in New York under the aura of commercial prosperity, only to settle in the isolated middle-class landscape of suburban Missouri. The film follows the lives of Amy (Rosamund Pike), a young, affluent New Yorker, and her husband, Nick (Ben Affleck), a midwestern 'everyman' who teaches writing at a community college. On the morning of the couple's five-year anniversary, Amy disappears and Nick is implicated in her murder, which causes a media frenzy reminiscent of the 2002 Laci Peterson case. The plot develops under the gaze of a hawkish media—including a clever caricature of Nancy Grace named Ellen Abbott (Missi Pyle)—though it becomes clear that Nick has been framed by Amy. Hence, the bulk of the film focuses on Nick attempting to exonerate himself in front of news cameras, the police, Amy's family, as well as his twin sister, Margo (Carrie Coon).

Although the twist that Nick has not participated in his wife's disappearance is revealed early on, he is far from inculpable; in her diary (later found by police), Amy accuses Nick of domestic abuse, and he has cheated on her with one of his young students Andie (Emily Ratajkowski). Amy, it turns out, has faked her disappearance and taken to the road disguised as a working-class woman. She ritualistically strips herself of the signifiers of her affluence and replaces them with working-class ones (a bandana, sweat-pants, Coca-Cola, and Little Debbie), all while carefully and painstakingly carrying out her meticulously planned revenge plot against Nick. When Nick gains the upper hand in the media, Amy seeks assistance from her former lover Desi (Neil Patrick Harris) whom she will later falsely frame as her kidnapper. Amy eventually makes a 'heroic' return to Nick's arms in front of news cameras after staging her escape and murdering Desi. Nick is nonplussed, but must keep up appearances in front of the vulture tabloid media perched outside of their home.

The film occasionally offers visual and dialogic hints at the ideological differences between New York and Missouri—Nick describing himself as a "Corvette, salt-of-the-earth, Missouri guy" and Amy identifying herself as a New Yorker for whom "the world ends at the Hudson"—however, the film fails to capture the potential impact of this truly radical geographical juxtaposition. Cultural differences such as the ideological, economic, and social antagonisms between these loci are shown in several superficial and short-lived montages early on in the film, depicting both the desolate midwestern scenery and the glitz, glamour, and magical aura of New York.

The viewer is introduced to the latter via a rather banal scene in which Amy and Nick fall in love under wafts of powdered sugar that rise into the air from workers in the background unloading parcels from a truck in an alleyway; the sugar is momentarily suspended in the night sky as the couple share an embrace—one example of the numerous clichés that mar the film. This simulated romantic atmosphere indicates, at best, Fincher's willingness to broach issues of class difference in the most cursory way imaginable. The specific context for the couple's New York romance may very well have been a byproduct of the laborers' efforts, but any intrigue born of this encounter between two well-to-do young lovers and the workers stops short when the narrative shifts to a mundane conjugal fantasy in which the two leads are depicted taking one another on treasure hunts and keeping their love life interesting, often via adventurous sexual liaisons in odd places (a bookstore, for instance). The sexual fantasy elides the social context in which the fantasy itself is upheld.

Fitzgerald employs a strikingly similar visual metaphor of...