Spoilers.
If you grew up in the late
80s/early 90s, then you were doubtless exposed to a very specific type of
glossy domestic thriller in which well-heeled, upwardly mobile couples with
fantastic kitchens find their ideal existences thrown into turmoil by some
malignant, disruptive force – normally a psychopath whose façade of mental
normalcy crumbles like an industrial demolition job once the couple have let
them into their lives. New Zealand film
critic and blogger Dominic Corry has aptly christened this sub-genre the Yuppies in Peril cycle. The template was set in stone by Adrian
Lyne’s 1987 smash Fatal Attraction:
a domestic setting which is glamorous enough to be escapist, but familiar enough
to allow queasy audience identification; an association of erotic gratification
with unforeseen consequences and peril; a manipulative plotline that taps into
themes of infidelity and gender relations.
The crucial element, of course, was Glenn Close’s obsessive,
psychopathic clinger Alexandra Forest.
Not all the crazies in the cycle of films that followed were female, but
the female psychopath remains the presiding motif in the genre, and as such the
figure can be traced back to Jessica Walter’s proto-bunny burner in Clint
Eastwood’s Play Misty for Me
(1971). (Elements of the Yuppie in Peril
and erotic thriller were also prefigured in Brian de Palma’s brilliant Dressed to Kill (1980), in which Angie
Dickenson’s bored housewife pays a disproportionately horrendous price for
indulging in casual infidelity with a stranger she meets at a gallery.) Why did these films emerge precisely when
they did? In some respects, they
reflected a turning away from the hedonistic and experimental sexual ethos of
the 70s – a societal change reflected politically in the Reaganite conservative
counter-revolution, and driven viscerally home by the emergence of the AIDS
virus. While the slasher movie reflected
anxieties about sexuality which are perhaps universal to adolescents, the
Yuppie in Peril and related erotic thrillers reflected a new cultural mood of
anxiety relating to sexual promiscuity among adults. In this light, a film like Fatal Attraction can be seen as
reflecting an affirmation of conventional monogamous marital values, showing the
necessity to purge them of the disruptive threat represented by Close’s
unmarried psychopath. Nevertheless,
there is always a slight, perhaps unintentional, undertow of ambiguity
regarding these monstrous female avengers – we feel that by the end Douglas has
had his cake and eaten it, and perhaps a degree of sympathy for the bunny-burner. These are the contentious issues that these movies
skirt over; in her Slate article The Psycho Bitch, from Fatal Attraction’sSingle Woman to Gone Girl’s Perfect Wife, Amanda Hess points out that the
original short film on which Attraction was
based, Diversion, was far more a
critique of the cheating husband than a demonization of the Other Woman.
In
his self-conscious horror pastiche/homage Cabin
in the Wood, Joss Whedon lampooned the slasher movie audience’s sadistic
appetite for watching pretty, vacant young things terrorized and hacked
up. The movie presents this generic
convention as a seasonal sacrificial ritual, designed to pacify Lovecraftian
elder-gods. After Fatal Attraction, Hollywood’s eldritch gods – or any rate, its
ticket-buying public – wanted to see picture perfect yuppies put through the
ringer. As Dominic Curry points out, the
cycle largely bifurcated into erotic thrillers and _____ from Hell movies. In the latter category, there was a Nanny
from Hell (The Hand that Rocks the Cradle),
a Flatmate/Tenant from Hell (Single White
Female, Pacific Heights), a
Secretary from Hell (The Temp),
various Lolita temptresses from Hell (The
Crush/Poison Ivy), and on, and on. I
guess that in between the Cold War and War on Terror, we needed something to be
frightened of; in the absence of clearly defined ideological threats, people
from ordinary walks of life Who Happen to
Be Psychopaths from Hell! had to fill the gap. Don’t let them into your home! The appetite for yuppie suffering had its
watershed in 1992, the year that saw the release of The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Single
White Female, and Unlawful Entry. I maintain a certain nostalgic fondness for
these torrid, schlocky entertainments.
They were so pervasive when I was growing up that some aspect of my view
of the adult world almost felt like it was filtered through their cinematic
world of exquisite kitchens and open plan apartments - this gleaming,
aspirational world which was always threatened by the incursion of sexual
temptation and psychopathic peril.
It
was clear from its trailers that David Fincher’s latest movie Gone Girl was going to be some kind of
descendent of the Yuppie in Peril cycle. Based on Gillian Flynn’s 2012 New York Times Best Seller (which I
haven’t read), the film is a domestic thriller/mystery whose primary narrative
arc hinges on the question of whether or not Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) has
murdered his missing wife Amy (Rosamund Pike).
Unlike most of the Yuppie in Peril
movies, the psychopathology is not an outside incursion, but resides within the
marriage itself. We discover that Amy
has ingeniously staged her own disappearance and putative murder, in order to
punish Nick for his affair with a younger woman, as well as a general sense of
disappointment with his character and their marriage. Nevertheless, the general arc of the story
harkens back very distinctly to the glossy thrillers of the 80s and 90s. 1985’s Jagged
Edge builds its suspense on the ambiguity of whether or not Jack Forrester
(Jeff Bridges) has murdered his wealthy socialite wife. Written by creature of the Hollywood night Joe
Eszterhas, and starring the original psycho bitch from Hell Glenn Close (this
time on the side of the angels), Jagged
Edge has a firm pedigree in the Yuppie/erotic sub-genres. Nobody would accuse it of being high
cinematic art, but its page-turning narrative is very effectively
executed. Much of this comes down to
the lived-in authenticity of the performances.
Jeff Bridges, of course, is a singularly charming, likable presence; we
want him to be innocent. Close and the
always brilliant Robert Loggia also do much to bring the pulp to life. Another movie which effectively kept its audience
guessing about the innocence of its protagonist was Alan J. Pakula’s 1990
adaption of Scott Turrow’s legal thriller Presumed
Innocent. This time around,
prosecutor “Rusty” Sabich (Harrison Ford) has an affair with colleague Carolyn
Polhemus (Greta Scacchi), who, while not a psycho bitch from Hell, turns out to
be something of a careerist bitch
from Hell. After she’s found raped and
murdered, Rusty finds himself first chief investigator, then prime suspect, in
the case. A late entry from Alan J.
Pakula, whose magisterial 70s work is a major touchstone for David Fincher, Presumed Innocent is another taut, able
piece of pulp that derives much tension from an exceptionally coiled and tense,
possibly career best, performance from Ford.
The twist/conclusion of this movie
is worth noting in relation to Gone Girl. Rusty is exonerated after various legal shenanigans,
and the Carolyn Polhemus murder remains unsolved. Later, Rusty finds a bloody hatchet in his
home, and we discover that it was his wife Barbara – hitherto a supportive,
self-sacrificing figure in the background – who murdered Carolyn and fabricated
the evidence of the rape. Once again, we
have a female avenger – the wife this time, rather than the mistress. In Gone
Girl, Pike’s Amy takes Barbara Sabich’s calculating rage to a spectrum of
high operatic camp, and her faculty for stage managing crime scenes to the evil
genius level of a Hannibal Lecker. She
is, in some respects, a Frankenstein’s monster quilted from all the female
avengers, psycho bitches from Hell, and dangerous temptresses that dominated in
the 80s/90s vogue for domestic and erotic thrillers.
Though
widely praised, Gone Girl is proving
to be an extremely divisive film, and part of that divisiveness derives from
its rootedness in this tradition of schlocky cinematic pulp. Fincher is the premier Hollywood formalist of
his generation – since 2007’s procedural masterpiece Zodiac, he has developed a signature filmmaking style which combines
a unique affinity for using the very latest cinematic technologies, with an
approach to staging and storytelling which is classical through and
through. Frequently working with dp Jeff
Cronenweth, Fincher has taken advantage of the digital camera’s capacity to
work in low light conditions (and utilize natural light sources) to create an
inky, velveteen world of astonishing detail and subtle, twilight textures. In his last three pictures, he has employed ambient
electronic scores by Tent Reznor and Atticus Ross which fit his imagery like a glove,
adding another layer of oil slick fluidity to his work. But Gone
Girl follows directly from another bestseller adaptation (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) from
Fincher, and some critics have questioned whether the director's daunting technical
prowess is wasted on these popular novels.
Indiewire critic Michael
Nordine found it hard to “shake the notion that he could be doing something
more rewarding than becoming the preeminent director of airport novel
adaptations”, humorously opining that the director had gone “further down the Barnes
& Noble rabbit hole” than the Tattoo
adaptation had taken him. Certainly,
everybody seems to agree that Gone Girl
is some kind of trash, but that's about as
far as the consensus goes. For some, it’s
trash with a biting satirical edge; for others, its ruminations on 21st
century relationships and jabs at modern news media are old hat and obvious. Certainly, the notion that bestsellers are
beneath Fincher’s talents is a questionable one, since airport paperbacks have
served Hitchcock’s and Coppola’s just fine in the past. Nevertheless, the question of whether Fincher
is a good fit for the material is crucial to the success of the film – that is,
either the juxtaposition of Fincher’s coolly precise and naturalistic style
with the operatic high camp of the plot is a counter-intuitive masterstroke, or
a disastrous miss-mash of form and content which results in an unsatisfying,
tonally confused experience. Having
seen the film just once, I find it difficult to decide between the two.
Throughout
the first 40-50 minutes of the film, I kept thinking that although Gone Girl was infinitely better-made
than its Yuppie in Peril predecessors, it didn’t seem to fulfil its generic
obligations as effectively, in the sense that the film built up little or no
suspense (for me) in relation to the question of whether or not Nick Dunne had
murdered his wife. This, I think, was
for two reasons. Ben Affleck is clearly
a smart and highly engaged individual, and has won major plaudits for his directing
in recent years. I’m not sure, however,
that he has ever had an especially strong dramatic presence on screen. There’s nothing whatsoever wrong with his performance in this role,
but if you think about his Nick Dunne in comparison with the type of actors who
played the morally compromised Everyman role back in the 80s/90s – Michael
Douglas’ nervy intensity, for example, his endless ability to make an utter
shit somehow likable - Affleck just
doesn’t draw you into the character’s predicament, and the movie’s story, in
quite the same way. (Maybe it’s
intentional – Affleck seems to float through his situation for much of the
movie with all the nervous tension of somebody trying to rearrange a work engagement
so they can go to a football match.)
Nobody can accuse Rosamund Pike of lacking dramatic fire in this picture,
but perhaps if Affleck is presented to us at too low a key to draw us fully in,
then Pike is introduced at too high a pitch.
We are introduced to her character, and shown a version of her meeting, courtship,
and marriage to Nick, in series of subjective and unreliable scenes which
feature breathless narration from her diary.
These cloying, overwritten sequences are in a sense a pastiche of the
classic set-up of the Yuppie in Peril
narrative: here is the couple who have everything, here is the couple who are
perfectly happy; it would stretch
ordinary credibility, surely, that anything could go wrong? There a kind of generic self-consciousness in
the set-up which is not especially conducive to traditional suspense, and something
of the film’s hand has been shown: we know Amy is a psychopath, surely, because
people who behave like this in movies are invariably
psychopaths. In an interesting dialogue
about the movie at the Notebook, Doug
Dibbern captures the non-naturalistic oddity of Amy’s characterisation in the
first half of the film: “But Flynn and
Fincher make his wife, on the other hand, one of the most outlandish
caricatures I’ve seen in years. Rosamund Pike plays her from the opening scenes
with a vacant, ice-princess stare as if she’s always posing for a George
Hurrell glamour shot. Her voice-overs have a disembodied ethereality to them,
made all the more strange by the accompaniment of composers Trent Reznor and
Atticus Ross’s aqueous synthesizer bleeps.”
So
between Affleck’s lack of character, and Pike’s heavily caricatured departure
from anything resembling naturalistic character, we find it difficult to find
anything resembling a traditional dramatic impetuous in the first section of
the movie, despite the elegance of Fincher’s filmmaking and night-time
cinematography. Nevertheless, the film
really does come to life at times. The
Amy reveal/twist may not be especially surprizing, but it unspools in a montage
that is sheer, classic Fincher; it’s so good it makes you wish that
you’d been enjoying the movie more up to that point. Gone Girl begins to become a little more
enjoyable in the second half, oddly enough the more it increasingly departs
from any semblance of credibility. Tyler
Perry shows up as the beautifully named celebrity defence attorney Tanner Bolt (say it again, TANNER BOLT!), and finally a
character in the movie articulates in his whole demeanour what we have been
feeling throughout: “Man, who the fuck are
these people? What planet are they from?” It’s a peculiar universe in which we finally
feel grounded in the presence of a celebrity defence attorney. Another stand-out moment is Amy’s mid-coital box
cutter murder, in which Fincher again displays his ability to turn sexualized
violence into a disturbingly fascinating type of installation art. This scene is executed with such Grand
Guignal intensity that you can only imagine old school masters of bloody mayhem
like Argento and DePalma tipping their hats in admiration.
By
the time Dunne is finally reunited with his bloody bride, you start to realize
that this movie is actually operating in the realm of psychosexual high camp
normally occupied by directors like Brian DePalm or Paul Verhoeven. This again raises the question of the fit
between Fincher and the material – on the face of it, it’s a peculiar
juxtaposition with the cool, methodical, and naturalistic style which he brings
to bear on the movie. I didn’t enjoy Gone Girl much when I was watching it, but ever since I’ve had the
lingering suspicion that maybe I was bringing the wrong expectations to bear –
maybe Gone Girl is a bone dry
postmodern farce that was never really interested in the suspense mechanics or
surface social commentary of its source in the first place. Critic Luke Goodsell took this view of the
film, calling it a “pitch black satire of procedural pulp” that “uses the
material’s contrived plot and stabs at relationship commentary as a launching
pad for a jet-black comedy that at its best approaches the japery of a Grand
Guignol.” (This sounds like a very plausible read of the film, but comes pretty close to suggesting that Fincher is burlesquing his screenwriter Flynn under her nose.) One of my main beefs with the film when I was watching it for the first time was the sense that the older, less prestigious, less self-conscious incarnations of this type of movie derived more plausibility from a more authentic sense of character - they seemed to contain more lived-in, realer people. This is actually a common enough complaint with modern popular cinema. Compare, for example, the characterization in Ridley Scott's 1979 Alien with that in the same director's 2012 prequel-of-sorts Prometheus. The first creates its blue-collar characters with ease and authority - in the second we see only the confused machinations of the screenwriters trying to justify themselves through characters whose only consistency lies in their lack of verisimilitude. The characters in Tim Burton's 1989 fantasia of Batman feel in an off-hand way more real and authentic than the stern mouthpieces of plot mechanics and thematic heft in Christopher Nolan's putatively hyperreal take on the same character. For whatever confluence of reasons - and I suspect a more self-conscious, schematic approach to screenwriting is part of the problem - creating real-feeling characters no longer comes as naturally to our popular entertainments. In the same way that the 21st century remakes of 70s horror films replaced the physically realer looking originals with gym-honed, air-brushed looking models, some kind of invasion of pseudo-people seems to be afoot in the entertainment world. Maybe, if Gone Girl has something to say, intentional or otherwise, about the modern condition, it lies in this invasion of the pseudo-people. Rather than representing some kind of feminist re-tooling of the psycho-bitch from Hell archetype, Pike's Amy seems to be primarily a creature who is fatally and obsessively devoted to the surface rather than the reality. She returns to Dunne on the basis of a patently phony talk-show performance, but this doesn't bother her because this was all she was ever looking in the first place. In the end of the movie, Nick and Amy's marriage has become a media creation, maintained through both writing books; they are more successful as simulacrum than they ever were as real people. Ultimately, though, their marriage and characters never had a tangible sense of reality in the first place. Friendless, seemingly floating in a vacuum, they were pseudo-people from the get-go. Maybe every generation gets the Yuppies in Peril it deserves.
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