If that question sounds familiar, that’s because, in some ways, with
“Gone Girl,” Fincher has returned to the structures of “Fight Club,”
substituting a married couple for Tyler Durden and his gaggle of
disenchanted bros. In both stories, the characters rebel against the
unbearable myth of attainable perfection, substituting for it an
alternative one of transcendent, authentic, freedom-giving destruction.
“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we
can buy shit we don’t need,” Tyler Durden says. “We’ve all been raised
on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and
movie gods, and rock stars, but we won’t.” Durden’s response to his
disillusionment with contemporary masculinity is to embrace a seductive,
violent, and supposedly more genuine idea of “real” manliness—but that
alternative turns out to be a disastrous illusion. In “Gone Girl,” it’s
the mythos of coupledom, not the mythos of masculinity, that’s
oppressive. But the imagined solution is the same: “We’re so cute I want
to punch us in the face,” Amy says.
What "Gone Girl" is really about by Joshua Rothman
