Boy Movies #17
The romance issue: Gone Girl and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, feat. Bailey Herdé
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Fincher February: Week 2
Happy Valentine’s Day to that one frame from Gone Girl.
I see Gone Girl as one of three girl movies David Fincher has made, following the anomaly that is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and the more Fincher-esque The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. An exploration of his films isn’t complete without touching on his girl movies, and I’ve always looked at Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl as spiritual siblings. Different, but similar enough to warrant comparison: In 2011’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, he adapts the first novel in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy into a tense thriller about the partnership between hacker Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) and disgraced journalist Mikhail Blomkvist (Daniel Craig — love when a sexyman plays a journalist and we all have to be like, “Okay”) as they investigate the case of a girl from a wealthy family who went missing forty years prior. In 2014’s Gone Girl, for better or for worse a pioneering entry in Good for Her cinema, he adapts Gillian Flynn’s novel about regular guy Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck — friend of the newsletter) who becomes the lead suspect in the highly publicized investigation into the disappearance of his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike).
Both, to me, are perfect films. I would change nothing about them, neither the casting of Emily Ratajkowski in Gone Girl nor the half-hearted Swedish accents in Dragon Tattoo. Having seen both many times, I remain impressed by how well Fincher lays out the mysteries, by his careful precision that lends itself so well to stories like these, which work because of the ways they strike a delicate balance of evoking surprise without leaning into shock value. I was thrilled to welcome hall of fame horny tweeter and excellent writer Bailey Herdé for this issue, who I knew was a big Girl with the Dragon Tattoo fan but delighted me with her musings on Gone Girl as well. There’s simply nothing more fun than when the girls get together to gab during Fincher February for what I’m affectionately referring to as the romance issue.
Below is mine and Bailey’s conversation, in which we get into the similarities and differences between the two couples at the center of these films, female rage as seen through the eyes of a man, and Amy Dunne and Lisbeth Salander as David Fincher’s self-inserts. Bailey also makes some astute observations on why she thinks The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo might actually be a boy movie.
Allison
I definitely see Fincher as a boy director, but I’m curious about your thoughts on him and your relationship to his work.
Bailey
I agree that he is a boy director. When I was first getting into movies, he was the director that film bros loved — Fight Club, that type of stuff. But I think he's a boy director with girl sensibilities. For one thing, with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl, I think he’s shown himself to have some sort of understanding of the experience of womanhood. They don’t necessarily feel like those movies where you’re like, “Wow, a man made this.”
Allison
It’s almost like, “Wait, a man made this?”
Bailey
For sure, and I think part of that is with Gone Girl, he's adapting the novel written by Gillian Flynn, but The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a novel written by a man. He still very much gets the feminine rage without feeling like he's talking down or stereotyping it.
Allison
I of course have to give it up for what an impact he’s had on boys, but he’s also had such an impact on the girls.
Bailey
I mean, we couldn't escape ‘Good for Her’ for the longest time.
Allison
I know you saw that thread going around recently that was like, “Name your three favorite rom-coms. Anyone who says Gone Girl is getting blocked.” He kind of invented ‘Good for Her.’
Bailey
Obviously that type of movie existed before, but I think that he's the one who made it more of a thing with people our age. And it's just a good movie, too.
Allison
It’s just a really good movie. I saw both Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl in theaters when they first came out, but I tend to rewatch Gone Girl more frequently. I sometimes go into a Gone Girl rewatch thinking, “Surely there will be a breaking point with this movie where I realize that it's actually stupid,” and then it's as good as I remember.
Bailey
I remember the part where Neil Patrick Harris’ character, Desi, takes Amy to his house and I was like, “This is exactly what I thought the house would look like!” They were both immediate hits with me. No hesitation.
Allison
I had experiences with both where I was like, “Hm… this is the first time I've ever seen a movie.” Not to sound like a man, but I feel like that with a lot of Fincher’s movies.
The reason I wanted to compare these two — I should say that I feel like he's made three girl movies: these two and Benjamin Button. But Benjamin Button does not fit neatly within the, like, crime girl category. They both literally have ‘girl’ in the title, which is funny. Having watched them so closely back to back, which I'd never done before, I noticed so many thematic and tonal similarities. To me, they make a lot of sense to group together. I'm wondering if you prefer one to the other and what you think about the ways they've aged.
Bailey
I think I like both of them pretty equally. I've probably rewatched Girl with the Dragon Tattoo more, which is such a funny movie to like to rewatch. Well, not funny.
Allison
I used to put it on to fall asleep. That’s crazy.
Bailey
Are you okay?
Allison
No. And I never have been.
Bailey
I find it immensely rewatchable, I think, because of the way the mystery unfolds. With Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, if you have a little bit of distance from it, it's a little bit easier to forget what the twist is. That makes it more rewatchable than Gone Girl, because the twist is the thing that everybody talks about. It’s unavoidable. Like, if you haven't seen it and you don't know what happens, kudos. But I do like both of them very much.
I was thinking about the way it aged thing as I was rewatching, because I think the sequences [in Dragon Tattoo] where he's scanning all the pictures into his computer and scrolling through them is dated. It's, what, twelve years later? But it’s still very cinematic. It’s still very thrilling to watch him do his little thing. [Fincher’s] kind of poking fun at Mikhail in that scene where Lisbeth is watching him trying to pull things up. I think because they are implicitly poking fun at him for being old and not really knowing what’s going on makes it age a little bit better. Even if you have a totally different relationship to your computer, and even if there have been all these technological advancements, you can see that she knows what she’s doing and he’s kind of bumbling through it, but they're still working together.
Allison
This happens a lot in journalism movies where the woman will sleep with a man she's working with, or her subject, or something like that. This almost treads into that territory, but the relationship between them is so… they have so much chemistry, and there's something about the two of them together. She always seems like she's one step ahead of him, and she's such a smart character. He’s very smart too, but he's very bowled over by her, which is cool. The way it goes into the relationship between the two of them is very well done. That has aged well for me.
Bailey
It’s also very clear that she knows exactly what she's doing for the whole movie. They take the time to establish that so then by the time it gets to the part where they sleep together, you know she's doing this because that's what she wants to do.
Alison
In a different movie, with a different director, with a different writer, it might’ve felt like an overdone girl power stereotype. Hard line to skate, too. The idea that a woman is getting revenge on her rapist in general, and that line where Mikhail’s like, “I'd like you to help me catch a killer of women,” when Stellan Skarsgård literally says, “We’re not so different, you and I.” There are so many cliches, but for some reason it works.
Bailey
There are a lot of those tired journalism type stereotypes, but it does play out in a way where it doesn't feel like it's been done a hundred times before. Lisbeth especially, her character is a unique wrench in the situation. She throws everything off, but it's very seamlessly integrated. Even though, if you boil it down, a lot of her actions, yes, are girl power or whatever, it doesn't really feel like that because it's so clear that that's not what she's thinking. It’s more about herself and the fact that she's never had independence legally. He asks, “Do you want to find a killer of women?” which obviously would interest her just because she's a curious person, but also because of her own personal history.
I read the first book and then I watched the other Swedish movies. It’s definitely a different vibe, and I have to say, I do like this one just because I love Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara so much. My silly little American opinion. But watching those, you find out more about her background, her youth, and her stuff with her dad. They knew that making this movie, and they had a tentative plan to make more, but even if you don't have the explicit details, you can see that this strikes her as something close to her own experience. I was looking it up, and the novel apparently was originally called Men Who Hate Women. That plays into it, too. Basically all of the men in this movie are horrible. Even Mikhail, he's the nicest one, and still in the end he disappoints her.
Allison
I always forget that that’s how it ends. It’s so brutal to watch her approach him at his job. He won’t smoke with her, he immediately severs that connection when he’s done working with her. On one hand, it really does make you wish that they'd been able to do as many of these as they'd wanted to, but I do think it stands alone very well, however unintentionally. The ending really plays into the original title of the novel: Even the quote-unquote nice ones, even the ones who do this with their glasses — which, side note, I’ll never get over. Every time I watch it…
Bailey
I feel like that’s a pure Daniel Craig detail. He just wears his glasses in a really fucked up way.
Allison
Right, he started doing that and they were like, “Okay, sure.” But that threads well into Gone Girl, too. Nick’s a grayer character than Mikhail — he even says at one point, “They disliked me, then they liked me. They hated me, and now they love me.” They’re not that similar when you look at the two characters straight on, but the way that Fincher portrays them, and the way that they’re written and played throughout creates a throughline where you think they might be nice guys, but they are kind of fucking up. He never lets his characters off easy. I mean, usually — I just rewatched Fight Club, and I was like, “Who is Marla? She’s no one. All she does is smoke.”
You watch her encounter all these people who look at her and have a very quick perception of her. It makes it even sadder at the end because you get the idea that Mikhail did see her, at least partially. She sees him, he sees her. It's almost the opposite in Gone Girl, where they see each other, but it’s bad.
Bailey
Ultimately, Mikhail and Lisbeth and Nick and Amy are two couples who do see each other. With Nick and Amy, they get really caught up in what they're supposed to be like. At first they see each other and then they drift apart. “What is this marriage supposed to be? What are we supposed to be to each other?” With Lisbeth and Mikhail, I don't think there's really any sort of change in dynamic in that sense because they don't really evolve together. By the time they get to each other, I think Lisbeth evolves in the sense of opening up. There are very few people that she lets in, but that's who she always has been. She takes a chance on Mikhail and it seems like it's gonna work out and then it doesn’t.
Allison
I like what you said about Nick and Amy worrying about who they’re supposed to be and applying that to Lisbeth and Mikhail. They’re roommates for a bit on this Swedish island while they investigate this crime, they’re getting closer. But the second he goes back to his “real life” with his job and with Robin Wright, he does give into the perception of who he’s supposed to be, which is a guy who is, I guess, with a woman his own age rather than this young woman who has all these tattoos and piercings. Like Nick, he's very aware of how it would look if he was seen with her.
Bailey
He solved this case, and Lisbeth is also kind of a case that he’s solving. Not that he solves her, but he comes to a natural conclusion. It's done, he can go back to his life. They’re in this bubble on the island, and then the case wraps up, and then she basically has a guy murdered for him.
Allison
That’s also very Gone Girl. “I’ve killed for you.”
Bailey
Exactly. With Nick and Amy, it's definitely more about what they appear to be to other people. That's more her thing, but I think that factors into his view of their relationship. He’s cheating on her and he’s hiding it but he doesn’t want to leave her because he doesn’t want to be the bad guy.
Allison
I’m wondering whether you think there are boy movie elements in these. I kept noticing how Lisbeth treads the line of a male fantasy character. Both she and Amy play into a man’s idea of how a woman would get violent revenge.
Bailey
That first part of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo where they’re investigating is very boy movie.
Allison
Totally. It feels more in line with his crime thrillers.
Bailey
But then, once they find out what happened to Harriet, there’s still forty minutes left. She basically entraps [Wennerström] so that Mikhail can be vindicated in the eyes of the public. I was thinking as I was watching that it’s probably the most loving thing that she's ever done.
Allison
It’s a very romantic act.
Bailey
The last forty minutes of the movie, I feel, are a romance. Moving all this money around so everybody can see that he was telling the truth the whole time. She gets that leather jacket for him, but I think that traveling around the world and incriminating someone is way more romantic. And he doesn’t even know!
Allison
He has no idea what she did. He doesn’t care! He never asks what she’s borrowing the money for. It’s because he trusts her, but it’s also like… you don’t want to know what she was doing and where she went? You’re not at all curious about how this happened and how you’re suddenly exonerated? That’s a male thing, too. “I guess I’m fine now! Cool!”
Bailey
“Wow, that really worked out!” I feel like there’s a very clear division between the straight boy movie and the last forty minutes, which has those girl movie sensibilities. She’s obviously doing this because she loves him. I think that has a very clear delineation. I think that Gone Girl is…
Allison
Gone Girl’s harder.
Bailey
It is. It has those elements of investigation, but ultimately this is all Amy's machinations, you know? She is crafting this version of her according to what she feels men, women, whatever, will sympathize with. That’s what makes it complicated.
Allison
I mean, the cultural impact this movie had on women. And is still having! SZA just wrote a song called “Gone Girl,” you know what I mean? Having Gillian Flynn adapt her own book feels very for the girls. You were talking earlier about the concept of female rage, present throughout both, but the way female rage is depicted in movies can sometimes become a man’s idea of what women get angry about and how they get angry. Gone Girl skirts that line because of the fact that a man would never dream up a scenario where his wife completely ruins his life, unless he came out looking incredible. Nick doesn't necessarily come out looking incredible. Did he abuse her? No, but he’s still a dick.
Bailey
If a man were totally behind Gone Girl, I don't think the plot would have been quite so intricate.
Allison
She’s pretty much thought everything through until she gets robbed. There are so many elements to her plan. I’m so gagged every time watching Nick figure out what she’s done, learning that she’s insane. I mean, I called her insane, but I don’t think the movie thinks she’s insane. If it were a straight up boy movie, she would be truly crazy.
Bailey
If it were a boy movie it would go more in the direction of Fatal Attraction. You’d have no sympathy for her. There's no understanding there. But with Amy it's like, this is objectively an insane thing to do. She’s been plotting this for months, drawing her own blood, all that stuff.
Allison
But she's so clear headed throughout. She knows exactly what she wants to happen to him.
Bailey
Maybe she’s sociopathic, but it’s not like she doesn't know what's going on. There’s also a reason that she's going to these lengths, right? This is years of resentment building. She’s like, “He's made me this caricature of myself, so that's what I'm gonna do to him.”
Allison
She is such a Fincher character in the way that she has intricately plotted everything, because that’s the way he works. He thinks through every single thing that every character is going to say, every character is going to wear, every movement they're going to make. Watching characters like Amy and also like Lisbeth, too — women get accused of this a lot, but they’re his self-inserts in many ways, even if he didn't create them. You can see a lot of his directorial style in the ways they operate. It’s like, I can completely see why you got something out of them. Like, look at these characters. They are you.
Bailey
You get the sense that he's very understanding of both Amy and Lisbeth. With Amy, there is a bit of judgment of what she's doing.
Allison
It’s a wryness, almost.
Bailey
“She went about this kind of crazy, but I don’t really blame her.”
Allison
Nick did do that! He did do those things.
Bailey
They both go to extremes. Amy, that's her whole thing, and then Lisbeth, when Bjurman rapes her, she basically does the same thing to him. That's not within the lines of what people would normally do, but it's not unjustified, right? There's no point where you're like, “She shouldn't be doing that.” Fincher definitely gets what they're doing, which I really appreciate. Like you were saying earlier, he doesn't let his male characters get away with stuff. I think that's especially true in these two movies. All of the men here, even Stellan Skarsgård — he's nice! He's the one who's pushing for Mikhail to keep investigating when Christopher Plummer is sick, and then in the end, he's the worst one. I noticed this time that Stellan Skarsgård’s house is all glass. He’s going around like, “I have nothing to hide.”
Allison
Kind of the same with Desi’s house, too. He has that line where he’s like, “You’re completely secluded here,” but the glass walls allow Amy to have this fake evidence when she kills him.
Bailey
Some of that is just David Fincher’s aesthetic preferences, but it works for those people. These people who have nothing to hide, they’re open books, but then they’re hiding these deep, dark secrets. With Desi, he's been obsessed with Amy this whole time, he's not hiding it. With Amy, it's like, “You can see everything that happened to me, it's right there on display. There's no disputing it.” But obviously, there is.
Allison
Also, there are so many shots of Nick closing the blinds in Gone Girl, and Mikhail lives in this very secluded house. The only people around him are this family. It’s interesting to look at the ways Fincher shows people showing themselves. We’re following Mikhail and Nick through the movies, we know them, but they're closing themselves off in other ways. I feel like I'm describing filmmaking 101.
Bailey
No, but I get you. Thinking about the boy-girl dichotomy, both movies have something to say about watching and being watched. With Gone Girl, it's what these people outside of us think about our relationship. What you’re seeing is not necessarily what’s happening. In Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, theoretically this family’s whole history is on display. Everybody knows them in that small town, everybody knows what happened to Harriet. They know there are two Nazis in the family, and this one’s a deadbeat, and this one was an alcoholic. It seems like all of their secrets are out there on display, but there are so many layers underneath.
Something that I latched onto was that at the beginning when Lisbeth’s telling the security company about her report on Mikhail, the director of the security company says, “Everyone has a right to privacy.” That comes into play a lot, how much privacy people are entitled to and what’s capable of being kept private.
Allison
It’s also interesting contrasted against Gone Girl, which is about this crime that becomes incredibly publicized. Nick’s suddenly very much on display. There’s that moment in Dragon Tattoo where Lisbeth comes to Mikhail and she's like, “Everyone in town knows where you live. Everyone knows who you are.” He's been ostracized, he skipped town to work on this investigation. He’s left where he was most on display, but he is still on display. Lisbeth is even watching him, that's how she knows where to find him. Meanwhile, Nick can't even breathe without someone finding out about it. It’s cool, the way he plays around with public perceptions and the ways that they factor into people's relationships, and the ways that they color the lives of these characters.
Bailey
That condition of being constantly scrutinized is kind of inherent to femininity. Whether we like it or not, you're always being watched and observed. People are always forming opinions about you. That's true for everyone, but I think it's especially true for women who are either famous or adjacent to fame, or now, just being online, really. In both movies, Fincher is putting the male characters under that same kind of microscope that women are constantly put under. It's uncomfortable for them for obvious reasons, Nick’s being accused of killing his wife. Mikhail is put under that microscope, but it's more like men as a whole. In the Vanger family, all of these men are being more closely observed now that Mikhail’s on the case. He’s peeling back these layers. Even though they put their worst qualities on display, it turns out that there's more.
Allison
They’re still hiding something. Men are always hiding something.
Bailey
That's the real lesson here. I think that’s David Fincher putting men in women's shoes, to some extent.
Allison
Obviously Daniel Craig and Ben Affleck are completely different actors, but I do think the choices to cast them in these movies is fascinating. When Gone Girl came out, everyone was like, “Ben Affleck is playing himself, and he's doing an amazing job.” But Daniel Craig is kind of playing against type. I love when he was like, “I gained weight for this movie.” I was like, “Where?”
Bailey
What, you have a four pack instead of a six pack? They also make a point where he’s going up a hill or whatever—
Allison
And he says, “I'm out of shape.” No, you’re not.
Bailey
Shut up!
Allison
Enough! I just think it’s interesting to have two actors doing completely different things, but then somehow meeting in the middle.
Bailey
Ben Affleck — nobody could’ve done it better. Yes, he’s playing the bumbling husband who's a bit of an asshole, but the undercurrent there was that he did mean well. It came and went, but he is ultimately an innocent guy.
Allison
It’s not illegal to be a bad husband.
Bailey
The situation got away from him. Ben Affleck is good at playing somebody who things just happen to. In a way it’s true to life, but I think that he's also infusing elements of Nick's innocence into it, too. With Daniel Craig, I don’t know that he’s necessarily playing against type. At the time, he was fully embroiled in Bond.
Allison
You’re right. What was his type? We didn’t know what it was. I’m actually still not sure exactly what his type is.
Bailey
I was going to say, now you have more distance from Bond. I love this, I love Logan Lucky, and it’s like, “Okay, you’re kind of weird.” I wouldn't say that it's necessarily against type, but it's definitely against what everybody was expecting from him at the time. There's a thread there where Mikhail’s just kind of a clueless dad, he doesn’t understand technology.
Allison
I always forget that he has a daughter.
Bailey
He even says, “I haven't really been around. I don't really know what's going on with you, but I'm trying.” He does play into that with his relationship with Lisbeth, too. It is a relationship of equals in terms of their investigative abilities, but in terms of her social abilities and her ability to be a functional human, he's much better at that. When they meet, he brings her the bagel and is like, “You need to eat.” Even though he ends up kind of sucking in the end, you can see why she got attached to him. When he asks, just very simply, “Why are you still a ward of the state?”
Allison
Great moment, the way he rolls over. They get each other.
Bailey
And it's so weird, you would not think in this movie about rape and incest that there would be such a nice little moment of emotional intimacy. That’s Daniel Craig flexing his chops there: “I can do the emotionally unavailable Bond thing, I can be an asshole playboy, but I can also be a guy who does genuinely care about the people around him.” He does care about finding the truth. He’s not a judgmental person. He knows he’s fucked up in the past.
Allison
You can see why Robin Wright is attracted to him, and why Lisbeth is attracted to him, and why his daughter keeps coming back and trying to have a relationship with him. Gone Girl does this with the flashbacks where you see what it was about Nick that attracted Amy in the first place. You understand why these guys are so magnetic to people.
Bailey
I do want to say that the final point for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo being a boy movie is how much everyone freaked out when Rooney Mara said that she got all her piercings for real. I remember that being such a huge thing.
Allison
The reception to her during that time in general was kind of bananas.
Bailey
We've had so many conversations about method acting the past couple of years. That, in a way, is kind of method. She literally said that she did it so that she would still feel like she was in character even when she didn’t have all the clothes and stuff. Ultimately, it's not that big of a deal! I feel like that kind of puts this in the category of boy movie — that scrutiny of her body, and is she ruining her body, all of this stuff. Why was that such a big deal?
Allison
I still cannot wrap my mind around it. I can’t remember what company1 it was, but there was that Lisbeth-inspired clothing line, and I remember people saying, “Wait a second, I don't know if this is the right character to necessarily be calling a fashion legend.” The scrutiny around her body and the way that character was perceived feels very American. With Rooney especially, everyone was talking about how skinny she was.
Bailey
It’s such a big part of the character. She looks malnourished, she looks like she doesn't take care of herself. Maybe I’m being a little bit optimistic, but I feel like if they made this movie now and she got all the piercings, everyone would be like, “That's so cool.” It’s funny that this movie that's so much about scrutiny and what people think of you kind of blew back on her. Which is annoying, but appropriate.
Also, I just want to say, I forgot that Joel Kinnaman makes a brief appearance at the end. He was there because his character has a much bigger role in the second and third books. What we could’ve had!
Allison
What happened with Fincher’s original idea? Were they too expensive to make?
Bailey
I think it just didn't perform well, so they didn’t make more. Which sucks.
Allison
People are so stupid. People do not understand what they got when they got it. Well, I'm so happy that we both love it and that we have taste.
Bailey
Me too.
Boy Movies news: Vin Diesel comparing himself to Tolkein. Hell yeah brother.
Still gasping for air over this.
Lmao it was H&M.