David Fincher is one of those filmmakers whose style has become a commodity unto itself; often imitated, more often admired, and tremendously marketable. Like Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Ridley Scott before him, Fincher’s signature aesthetic has transcended style, evolving into a signifier of sorts in its own right. His astute attention to detail and visual texture has been rightly praised, but his films in their entirety, with the sum of all of their parts and attributes accounted for, remain void of any unique or personal cinematic expression.
Gone Girl (2014), much more than The Social Network (2010), conforms to a genre without offering any new revelations about the sociological issues it supposes. Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction (1987) provides a clear-cut blueprint for the narrative arc of the film as well as the basic positions of power inhabited by the films characters. Interestingly, the recasting of the female as the cold-blooded and violent possessor of men is a distinctly male reaction to feminism, inverting the sexual politics of films like Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964). Neither rendering of the sexual politics at work in a heteronormative relationship escape the chauvinism of the films author.
