Although David Fincher became famous for his portrayals of outcast men, later in his career he found a character who was a perfect catalyst for his aesthetic vision: the wronged woman hell-bent on revenge.
Fincher started his filmmaking career with largely male-centered stories: Se7en (1995), for instance, the film that hurled him permanently into the cinematic zeitgeist, follows two male detectives in a cat-and-mouse chase with a maniacal male killer. The Game (1997) similarly examines a fraught relationship between brothers through the lens of an idiosyncratic story crammed with action, fraud, and deception. Alien 3 (1992) is an exception to this rule – although Fincher famously had very little creative control over its production.
But David Fincher has always been a critic of the way masculinity is exhibited in the media. Take, for instance, Fight Club (1999), a satirical look at the hyper masculine in its portrayal of a fight club born from toxic masculine energy, or The Social Network (2010), a damning depiction of the tech-bros who created Facebook.
A decade after Fight Club, Fincher began to lean into more female-centered stories. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), for example, follows Lisbeth Salender (Rooney Mara), a private investigator and hacker who helps solve the case of a killer in Sweden who targets women. Gone Girl (2014) tells the story of Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike), a woman who mysteriously vanishes from her home one morning. And for fans of Fincher’s work, this move made perfect sense. Fincher is known for his cold, stagnant, and icy aesthetics, as well as his inclination toward a beautiful shot and a beautiful subject. In both The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl, the protagonists know that their presentations of femininity are heavily enmeshed with their power, and subsequently their ability to exact justice and revenge where needed.
In Gone Girl, Amy Dunne is a confident and independent woman who is at first pointedly unconnected to a man. Even still, her character is introduced and her story subsequently told through the lens of her relationship with Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck). When we first meet Amy, it is in a diary entry. Before we see her face, we hear her voice: “I’m so crazy, stupid happy,” she says in voiceover, the camera showing her scribbling the words on a blank page. The diary serves as the framework for Amy’s story; already, while Nick’s story is told as a classic narrative, Amy’s story has a very particular, clinical method.
For the first third of Gone Girl, Amy is only known through fragments of her person. DNA sweeps of what detectives suspect is her blood in her home. Fractured pieces of information Nick gives the investigators at the police station. And, of course, her diary entries. According to Nick’s descriptions of Amy and perception of her, this introduction to her character is more than fitting.
But instead of being told through Nick’s descriptions, it is Amy who ultimately carefully selects the way she chooses to present herself. One of the first things we learn about her is that she conducts treasure hunts on each of her and Nick’s anniversaries, in which she seals clues in hidden envelopes. What might be viewed merely as a creative romantic gesture is, on closer look, largely indicative of Amy’s personality.
When it is revealed that Amy is still alive a third of the way into Gone Girl, and is subsequently afforded the opportunity to tell her own story, she sticks to the same methodical, clinical process of storytelling. In a cold and affectless manner, she tells the viewer about how Nick cheated on her with his student, Andie (Emily Ratajkowski), and about how she subsequently set out to make him suffer as she did. “To fake a convincing murder, you have to have discipline,” she explains. And Amy has just that. Calmly, she describes how she drained gallons of her own blood, stole a pregnant woman’s urine, and upped her own life insurance. All that, in a way that one might give a tutorial on how to build an IKEA dresser or make sourdough starter.
The cinematography and the overall anatomy of this scene reflects Amy’s cold, methodical approach toward revenge. While Amy explains how she framed Nick, short clips illustrate the sequence, spaced out evenly in an almost mathematically calculated style. The shots are also surprisingly objective: when Amy gives Nick her life insurance policy to sign, for example, we do not see her face at first. When she buys a car on Craigslist, her face is shrouded in shadow. Ultimately, the scene is heavily impersonal; objects are almost more of a focus than people: a book, a computer screen, a syringe, a fire iron.
A similar sequence occurs later in Gone Girl, when Amy attempts to frame her ex-lover, Desi Collings (Neil Patrick Harris), for rape. By now, we know that this is simply the way that Amy has learned to approach revenge, and David Fincher frames her actions accordingly with his own cinematic language. But why does Fincher use filmmaking techniques to mirror the revenge methods of his female characters in a way he does not with his male characters?
In a patriarchal society, it goes without saying that women are given disadvantages in many aspects of life. Revenge stories in cinema are typically filled to the brim with testosterone; take popular modern examples like The Revenant (2015), Memento (2000), and Oldboy (2003). Indeed; because revenge has been historically reserved for male-driven stories, a woman’s approach toward exacting her own justice must necessarily be different. When a woman is forced to use her looks in order to penetrate a male-dominated field, it only makes sense that the media it is presented in reflect that. But where Fincher ultimately succeeds is his rejection of the notion that a woman’s story must look as beautiful as she is.
The vengeful woman has always been a popular trope in cinema – though they are hardly ever rough and gritty like their male counterparts (and if they are, they eventually make a transformation into a classy, conventionally beautiful woman). Take, for instance, the Film Noir movement. The justice-seeking women, or the femme fatales, is a vital stamp of these films. In Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), Barbara Stanwyck’s alluring, icy demeanor as Phyllis Dietrichson is what seduces an intelligent insurance salesman into a murder plot. Tay Garnett’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) follows a similar plot structure, and the woman, Cora (Lana Turner) is the orchestrator of the plot for justice.
But where Fincher and Film Noir depart, is that Film Noir places female beauty at its forefront as a vital plot device. The aesthetics of Film Noir are almost always uniform: soft, pale lighting that gives its female character a delicate presence, heavy emphasis on flattering costume, long lenses that frame the woman in question like a portrait, as opposed to short lenses which stretch and widen the face. Fincher, on the other hand, looks at his women objectively. They are not an instrument in the story. They are the story.
Indeed, Amy’s revenge in Gone Girl is heavily enmeshed with the way she looks. Part of the reason her town in Missouri – where she hardly knew anyone – is so consumed by the possibility of her death, is because she is beautiful. Her undeniable allure is also what allows her to seduce Desi, and what allows him to, in turn, be totally blind to her deception. But Fincher does not fall into the trap of framing a beautiful woman in a beautiful shot. No; he takes a cold, objective approach in order to separate the woman from her seductiveness. When Nick Dunne sees Amy, he sees a beautiful woman. But, when she takes things into her own hands, a clear transformation is made. She is so much more than that. And it is only appropriate that the film frames her as such.
In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Fincher takes a similar approach to illustrating female revenge, but his protagonist admittedly has a different relationship with femininity. In most ways, Lisbeth Salander rejects the conventional societal ideals of womanhood – she styles herself in as androgynous, and is told by a number of the men around her that she is not “lady-like;” her stand-offish nature is largely off-putting to those around her, in a way it likely wouldn’t be were she a man.
Lisbeth seeks vengeance of her own when confronting her rapist, Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen) in his apartment. Like with Amy’s revenge, Lisbeth takes a methodical approach that is object-oriented; she uses a tattoo machine to imprint her vengeance on Bjurman’s chest. And, though this is a heavily personal scene, shots are surprisingly impersonal just as they are in Amy’s. Although it is Libseth’s pursuit of revenge, we hardly ever see the assailant from her perspective. Yet, the framing of the scene obviously puts her in power. We hardly ever see Lisbeth straight-on; we mainly see her from below, indicating that she finally has the control she has been seeking. Similarly, Bjurman is shot from above – he is weak, small, at the mercy of his victim.
In subverting the typical sexualized method in which women are shot in films dealing with revenge, David Fincher offers critique of the fetishization and instrumentalization of violence against women and by women in film. On the surface level, Lisbeth Salander and Amy Dunne couldn’t be more different. In Fincher’s eye, however, they are two sides of the same coin. Ultimately, Fincher tells female revenge stories in a way that is different from the way he tells his male stories; simply because he believes that women should not be given male roles, but rather roles of their own. And, most importantly, he advocates for women to have a role in their own narratives – a role that they finally have control over.
