Everyone please give a warm welcome to our new contributor, Rioghnach Robinson!
Hi, AE readers! Welcome to a new ongoing series, Was the Book Better?, a page-to-screen analysis in which I, a fan of pages and screens everywhere, will compare movies adapted from books to their source material. I’ll ask questions such as: Do both versions of the story want to accomplish the same things? Which characters, subplots, or themes have been blessedly cut, faithfully transferred, or unforgivably botched? How do film and literature as mediums interact with different elements of the same story? Is one version, in fact, better?!
Points will be awarded to each story element based on two stringent artistic criteria: 1) the number of points must be an integer between -100,000 and 100,000, and 2) the reasoning must mildly amuse me. The prize, given to the highest point-getter, will be nothing whatsoever.
This month I’m kicking off with a personal favorite: Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. This is not a spoiler-free zone, so steer away now if necessary!
The Backstory:
Originally published in 2012 by Crown, Flynn’s mammoth bestseller had sold over six million copies before trade paperbacks hit shelves. It was a novel that cemented Flynn’s status—already nascent after the deliciously nasty Sharp Objects and Dark Places—as the queen of the modern middle-American thriller. The 2014 film adaptation of Gone Girl went on to unite Flynn, as screenwriter, with another of the most keen-eyed, black-hearted misanthropes working in any fictional medium: director David Fincher.
From my perspective, it’s a match made in heaven, and clearly Fincher agreed. When 20th Century Fox optioned the novel in 2012, Flynn penned the screenplay’s first draft—her first time screenwriting. After Fincher read it, he hatched a meeting with Flynn, and the pair agreed to work together for the duration of the project.
The resulting movie is just as bitter, scathing, and cynical as the novel. Are they the same animal, though? Let’s discuss.
Theme: What Is Each One Up To?
“We liked the same things about the book,” Flynn said about her collaboration with Fincher, “and we wanted the same thing out of the movie.” You feel that confluence on the screen. The movie is neat, tight, focused, as quick a 149-minute movie as you’ll find.
In contrast, the book is confessional, indulgent, and sprawling. Most of all, it’s defensive. The two unhappily married narrators, Amy Elliott Dunne and Nick Dunne, spend lovingly detailed paragraphs justifying their anger, resentment, and outright loathing toward each other. Throughout the novel’s first half, the recently missing Amy describes the couple’s seven-year, steadily deteriorating relationship, shown via diary entry. Meanwhile, Nick narrates the fallout from Amy’s present-day disappearance in first person.
Swimming through this flood of direct address, the reader feels like Nick’s and Amy’s closest confidant—up until the narrators allow glimpses of omission, moments that land like personal betrayals. Nick confesses—for pages!—the bleakness of his derelict hometown, of his parents’ divorce when he was a child. Then this man we thought we knew narrates, as though it is normal, “I drove aimlessly down the highway so I could make a call on my disposable [cellphone],” and suddenly he is made alien. We nod along with Amy’s diary, sympathizing with her opinions on uncomfortable gender dynamics; then the midpoint hits, and we discover that Amy faked her murder, and that diary was meant to be found. Exactly how much of Diary Amy is real, we can no longer know.
This structure mimics the kind of interpersonal intimacy that the novel is interested in unraveling: apparently deep but fundamentally compromised. It’s a structure that makes a case: Gone Girl the novel’s primary theme is the stubborn unknowability of people we believe we know intimately. The novel wants us so close that we can barely see a thing.
Gone Girl the movie, on the other hand, holds us at an exacting distance. Fincher gives center stage to another major book theme: the creation of characters in onlookers’ narratives, the transformation of a surface into imagined substance. Its form is well-suited to that. Fincher’s Gone Girl is all cool smooth surfaces, photographed in wintry neutrals with crisp verging on uncanny precision. A crucial media interview goes full-screen as though breaking out of diegesis, inviting us to watch through the eyes of America’s cable viewers. And during Nick’s uneasy public appearances, we’re often ushered back into wide shots, nestled in crowds or watching from afar. Repeated fade-to-black moments between scenes are as literal a visual message as you can get: this is what has been curated for you to see, and no more. (To be honest, it’s literal enough to be a bit much for my tastes, but fine.)
Meanwhile, the Reznor/Ross score hums and taps ambiently in the background, punctuated by soft mechanical elements—like music you’d hear in the front room of a spa, combined with distorted kitchen noises. So the sound, too, lies lightly on the surface, content to make you itch rather than penetrating into the blood. Who, we’re always asking of the movie, are these people, really? We’re never meant to think we know.
Point tally:
The Book: +78 points, one for each lie of omission. An additional +10 points for being about heterosexual marriage in a way that—in its wide array of terrible women and men, all espousing terrible, heavily gendered opinions—winds up feeling almost gender-agnostic.
The Movie: +63 points, one for each shot of something that could be classified as a “facade”
What’s What: Has the Plot Changed?
There’s a short answer here, and it’s “no.” Watching the movie, you get the sense that if it were a miniseries, it might have been adapted scene for scene; the film never strays from the path laid down by the book. But there simply isn’t space in a feature, even a 149-minute one, for every subplot detour.
So, say goodbye to Nick’s drunken interview at a bar, his sneaky trip to a tourist town where he worked as a teenager, and his college girlfriend biting him on the face (!) in a breakup. Say goodbye also to Amy’s manipulation of a high school friend. Plus the gross-out scene when Amy illegally nets catfish to be killed, bloodily, right beside her. (I don’t grieve this loss.)
There’s some reframing at work, sure, mostly to amp up the media presence—e.g. we meet Nick’s lawyer, Tanner Bolt, not in private but through a new interview segment on the cable network show Ellen Abbott. The film’s ending also publicizes what was previously private. The events are the same: Amy impregnates herself to ensure Nick’s lifelong silence. But in the novel, the fallout takes place in secret, the last battle in a hidden war between husband and wife. In the film, the happy couple delivers the announcement to a live audience in the Dunne home, the tidy bow on the news narrative.
Point tally:
The Book: +300 points, roughly one for every minute I spent reading this book in a store the first time I picked it up, unable to tear my eyes away until I had finished this plot. (I never said this point-giving business would be objective.)
The Movie: +301 points. Same lean, nasty mechanics. Bonus point for removing the catfish scene.
Who’s Who: Have the Characters Changed?
The novel’s characters hit the screen largely intact. The largest omission is Nick’s recently deceased mother, cut completely, while in the novel she plays an internal counterpoint to the influence of Nick’s misogynist father.
Another mother has been dropped—the mother of Desi Collings, the man whom Amy ultimately frames as her stalker, kidnapper, and rapist. This is for the best. Desi’s mother looks uncannily like Amy, and although the Oedipal angle goes down easily enough in the novel, it’s one of the pulpiest elements, and Fincher’s adaptation is too restrained for proper pulp.
Side characters occasionally transform under the more objective light of the camera. Unconstrained by the first person, we track local cops Gilpin and Boney as they sweep the Dunne home for blood, then track down a mention of Amy in an abandoned mall. We see Boney guilt-trip Nick about not knowing Amy’s blood type, then admit in private that it was just a psychological angle. Being privy to the detectives’ movements and motives shifts the viewer’s focus away from Nick’s self-consciousness, back onto the plot at large.
The most substantial character difference, though, is in our understanding of Nick. Nick as book narrator can get out in front of accusations like cheater, asshole, sleazeball; he thinks criticisms before the reader can make them. He overexplains his constant compulsion to smile, the lifelong defense mechanism of a man aware that he has a punchable face. When stripped of inner monologue, this character becomes a cypher.
Take an early interrogation scene between Nick and Boney, shortly after Amy’s disappearance. Book-Boney asks about Amy’s life as a housewife: “So then what does she do most days?” To which Book-Nick internally responds:
That was my question too. Amy was once a woman who did a little of everything, all the time. When we moved in together, she’d made an intense study of French cooking, displaying hyperquick knife skills and an inspired boeuf bourguignon. For her thirty-fourth birthday, we flew to Barcelona, and she stunned me by rolling off trills of conversational Spanish, learned in months of secret lessons. My wife had a brilliant, popping brain, a greedy curiosity. But her obsessions tended to be fueled by competition: She needed to dazzle men and jealous-ify women …
Book-Nick is a font of detail and observation. Compare to the filmed version: “Woman with all those degrees,” says Movie-Boney— “what does she do?”
“She keeps busy,” says Ben Affleck’s Nick, opaque. We see disinterest in his body language, dismissal in Affleck’s flip delivery. We are always the crowd watching the TV show, looking for evidence. He flashes that defense-mechanism smile in the press conference, denuded of context about childhood or self-effacement, and it lands like a clue.
Point tally:
The Book: +80 points, one for each archetype that Flynn gamely toys with, shuffling characters’ musings into and out of well-known frameworks with entertaining ease
The Movie: +61 points for spot-on casting, and for distilling several chapters of characterization into the flinch of Ben Affleck’s hand in the movie’s final shot
The Front End: Any Differences in Marketing, Publicity, Zeitgeist, or Public Reaction?
Both book and film were marketed straightforwardly as a did-he-do-it murder mystery, focusing on cryptic questions about marriage (and, in the case of the movie trailer, flashes of media frenzies). The marketing of neither version waded into feminism or any commentary on gender. Probably a good idea. Some say that if you close your eyes and listen hard, you can still hear two people going at it in some corner of the internet, saying that Flynn is the proponent of damaging misogynist myths or alternatively the savior of female-driven media.
In terms of zeitgeist, there’s one level on which Gone Girl the movie seems oddly uninterested in operating. Flynn’s Gone Girl is explicitly a recession novel. Despite its identical timeline (2005-12), the movie lacks this dimension almost entirely, with an entire secondary setting (a nearby defunct tourist town) absent, and the fallout from Nick’s and Amy’s respective layoffs axed way back. There’s no real sense of financial danger for the couple, and little sense of larger societal instability.
It’s a shame, because the precarity of the recession activates the setting. The story’s physical spaces emphasize vacancy: the foreclosed suburban neighborhood with its hollow-eyed minimansions; the sucked-out towns of the American heartland; the megamall that used to teem with, among other things, jobs. In the movie, these elements feel like an aesthete’s bleakness, added for menace. But in the book, Nick and Amy—especially Amy, with her privileged financial background—are palpably threatened by Missouri’s emptiness, by the forms of absence that begin to swallow their lives there. The voids are opening up: no careers, no money, no purpose, no family, no children, no future.
When it’s more fleshed out, the setting serves as a mirror, too, reflecting the voids Flynn tucks inside characters and relationships and moral centers. Of course, in this author’s America, parts of what seemed to be a normal human being would peel away to reveal hollow interior places. The characters’ lies are just more forms of precarity. You put your foot on the seemingly solid surface of a job, a salary, and/or a marriage, and the next moment you’re plummeting down into space. You can’t lean on anything, or anyone, in this kind of world.
Point tally:
The Book: +63 points for animating the recession in an interesting fictional way, an oddly rare quality. -15 points for the readers who claim, due to the sheer confidence of the coolgirl monologue, that Amy Elliott Dunne is a girlboss who did no wrong.
The Movie: +50 points for getting the sublime Rosamund Pike an Academy Award nomination. -15 points for the viewers who treat fictional character Amy Elliott Dunne as though she is a driver of misogynist myths rather than a reaction to them.
(Is it fair for me to blame the book or movie for their readers or viewers? No. But them’s the breaks with a section including audience response.)
Final point tally:
Gone Girl, the book: 516, plus an additional point for every thriller that has since included “Girl” in its title
Gone Girl, the movie: 460, plus the numerical value of Ben Affleck’s dead-eyed smile
Final judgment:
Book recommended? Yes. Read when feeling frustrated with your partner or lack thereof. Enjoy the warm glow of your normal, humane relationships.
Movie recommended? Yes. Watch when feeling insignificant or fame-hungry. Enjoy the underrated bliss of anonymity on the national scale.
Rioghnach Robinson lives in Chicago, where she spends 70% of her waking hours dissecting the mindsets of fictional characters; the remaining 30% go toward rubbing her palms together in doomed attempts to generate heat. She writes books under the pen name Riley Redgate, most recently Alone Out Here (Disney Hyperion/2022), and she has also written for The Onion, America’s finest news source. You can find her on Instagram, Tumblr, Letterboxd, or her website.