Quick Context:
"Gone Girl" follows husband Nick Dunn after his wife goes missing — a media circus quickly ignites and blame gets tossed around like a bad round of "hot potato." This is all I will tell you, because the rest of the film is close to impossible to sum up, and is also entirely irrelevant.
Why is any of this important?
Where "Gone Girl" suits my needs right now is in the portrayal of the press, notably the talk show hosts, reporters and journalists that hound Dunn over his lost wife. They stake out his home. They trail him around town. They scream questions and invade his space without any regard for privacy.
They're absolutely awful, and for viewers, an instant target of ire.
Quickly I found myself in my seat, tired of the swarms of desperate cameramen, with their prying, foolish questions. Blonde-haired anchorwomen gossip and defame Dunn, insinuating guilt without any semblance of reason. But this is simply a movie — it couldn't be close to accurate to real life.
How this is not just a movie and is entirely, horribly accurate to real life
"Gone Girl" followed a dissapearance, but let's first start with something more light-hearted.
This was the scene outside of St. Mary's hospital, just before the birth of the "Royal Baby." The "journalists" here had waited for several hours, all hoping for a moment to snatch a pic of the new, royal tot. This image was the first to come to my mind as I watched Dunn struggle past the countless reporters that hovered around his home.
But how about something more horrible?
Something more horrible
This is a purely anecdotal. I have no video to chronicle the stupidity of CNN during the Malaysian flight disappearance, though if I did I don't think I'd have a hard-drive big enough to hold it. So work with me.
Fincher was remarkably successful in portraying one sad facet of news coverage today: the sensationalism. Dunn is quickly villanized, then sanctified, then villainized — rinse and repeat —for the entire run-time of "Gone Girl." The "feeding frenzy" of media was itself, a figure throughout the film, and I couldn't help but reminisce as I watched it.
See, it reminded me of a particular moment I had eating lunch, gazing at a television tuned to CNN. It had been over 20 days since Malaysian flight 370 vanished over the Indian ocean, and CNN had proved to be the main source of coverage on this global mystery.
Search, so far, had found nothing. It had been almost 2 weeks of searching. Then this happened:
There had been, and still is no evidence on any front to even been to implicate black holes. In fact, the segment barely even spoke of black holes: the headline itself is essentially the television equivalent of click-bait.
What are you getting at, Steve?
As I walked out of "Gone Girl," I was surprised by how much I was thinking of journalism and reporting. The film made me ponder ethics, the nature of reporting, and what the public actually wants to see out of news.
Then I realized something that was admittedly a bit concerning: "Gone Girl" had provided perhaps the strongest commentary I had seen about the state of news today it its subplot.
Perhaps, again, I am getting a bit ahead of myself, but what does this say for the United States' own understanding of its media? We watch it, we witness it, but do we ever consider the means of which we get it, and the consequences of those means, for that matter?
Maybe it's a question of ethics, or one of self-awareness, but I have to commend a film for spurring the conversation. Hopefully, viewers will be able to take away some notion of how media operates, rather than simply tacking it up to another artistic liberty taken by "Gone Girl."
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