Gone Girl, Gone Truth

By the time I actually watched Gone Girl, I have already had my fair dose of spoilers from more than a dozen movie reviews, half of them devoted to the relentless psychoanalysis of the protagonists, and the other half lamenting marriage as an abduction. I am no expert on psychoanalysis, let alone marriage, or abduction. However, what left haunting in the remnant of my memory is the omnipresence of storytelling: the societal obsession with stories, the legal urgency to tell a convincing story, not necessarily a truthful one, to either incriminate or exonerate, the existential need to validate oneself through an autobiographic self-narrative, and, as Jerome Bruner put it, Life as Narrative.
　　
　　 Amy’s life is a narrative. She is the real-life Amazing Amy, who is forever overshadowed by her fictional alter ego, who is truly amazing. She fell in love with Nick, and, for the first few years, they are the co-authors of their love story: treasure hunts, orchestrated serendipities, and countless epiphanies. Every day is like an unexpected shower in a sugary drizzle. Eventually, their relationship sank to a lull. Amy wants to continue writing their story, but Nick wants an out. So Amy decides to gear their careless hipster love story to a different shelf in the bookstore: suspense and murder. She is beautiful. She is sexy. She is smart. Most of all, she has a vengeful mastermind that weaves her own story where she, the screenwriter/director/leading actress, sacrifices her own life so that her legally innocent, but morally shaky, husband would be put to death by the people jury in Missouri. She doesn’t tell her story. She lives it.
　　
　　 As Amy well expected, the public cannot get enough of her story. The public, through the two cable-TV hosts, rifled through Nick’s privacy, fragments of his life glimpsed through the camera, to read his state of mind, trying to spin a convincing story about Nick. A loving husband? A disgusting cheater? A soulless killer? Or just an average guy who means well but inevitably fucks up. Nick’s incrimination or exoneration all depends on how the clues left by Amy are read. Nick, again, wants to co-author the story. Like Nick’s lawyer said: “She has the perfect story going. Now, you need to tell your version.”
　　
　　 Nick’s lawyer surely is a master of storytelling, his taste for words of surgical precision: “Don’t say ‘built up’. It implies an explosion coming”. Storytelling lies at the heart of what lawyers do, as JBW famously argued. The law always begins in story, and it ends in story as well. Usually, the client comes in with her story, recalled from her memory, if not faulty but definitely incomplete, and told from her perspective to achieve her purposes. The lawyer distills the legal elements from the myriad of facts, casts them to a legal framework, and reorganizes them into a legally convincing, sometimes morally appealing, story that, hopefully, resonates with the judge and the jury. Hence, at the trial level, two competing stories are told. Is Amy a first-degree psychopath with the most fucked-up mind who framed her husband as a murderer? Or is Nick a shameless cheater who kills her nice and beautiful pregnant wife? Eventually, it ends in story, too, with a decision by a court of jury, who shuffles the facts presented by two competing narratives, draws on their specific past, however biased, and constructs their own stories so that they can say yea or nay.
　　
　　 Narratives are innate ways of understanding and structuring human experience. This is what makes them inherently persuasive in the courtroom. However, our obsession with storytelling dates way back to when our ancestors were still trying to figure out how to preserve food or navigate the sea. Years after years, oral legends had been recounted by willing tellers to willing listeners, from the Iliad and the Odyssey to Mahabharata and Ramayana, from Norse sagas to the Bible. Story tellers and listeners eventually all find eternity in the grace of death, but the stories live on. History, his-story. Whether there are embellishments, modifications, exaggerations, alterations, adaptations, or omissions from what may have been the “factual” events is largely irrelevant. The story, as it is, carry the cultural identity of tellers, retracting and shaping the cultural identity of the listeners, from which emerges an intellectual truth, a psychological truth, and a moral truth.
　　
　　 As Henry James put it, stories happen to people who know how to tell them. Amy is a good storyteller, because she knows her audience very well. Her story is hitting every button, and ringing every bell. She understands the need of a sensation-craving crowd to construct the reality through familiar stories, a constricted imagination of this collective mind. Indeed, “the soul of a people is mirrored in their legend.” The Greeks find resonance in the stories told by Homer, because they live in a similar world with the one described in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The heroes and battles that shape the Northern world find their eternity in Norse sagas and live on in those who find faith and strength in reading the stories. The crowd who are pushing Amy’s story to a well-planned climax is the invisible pen Amy wields to send her husband up the river and land him on death row.
　　
　　 However, the omniscient authorial voice of Amy fades when she decides to continue her communal life with Nick. The story of Amazing Amy now has a new sequel, and Nick, her partner in crime, is in it. Is she still the Amazing Amy, a psychopath, or a mother who is struggling to find meaning in life? Life is preserved and illuminated through one’s autobiographic recounting. Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. She needs an inspiration. She needs a real purpose. She needs a rebirth. So she continues writing her story and recreating herself by living the story. In this autobiographic self-narrative, the psychological reality of “life itself” blurs. After all, life imitates art far more than art imitates life, as Wilde said. Amy disappears in her story, from which another Amy surfaces. The story goes on. So, dear, how shall you tell YOUR story?