After visiting White Cube’s summer show at Mason’s Yard and finding it pretty dull, we braved going to Bermondsey with the hope that perhaps it would brighten up on the other side of the Thames. We were kind of right. The show is similarly made up of arty-looking-art but then in the corner at the very back of the last room they’re showing Christian Marclay’s film ‘Made to be Destroyed’. We have never seen this work and we were genuinely jealous of how close it is to ours and how we definitely could’ve done it. it’s a 24 minute montage showing a succession of different film scenes in which artworks are being destroyed, juxtaposing an incredible myriad of genres, narratives, contexts, sound-effects, with the common denominator of one fundamental action. The film serves as a powerful concluding piece for the show open to different interpretations. It can be easily viewed through the political lens where the media directed to the masses revels in depicting destruction of elitist artifacts. It can also be more directly viewed as a depiction of destruction as an irresistible human impulse, as arguably art (both in its creation and destruction) transcends class struggle. For us, it really made the show.
We also watched Gone Girl for the first time this week. We thought we must’ve seen it before but after putting on and not remembering the first 5 minutes we realised maybe not. First things first, we absolutely loved it and watched it for a second time within the next couple of days. The movie crosses the thin line that divides genre fiction from postmodern fiction; it is decisively unreal, in the manner of Fight Club – a movie in which the actual and the symbolic occupied the same slice of reality. Its characters are ciphers, its setting is perfunctory, and its violence is stylized. Gone Girl is what the critic Ted Gioia calls a “postmodern mystery”: it lets us luxuriate in the “reassuring heritage” of the traditional mystery, which feels like it’s building toward a tidy solution, even while we enjoy “the fun of toppling it over and watching the pieces fall where they may.”
As in many postmodern narratives, the heroes and villains in Gone Girl aren’t people but stories. We hope that the familiar, reassuring ones will win out (they don’t). In fact, the film is so self-aware that none of the stories it tells can be taken at face value. The film’s drama and characters have been streamlined so as to reveal their underlying mythic power. But Gone Girl is also anti-myth. When Amy says, of her plot against her husband, Nick, “That’s marriage,” you’re not supposed to believe her. If the myth of the perfect marriage is poisonous, then so is the myth of the continual “war of the sexes.” The question the film asks is: Are there any stories that we can tell ourselves about marriage that ring true?
If that question sounds familiar, that’s because, in some ways, with Gone Girl, David Fincher has returned to the structures of Fight Club, substituting a married couple for Tyler Durden and his gaggle of disenchanted bros. In both stories, the characters rebel against the unbearable myth of attainable perfection, substituting for it an alternative one of transcendent, authentic, freedom-giving destruction. “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need,” Tyler Durden says. “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won’t.” Durden’s response to his disillusionment with contemporary masculinity is to embrace a seductive, violent, and supposedly more genuine idea of “real” manliness – but that alternative turns out to be a disastrous illusion. In Gone Girl, it’s the mythos of coupledom, not the mythos of masculinity, that’s oppressive. But the imagined solution is the same: “We’re so cute I want to punch us in the face,” Amy says.
Gone Girl, in a sense, is Fight Club squared. To explore the positive and negative sides of the manliness myth, Fincher had only to propose a single character, a man with a disassociated personality (Tyler Durden is the alter ego of Edward Norton’s unnamed, milquetoast protagonist). Gone Girl demands two bifurcated people, each of whom must play both the victim and the aggressor. And the mythos of coupledom is more complex and troubled than the mythos of manliness. Even back in 1999, when Fight Club came out, there was something trumped-up and artificial about the idea that men were experiencing a crisis of masculine disenchantment. (The urgency of that crisis, if it did exist, certainly seems to have faded.) Coupledom, on the other hand, is and remains genuinely fraught territory. While our cultural imagination no longer fixates on the Great War or the Western frontier, the idea of the perfect couple (and, especially, the perfect wife) is still alive and well.
