Keele Research Repository

Looking comparatively and respectively at the two recent iterations of Gone Girl – Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel, and the David Fincher-directed film from 2014 – this essay focuses on the texts’ specific concerns with cultural use, within a mass-media and post-recessional landscape that has only further called into question the meaning and value of “Culture” itself. Looking specifically at the commercial contexts and processes of cinematic adaptation, and some of the discourses around Fincher’s film version, the essay considers the extent to which such contemporary “event” adaptations reinforce the redundancies and commodification latent within such production; while arguing, nevertheless, that the film’s ambivalent engagement with the practices of mass media positions it within the reconfigured terms of film noir, in a post-Cultural context.