Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

Gone Girl is a mystery-thriller based on the novel by Gillian Flynn, directed by David Fincher, and starring Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris and Tyler Perry. It follows the life of Nick Dunne, whose world is turned upside down when he returns to his suburban home to find his wife, Amy, missing and apparently abducted. Before long, and despite his protestations to the contrary, the police and the media have fingered Nick – who is awkward and sometimes behaves inappropriately in front of the camera – as being responsible for Amy’s disappearance. Not only that, but secrets are revealed which show that Nick and Amy’s marriage was not as idyllic as they liked to portray, leading to further scrutiny of Nick and his actions. But, of course, things are never quite as they seem in films of this type, with more revelations and twists before the final reel which I’m not going to spoil here. Suffice to say, Gone Girl is a dark, nihilistic movie with a lot of points to make about levels of trust in relationships, unreliable narration, and trials by media, although, ironically, it doesn’t work as well as an actual thriller, with numerous plot holes and illogical jumps in narrative flow. Where Fincher excels, however, is in creating an oppressive atmosphere of uncertainty, through his muted color palette, understated acting choices, and the score, by Oscar-winners Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

Ah, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. I’ve been very vocal in the past about my dismay at their Academy Award win for The Social Network, and with the general critical and public acclaim that score, and their subsequent effort The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, attained. To me, their entire aesthetic approach to film music stands at odds with what I feel film music should aim to be – conceptually, compositionally, emotionally, everything – but I’ll get back to that in a moment. Defenders of their work often say that their scores ‘work in the film’, and that this is the only criteria by which their music should be judged. And, to be fair, on some level, I actually agree with that. Gone Girl does create an atmosphere of uneasiness, tension, and mystery, and was undoubtedly the exact sort of music that director David Fincher wanted his film to have. On those terms, Reznor and Ross succeeded entirely in what they set out to achieve. But here’s the thing; to me, the absolute bare minimum standard a film score must attain is ‘working in the film’. 99% of all film scores ever written ‘work in the film’ on some level, and so at this point my next question is “what else does it do?”

The greatest film composers all wrote film scores which worked in their films, but also took audiences on a journey. They were storytellers, almost as much as the director and screenwriter were. They were able to convey complex emotions to the audience – either overtly, in direct response to the images on the screen, or covertly, playing to the subtext or the hidden meaning of a scene. They were able to make the audience feel for the characters they were watching, and empathize with whatever situation the characters were in: love, exhilaration, danger, sadness, loss, freedom. And then they were able to pour years of musicality into their work, using interesting and intelligent compositional techniques to make their music satisfying on an intellectual level as well as an emotional one, guiding the audience through what may be difficult narrative ideas with structured thematic design, and recurring motifs, whether they be melodic or textural. From my point of view, it is when being judged under these criteria that Reznor and Ross fail entirely – not only here, but over the course of their entire film music career together.

When talking about writing the music for Gone Girl, Reznor tells a story about how David Fincher visited a chiropractor’s office to get his back massaged and, while sitting in the waiting room, was aware of music being piped through to the patients. Fincher told Reznor, “Think about the really terrible music you hear in massage parlors, the way that it artificially tries to make you feel like everything’s OK. And then imagine that sound starting to curdle and unravel.” As a conceptual starting point, that’s not a bad idea, but the irony of all this is that the music Reznor and Ross eventually wrote sounds nothing like that which Fincher described. A tiny string section and a solo piano combine with a vast array of electronic tones, most of which are little more than ambient drones, but which occasionally veer into processed noises and effects which grind, screech and whine. The mood varies little – slow, solemn, understated, almost subliminal – except for a few occasions when the score becomes intensely irritating, apparently mimicking the sound of an old dial-up modem, or some other piece of random machinery.

Cues such as the opening “What Have We Done to Each Other?,” “Empty Places,” “Something Disposable,” “Like Home,” “Perpetual,” and “A Reflection” literally do nothing other than drone aimlessly for a couple of minutes. Pieces like “Just Like You,” “Appearances,”, and the aptly-titled “Background Noise” have a more noticeable internal rhythm that is quite relaxing, almost akin to chill-out music, especially when the tinkling solo piano textures appear. However, parts of “With Suspicion” sound like the noises you hear when you clap your hands over your ears and can hear the blood rushing through your veins. The same can be said of other cues like “Clue Two,” “The Way He Looks At Me,” the vaguely dance-music infused “Secrets,” and “Consummation,” which reach simply intolerable levels of auditory awfulness. “The Way He Looks At Me” is especially notable for its incorporation of what appears to be the gasping, guttural sound of someone being strangled to death with a fax machine cord. The two “Sugar Storm” cues are a little more interesting, them having a peculiar dream-like ambience. Similarly, “Procedural” and “Technically Missing” have a little bit of pep and vigor, reprising the watery synth effects from the Sugar Storm, and combining them with a wailing electric guitar. So, you know, it’s not all bad.

Taking all this into account, I think the way the music was written led to most of the problems. In most cases, the composer writes music based on filmed footage, structuring the score to fit scenes, timing them to hit key dramatic points, and giving them the opportunity to write music that ties together characters, situations and concepts. But not Reznor and Ross; instead, they write several hours of music based on little more than descriptions of mood, which they then provide to Fincher for him to simply drop into the movie wherever he chooses. Their music is not written to accompany any specific scene, and therefore it cannot convey any specific emotion or heighten any particular nuance in, say, Affleck’s performance, a line reading, or a particularly significant event. In fact, I don’t know why Fincher even commissions original music: he would be able to achieve the exact same effect if he licensed two or three of those “Ambient Moods” CDs you can find on the $1 rack at Wal-Mart, and dropped them into his movie.

This is all the more frustrating when you look back and see the caliber of composers David Fincher has worked with in the past: Elliot Goldenthal, Howard Shore, David Shire, Alexandre Desplat, Jeff Beal. Any one of those outstanding artists would have been capable of conveying the dark, oppressive mood Fincher needed for this film, but would have increased the musical, structural and intellectual aspect of the score a thousand fold. I truly believe that, had anyone other than Reznor and Ross written this, no-one would pay it the slightest bit of attention, simply because it does nothing of note. It’s not especially groundbreaking, it’s not especially challenging, and it’s not even especially interesting. Hundreds of composers can write music like this in their sleep, and most of them can do it better, but because the guy from Nine Inch Nails wrote it, suddenly it’s on the front pages of mainstream music magazines, and it’s winning Academy Awards.

In my review of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in 2011 I stated; “When the score isn’t jarringly distracting, it’s virtually inaudible or indistinguishable from the film’s sound effects, begging the question of why the music is there in the first place. I would argue that if the score does nothing to enhance the emotion of the film because it’s either too low in the sound mix, or is written in such a way that it’s virtually indistinguishable from source music and sound effects, then what purpose does the score serve? What is its basic function? If you can’t hear it, and can’t feel it, why is it there?” The score for Gone Girl is much more audible in this film than it was in either Social Network or Dragon Tattoo, but I still stand by my question of, if it’s virtually indistinguishable from source music and sound effects, what purpose does the score serve? The lack of any emotional development beyond the general mood of uneasiness makes the film a one-note auditory bore; there is no light and shade, no ying to counterbalance the overwhelming yang. The music stops us from feeling any of the nuance or subtlety the acting or writing may have otherwise provided, because it never alters its disposition.

Worse still, on the few occasions the score does try to accentuate something specific, it picks the wrong thing to accentuate – there is one scene where someone is using the internet, and so the music immediately drops in the dial-up modem sound. What is this supposed to be telling us? We can see that the internet is being used; why do we need to hear the modem sound? What about the emotions of the character at that moment? Shouldn’t the music be telling us something about that, rather than mimicking a piece of office equipment? Reznor did something similar to this in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo when the main character walks down a hallway where an extra is using a floor buffer in the background, and at that moment the score starts to sound like a vacuum cleaner. Things like that, to me, indicate a complete lack of understanding of a film’s narrative requirements, not only on the part of Reznor and Ross, but also of David Fincher, for using the music in that way.

As an artist with Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor was genuinely groundbreaking, and will go down in history as a true pioneer, one of the greatest ever musicians of that genre. However, I just don’t buy into all the hype about his film music career. I read reviews from professional critics in well-respected music magazines, and they all laud him as though he is the individual savior of the art, someone who is finally writing the sort of edgy, avant-garde film music we have all needed all these years, but were too stupid to realize. I just don’t buy it. You want edgy and avant-garde? Listen to John Corigliano. Listen to what people like Alex North and Leonard Rosenman were doing back in the day. Heck, listen to Christopher Young when he’s at his most abstract and experimental. They make Trent Reznor seem like a floundering amateur. Yes, Gone Girl creates an appropriate mood. It “works in the film,” and as an album of ambient electronica it may be appealing to those who have an affinity for that sort of music. However, as actual film music, it’s as much as a failure as its two predecessors.

Buy the Gone Girl soundtrack from the Movie Music UK Store

Track Listing:

What Have We Done to Each Other? (2:30)

Sugar Storm (2:53)

Empty Places (2:46)

With Suspicion (3:16)

Just Like You (4:11)

Appearances (2:52)

Clue One (1:30)

Clue Two (5:10)

Background Noise (3:09)

Procedural (4:30)

Something Disposable (4:28)

Like Home (3:39)

Empty Places (Reprise) (2:20)

The Way He Looks at Me (3:27)

Technically, Missing (6:43)

Secrets (3:08)

Perpetual (4:00)

Strange Activities (2:37)

Still Gone (2:47)

A Reflection (1:46)

Consummation (4:09)

Sugar Storm (Reprise) (0:41)

What Will We Do? (3:05)

At Risk (11:05)

Running Time: 86 minutes 42 seconds

Columbia Music (2014)

Music composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Orchestrations by Dana Niu. Recorded and mixed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Edited by Jonathan Stevens. Album produced by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.