Gillian Flynn, millionaire author of Gone Girl – what America’s hype machine calls a “mega-bestseller” — was hired to write the movie’s screenplay (her first) by people who don’t know what a good screenplay is but do know how to keep the machinery running. The result is a routine romantic crime drama — a crime-rom – of the sort broadcast nightly on the Lifetime for Women cable channel but here tricked up with director David Fincher’s glum, stylish, expensive slickness.

The crime-rom concept is offensively cynical: Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) never had a chance when he married the sophisticated sociopath Amy (Rosamund Pike). He’s a sexual patsy, despite his horndog loutishness, born to be duped by a woman. Man-eater Amy outdoes jaded, misogynist Nick (who is partly based on the real-life heartthrob convicted wife-killer Scott Peterson), entrapping him in her own kidnap-murder plot. Affectless Fincher can’t do emotion, so Amy’s hoax is filmed as if something unfathomable or existential were happening, Fincher’s usual puffed-up nothingness. As Affleck’s dope is revealed to be an innocent dupe, arrested by police and instantly condemned and humiliated by ambulance-chasing TV hosts, the film suggests Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man. That’s not a compliment, because Gone Girl is The Wrong Man done the wrong way.

It is significant that Flynn began as a writer for Entertainment Weekly, the Time Inc. periodical that did its best to create an audience of non-thinking fanatical consumers. Frequently annexing its journalist mission to the promotion of the Oscars and Emmys, EW mixed tastelessness with a tradition of degraded values — laying ground for today’s venal, trivia-obsessed media culture. This sensibility is everywhere apparent in Flynn’s male-female relations, which smack of pop-therapy literature, violent potboilers, and sensationalist tabloid media. Flynn teaches a lesson to both Nick and Amy, as if they were prototypes for the great unwashed, through their scandalous courtship rituals tied up with ideas of middle-class avarice. Each lover’s greed and possessiveness exploits the other. This is consistent with EW’s formula, which is so cynical it always presents itself as “smart” — that’s advertising code for suckers, deceptive millennial self-flattery, thus typical Fincher material.

Consciously or not, Flynn’s quasi-feminist, Lifetime Channel posturing (her poorly structured, back-and-forth narrative) manipulates public prurience about the gender wars, but her real subject is class — always Hollywood’s hidden subject. Although Flynn flaunts her success as girlish (her term not mine), she’s not motivated by feminism but by a freaky self-reproach presented as entertainment — a paradox only a parvenu from the privileged media class can pull off.

Flynn and Fincher pretend to identify with self-pitying Nick, pulling us through a facile critique of media ruthlessness and then faking concern with the state of modern marriage. Critics who fall for this are as untrustworthy as those opportunistic “feminists” were at the Village Voice who embraced the similarly noxious Fatal Attraction in 1987 simply to vent their sense of entitlement. Gone Girl aims to be a millennial Fatal Attraction; its style emulates that film’s glib sensationalism.

Fincher-worshippers know he descends from the Ridley Scott–Adrian Lyne advert school of film directing, but he makes the commercials director’s biggest mistake: This film is totally, fatally miscast. Each character is one-dimensional, a spokesperson. Affleck’s fall guy recalls his role in the unfairly maligned Gigli, and he’s still a lethargic actor. Nick’s personality (“I’m so sick of being picked apart by women”) is less distinctive than Flynn’s exposition of him as a man who drinks “canned beer while watching Adam Sandler movies” (truly an EW sin). Rosamund Pike is always hoity yet a charmless monster. (Have Fincher and Flynn never seen Out of the Past or Detour?) When Amy goes off-grid in redneck country, she’s no different than an EW snob. (As the daughter of a best-selling authoress, she’s also the overindulged model for her mother’s resourceful book heroine “The Amazing Amy.”) The revenge she exacts upon a fellow elitist (Neil Patrick Harris) unleashes excessive, murderous contempt. This is Fincher’s money shot. Its bloody excess is candy-apple red — different from his usual dull, neutral palette, which mimics All the President’s Men’s portentousness. “Sick,” as the kids say.

When a movie like Gone Girl receives across-the-board adulation and bow-down praise the way it has — despite the confusion of genre tropes, social bias, and sexual fantasy — it indicates a breakdown in our film culture that demands careful consideration. Nick’s confession “I had mediocre aspirations” as the reason his marriage fails is consistent with how Flynn’s crime-rom deviousness conceals class contempt. From the opening moment, when Nick misleadingly announces his desire to “crack” the heroine’s skull, it’s obvious that Gone Girl expresses its author’s own careerist’s regrets and shameless self-exploitation. She’s put EW’s snark in motion.

Nick complains, “We resent each other, control each other, cause each other pain.” And his wife’s response, “That’s marriage” gets a sarcastic chuckle from the chuckleheads in the audience. But they forget it’s a “smart” retort from a lunatic. It indicts our age, and Amy boasts a self-incriminating profanity (the C-word) to prove it. Gone Girl isn’t about marriage; it’s all about feminists’ dread C-word, but in an excruciating way.

— Armond White, a film critic, writes about movies for National Review Online and received the American Book Award’s Anti-Censorship prize. He is the author of The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World and the forthcoming What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about the Movies.