In my first year of library school back when I still thought I would be in academic libraries for the long haul, I took a digital information literacy class. One of our assignments was to map C.C. Kuhlthau’s Information Search Process (ISP) as established in her 1999 article “Accommodating the User’s Information Search Process: Challenges for Information Retrieval System Designers” to a movie. One of the reasons this article is still a seminal library school text is that Kuhlthau explicitly centers “confusion and uncertainty” as a driving force behind information retrieval. Helping users navigate these feelings is fundamental to any information professional’s job, and this skill has been critical to my roles as an academic library worker and as an information architect.
Since David Fincher’s 2014 adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl also centers these themes, I felt it was a natural choice for the assignment and I’m still pretty pleased with the results (the instructor also asked to use it as an exemplar for future classes, but who’s counting!). A quick summary for the uninitiated: Gone Girl explores how the breakdown of the marriage between Nick and Amy Dunne leads to her disappearance and the surrounding public outcry. I’ve always been interested in the way the narrative challenges the audience to reconsider their own information literacy skills, and how Amy is shown to consciously construct and leverage her image as a missing pregnant white woman to manipulate media industries that profit from tragedy into targeting her husband. Although these identities (wife, daughter, expectant mother) made Amy feel trapped in her relationships, she is successfully able to weaponize them, and the narrative demonstrates to the audience the contextual and constructed nature of authority.
Kuhlthau lays out six stages researchers move through as they seek answers to a question:
- Initiation: Become aware of information gap
- Selection: Identify topic to investigate
- Exploration: Investigate information related to gap
- Formulation: Develop point of view from information
- Collection: Gather information
- Presentation: Close information gap
Below, you will find Nick Dunne’s journey to solve the mystery of Amy’s disappearance mapped to these stages.
Initiation
Nick’s search process is initiated by a call from a neighbor who notices his front door has been left open. As he enters the house, he finds a shattered glass table but no sign of his wife. As the police are called and the gravity of the situation sets in, Nick begins to realize the gap between his emotional experience of his wife and the material evidence the police find in the form of interviews and even Amy’s own diary. The audience and the police label Nick as a suspect from the very first scene in which he demonstrates what Kuhlthau calls a “lack of understanding” of his own wife’s anniversary treasure hunt clues. Much as a user in a traditional research process must grapple with the discomfort of the initiation stage, both Nick and the audience must grapple with the tension of the film’s inciting action.
Selection
Nick’s inability to successfully resolve the clues pushes the plot to the selection stage of the ISP, in which the searcher chooses the topic to guide their investigation. It becomes clear to both Nick and to the audience that understanding the dynamic of the Dunne marriage is key to solving the mystery of Amy’s disappearance. The film uses Amy’s past diary entries and Nick’s present behavior to demonstrate how little he knows about his wife, which leads to the public’s growing suspicion of his motives and to the exploration stage of the ISP.
Exploration
During this stage of Nick’s process, he knows that he needs to investigate the clues Amy has left but as Kuhlthau notes the “[f]eelings of confusion, uncertainty and doubt frequently increase during this time.” While the film reveals details about Nick’s behavior both past (through Amy’s diary entries) as well as present, the supporting characters and the audience increasingly scrutinize Nick’s reliability as a narrator. Interestingly, Amy’s authority as a narrator remains unquestioned, even as her diary entries portray her in a subordinate position in her marriage. Those negative feelings mentioned above weaken Nick’s personal and public positioning of innocence.
Formulation
Once Nick begins the process of seriously committing to solving what he believes to be clues from Amy, he comes to the formulation stage of the ISP. After solving a clue brings him to a woodshed filled with expensive electronics purchased on a credit card, Flynn’s script takes a turn when Nick and the audience realize that Amy is trying to frame him for her murder. This twist the critical point of view that defines the formulation stage, and Nick’s arc in the film. The only way to exonerate himself is to find Amy and prove she is still alive. Part of the reason this reveal is so effective is the film’s willingness to engage the problems of information consumption as it relates to the genre of true crime media. Numerous characters exploit Amy’s disappearance for social and financial capital: her parents, her neighbors, and even the Not-Nancy Grace television personality whose supposed reportage plays on screens in the background of many scenes. By deploying this twist, the film forces the audience to question the motivations of each character and push them to translate that to their real-life consumption of media about similar tragedies.
Collection
Nick then enters the information collection stage in earnest as he must convince his wife that he understands her. He meets with Amy’s ex-boyfriends, including one she successfully framed for a different crime. Nick has been trying to understand their relationship only from his point of view and this exercise forces him to consider Amy’s experience of their marriage and romantic relationships writ large. Finally, Nick realizes that Amy has constructed a scenario in which he is essentially powerless and must subordinate himself to her to save his own life.
Presentation
With this realization, Nick is able to reconcile with Amy. In a literal presentation, he submits to a nationally televised interview in which he finally performs the role of husband in the way Amy has always wanted. In this phase of the film, the information conveyed and consumed by the characters has virtually nothing to do with authentic emotion. Instead, it is about wielding gendered, raced, and classed power within a marriage and within American society.
In Conclusion
Gone Girl is a compelling movie and Gillian Flynn is a great writer.
More seriously, information search frameworks like Kuhlthau’s are valuable to solving information problems in any context. As I have progressed in my career and solved information problems in different contexts, I consistently find myself falling back on this training to empathize with users. I still appreciate that this assignment helped show me the practical versatility of these frameworks.
