Colin Sheridan: Time to do what’s best for Mayo

It’s one of the most meme-worthy moments in recent cinema, when, in the movie Gone Girl, Ben Affleck’s character poses awkwardly beside a poster of his wife, who is missing and feared dead.

Uncomfortable and uncertain, he smiles a smile so smug you want to punch him, just as the cameras flash. The image becomes a totem for his apparent guilt, or rather, it renders the question of his guilt obsolete. Suddenly, nobody really cares whether he murdered his wife. They just care he smiled beside a picture of his maybe-murdered wife. In that moment he becomes much more than a suspected murderer. He becomes an unlikable bastard.