David Fincher Films

David Fincher
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David Fincher
Films That Scar
MARK BROWNING
Copyright 2010 by Mark Browning
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Browning, Mark, 1966–
David Fincher : films that scar / Mark Browning.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-313-37772-3 (hardcopy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-
37773-0 (ebook)
1. Fincher, David—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
PN1998.3.F54B76 2010
791.43020 33092—dc22 2010004042
ISBN: 978-0-313-37772-3
EISBN: 978-0-313-37773-0
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Contents
Introduction vii
1. Opposites Attract: Commercials and Pop Videos 1

2. Woman in Peril or Final Girl? Alien3 and Panic Room 23
3. To Catch a Killer: Seven and Zodiac 55
4. It’s Only a Game: The Game and Fight Club 89
5. It’s Not Like the Book: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button 115
6. The New De Palma? 131
7. A Sense of an Ending—No ‘‘Happily Ever After’’? 159
Conclusion 177
Notes 181
Bibliography 185
Index 187
Introduction
‘‘I’ve always been interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about Jaws
is that I’ve never gone swimming in the ocean again.’’
—David Fincher1
David Fincher is arguably the leading filmmaker of his generation, with a

body of work that includes Fight Club, Seven, and The Curious Case of
Benjamin Button. His movies are distinctive and often disturbing, but to
date, very little has been written about how they actually work. In terms
of existing critical literature on Fincher, there are huge gaps. There are
studies on single films, such as Richard Dyer’s Seven (1999), which
approaches the film as an inquisition into the nature of sin and David
Thomson’s The Alien Quartet (1998), which is chronological and reason-
ably thorough but frequently recounts the plot and virtually paraphrases
dialogue. At times, Thomson becomes hugely self-indulgent, explaining
over pages, especially in relation to Alien Resurrection, the film he would
have liked to see, rather than dealing with the one we have.
As a starting point and a source of factual information, James Swallow’s
book Dark Eye: The Films of David Fincher (2003), is useful. However, a
general problem with it is that it does not really analyze the films it talks
about—we have a great deal of direct quotation from Fincher and other
key players (all without specific citation) but there is no criticism of these
words; they are simply reported as fact. Review quotations are mostly gen-
eralized and from mainstream sources, and bald financial figures of open-
ing weekends or annual grosses do not help us dig beneath the surface of
the films. It is difficult to engage with a critical line of argument as
viii Introduction
Swallow is not really putting one forward. Dark Eye is full of useful infor-
mation and interesting observations, but it does not really cohere into an
argument (neither does it really try to), reflected in the lack of a conclu-
sion. In its place is consideration of potential future projects, but this is
inevitably redundant as these are entirely hypothetical ‘‘case studies’’
(something of an oxymoron), which posterity has shown did not take
place. In his introduction, Swallow claims that he will not spend valuable
pages on lengthy synopses but then goes on to open each chapter with
one. He recounts the development and production process and lists cuts,
rarely commenting on the significance of such observations. The tone is
generally descriptive; the emphasis factual. There is no apparent awareness
of a critical heritage about Fincher’s work and similar films by other direc-
tors are often just listed by theme, without exploring how or why they
could be linked.
As Swallow admits, ‘‘I’ve done my best to allow David Fincher to tell
us, in his own words, what he thinks of his works.’’2 However, this
approach glosses over a number of issues. It marginalizes the role of the
critic and repeats a critical fallacy that a director knows his or her own
work best and is best placed to analyze it. Secondly, it presents the taking
of directorial statements at face value as a virtue, rather than questioning
them as products of a larger industrial/commercial process in which inter-
views and directors’ personas are crafted as much as those of stars on
screen. Thirdly, there is an underlying element of ‘‘fidelity criticism’’
here—Swallow suggests that if we just let the director speak directly to us,
we will somehow see to the core, the ‘‘truth’’ of a film text, as if that were
an essence on which we could all agree and that this is the natural method
to unearth it.
It is a contention of this book that David Fincher is one of the most
imaginative filmmakers at work today and the complexity of his films not
only invites, it demands, a more detailed, analytical response than has
hitherto been the case. Critical energy has so far only been directed to-
ward very specific areas, such as masculinity-in-crisis and the glorification
of violence in Fight Club, the groundbreaking cinematography of Seven,
and the failure of Alien3 to meet the expectations of that particular fran-
chise. This book endeavors to look afresh at the films in their entirety and
reconsider neglected critical areas, such as the literary background to Fight
Club, Benjamin Button, and even Alien3.
Rather than imposing a preexisting view onto the films, this book will
seek to analyze the films closely and derive conclusions from evidence.
Fincher’s background in music video and commercials is often cited as a
Introduction ix
criticism and de facto proof of a superficial aesthetic. However, to the con-

trary, Fincher’s experience with shorter film forms makes him acutely
aware of the potential of every single shot, in which he needs to show sen-
sitivity to a different sense of storytelling rhythm based around the three-
minute pop song and remain in touch with state-of-the-art visual effects.
These experiences and his rejection of film school as a route into the
industry link him with a small but growing band of directors who have
taken a similar career path—Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Gore Verbinski,
and Wes Anderson.
In terms of readership, this book is aimed at the thoughtful film viewer.
Fincher makes films to be seen by a mass audience and therefore discus-
sion of his work should be accessible to that same market. That said, this
book assumes basic knowledge of the films themselves and an awareness
that disciplines such as Film Studies exist. This author feels it is important
to go beyond regurgitating plots or repeating established critical positions
about them. This book aims to be critically rigorous but avoid unneces-
sary jargon that would exclude a mainstream reader. Ideally, it should
make the reader want to look again at films he or she thinks they know
and try out those they may have missed.
Chapter 1
Opposites Attract: Commercials

and Pop Videos
Given the often tortuous gestation process of film production (something

Fincher experienced very early in his directing career), the chance to see a
project through from conception to completion in a matter of weeks or
months rather than years, is clearly attractive. Apart from what can be a
lucrative, regular income, short film forms offer directors the chance to
experiment with technology (such as a new kind of film or a post-produc-
tion piece of software) or an idea, which in the frenzy of a film schedule
would be just too risky. At the same time, both commercials and pop vid-
eos represent the challenge of being sufficiently memorable to repay, and
perhaps even demand, repeat viewings. Increasing use of video as part of
art installations, has blurred the boundary between pictorial art and mov-
ing images, high and low culture, and the classically artistic with a me-
dium often associated with crude commercialism.
COMMERCIALS
Adverts are not only a stepping stone in Fincher’s career but a touch-
stone to which he periodically returns. His involvement with commercials
began in the mid 1980s but has continued sporadically to the present day.
After two years at Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), 1981–1983, it was
his commercial work (for The American Cancer Society) where he started
to make a name for himself. In contrast with pop videos, commercials
offer greater opportunity to produce a more complete concept, rather than
necessarily promoting a band and one particular song and allow greater
subtlety in how products can be presented (or perhaps even only alluded
2 David Fincher
to). Many of his commercials were made in collaboration with special

effects company, Digital Domain (who has also helpfully archived much
of Fincher’s work at HYPERLINK ‘‘http://www.digitaldomain.com’’
www.digitaldomain.com). More recently, fan-sites, particularly www.
fincherfanatic.com, have made a number of Fincher commercials available.
To make most sense of the comments that follow, it is recommended (as with
the films in subsequent chapters) that you view the material before reading on.
American Cancer Society—‘‘Smoking Fetus’’ (1984)

Fincher’s first commercial at only age 22 seems simple enough—a single
shot that pulls back, with an accompanying heartbeat-effect on the sound-
track, to reveal a cigarette in the hand of a fetus.
It was shocking at the time, leading to its removal from prime-time
schedules, but in part this may have been due to the clarity of the visuals
and the awareness that pre-birth scanning was making such images a near
possibility in the real world. Even here, there is some subtlety in the tiny
cloud of smoke the fetus exhales. It’s worth comparing with the opening of
‘‘Fate’’ some 24 years later, which also sees quirky, almost otherworldly,
humor in the pre-birth state. The fetus swaps its thumb for a cigarette quite
easily, suggesting that one form of oral gratification is being replaced by
another. There is a thin line between satire and the suggestion that the baby
is happy—he seems to be exhibiting a mellow high, which although clearly
not desirable medically, may even appear to glamorize smoking. The effects
still look fairly good and do not date, unlike like the final wraparound with
a leaflet and number that seems to belong to another era entirely.
‘‘Stand Up to Cancer’’ (2008)

Although appearing 24 years after the previous commercial, this com-
mercial represents an enduring interest in this particular disease. A series
of shots of figures standing up may seem simple, but the literalization of
the metaphor is a powerful tool in driving home a slogan that also exhorts
a particular action. Recognizable A-list figures (including Jodie Foster,
Keanu Reeves, and Morgan Freeman, as well as cancer campaigner and
survivor Lance Armstrong) are all shown in a variety of settings, but
unknown figures are shown too (including a woman looking straight at
the camera at the opening, suggesting a direct appeal to the viewer). The
opening and closing lines, delivered by Sidney Poitier, are from a stage to
an empty auditorium, evoking the sense of why people stand at the end of
a performance, a moment of national pride, or to protest and make one’s
Opposites Attract: Commercials and Pop Videos 3
voice heard—all three are relevant here as all the recognizable figures,
although known globally, are American. Camera movement is gradual, of-
ten pulling back to put the figure in context, one individual in a public
place, by implication, surrounded by like minds, accompanied by the
archetypal American, folksy sound of ‘‘Rise’’ by Eddie Vedder. There is a
sense of a growing movement as numbers increase in scale from a restau-
rant, to a cinema, to a football stadium.
Softbank—‘‘Wind’’ (2009)
A single reverse-tracking shot follows Fincher-favorite Brad Pitt as he is
surrounded by signs of a city blown away around him, including cars flying
past as if in the midst of a tornado. Initially he appears not to notice the de-
bris but does glance back at one car. The ad seems based around the effect
rather than being particularly conceptual, and the Twister-style effects do
not really relate to the product in any meaningful way, except in the
obvious sense that reception is so good, it makes you oblivious to external
events. It is perhaps more interesting as a reference to Michel Gondry’s The
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), which features a similar pi-
ece of action as a subjective universe starts to collapse. The music, Saul
Williams’s ‘‘Banged and Blown Through’’ feels very Seven-ish in its gritty,
industrial harshness, complementing the handheld camera evocative of the
chase sequence or the cab scene in Zodiac. A still human figure surrounded
by choreographed, slow-motion destruction is also dramatized in Young
Miss magazine’s Her World (1993), which also stars the future Mrs. Brad
Pitt, Angelina Jolie, in a great final close-up when she was still modelling.
Heineken—‘‘Beer Run’’ (2005)

Another collaboration with Brad Pitt shows the insanity of his lifestyle
pursued by the paparazzi. There is some of the ballsy insouciance of Ste-
ven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s franchise (2001, 2004, and 2007) as the Pitt
character (really playing an exaggerated version of himself, referred to as
‘‘Mr. Pitt’’ by the concierge) coolly walks out the front door of his apart-
ment block, loses a pack of photographers by heading out the back of the
mini-market, and finally remains breezily cheerful and on first-name terms
with a photographer who is so surprised to be greeted (and by name) that
he drops his camera. Pitt’s search of the fridge in conventional shot-
reverse/shot sequence is accompanied by what sounds like a drum roll, as
if he is about to engage in battle or be executed. The baying pack of
4 David Fincher
reporters is captured in overhead shots—first the stairwell of the opposite

building, then the camera rising over the edge of a building as the crowd
amasses at the door of the market, and finally the nice contrast of a crowd
pressed into a backstreet pursuing a single figure, trailing a long shadow.
Moronic calls (‘‘He’s on the move’’ and ‘‘There he is’’) make this feel like a
bizarre urban safari. Like the wittier parts of the Ocean’s franchise or the
museum sequence in the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair (John
McTiernan, 1999), there is the sense of the individual outsmarting the mass
but remaining true to himself—an impression implied about the beer with
which Pitt manages, rather unbelievably, to return home. There are some
nice little touches—not just Brad’s plea at the end to be picked up (by
Angelina, we assume), but also the music that accompanies the chase while
Pitt is in the store; it has a tinny, poor-quality, in-store feel to it.
Levi’s—‘‘The Chase’’ (1996)

The video is a decontextualized chase sequence, ultimately revealed as a
joke about breaking-in jeans, effectively made up of a collection of movie
cliches, suggesting that it was produced primarily to be exhibited in movie
theatres. We see a man running, jumping a fence in slow motion, and hop-
ping a ride on a truck, and the style is like much of Seven (except for the
jazz score). The ad opens with a low-angle tracking shot following behind
the man with strong backlighting and some camera shake. Fincher pulls
focus so we cut from a blurred close-up of wire mesh to a clear shot of the
man hitting a fence. Dogs come round the corner in slow motion and the
hero rolls over the top of the fence (in apparently even slower motion).
We crane down from a high angle to street level as the man and dogs (in
the same shot now) come toward us.
Half a second of speeded-up motion with some frames missing and
some bright street lights behind the figure make the man momentarily just
a blur and convey his panic and almost superhuman efforts to escape.
Running across the dumpsters feels like the alley scenes in The Game and
the kinetic headlong action of Seven’s chase sequences. Slow motion of the
man in a clearer head-on shot casts him in the guise of an Olympic
sprinter, face contorted in effort.
The music pauses for a few seconds as we see from low angle the build-
ing-to-building jump, something of a movie cliche (one of many shots
parodied in The Beastie Boys’ 1994 Sabotage, directed by Spike Jonze).
The appearance of a truck, often used as a symbol of threat, here is a
means of escape as the man runs and hurls himself at it in a nod to
Terminator II (James Cameron, 1991) and Indiana Jones’s exploits in

Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981). The driver tries to shake
him off and the man is shot looking down the side of the truck as it careers
along, making sparks and screeching sounds, suggesting some contact with
the wall. He is flung clear and caught in another fence, now acting as a
safety net, before picking himself up, brushing himself off, and wandering
off down a busy well-lit high street, apparently unperturbed. The camera
tilts down to the product which is dusted off, the voiceover delivers the joke,
and a light, whimsical flute theme gives the final impression of a witty James
Bond/Bourne Identity franchise rather than a gritty cyberpunk narrative.
Nike—‘‘Fate’’ (2008) and ‘‘Referee’’ (1994)

A football scenario had been used in an earlier Nike ad, ‘‘Game-
breakers’’ (2003), but in ‘‘Fate’’ it works with more finesse. Cinematogra-
pher Emmanuel Lubezki, whose credits include Tim Burton’s Sleepy
Hollow (1999) and Michael Mann’s Ali (2001), complements Fincher’s
visual aesthetic in the arena of sporting subjects. The ad uses a remix of
Ennio Morricone’s ‘‘The Ecstasy of Gold’’ (L’Estasi della Oro) made fa-
mous in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966). Fincher
also refers to this sub-genre in an earlier Nike commercial ‘‘Instant
Karma’’ (1992), where a single shot of a lone man running up the steps of
a stadium is distorted into a thinner figure, casting him as a movie star
(particularly used of heroes in classic westerns) as well as an inspirational
one, a self-made man, becoming fit and losing weight. Here, a boy in a di-
aper runs into a typical suburban hallway (looking a little like the closing
shots of John Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween), but here there is absolute fear-
lessness in the boy’s demeanor. Movement is an instinctive sign of healthy
life. Looking back to the taxi murder sequence in Zodiac or the chase
sequence in Seven, there is some effective handheld camerawork, probably
with a Steadicam, and a little camera shake as the child runs around and
hits a table.
We do not see much nurturing taking place—two boys are genetically
programmed to survive by running—to get to class on time, jumping onto
a table (from which one assumes they learn something). However, this is
not a comment on neglectful parenting or the ‘‘ghettoization’’ of African
Americans into sport as indicative of limited career options. We see them
learning and growing by action. The ad conveys a great sense of move-
ment, in particular of kinetic pleasure, not just of running but especially
jumping and humankind’s ability to (albeit momentarily) defy gravity (and
6 David Fincher
film’s ability to manipulate time and space). The camera is rarely still, of-
ten following alongside a moving figure as we share their pleasure in
movement, i.e., we literally take the journey with them. We see the joy of
headlong motion (into a bean bag) or of being chased (a cropped shot of a
mother pursuing a little boy from the bathroom still with shampoo in his
hair). The urge to run and jump is common to both boys, whether
expressed through organized training sessions or the second boy from a
slightly less affluent background who must skip over sprinklers and take
the bus to the game rather than drive his own sports car.
The music increases in volume, using a bell chime to underline the first
tackle in the match and the cutting between attacker and defender speeds
up as the moment to which their whole life has been heading draws near.
Slow motion underlines the spaghetti western link in this man-to-man duel,
a battle for territory (10 yards at least) in America, now played out under
spotlights rather than in dusty streets. Importantly here, though, it is not a
fight to the death, aggression is controlled, no one is hurt, and sportsman-
ship prevails with both players picking themselves up quickly and the
attacker giving the defender a playful cuff in recognition. The final shots of
both boys falling back on their beds, still in slow motion, laughing, is a
nice way to relieve the tension as the piano theme fades away. The title of
the ad (‘‘Fate’’), its central conceit, and even its piano theme, all make it a
potent parallel for Benjamin Button—a narrative about two characters,
destined to meet, who, due partly to their own decisions and circumstances
beyond their control, only really consummate their relationship after many
near misses. There is a similar sense of an epic confrontation between two
elemental forces and both narratives start with a birth, here a CG (com-
puter-generated) effect of a fetus’s legs running even in the womb.
There is a strange contrast in all the adverts considered up to this point.
Within the controlled environment and budget of a commercial, Fincher is
comfortable to shoot motion, even unpredictable motion with child sub-
jects. In Nike’s ‘‘Children Running’’ (2003), at least half the length of the
ad is a slow-motion shot of children running toward the camera (a shot
used in a bleaker context in Fernando Meirelles’s and Katia Lund’s 2002
City of God), ultimately invading focal distance. Cropped shots, focusing
on torsos and feet, strong backlighting making the figures virtual silhou-
ettes, jump-cuts, and a lack of continuity editing all convey the concept of
movement as more important than a specific movement for a specific end.
Increasingly, this aspect is disappearing from his feature films, which lack
this sense of joyous spontaneity (even if it is only the appearance of spon-
taneity and is actually very contrived).
In Nike’s 1994 ‘‘Referee’’ series, we see Dennis Hopper at his lunatic

best. In ‘‘Troy Aikman,’’ he plays a crazed former referee describing an
Aikman play, inter-cut with footage of the game. The key part of the
advert, apart from the sheer bravura of Hopper and his manic laugh,
hand-waving (a throwback to his profession) to represent all the ‘‘crazed
linesmen’’ supposedly surrounding Aikman, and the CG of placing Hopper
on the field or even the absurdity of an official screaming support at a
player, is one simple fact: the next seat is empty. He is ranting to himself.
With Hopper’s delivery, memorable dialogue (‘‘like a man . . . man’’) and
the contrast of ‘‘armchair’’ spectator with slow-motion footage to punctu-
ate the account, Fincher creates a powerful, ‘‘water-cooler’’ moment. Fol-
low-up ads demonstrate the law of diminishing returns. ‘‘Junior Seau’’
(1994) uses the same technique less effectively. A less-crazed Hopper
proudly shows his sand-built model of Jack Murphy Stadium where Seau
performed some of his fiercest tackles, only to be interrupted by a figure
(turning out to be Seau himself) who runs through his work. Perhaps it
would have worked better without the Aikman ad, but this seems muted
by comparison. Hopper is reduced to awe by Seau’s rather predictable
appearance and the final worship of the footprint is not as punchy as the
original ad. In ‘‘Sterling Sharpe’’ (1994), Hopper gate-crashes a training
ground and although he is bundled to the ground, he has time to kiss
Sharpe on the head and deliver the immortal line, ‘‘Like a freight train,
man. Choo-choo.’’ In all of these ads, Hopper draws on his iconic charac-
ter of Billy from Easy Rider (1968), which he also directed and co-wrote,
with his addled hippy-speak (‘‘He’s a strong man, man’’). Stylistically,
there are echoes of this too in the handheld camerawork, small jump-cuts,
and a sharp contrast between Hopper’s sections and slow-motion footage
of Sterling, as well as the obvious rebellious act of trespassing.
The Evolution of a Style

Film allusions permeate Fincher’s commercial work. Apple’s ‘‘Hallway’’
(2008) for the iPhone-3G appropriates iconography straight out of a heist
movie although it climaxes with a self-opening box, almost like Clive
Barker’s puzzle-box from Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987) and the grey me-
tallic morphing is closer to an aesthetic from Terminator II (James
Cameron, 1991), both allusions seeming quite dated now. Teleþ Digitale’s
Director’s Cut (2003) parodies action movie cliches. Events start with men
crouching behind a wall but breaking cover, apparently armed with
umbrellas. We cut to more ‘‘ordinary people’’ diving for cover behind cars
8 David Fincher
from nonexistent bullets, the postman tossing newspapers as if they were

grenades, and businessmen crawling across pedestrian crossings on their
stomachs like commandos. Driving the kids to school now features unmo-
tivated hand-brake turns. The bemused look of those not apparently in on
the joke could be acted but might be real. There is the sense of perform-
ance pavement art here. In the supermarket, customers start passionately
kissing check-out staff and outside after a crash, a couple suddenly kiss
rather than being angry with each other. The world of movie cliches is
brought to suburban streets. The implication is that if this is how the mov-
ies show reality then we are happily complicit to accept such cliches, as
well as showing their inherently ridiculous nature.
Nike’s ‘‘Barkley on Broadway’’ (1992) is constructed around a series
of self-conscious film references, including Busby Berkley dance routines
(virtual pun on the name too), a Citizen Kane–style montage of Charles
Barkley’s rise to fame, and a plane going round the basketball in a
clear allusion to the former Universal logo. In Nike’s ‘‘Godzilla Versus
Barkley’’ (1993), slightly ahead of the curve in terms of the fashion for
pitching horror icons against each other, this is a nice tongue-in-cheek par-
ody of cheesy Godzilla movies with a deliberately unconvincing monster,
unmotivated female screams, and Metropolis-style cityscape but in papier-
mâche.
Coca Cola’s ‘‘Blade Roller’’ (1993), apart from the obvious title, is a clear
homage to Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner. The opening caption places
the action in ‘‘Zero City’’ 2021, only two years later than Scott’s film, which
also featured ubiquitous neon screens advertising products (including Coca
Cola). The advert taps into the then-modish craze of roller-blading and the
rise of short-track skating as an Olympic event. The basic setting replicates
the film’s sense of street-level chaos, pervasive Oriental cultural influences,
and an environment dominated by steam, traffic, industrial noise, and
above all, darkness. However, what was prescient in 1982, nowadays feels
closer to pseudo-documentary as so many of those trends in urban living
have indeed come to pass. Nothing dates like visions of the future.
Pop promos and more particularly adverts are clearly both driven by
commercial motivation, and the fact that Fincher has been invited to con-
tinue to make high-profile ads for major global companies suggests that at
the level of increasing sales, they are successful. Despite experience with a
range of clients, including Nike and Coca Cola (and a continuing interest
in public health issues), it is notable that the main companies that he con-
tinues to come back to are known for their innovative technology, such as
Motorola (see the 2006 PEBL) and Apple.
POP VIDEOS
Not all of Fincher’s videos can be classified as great works of art,
although if it is borne in mind that the pop video is primarily a medium of
commercial promotion, Fincher certainly has a consistently high threshold
of artistic value, i.e., he is usually trying to do something different. In this
context, the Internet, often associated with ephemera and the transience of
modern life, is fulfilling here an increasingly archival function—allowing
new generations of viewers to see music videos, TV adverts, and other ma-
terial they were too young to see on first release and adults to re-live
media experiences from their youth. It is notable too that Fincher seems
open to working for a fairly eclectic range of musicians, both superstars
and small, relatively unknown bands.
Early Work: Springfield and Abdul

In Rick Springfield’s Bop Till You Drop (1984), anonymous, sexless
Metropolis-like workers clothed in gray rags are engaged in a large factory
on monotonous tasks for unseen ends. By the time of Madonna’s Express
Yourself, some five years later, one can see the development of Fincher’s
visual imagination. It is strangely more overtly political than Madonna’s
video—Springfield inspires the workers to break their chains, literally, and
rise up against their alien oppressors.
There is a nice close-up of the flute-playing boy reflected in the alien’s
eye (an effect overused by Fincher in later videos). The monster is shown
piecemeal, partially obscured and from a distance—when it is clearly
framed or shown in its entirety, it only looks like what it is (a man in a
rubber suit). The alien, with a look of the creature in Wolfgang Peterson’s
Enemy Mine (1985), is often backlit, creating almost a silhouette, so that
sharp white teeth are visible but the budget limitations are not. There is
even a slight Star Trek feel to the stylization, not just of monster but melo-
dramatic reaction of boy (via a crash zoom) before being blasted. The
reverse-tracking shot underneath the factory floor feels a little like shots
through the rebel base in Terminator (released the same year); the laser
gun turned on the boy and Springfield’s later heroic rope slide to kill the
alien both evoke Star Wars (1977); and the overall excess of the dystopian
vision, which is never believable as anywhere but a film set, is reminiscent
of the ludicrous excesses of Duran Duran’s Wild Boys (1984).
The video segues into Springfield singing, with a face-mike, casting what
we have seen as a stage show, thereby promoting Springfield as a live
concert experience. Once free, the workers dance and carry Springfield
10 David Fincher
Messiah-like as their savior but also demonstrating the pleasure of stage-

diving at his concerts. This may seem conventional in visual terms, but at
22, Fincher is right at the beginning of his career here, whereas Springfield
is an established star and teen idol, whose record company might not want
to bury his looks in more sophisticated imagery. As a step toward the
world of feature film, the song is also part of the soundtrack for Hard to
Hold (Larry Peerce, 1984) starring Springfield, and therefore part of the
increasing marketing synergy of movie, song, and artist.
Fincher chose to work with Paula Abdul four times, including Cold
Hearted (1989), which aspires to the power of the Erotica sequence in Bob
Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979) but feels like a parody of the audition sequence
from Flashdance (Adrian Lyne, 1983); and Forever Your Girl (1989), fea-
turing a very young Elijah Wood. Although often attributed to Fincher,
Opposites Attract was actually directed by husband-and-wife-team Can-
dace Reckinger and Michael Patterson (the latter credited with the cartoon
character MC Skat Kat, who appears in the video). It is Fincher’s vision
that helped launch Paula Abdul, then seen more as an influential choreog-
rapher, on an unsuspecting world. She is actually extremely small (barely 5
feet) and Fincher mostly frames her alone (as in Straight Up) and often in
low angle, so that her diminutive stature is not immediately obvious.
Straight Up (1989), which won MTV Awards for Best Female, Dance,
Choreography, and Editing, starts with a shot of feet (as does Fincher’s
promo for Roy Orbison’s 1989 She’s a Mystery to Me). Before the song even
starts, Abdul taps out a 20-second routine in full shot (a key part of all her
subsequent videos), clearly suggesting she is a serious artist (also signalled by
the black and white color palette). Full shots and close-ups of Abdul are
inter-cut with male dancers (some leaping in slow motion), so that essentially
everything we see in the video is choreographed dance moves, juxtaposed in
the edit rather than big ensemble performances. Fincher develops his trade-
mark combination of soft focus with extreme backlighting, so that Abdul’s
features are almost silhouetted or blurred. This is a video of juxtaposition:
black and white (ethnicities as well as backdrops), male and female, inside
and apparently outside (one male dancer is wearing a coat and carrying a
cane with a slight wind machine effect), left and right of the frame (divided
into black and white), real time, and slow motion. There is no attempt at
narrative—the audience sees Abdul dance, sing, and model the style of
clothes she is endorsing: earrings big and looped, hair up, and skirts short.
Midway through the video cuts to Abdul held in top-lighting, the rest of her
in darkness, highlighting her cheekbones in a slight nod to Marlene Dietrich
but not as obviously as with Madonna in Vogue.
Mature ‘‘Gun for Hire’’: Madonna, George Michael, and

Michael Jackson
Madonna’s Express Yourself (1989) is an explicit homage to Fritz
Lang’s Metropolis (1927), from the huge set with an old man overseeing
production in a brutal, anonymous factory to the final intertitle taken
directly from the film (‘‘Without the heart there can be no understanding
between the hand and the mind’’). Lyrically, it is revised for a feminist
reading of sexual expression but visually it retains all the stylistic hall-
marks of German Expressionist film. More than just black and white, it
features chiaroscuro lighting, i.e., pools of light and shadow, rainfall,
extreme angles, shadows are especially elongated, reflecting an alter ego,
particularly related to a more liberated sexual self. It is steamy in every
sense—sex is portrayed as a necessary safety valve in human affairs.
Scenes of Madonna behind a screen are inter-cut with an individual
worker in bed, suggesting she is his fantasy but also perhaps vice versa.
Animalism appears in sexualized symbols—Madonna is shown holding
and stroking a cat like a James Bond villain, inter-cut with an elongated
shadow of a cat and a pair of feline eyes overseeing the final shot.
There is also ambiguity of gender roles. Madonna is not just a stereo-
typical femme fatale (we see her smoking, in fitted suits, and with 1940s-
style hair and make-up) but also a satirical figure, sporting a monocle and
giving a crotch-grabbing gesture. Close-ups are mostly of anonymous,
sweating muscular male torsos, in slow motion, working at machinery,
allowing the video to address both gay and straight audiences simultane-
ously. Through a predominance of low angles and forward camera move-
ment, the mass is contrasted with the individual—high shots of Madonna
singing alone in her room are inter-cut with shots of male workers moving
in unison. The male owner appears to be superseded by the power of
female sexuality, but there is also a call for greater male emotional/sexual
literacy from the opening lyric (‘‘Come on girl, do you believe in love?/ Well,
I’ve got something to say about it and it goes something like this . . .’’).
Expressionist iconography, such as the rooftop opening, juxtaposes
Madonna with a hawkish statue, a symbol of male commercial empire.
Technology affords the ruling classes the opportunity for sexual and politi-
cal oppression, but the element of consent is ambiguous here. Madonna’s
clothing is often limited to corset and stockings, and in particular there are
shots of her naked on a bed except for a collar and chains, watched by an
older man on video, but exactly who is exploiting whom is unclear. The side-
on shot of Madonna crawling under the table, links her with the cat, the link
12 David Fincher
becoming explicit as she approaches and licks milk from a large saucer, in a
balance between a subservient ‘‘pet’’ and flaunting her sexual power to keep
the man in thrall. A similar sequence occurs in Billy Idol’s Cradle of Love,
which is even more problematic given the age of the girl in that video.
Oh Father (1989) is a weaker song (the verses sounding more like musi-
cal theatre than a pop song), reflected in lower worldwide chart positions
and sales. Typical Fincher features are present: black and white, shadows
(a grown-up Madonna and father appear in the same scene as shadows of
their younger selves), leisurely camera movement, extreme high angles,
and some slow motion. There are a few nods in the direction of Orson
Welles’s Citizen Kane (1939)—a black and white setting dissolves between
shots, creating a sense of fluidity between scenes and images, and many
scenes are shot in snow, particularly the reverse-tracking shot in the open-
ing from the snowscape into the house. However, the child-centered narra-
tive in which trauma in childhood supposedly affects the life of an adult is
not really visually coherent.
There are several shots of a dressing table, but none of the objects on it
have a particular Rosebud-like significance. It is supposedly the ongoing
rough/abusive treatment of the father, especially after (and possibly triggered
by) the death of the mother at the beginning rather than a single event as in
Kane, which scars the little girl. There are a couple of effective shots—one,
the distance between father and daughter is conveyed by a distorted image of
the adult Madonna walking out of the father’s room, shot through a close-up
of a bedside glass (a small allusion to the globe in Kane, reflected in wider
shots of Madonna apparently walking through light snow or the closing shot
of the girl dancing in the graveyard, almost as if she were in a globe herself
still). The other is a shocking shot of the mother’s corpse at the funeral in an
open casket with apparently sewn-up lips. Implications of the father as abu-
sive are not really present elsewhere, but it is a disturbing image nonetheless.
In the same year, Aerosmith’s Janie’s Got a Gun conveyed an abusive father
by more direct implication—juxtaposing the dropping of papers, a shocked
expression of a wife, Janie cowering back in her room, a pan left across
his daughter’s legs (her head cropped from the shot), and across the
father’s face who looks back right (by implication at those legs).
Vogue (1990) won MTV Awards for direction, editing, and cinema-
tography. The visual style here is strongly influenced by the Art Deco of
Tamara de Lempicka with allusions to works by photographer Horst P.
Horst (often referred to as just Horst), especially his iconic ‘‘Mainbocher
Corset.’’ Fincher recreates poses of style icons, including among others
Veronica Lake, Marlene Dietrich, and Marilyn Monroe (the latter two
reflecting lyrical content). Camera positioning is mostly high or low angle

but rarely at eye-line level, and lighting, typically for Fincher, is often from
an apparent single source, often placed above, at times through some kind
of obstruction like a veil or blinds. The combined effect is to evoke Joseph
von Sternberg’s lighting used to iconic effect on Dietrich.
Madonna is adept at tapping into (or crudely exploiting, depending on
one’s point of view) movements in youth/pop-culture, such as the ‘‘clown-
ing,’’ parcours, and video dance machines in 2008’s Hung Up. Here she is
giving the fashion of dancing in exaggerated posing movements, or ‘‘vogue-
ing,’’ often attributed to the New York gay club scene, mainstream cultural
currency. The dancers featured were part of Madonna’s ‘‘Blond Ambition’’
tour and choreographed by Karole Armitage, known more widely for her
mixture of classical ballet with brutal, aggressive movements, often dubbed
‘‘punk.’’ The video, only released days before the tour began, therefore also
acted as a teaser-trailer for the tour. With downloads eroding CD sales,
especially via illegal means, an increasing proportion of an artist’s income is
generated through sales of concert tickets. Hence, there is an increasing
drive to promote the image of a band or individual as much as one particu-
lar song and videos increasingly seek to underline the entertainment creden-
tials of musicians, via concert footage or pseudo-performance scenarios.
In Bad Girl (1993), post-Alien3, Fincher shows greater directorial assur-
ance. The use of an elevated director’s chair to signify a God-like presence
in the character of Christopher Walken, joined by Madonna after her char-
acter’s demise at the end, is an effective and nicely tongue-in-cheek image
of the responsibility and pressure that comes with directing. There is some
gentle humor in the elision of the role of director and an overseeing (but
not controlling) spiritual presence (Walken is seen sporting an umbrella
and reading a paper to pass the time). Fincher’s use of slow tracking shots
up to Madonna’s window creates the sense of a prurient, voyeuristic
point of view, which her image both invites but obviously leads to poten-
tial danger. Tracking shots of her character sweeping through her office, at
first from behind as if we can barely keep up with her, then a reverse-
tracking shot from the front and then a side shot, still in motion, give us a
three-dimensional sense of kinetic movement, of a character moving
through life at a speed most of us cannot imagine. Only alone in the office
does she show uncertainty and doubt. As we track back from Walken
standing outside her window on the ledge looking in, Fincher gives us a
view of a private moment (like the crying scene alone in her apartment
later). A series of superimposed images juxtapose Madonna smoking,
shots of the cityscape at night, and Walken dancing, creating a strange
14 David Fincher
impression of time passing and characters waiting for the inevitable. Spike
Jonze’s Weapon of Choice (2001) for Fatboy Slim brought the impressive
Walken’s dancing talents to a wider audience, but here we see him skip-
ping a whimsical little dance in a corner.
As with Janie’s Got a Gun, the video begins with a crime scene, which is
reflected in Madonna’s look for Body of Evidence (Uli Edel, 1993)—in
itself, a blatant crib from Paul Verhoeven’s 1991’s Basic Instinct. Among
many close-ups of her smoking (by 1993, behavior associated with a ‘‘bad
girl,’’ reflecting the title), such as a bird’s-eye view shot as her hand reaches
across a desk for a cigarette from a case, we have a close-up of Madonna
in femme fatale mode, on her back unzipping a black dress, feeling like
Basic Instinct in the era of the Hays Code. A nice graphic match between a
black tarmac road and a bar, under-lit, evokes the ghostly set of Kubrick’s
Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1980), foreshadowing the ghost that she
will become. The match itself is gradually introduced from the bottom
right corner with a barman wiping down the bar, while Madonna and her
first conquest are shown leaving her work building, effectively guiding our
vision across the frame from bottom right to top left and followed by a
180-degree pan around her darkened apartment the next day.
In a diner, Walken’s character literally mirrors Madonna, sitting oppo-
site her and apparently blowing out his lighter which extinguishes her
flame, either as a warning or a sign of what will happen. As her guardian
angel he seems concerned, looking over his paper, when she goes off with
the last man and at the close he puts a black gloved hand over his face in
funereal grief as her body is discovered and taken out, but he does nothing
to prevent what happens. At the close he lights a cigar and shares a
moment of nicotine camaraderie with Madonna, also smoking, who sits,
apparently happily, next to him, suggesting they were destined to be to-
gether and that in a spiritual sense, there is no demonic condemnation for
such apparently immoral behavior. It would appear that with the crane on
which they are both perched, rising slightly, she is not such a ‘‘bad girl’’ as
the song might suggest. The scene where the music stops for around 30
seconds, he comes into the bedroom, sits next to her and they kiss, is quite
lightly touching, so that the cut to Madonna’s eye-line, still looking at the
space where Walken was moments before, is simple but effective. A small
‘‘movie moment’’ appears as Fincher makes the most of the lack of music
to use a soft sound of fluttering breeze in the vents of the apartment, the
distant chiming of a clock and the insert of the killer spraying his mouth
in a harsh-sounding gesture inter-cut with a cat snarling, feels intrusive
and is closer to the predatory nature of the club scene of Tony Scott’s
remake of Cat People (1982). In her second partner’s room, the opaque
lighting, Madonna making herself up, while visible in four mirrors simul-
taneously, the sweeping searchlights, and the momentarily glimpsed mise-
en-scene details of a clock (time is running out for her), and a crucifix
(judgment time is nigh) feel very like the iconography of Blade Runner
and continues the Expressionist imagery from Express Yourself.
Michael Jackson—Who Is It? (1993)

The basic detective narrative never really takes off as we see where the
mysterious girl goes right from the outset and by the end we are till no
nearer knowing why she does what she does and whether Jackson’s persona
in the song does something to drive her to it. The woman using the card
with ‘‘Diana’’ on it could equally be using ‘‘Alex’’ as another alias, although
the Jackson character, and the initial motivation for the song, supposedly
the suspicion of infidelity with a man called Alex, is far from clear. What
might have been a consideration of personal identity is more a confused
mess. Its supposed sexual suggestiveness contributed to low airplay on
MTV, but this may be due to a rare blip in Fincher’s quality control, too.
Jackson is framed in virtual silhouette against a huge window looking
down on a city. The mixture of high-angle, single-figure framing and
warm honey-gold lighting almost feels like George Lucas’s ‘‘first’’ three
Star Wars pictures, and the scenario, visual style, and inherent melancholia
evoke Ridley Scott’s shots of Harrison Ford looking out at the Los Angeles
skyline or the view from the Tyrell Corporation in Blade Runner (1982).
The woman, who is shown as the center of a bustling prettification busi-
ness, with make-up and hair specialists fussing around her, evokes the
preparation for a catwalk show. We are watching the operation of the sex
industry as performance. A high-class call-girl is being prepared for her
role as fantasy object—this is Pretty Woman without Julia Roberts’s
engaging smile. The act itself, what happens in the room, is the lacuna
in the middle of the video but the preparation, the ‘‘escape’’ down the
stairs, the rapid counting of money, the swift drop-off and pick up at the
front of the hotel, all proceeds with military precision.
We later see a girl who could be the same one as before, now using a
card introducing her as ‘‘Celeste,’’ with quite a different dark-haired look.
Here we see the actual client, apparently in his palatial home, in a wheel-
chair and taking oxygen to control his arousal, all of which has unpleasant
overtones of Dennis Hopper in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1983). ‘‘Cel-
este’’ appears toward the end of the video (so apparently not the same
woman as the first one), and is slapped by a blond woman, implying she
has taken the place of someone else, but this is all very unclear. The
16 David Fincher
shadowy nature of the sex industry is certainly reflected in Fincher’s cine-

matography but it is so unremittingly dark that the quick cutting and dis-
solves mean one has to watch it in a darkened room, i.e., almost recreate
the darkened conditions of the video, in order to even see it.
George Michael—Freedom 90 (1990)

Fincher is complicit here in Michael’s ongoing feud with Sony at the
time and is content to create a promotional video that does not actually
feature the artist. A series of known supermodels (tapping into the link in
popular culture between Michael’s image and the glamor of a supermodel
lifestyle, as in Too Funky, 1992) lip-sync the lyrics. It also suggests that
Michael is now making music to be listened to at home, i.e., he is a more
thoughtful, serious artist. A host of supermodels are featured (including
Naomi Campbell, Christie Turlington, Tatiana Patitz, and Linda Evang-
elista), all dressed in black and white to complement the limited color pal-
ette of the cinematography, in their own shadowy lit apartments (one with
a rather unlikely leaking roof, included more for the effect of drips falling
into a jar than the realism of a supermodel living in a wrecked place).
The focus racks from Evangelista’s face to the remote control in her out-
stretched hand, which activates the sound system, thereby motivating the
music and the basic conceit of the song—these figures are singing along
with the record as any of us might do in a private moment, not miming
for Michael. Cutting between male and female models perpetuates the sex-
ual ambiguity that still surrounded Michael’s own sexual orientation at
this point in his career, thereby still addressing both gay and straight ele-
ments of his fan base (a woman’s face is shot in the reflection of an
extended shaving mirror). Revealed in juxtaposed steamy bathrooms are
two models both framed upside down—a male model hanging from grav-
ity boots and a woman with her head hanging over the edge of a luxurious
bath (shot upside down in a fantastic close-up, which could be a glamor
shot in itself).
The video represents something of a watershed in popular visual culture
as supermodels become so well-known by name and face that they can
even stand in for a pop star with a powerful global profile. As pop stars
appear on catwalks, release their own brands of clothes or perfume, and
endorse such products, models in their turn have become the new stars of
rock and roll. The lyrical content of ‘‘sometimes the clothes do not make
the man’’ is also reflected in Michael’s conscious ironic choice of the
world’s most famous models to suggest that we should not judge him by
appearances. It is also a literal rejection of the boy-band iconography from
Michael’s days with Wham as his black leather jacket (associated with the
video for ‘‘Faith’’) spontaneously combusts (not as a result of Turlington’s
look as Karina Longworth suggests in her blog; there is no eye-line match
here, she is looking down).1 Fincher repeatedly cuts back to a shot of the
jukebox and later the guitar, as they explode, suggesting Michael’s rejection
of superficial pop as well as making the most of potentially expensive effects.
The Evolution of a Style II

At least three-quarters of Fincher’s videos are in black and white, which
is often viewed as a sign of artistic seriousness (or pretentiousness, depend-
ing on one’s point of view), from Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980) to
Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1996) to the video and film work of
Anton Corbijn with artists like David Sylvian and U2. Monochrome
palettes seem particularly appropriate for gritty, pugilistic subject matter.
For Sting’s An Englishman in New York (1988) (with over two million
YouTube hits), Fincher contrasts some fortuitous snow and Sting’s black
garb, complete with iconic umbrella, and manages to blend imagery of a
Woody Allen Manhattan-style New York with the quirky English sensibil-
ity of Quentin Crisp—pictured himself on a park bench and speaking over
the closing bars of the song.
Fincher is consciously intertextual. Even in The Gypsy Kings’ Bamboleo
(1989) (Version 2 of 3), the opening tracking shot for the first 30 seconds
establishes an arid landscape, and features a girl in a white dress hopping
in and out of shot, before we reach a pair of lovers. It feels like the basic
construction of the tracking shot of the traffic jam in Jean-Luc Godard’s
Weekend (1967), with the girl acting like the car of the protagonist, being
lost from the shot and then picked up again. Less subtle is Billy Idol’s LA
Woman (1990). A plane flying over the Hollywood sign opens this video,
which is perhaps not surprising given the title, but there is a strong Blade
Runner feel to the video. The club scenes (especially the under-lit bar area
evoking Ridley Scott’s brother Tony’s 1983 The Hunger), strange drinks
with bugs in them, the Oriental street restaurants, the ‘‘city of night’’ as
Idol’s lyrics call it—all look similar to Ridley Scott’s cityscape. The cine-
matography of Idol’s flat is close to the living space of Scott’s hero; Deck-
ard and Idol coming down an external elevator at night evokes the
architecture of the Tyrell Corporation Building. The rather cliched bonnet
shot of streetlights reflected on a sportscar is closer to Miami Vice, but the
tilt shot of the tunnel at night is pure Blade Runner. Idol himself, dressed
in black leather and bleached-blond hair echoes Rutger Hauer’s Roy
Batty. The ground-level visual style is similar: the streets are dark and
18 David Fincher
rain-spattered, and we see Idol cross between speeding motorbikes. The

drug den he enters is partitioned by sheets of plastic like the imagery sur-
rounding the Replicant dancer Zhora. Musically, The Doors’ cover does
not easily complement such futuristic allusions. Before the vocals kick in,
there is a series of tracking shots of Idol’s apartment inter-cut with a track
up to an actress dressed as Marilyn Monroe in a crucifix pose on a tele-
graph pole, finishing on a close-up—a feature which we see again in
Madonna’s Vogue. As Idol is just waking, this first 20 seconds or so can
be read as his waking dream, which he then pursues through the rest of
the video—a myth of American excess.
We might see elements that foreshadow specific film work. The dissolv-
ing shot of the pocket watch running backward in Madonna’s Bad Girl
anticipates Benjamin Button and the slow forward-tracking shot through
a gap in a chair in George Michael’s Freedom 90 looks forward to Panic
Room’s banister and coffee pot shots. The scenario, lighting of a crime
scene by flashlight, and some of the underlying melancholia of Janie’s Got
a Gun prefigure the grittiness of Seven. More specifically, the closing
sequence of the Aerosmith video begins in the dark, disorientating the
viewer, and from incremental repetition we spy the scuffed end of what is
slowly revealed to be a bullet filling the screen and realize that we are
inside the father, exiting the wound, and rising up to see the body on a
stretcher. This prefigures by a decade the frame story of Fight Club with
the progress both of a flight of fancy at the beginning and a bullet at the
end. Sometimes videos even reference each other—the mask-like face that
appears on the writing paper in Michael Jackson’s Who Is It? looks for-
ward to the stipple effect in Nine Inch Nails’ Only (2005).
Fincher often uses extended (often low-angle) forward-tracking shots,
such as the opening of The Outfield’s No Surrender (1987). Typically he
uses single light sources, i.e., with very little ‘‘fill’’ light, so subjects are lit
from behind or one side but rarely all the way round. For Neneh Cherry’s
Heart (1990) he uses a strong single spotlight, which obliterates everything
else as the camera swings behind her, taking the light full-on for a
moment. At its worst we have the overuse of eye-catching techniques, for
example, constant low angles in The Stabilisers’ One Simple Thing
(1986). In Foreigner’s Say You Will (1987), there is a powerful shot of a
woman reflected in an extreme close-up of an eyeball (a nod to Hitch-
cock’s 1951 Strangers on a Train) but its effect is completely dissipated by
its subsequent repeated use, seven times in all, which not only disorien-
tates the viewer but renders the shot meaningless. An unremitting focus on
style can reminds us in every frame that we are watching an effects-driven
video. Johnny Hates Jazz’s Heart of Gold (1988) is relatively uninteresting

beyond the technical gimmick of multiple video screens within the frame
over a restless point of view, panning back and forth across a single room
(also used by Fincher for Bourgeois Tagg’s 1987 I Don’t Mind At All,
albeit with a literal twist that the frames rotate here). It does produce a
scrapbook-style effect (in The Game and Benjamin Button, memory is
conveyed in filmic terms), but this quickly loses its power and becomes
quite annoying.
Fincher often foregrounds the machinery of filmmaking. At the very end
of Jody Watley’s Most of All (1988), Fincher tracks back through an arch-
way miniature to reveal the machinery used to frame one particular set-up
and create the illusion of an opulent building.
For Heart (1990) Neneh Cherry holds a boom microphone with a
strong neon light attached to it, acting almost like a Halloween game,
bringing it close to her face to distort her features and moving it way to
make her face less visible.
Straightforward shots of bands performing songs, such as in Ry
Cooder’s Get Rhythm (1988) are rare. The Outfield’s Everytime You Cry
(1986), with lots of fill light, making all the singers’ faces clear, close-ups
on drummers or hands on keyboards, all feels cliched. Fincher inter-cuts
clouds speeding across a blue sky, a night sky effect with stars speeded up,
shooting stars, and a rising of the moon—all trying to import spectacle
into a fairly ordinary song. At its worst this tendency gives us Loverboy’s
Love Will Rise Again (1987), which, with its straight concert footage of a
rock band, feels like a slightly updated outtake from This is Spinal Tap
(Rob Reiner, 1984) without any sense of irony. The unmotivated sprinkler
system only falling on an attractive girl, held in a spotlight, could be an
extract from the concert scenes in Wayne’s World (Penelope Spheeris,
1992). The Rolling Stones’ Love Is Strong (1994) is a partial homage to
The Attack of the 50ft Woman (Nathan H. Juran, 1958), but it is also
arguable that it is as much about Jagger’s longevity (reflected in Martin
Scorsese’s choice to focus on the band rather than peripheral special
effects, or indeed even the audience, in his 2008 concert film of The
Stones’ Shine a Light. In Iggy Pop’s Home (1990) Fincher employs copious
use of strobe lighting, black and white film, and plenty of Mr. Pop’s craggy
facials and skeletal torso, in a similar way to the Stones’ video. For both
Jagger and Iggy (like the lips of Steven Tyler from Aerosmith), their
bodies, ravaged by time and excess but still surviving, are their own spe-
cial effect. Explicit promos for movies, i.e., blatant commercial tie-ins, are
also rare with the exception of Mark Knopfler’s Storybook Story (1987),
20 David Fincher
with a huge video screen running footage from Rob Reiner’s The Princess
Bride (1987) in the background. Billy Idol’s voyeuristic Cradle of Love
(1990) does include a background screen showing extracts from The
Adventures of Ford Fairlane (Renny Harlin, 1990), but even this is blurred
in some versions, due to the banning of provocative comedian Andrew
Dice Clay from MTV.
There are also examples of elements either completely absent or at least
rarely found in his other film work, such as humor. In Rick Springfield’s
Dance This World Away (1985), Fincher uses a concept, used more
recently by The Foo Fighters in Learn to Fly (1999), cutting between
Springfield playing all the main parts. There is an interesting mix of parody
of children’s TV, complete with brightly colored set, Sesame Street–style
puppets, and simplistic props to explain about acid rain and nuclear waste.
There is a nice sense of irony in Springfield’s ridiculous Superman-look and
the ball bouncing along the subtitled lyrics karaoke-style and his knockabout
routine with a clown to explain the word shown on screen: ‘‘Stockpile.’’
In a very few commercials and pop videos, Fincher retains a sense of
spontaneous motion, especially around children, such as in Rick Spring-
field’s Celebrate Youth (1985), where they create almost a Brownian
motion effect. The washed-out cinematography contrasts well with a few
key items: a red scarf, a child’s purple shoes later, a blue plane, and a red
balloon, possibly foreshadowing Spielberg’s 1993 Schindler’s List. A young
boy wanders around an attic, putting on an oversized adult jacket and
hat, opening a trunk—action symbolic of growing curiosity, looking for-
ward to Benjamin Button.
In Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence (1989), Fincher juxtaposes a
powerful collection of images of the passing of small-town America to
articulate a rarely seen political, even patriotic, side of his work. There is
no clear blame attached to the crumbling of rural communities, but from
the opening shot (a slow track out from a mailbox, another track up to a
religious bumper sticker, and then the Stars and Stripes with a prize stuffed
fish in front of it), there is a sense that the party is over as we pass iconic
petrol pumps with an equally iconic slogan (‘‘Service With a Smile’’). A
crane shot across bushes to a couple, lying secreted together on a blanket,
feels like the illusion of hope while all around the American Dream crum-
bles—certainties (family, security, signified by the children playing in the
car) are all exposed in the lyrics as ‘‘fairy tales’’ in an elegiac feel absent
from Madonna’s less-subtle version of American Pie (2000). The end of
the innocence is not just the loss of the girl’s virginity but the end of the
innocence of a nation.
In a clear departure from MTV norms of pacing, shots of stationary

objects are held for up to five seconds to encourage, and arguably force,
the viewer to search the frame carefully for meaning or use it as a mirror
to reflect on the lyrical content. A lengthy (in MTV terms) close-up of rain
falling in a pail of water has no ‘‘narrative’’ purpose and invites the reader
to read the image only metaphorically, i.e., as storm clouds approaching
the nation. A series of powerful images of decay follow—peeling Reagan-
ite posters, a generic politician in low angle addressing apparently no one,
and a track past a small mobile TV showing Oliver North testifying, fol-
lowed by a male hands washing, suggest a lack of accountability. The fall-
ing hair of a boy having a crew cut before joining the military is
juxtaposed with streamers and confetti falling around Henley, the Stars
and Stripes appearing in many shots (beside the parade, children around
the table, and behind the politician at the microphone). A woman in an
old-style fur wrap pulls it ineffectively around her shoulders as if sensing
the coming of less-welcoming times (a little like Lincoln’s shudder in
D.W. Griffith’s 1915 Birth of a Nation before his assassination), a man is
pictured sweeping up after the parade, and a final image of Henley shows
him attempting to hitchhike and not getting a ride. The video is a series of
images, some apparently quite private and personal but reflecting the reso-
nance of national politics at the level of everyday small-town life, which
has been diminished and often destroyed.
Clearly there are hints of future feature films—the besieged protagonist
of Billy Idol’s Cradle of Love unlocks several locks before opening the door,
suggesting the distrust of modern urban living, expressed more fully in
Panic Room. In the opening shots of The Hooters’ Johnny B (1987), a
floor-level tracking shot along a glistening, wet floor and then along a ceil-
ing covered with pipes, looks forward to Alien3. However, sometimes the
influence of Fincher’s movies finds its way back into subsequent pop videos.
Judith’s A Perfect Circle (2000) strongly links with Seven, not just in overall
content such as provocative religious lyrics (yielding nearly two million
YouTube hits) but especially in style, evocative of the alley chase sequence
with sudden jumps and stutters in single shots and between frames, the
golden light effect of apparent overexposure, grainy film stock, matter run-
ning through frames like at the end of a reel, the ‘‘jagged’’ rhythm of cut-
ting, often avoiding cutting on the beat, strong backlighting, extreme
angles, and relatively few close-ups. Clearly this is not a promo for individ-
uals as recognizable stars (like his work with Paula Abdul and Madonna).
In both commercials and adverts, Fincher’s work is highly allusive and
dominated by a camera in slow, but almost constant, motion, often placed
22 David Fincher
in extreme angles. He rarely uses overt narratives, and where they do

occur, they often concern serious abusive relationships (Bad Girl, Dear
Father, Janie’s Got a Gun, and Who Is It?). Fincher’s work in commercials
and pop promos represents more than an apprenticeship; it is a laboratory
to which (in adverts at least) he still returns from time to time to try out
new ideas and technological possibilities.
Chapter 2
Woman in Peril or Final Girl?

Alien3 and Panic Room
‘‘Star Wars was an important film for me as a kid, but nowhere near as im-
portant as Alien.’’
—David Fincher1
ALIEN3
The time has come for a reconsideration of Alien3 (1992). Convention-
ally, the film is described in terms of deficiency and therefore as a weaken-
ing of the franchise—it is not a war/action film and it refuses to deliver
the kinetic pleasures action of its predecessor, nor is it a horror/science-fic-
tion film with the stark originality of the first film. Much has been written
about the tortuous production processes of Alien3, such that it seems mi-
raculous that the film was ever made at all. That said, however, it is much
more than the dilution of the franchise, as it is all-too-often portrayed.
Philip Strick sees the film as ‘‘a sad and incoherent non sequitur’’ and
reviews summarily dismiss the film as ‘‘bleak’’ without really examining
what this means.2 The term ‘‘nihilism’’ peppers reviews of the film but of-
ten without any explanation or apparent understanding. Strick recycles
obvious criticism, pointing out the difficulty in distinguishing between
most characters, when they are all shaven and most destined to function
as victims, and eliding observations about Fincher’s background in music
videos (which, damning with faint praise, ‘‘have excited admiration in cer-
tain quarters’’) with criticism of what he sees as Fincher’s ‘‘disinclination
to remain with any one shot for more than a few seconds.’’3 Amy Taubin
asserts, ‘‘If there’s a future, Alien3 can’t imagine it,’’ but this misses the
24 David Fincher
kind of future the film portrays. She goes on to claim, ‘‘It’s every prison,
shiphold, sewer, grave robbing, guillotine, morgue, concentration camp,
New York subway, lunatic asylum movie you’ve ever seen.’’4 Like her list
of icons of bleakness, this does not cohere into a viewpoint or argument,
but merely into a coalescence of symbols.
However, this obscures a more sober consideration of the film as it
stands. It can alternatively be seen as a celebration of Sadean nihilism and
a useful example of the limitations of Barbara Creed’s notion of the ‘‘mon-
strous feminine.’’ Generically, it can be seen as a complex blend of Holly-
wood franchise movie and a technologically enhanced 1950s B-movie. Ten
years later in Panic Room (2002), Fincher again puts a heroine at the cen-
ter of a battle to the death in an enclosed space, effectively using both con-
ventional devices and developing new ones, to create on-screen suspense.
Usually seen as a ‘‘safe,’’ conventional Hollywood entertainment vehicle,
standard readings overlook that many of the same tensions exist as in
Alien3 but are transplanted to a suburban, bourgeois context.
There is quite a range of age and ethnicity in the cast of Alien3 but it
is true that the shaven heads, lack of fill lighting, and predominance of
English accents does lend homogeneity to the procession of victims on
first viewing, especially because apart from Clemens (Charles Dance), they
are given little dialogue to establish distinct characters. However, that is
not really the point. It is a prison/religious colony, where both institutions
serve to undermine a sense of the individual.
Barbara Creed’s theories of ‘‘the monstrous feminine,’’ which are often
cited in relation to the first two parts of the Alien series, do not work
here.5 It is difficult to engage with the theoretical detail of Creed’s
approach when you do not accept the basic tenets on which it is based or
many of the terms on which it is built, and I have discussed at some length
elsewhere weaknesses with Freudian-based psychological approaches to
film.6 Moreover, there are particular problems with trying to extend
Creed’s reading of the first two films to Alien3. Creed asserts that ‘‘[i]t is
the notion of the fecund mother-as-abyss which is central to Alien’’ but
this is singularly lacking here.7 Creed describes four scenes that she sees as
primal in Alien (the opening, the wandering Steadicam shot up to the
hyper-sleep chambers, the discovery of the eggs on the planet, and the
birth scene). However, unlike the groundbreaking chest-bursting scene
with Kane (John Hurt) in the first film or the ubiquitous deaths in Aliens,
here there are only two ‘‘birth’’ scenes. First, there is the alien’s birth
shown in extremely dark and rapid flash-cuts. This was only added reluc-
tantly by Fox in post-production and can be quite confusing, acting
Woman in Peril or Final Girl? Alien3 and Panic Room 25
primarily as a knowing parody of the primal scene and an ironic counter-

point to Newt’s cremation. Even an apparently positive act is rendered
negative as Dillon’s intoning that ‘‘for within each seed there is the prom-
ise of a flower’’ is inter-cut with the alien birth, bursting from the dog,
writhing about in agony. The sound of the animal howling in pain bleeds
over the edits. Secondly, the closing frames as the alien momentarily bursts
from Ripley’s chest (discussed more fully in Chapter 7), is more significant
as an act of self-extinction than creation.
Alien3 removes the feminine and birthing imagery on which Creed’s
theory relies. It is the first film in the series to feature no eggs, and no
references to the computer Mother, and there is a crushing denial of Rip-
ley’s ‘‘family’’ (no Jones the cat, Newt, Hicks, or Bishop). Moreover, there
is relatively little on-screen time for the alien at all. The set is no longer
dominated by H.R. Giger’s bio-mechanic aesthetic and is closer to a com-
bination of cathedral, furnace, and prison (which, of course, it is). The
presence of ‘‘images of blood, darkness and death’’ as trace elements of
the Creed’s notion of ‘‘the archaic mother’’ might mark almost any horror
film as supporting such a reading and the fact that in Alien3, kills are
mostly restrained, off-screen, or sometimes faster than the naked eye, all
undermines this point.8 The emphasis on the alien’s teeth, so much a part
of the first film and useful for a ‘‘vagina dentata’’ reading, is much reduced
here—victims are more often hauled up out of shot and dispatched off-
camera. Creed’s credibility is undermined by assertions such as that the
alien is ‘‘impossible to find’’ although the first two films both feature fairly
sophisticated tracking devices, albeit with a limited range, and here Ripley
instinctively knows where to look, heading off for ‘‘the basement.’’9
For Creed, speaking of the alien of the first film, ‘‘Its changing appear-
ance represents a form of doubling or multiplication of the ‘phallus’ point-
ing to the workings of the fetish project,’’ but here, despite again seeing
the creature from birth, it does not evolve in clearly distinct phases.10
Also, the appearance of the alien is less open to pseudo-sexual interpreta-
tions. With more prominent hind legs, the ability to run, and a whipping
tail, it more closely resembles known species of dinosaur, i.e., considerably
less ‘‘alien’’ to humanity than in the first two films. In Alien3, because Rip-
ley has apparently been impregnated by a Queen while in the escape pod,
there is no need of a male in the procreation process. Coming later in the
series (and in the chronology of the narrative), this foreshadows perhaps
an evolutionary development in which males play no part in the further-
ance of life. Without a need to mate, establish territory, or procreate with
males, the alien represents the ultimate negation of males—they are
26 David Fincher
biologically redundant. In referring to the first two films, Creed suggests

‘‘procreation and birth take place without the agency of the opposite sex’’
but actually Alien3 is the first film in the series to suggest this—the previ-
ous two both featured male victims used as hosts.11
The central problem with Creed’s theoretical model is that it produces
analysis in which actions are always seen as representative of a narrow
range of highly disputable psychoanalytical features over and over again
and cannot accommodate the specifically cinematic medium in which they
occur. To explain Ripley’s every action as some kind of evocation of the
archaic mother is reductive in the extreme, and Creed’s implicit solution
to this by defining terms such as ‘‘the monstrous feminine’’ incredibly
broadly, makes them virtually meaningless.
Stephen Mulhall considers the full Alien quadrilogy in a philosophical
context. More precisely, he considers not so much how the specific films
exemplify philosophical issues (an increasing trend in Higher Education
courses), here human embodiment, sexuality, and integrity, but also to
what extent these films are themselves philosophical, in the sense of giving
a space to a process of thought. In particular, he considers Ripley’s chang-
ing understanding of her own position, and in a sense, posits the series as
an ongoing dialogue between Ripley and a series of different directors. By
seeing a series of philosophical questions as key to the films, especially in
relation to gender and embodiment, Mulhall follows an approach, which
might be termed philosophical auteurism, seeking the development of a
particular theme as attributable to a particular director. Not surprisingly,
some films respond better than others to this approach, and like Creed, it
tends to be the first two films, where paradigms and ideas fit best, when
both theorists are seeking to establish their particular approach. By the
time we reach Alien3, for similar reasons to Creed’s fragmenting analysis,
Mulhall’s grip slips a little, but at least unlike Creed’s, the conclusions he
draws are derived from these four films alone rather than claiming a grand
film theory that can be applied universally.
Mulhall suggests the series is dominated by ‘‘the relation of human iden-
tity to embodiment’’ and ‘‘the conditions for the possibility of film.’’12 This
latter point is especially pertinent for Fincher. Arguably, it is not Ripley
who is dependent on technology as much as Fincher himself. For Mulhall,
‘‘We are being given a picture of human origination that represses its crea-
tureliness.’’13 What becomes problematic for Mulhall is to differentiate his
view of ‘‘philosophy in action’’ from intelligent film criticism, because
much of his book deals with analysis of the films, in much the same style
as conventional criticism. Admittedly, Mulhall’s focus is on a small
number of specific films rather than any grand, broadly applicable film
theory, and granted he is talking about ideas which are critiqued within
and between individual films, but the fact remains that he is effectively
talking about nothing more radical in practice than sensitive criticism.
However, his explanation for why Ripley expresses her sexuality explic-
itly for the first time in the trilogy is not especially convincing. Mulhall
traces Ripley’s concern from the first film, as Chief Medical Officer, with
breaching transitional states (the hull of the ship) and ‘‘hence (she) has
always understood her body as a vessel whose integrity must at all costs
be preserved.’’14 He sees her character as driven by fear of bodily penetra-
tion, especially by a male, that is both alien to her and yet a natural proc-
ess. For him, having lost her on-screen virginity to the alien in the escape
pod, there is a sense that ‘‘Ripley has, without willing it, already under-
gone her worst nightmare of heterosexual intercourse and survived’’ so
that penetrative sex is now imaginable for her.15 However, Clemens is very
much ‘‘second-best’’ and diminishes both the act and Ripley’s judgment
in undertaking it. To see Ripley as virginal is also a major misreading as
Aliens (in the Director’s cut, at least) featured the revelation of a child.
Admittedly, the events of that film and the time spent in space travel
meant she barely knew her but Ripley has a sexual history.
The problem perhaps is that if such a film does represent Mulhall’s
notion of philosophy, then it does so without providing clear or satisfac-
tory answers to the questions it raises, and that indeed those very ques-
tions can be read in other ways. Without this clarity, much of his
commentary could be seen as the kind of use of philosophy which he dis-
misses at the outset. Furthermore, although several ideas in the film are
certainly interesting, it is debatable whether they advance our understand-
ing of them in a new way. There are several assumptions lurking behind
Mulhall’s assertion that the Alien series works ‘‘in just the ways’’ philoso-
phers usually do, depending on which branch of Philosophy one subscribes
to.16 The weakness of Mulhall is that his reading of Alien3 is much less
convincing than the first two films, in particular why Fincher’s view of
humanity should be any more convincing than any other. There is also a
wider problem. While contributions from non-film specialists should be
welcomed, there is a weakness in Mulhall’s analysis, which tends to focus
on thematic issues, assuming those to be transparent, rather than seeing
meaning as deriving from cinematic representation. Such an approach
could be said to solidify subjective responses, which mean that any conclu-
sions drawn stand on limited specific evidence and as a result seem ulti-
mately less convincing.
28 David Fincher
Alien3 was certainly marketed as a sequel, which led in large part to

disappointment among fans expecting the ‘‘shoot-em-up’’ thrills of Aliens,
but the difference in Fincher’s film is clear even from the superscripted
title. As Mulhall notes, ‘‘David Fincher’s incorporates the necessary nu-
meral, but only after subjecting it to a radical displacement . . . as if
Fincher feels that anything he might do with his film will be superscrip-
tural, a writing over the writings of others.’’17 There is a tension in Alien3
between the notion of a palimpsest, an overwriting, a relationship to pre-
vious films, and an idea of the film as a denial, an obliteration of the previ-
ous films, literally the final word. The fact that the franchise continued
might suggest Fincher ‘‘failed’’ in killing off the series but the fourth film is
only possible through the notion of cloning, which arguably surpasses any
attempt at closure. It is perhaps worth noting that Alien Resurrection
(Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1997), clearly forced to some ingenuity in literally resur-
recting Ripley, creates a Nietzschean nightmare of Eternal Return in which
Ripley cannot destroy herself but is destined to repeat her fate endlessly.
Mulhall traces Ripley’s dependence on technology, particularly as a
means to avoid a biological, penetrative act. However, such dependence is
largely absent in Alien3. There is the scanner, the primitive communica-
tion devices, and the remains of Bishop the droid, but the key here is that
‘‘nothing works.’’ There is no dependence culture here. Furthermore, when
Mulhall quotes Stanley Cavell—‘‘Horror is the title I am giving to the per-
ception of the precariousness of human identity, to the perception that it
may be lost or invaded,’’ this has little resonance here.18 There is no P.K.
Dick–style loss of identity in Alien3, just a quick and brutal death. Even
Ripley, other than looking ill, shows little change of character and never
articulates a fear of loss of self.
Kipple
‘‘I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.’’
—Jack in Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club19
The film begins with a genre-defying challenge. Within minutes, the

opening montage establishes the death of Newt, the object of Ripley’s her-
oism, and the sole focus of her suppressed maternal instincts in Aliens.
With Corporal Dwayne Hicks, relegated to a momentary flash-cut of a
bloodied torso, and Newt shown in the frozen rigor of a scream, any
hopes of survival and the re-establishment of a new ‘‘family’’ are summar-
ily and brutally dismissed. Even Bishop, the droid, is covered with flapping
plastic, the equivalent of a burial shroud (Andrews later describes him as
‘‘smashed beyond repair’’). The negative, the refusal of genre expectations,

is apparent from the opening. However, Fincher’s desire to carve out a dis-
tinctive niche in the franchise by removing Newt, Hicks, Bishop, and later
Clemens after only a relatively brief time, also denies Ripley the opportu-
nity to develop emotionally except in definition with the alien. As Thom-
son notes, ‘‘if from the start, suspense and hope are taken away, then
surely we require large things to fill their place?’’20 What then are these
‘‘large things’’? My suggestion would be a Nietzschean-influenced form of
‘‘Kippleization.’’
The character of J.R. Isidore in P.K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Elec-
tric Sheep? provides the following definition: ‘‘Kipple is useless objects . . .
when nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself . . . the entire universe is
moving towards a process of kippleization.’’21 The purpose of the commu-
nity (waste disposal), the fabric of its nature (looking much like a scrap-
heap), and its inhabitants (a collection of deviant rejects) all personify
Dick’s vision of a universe ultimately made from Kipple. Thomson
describes them as looking like ‘‘serfs from a Dostoyevskian underground’’
and certainly they act as human emblems of dereliction.22 As Aaron
declares, ‘‘Nothing much works here,’’ including the people; the only work-
ing technology we see, the scanner, comes from outside. Much was made of
the departure with Aliens but Fincher’s film retains one key element—the
most important, resonant exchanges occur between a woman and the
remains of a machine (the pairing that achieved victory over the monster in
Aliens, here can only underscore termination as the sole solution).
After the failure of the first plan, the survivors stand around bickering
in long shot under a sign reading ‘‘Toxic waste,’’ underlining how we are
viewing the detritus of humanity. The precise purpose of the industry here
(the manufacture of lead sheets for toxic waste containers) reflects the
future as just so much waste management and even the planet, as a former
mining community, is used up. When Ripley says she is going to look for
the alien in the basement, Aaron replies that ‘‘This whole place is a base-
ment.’’ Fincher visualizes a dirty, ‘‘used’’ future. In particular, the giant
foundry, the steam and grime, and the reliance on 19th-century technology
to kill the monster rather than anything more modern, sets a strangely
anachronistic tone. Candles, set down manually, are used to measure dis-
tances and the monster is chased with men carrying flares. The furnace,
the sackcloth-like uniforms, and the gantries look more like an obsolescent
Victorian asylum than a futuristic environment.
When Ripley says that the creature is ‘‘right down there, in the base-
ment,’’ there is the suggestion that this is as much an idea of monstrosity,
30 David Fincher
with the base used as psychic space, as an actual phenomenon (underlining

the point by stating explicitly, ‘‘It’s a metaphor’’). Ripley must dig into her
deepest emotional resources in order to confront her past. Taubin reads
the film in a particular historical context, as an AIDS allegory.23 Certainly
we see Ripley in close-up, coughing, sniffing, and looking every inch a
washed-out addict with some extreme close-ups of Clemens putting a nee-
dle into her arm, but the implications of a punitive consequence from her
dalliance with him is not very consistent. He is summarily dispatched
whereas she is not, and while there are plenty of references to malignant
hosts, physical change is not achieved through the exchange of bodily flu-
ids but more kinetically through bodily invasion, based on insect-based
hierarchies of Queens and their needs, not humans and their emotions.
Taubin sees in the alien’s basement lair ‘‘the uterine and the anal plumb-
ing intertwined,’’ but without birthing references to eggs or Giger’s bio-
mechanical designs, it is the very lack of productivity on which the visual
and verbal focus—the anal predominates.24 The suppression implied in
this erupts in the language, which is couched in predominantly homosex-
ual terms, reflected also in the mainly British ensemble cast (especially
Charles Dance), playing on stereotypes of such accents as effeminate. In a
line deleted from the finished film, Golic asserts that ‘‘It’s okay to say
‘shit.’ It’s not against God.’’ The dialogue of the all-male community is
dominated by references to ‘‘ass’’ to the point of parody in empty, male
posturing. Dillon asks, ‘‘Why should we put our asses on the line for
you?’’ to which Ripley replies, ‘‘Your ass is already on the line. The ques-
tion is what are you gonna do about it?’’
Dillon and Clemens both refer to the men taking a vow of celibacy, but
there is no sign of this yielding any sense of serenity. When Dillon asserts
that they should ‘‘all stick to our sexual teams and not get unduly agi-
tated,’’ it is tempting to read this as the presumption, in an all-male soci-
ety, of a homosexual norm. The juxtaposition in the dialogue, especially
in an all-male community, of the ubiquitous ‘‘ass’’ and ‘‘fucking,’’ suggests
an underlying Sadean aesthetic. Even Dillon’s attempt to unnerve Ripley
at mealtime suggests a slightly unnecessary overstatement that he is ‘‘a
murderer and rapist of women.’’ There is a correspondingly strong scato-
logical element to the dialogue, which also reflects how the influence of
Kipple even extends to the language. As Morse (Daniel Webb) declares at
the end of a speech listing what they lack, ‘‘All we’ve got here is shit.’’
This concept of Kipple extends to the community—the spiritual order is
in terminal decline. What used to be a community of 5,000 now numbers
only 25. There is no productive work for the men to do—early drafts of
the script talk of the men looking for caches of food hidden in the tunnels
by earlier miners. The xenomorph has found, in a sense, its natural home,
where parasitical relationships are the norm (the lice, ineffective officers,
and those loyal to the Company). Fiorina seems like a negative version of
Eden—no sin, no temptation, and a sense of equilibrium, until the arrival
of Ripley as Eve, the bringer of knowledge. Ripley’s description of them as
‘‘a bunch of lifers who found God at the ass-end of space’’ not only under-
lines their status as human detritus but suggests also that is where God
resides, i.e., hope of a spiritual redemption has also been relegated to a
kind of ‘‘spiritual Kippleization.’’
The real problem with the plot is not so much with the lack of guns, or
indeed any weapons at all, in a high-security prison, but more that this
raises the question of what are we supposed to believe binds the men to-
gether. The personal queasiness that Fincher and Weaver have about fire-
arms does not make the decision not to have any guns in the narrative any
easier to accept. If Ripley, our main point of empathy in the narrative,
finds this hard to believe, it is likely that we will too. This revelation feels
a little like McMurphy’s disbelief at the awareness that the inmates in
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1975) are all voluntary.
This is part of a spiritual lacuna at the center of the narrative. When asked
by Dillon if she has any faith, Ripley replies ‘‘Not much,’’ and Clemens
explains that the men’s status shifted voluntarily from prisoners to custo-
dians, but we are given very little sense of what exactly they are guarding.
The dialogue is peppered with religious references but Dillon alone is the
only one who displays any sense of faith and fellow-feeling, culminating
in his self-sacrifice in the furnace. He talks about religion and ‘‘spiritual
unity,’’ but what we see is a group of aggressive, swearing lowlifes who
never suggest any act of faith, such as prayer, or in fact any selfless act at
all. Andrews (Brian Glover) describes the prisoners simply as ‘‘all scum.’’
It feels more like Dillon is putting a religious gloss on a fiercely amoral sit-
uation. Religion is used as a punitive tool rather than a shared sense of
values. The first time that Ripley is cornered by men without an authority
figure, they try to rape her and are only prevented from doing so by the
sudden appearance of Dillon (played by Charles Dutton, whose own expe-
rience as a convicted felon for manslaughter himself brings an additional
level of credibility to the role), who declares that he needs to ‘‘re-educate
some of the brothers,’’ which he proceeds to do with a metal bar. He
claims that he is ‘‘not the officer type’’ and that ‘‘I just look after my
own.’’ At the cremation, Dillon reads from the Bible, explicitly marking
their religion as Christian. However, Clemens’s description of the ‘‘faith’’
32 David Fincher
that the men share as ‘‘some kind of apocalyptic, Millenarian, Christian,

fundamentalism,’’ sounds almost like a random piling up of adjectives. Re-
ligion as a meaningful way of life seems obsolete; it is the name given to
an imposition of rules, backed by threat or actual use of force, not by
power of argument or belief.
First-choice director Vincent Ward had already produced the visually
stunning The Navigator (1988), subtitled ‘‘A Medieval Odyssey,’’ suggest-
ing an interest in blends of anachronistic elements (a boy digs a tunnel to
escape the Black Death and emerges in the late 20th century). Ward’s am-
bitious vision was to set the action on Arceon, a small planet, apparently
made of wood, hosting a monastic community. There are clear remains of
Ward’s original concept (he retains a story credit) in narrative features like
the lack of weapons, Dillon’s diction, calling his fellows ‘‘Brother,’’ the
uniform, sackcloth-like clothes, and shaven heads but more subtle ele-
ments too like the male chorister’s vocals running under the opening syn-
thesizers. The notion of celibacy seems more problematic as it does not
seem to be embraced willingly and does not yield any apparent benefits.
Ripley, in the role of Eve, does bring knowledge to this anti-Eden, but not
the kind that anyone wants to hear and she only seems to incite aggression
rather than lust (her attempted rape seems a crime of violence rather than
desire). Dillon’s rather grandiose statement of principles, that they ‘‘toler-
ate anybody, even the intolerable’’ seems at odds with his difficulties in
accepting Ripley, who is guilty of no crime other than being female.
The language and actions of the men suggest only the residual outer rit-
uals of belief, not its philosophical core. There is a relation to the monster
here. The birth of the alien and in particular its opening cry synchronized
with the ‘‘Amen’’ at Newt’s cremation, may seem just a case of ironic jux-
taposition but there is the sense too here of a certain perverse beauty in
the new life created at the same time as a denial of the Christian ideology
being spouted by Dillon. The creature is the ultimate nihilistic concept—a
being that kills for no apparent reason (it does not appear to ‘‘eat’’ its vic-
tims or feel its territory threatened) and is virtually impossible to destroy.
Andrews’ tone of disbelief in describing ‘‘an eight foot insect of some kind
with acid for blood’’ that ‘‘kills on sight and is generally unpleasant,’’ is
not just because such a creature is unknown. It is hard not only to believe
that such a creature does exist but to conceive of why it should exist at
all. Alan Dean Foster, who has written novelizations of the first three
Alien films, describes it thus: ‘‘A single imperative inspired its relentless
search, drove it mindlessly onward. Not food, for it was not hungry and
did not eat. Not sex, for it had none. It was motivated solely and
completely by the desire to procreate.’’25 However, we do not know at this

stage that the creature we are viewing is a Queen. As far as we know, it
shares the same lack of a coherent constructive raison d’être as the crea-
tures in the previous films. Bishop appeals to Ripley at the end, ‘‘Think of
all we could learn from it,’’ but it is actually unclear what this might be.
The xenomorph somehow finds its way to this planet with the sense that
it feels a kinship with the inhabitants of the planet as a fellow outsider
and reject. Similarly, the more inhospitable the environment, the better
able it is to cope, as ‘‘the perfect organism’’ as Ash described it in Alien.
This could be seen as creating suspense—if we are not sure exactly what
these creatures can do, we can never be completely relaxed.
The alien’s existence or territory is not threatened, except when directly
hunted by Ripley. It does not need to kill for food, for a mate, or for
power—it simply kills because that is what it does. It is the ultimate nega-
tion of life and meaning. It could be said that it kills in order to procreate
(it uses hosts when it can but does not seem to need them). Using a dead
body as a host, for example, seems to be a possibility, or Ripley’s concern
during Newt’s autopsy would be unnecessary. As Thomson notes, ‘‘if every
one of these monsters wants no more than to destroy all life . . . then they
do become tedious.’’26 In all three Alien films, but particularly in the third,
human life is juxtaposed with one of the most potent symbols in cinema
history of inexplicable nihilism. The alien’s lack of motive other than killing
and reproducing means it almost represents a negative force of nature, a kind
of biological anti-matter, which cannot coexist with other life-forms.
The very opening shot with its growling synthesizer over the appearance
of the titles underlines not just the vastness of space but its literal empti-
ness. Despite contradicting our knowledge that in a vacuum there can be
no sound (in space, no one can hear anything, not just a scream), an
unforgiving wind-like sound howls in the void. It is a powerful vision of
an absolutely godless universe, not a place of wonder but of a struggle to
survive, followed by an inevitable death. More than the first two films, in
the inhabited planetary environment, this world is not just dark, it is
overtly cold, windy, and inhospitable.
On the planet, it is telling that Ripley receives the greatest help and sym-
pathy not from a human but from Bishop, the droid, who almost seems
like a loyal family pet. It is fitting on a planet, where the ‘‘scum’’ of society
has been effectively dumped, the place where Ripley finds help is symboli-
cally a rubbish dump, in a dystopian version of Luke and Han’s descent
into the garbage in Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977). After giving her what
advice he can, the pervasive nihilism even extends to a machine, as he asks
34 David Fincher
to be ‘‘disconnected.’’ Ripley refuses, bags him up, and carries him over
her shoulder like a grave-robber. The tip where she finds Bishop was origi-
nally further outside the settlement but in the film it clearly seems part of
the facility.
A Battle for Survival

‘‘Strange to be without hair. It was such a slight, ephemeral part of one’s
body. The only aspect of one’s appearance that could be altered easily and at
will. She felt herself diminished somehow, a queen suddenly bereft of her
crown.’’
—Foster27
‘‘Too bad the girl won’t live. But then again, who does?’’
—Gaff in Blade Runner
When Andrews enquires of Clemens about the state of Ripley’s health

and receives the minimal answer, ‘‘She’ll live,’’ there is an echo of the clos-
ing dialogue of the original release of Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982).
Often associated with the stereotype of ‘‘damsel-in-distress’’ sub-genre,
The Perils of Pauline (Louis J. Gasnier, 1914) underlines that even early
examples of this narrative form contained the seed of what became Carol
Clover’s Final Girl.28 Although features often associated with this sub-
genre, such as cliff-hangers or the image of a woman tied to railway
tracks, never actually appear in this series of films, they are certainly epi-
sodic, and provided a model of female victim in the face of a series of
male threats. Perhaps it is a little unfair to Clover that her phrase has
gained such widespread critical currency, often being applied to generic
areas far from the relatively narrow sub-genre (rape-revenge slasher) from
whence it originally derived. Clover’s concept is sometimes simplified to
the idea of a female character who survives by taking upon themselves
male characteristics, and it is true that Ripley is prepared to suppress the
outward signs of gender difference by shaving her head and wearing the
standard, shapeless uniform of the inhabitants of Fiorina 161, but her
character is more complex than this. It is her inventiveness that creates the
plan to lure the creature into the furnace and she is the one with the pres-
ence of mind and physical strength to dive Tarzan-like on a swinging chain
(one of the definitive icons of the franchise’s visual style) to deliver the
water at the end.
However, there is no male hero who can rescue her—if she is to survive,
it will be due to her own efforts. Dillon performs a minor function as
‘‘helper’’ but only in the very limited sense of offering her release through
death—he still needs her, rather than the other way round, to show the
men how to kill the monster first. As a Lieutenant, as the only one with
some previous knowledge and experience of the monster, and as the only
one who remains calm and logical in the face of the men’s rising panic,
she is the one who assumes command on the death of Andrews. Clover
talks of a shift in identification from monster to survivor but unlike Alien,
where Ridley Scott’s use of a floating, apparently aimless Steadicam does
create the sense of an alien Other in the corridors of the Nostromo, here
we only really share the point of view of the monster in the relatively brief
chase sequences near the end. After the show of militarism is defeated in
Aliens, it is clear that firepower alone does not guarantee success. Here,
more specifically, without weapons of any kind, it can only be through
guile and planning that survival is possible. Indeed, the tone of this third
film is less of survival than inevitable death deferred—Dillon’s speech,
cliched though it is, reflects that precisely.
Unlike in the first two films, Ripley is not a member of a crew and
clearly has more in common with the alien, another lone female, than with
the characters around her. Ripley is subject to the dominant patriarchal re-
gime. The shot showing Ripley being manhandled onto a stretcher from
the escape pod in her vest and briefs is redolent of the denouement of the
first film, and open to the same charge of gratuitous display of female
flesh. However, here there is at least the mitigating factor that Ripley is
semi-conscious and the rest of her performance in appearance and action
does much to challenge the concept of a passive heroine to be merely
looked at. There is a key difference between the two scenes in that in the
original film, it is Ripley who actively and deliberately undresses as part of
a plan to blast the alien into space. Cynthia Freeland takes this a stage fur-
ther and suggests that Ripley is effectively flirting with the creature, using
her sexuality to distract it, but this ignores the fact that the creature is
marked as female and although it may look like a combination of male
and female sexual organs, it appears unmotivated by sexual instincts.29
Ripley is concealed from plain view as a woman, and therefore a source
of temptation, but more precisely Andrews, in the role of patronizing over-
seer, orders that she be confined to the infirmary with a ‘‘That’s a good
girl,’’ unaware of the irony that his command echoes historical gender
expectations of pregnant women. According to Robin Wood, this is a pro-
found case of Otherness: ‘‘In a male-dominated culture . . . woman as the
Other assumes particular significance . . . Woman’s autonomy and inde-
pendence are denied.’’30 Certainly she is viewed with suspicion as the one
36 David Fincher
who brought the creature with her and outright hostility, reflected in
Morse’s threat to put her head through a wall and the subsequent near-
rape, only prevented by Dillon’s timely intervention.
Apart from the lack of weapons in a prison, the other major lacuna in
the plot is the cut that happens when Ripley deliberately goes in search of
the alien and the creature drops down with a thud, blocking out the shot.
The next scene merely summarizes what we have been denied—‘‘It won’t
kill me’’ Ripley declares to Dillon, to whom she now looks to perform this
task. Admittedly, we have seen a face-to-face (if not eye-to-eye) confronta-
tion between Ripley and the xenomorph but to cut away from what argu-
ably is the key confrontation of the film seems, at best, anti-climactic. For
one brief scene, Ripley actively seeks to reverse the roles of hunter and
hunted as she goes to look for the alien itself. In seeking to destroy rather
than escape, she gains the status of ‘‘unkillable thing’’ herself due to the
alien child she is carrying, and so, albeit briefly, she becomes the stalker of
a slasher movie herself. This should perhaps not be so surprising. A prime
reason why she is the sole survivor through the films is that she adopts
some of the same wary thoughtfulness as the alien itself. It is ambiguous
whether the Queen selects Ripley simply as the only available female or
whether this reflects an elision of qualities (physical toughness, self-reli-
ance, ability to survive) which mark her as the best candidate. Most obvi-
ously in her shaven head, the scene where the alien puts its face inches
from hers, and the ambiguously worded promotional posters at the time
proclaiming ‘‘The bitch is back,’’ Ripley shares greater common ground
with the xenomorph than the rest of the human cast and taken to an
extreme might even suggest a role reversal, that perhaps the alien is the
Final Girl.
One problem with the Alien series is that the sole thread of continuity
in character terms is Ripley. Destroy her and you destroy the franchise.
Therefore, it is not whether she will fulfil the role of Final Girl but in what
manner that constitutes audiences’ expectations. Having killed off the ves-
tiges from the previous film in the opening minutes, Fincher takes the even
greater step of apparently killing off his heroine. Perhaps typically of other
Final Girls, knowledge about the monster sets her apart from her fellow
humankind and by definition closer to the monster itself. The experience
of the creature that she brings, the fact that she picks up on clues about its
development ignored by Andrews, and most symbolically by the drops of
blood that fall from her nose at the precise moment of its birth, the cut to
her eyes flying open immediately after the creature’s first kill or her slight
baring of teeth in close-up as she sets off in pursuit of the creature, all
mark a greater convergence of monster and heroine. The very fact that she
reverses the hunter/hunted dynamic marks her as having the courage nec-
essary to be seen as a Final Girl but when she wipes steam from a mirror
to reveal herself, newly shaved, it seems that she too has evolved. She
looks leaner and meaner but also sighs under the showers, looking like a
broken inmate of Auschwitz resigned to an imminent dose of Zyklon B.
Initially it is unclear if the figure held in long shot is male or female
when she rises into the frame at the head of the stairs. Shaven, in male
uniform, she seems like a generically disconcerting blend of Marlene Die-
trich in an iconic stairway descent and Demi Moore in Ridley Scott’s G.I.
Jane (1997) as she delivers her would-be rapist a good, solid punch.
Perhaps the Final Girl here is Weaver herself, credited as Co-executive
Producer, an isolated female voice in a predominantly all-male group—a
fitting image for the position of women in Hollywood, particularly the
lack of intelligent roles for women over.30 She personifies the institutional
battles of which she seems increasingly tired. ‘‘You’ve been in my life so
long now, I can’t remember anything else,’’ she states later with extra-fil-
mic weight—the role of Ripley has dwarfed all her other film work as if
she is a predestined victim of the monster too. Several versions considered
narratives without Ripley. If the franchise is the unkillable creature then
the exploitative Company becomes the bloated Studio system that made
Fincher’s life hell during production. When the real Bishop appears at the
end and appears sincere (‘‘I’m here to help . . . You have to trust me’’), the
hollowness of his words sound suspiciously like the stereotypical promises
made by film producers. In his ‘‘You must let me have it’’ he reveals him-
self as a mixture of film types (the collector of prize exhibits, the crazed
scientist, and the megalomaniac producer). What Strick sees as a criticism
(‘‘a cynical and unwelcome denial of the hard-won victory at the end of
Aliens’’) is exactly Fincher’s point.31
The decision to bring the alien right up next to Ripley cowering by a
wall unable to look at the creature creates a new proximity in the fran-
chise (as well as a useful poster shot), but ultimately once the moment has
passed, there is nothing worse we can imagine and the monster (and
thereby the film) loses much of its ability to instill fear. Perhaps in the late
20th century Final Girls expect more than just to survive. Bishop calls out
the one key to Ripley’s emotional life that we have been largely denied—
‘‘children.’’ Originally deleted but latterly restored scenes in Aliens record
that Ripley has had children, but much of the narrative thrust of the previ-
ous film and the elegiac punch of the opening of this one, is the ultimately
forlorn attempt to save Newt.
38 David Fincher
Apart from a single shot in the early part of the film through the hole
left by the creature that kills Murphy (as if the creature is still there), the
only other point of view from the creature’s perspective comes in the final
chase sequences. Here, Fincher’s use of wide-angle lenses creates the sense
of an ‘‘alien’’ distorted vision, headlong speed and at first the eye-level
position of a creature running at speed, rolling slightly to give the sense of
a living creature rather than a machine. The subsequent swing up to the
walls and even the ceiling is interesting in conveying the creature’s evolv-
ing capacity but feels very much as if it is purely designed for a subsequent
video game or trailer material, emphasizing the cinema-as-ride spectacle,
singularly absent from the rest of the film. Indeed, this misdirection of
genre expectations may go some way to explain the lukewarm critical and
commercial response to the film.
That said, the use of motivated light via flares, echoing screams, and
innovative use of Steadicam, are all effective at first. The second chase
from a 45-degree angle makes the doors look like coffins. The point at
which the alien runs right through the shot pursuing the human bait is the
first time in the franchise that we have seen it move quite like this. We are
exposed to moments of blind panic, apparently safe as doors are closed,
allowing us to recover and then be shocked again as the creature bursts
through the glass. Sudden movement and sound, moments of danger fol-
lowed by recovery phases—these are standard horror devices. As before,
moments of gore are either relatively restrained or shown in flash-cuts
(such as Jude’s death shown only by a shower of blood flying through an
open door or David’s demise only really visible in freeze-frame).
The third chase uses a rotating position up to a 180-degree inversion, so
that Fincher conveys the evolution of the creature across these three
sequences from floor to wall to ceiling. A disembodied scream, ‘‘Where
the hell is it?’’ conveys the sense of disorientation and rising panic and
Fincher cuts to a forward-tracking shot that turns around on itself, follows
the pipe-work, and is ultimately revealed as the alien’s own view. How-
ever, this is only slightly distorted and here slow-moving, so Fincher estab-
lishes stylistic tropes associated with the alien and then disrupts them a
little in order to further disorientate us. This is also achieved by ‘‘crossing
the line of continuity’’ so that David peers through a window, thinking he
is safe, but we cut to the other side of the door as the monster rises up
behind him and brain matter is blasted through the glass.
Perhaps the biggest mistake that Fincher makes in the film is at the
moment when we are discovering new sides to Ripley’s maternal desires
and even a first name (Ellen) and an inner life we could only guess at. She
is partnered with Clemens, who barely seems worthy of her time. There is
a slight challenge to the Final Girl model by Ripley’s initiation of a purely
sexual relationship with Clemens, who is apparently ‘‘punished’’ in the
narrative by being killed shortly afterwards, whereas she is not. This con-
tributes to the sense that these events are not fully convincing—the timing
and particularly the setting both seem inappropriate for this to be the
moment in the film series for Ripley to articulate a sexual need (and even
then in a rather strange, coy fashion: ‘‘Are you attracted to me . . . in that
way?’’). Particularly troubling here is Clemens’s apparent understanding
that Ripley uses the sexual encounter as a way to ‘‘deflect’’ the question
about what she is looking for in Newt’s chest, which Ripley does not deny.
She appears to initiate sex with Clemens because she wants to feel desira-
ble, which is an understandable enough reaction if we are given enough
dramatic purchase to believe it, and perhaps she expresses her sexual na-
ture for the first time in the franchise as part of an attempt to assert her
humanity in the face of all that would deny this. However, his back-story
about a mistaken morphine prescription is held back so long that it cannot
deliver the weight of expectation about his mysterious past which turns
out to be fairly predictable. His claim that ‘‘it’s a long, sad story and more
than a little melodramatic’’ is simply not true on all counts.
Sense of Authorship
‘‘The audience is going to expect guns, action non-stop and David has done
something very stylish, cynical yet innocent at the same time. Maybe some
people will say it’s too slow or existential. And that’s got people at Fox a lit-
tle nervous.’’
—Sigourney Weaver32
Perhaps we should not be so hasty to ascribe to Fincher a particular

world-view here because he arrived on the project after filming had already
begun, at least 10 writers were hired and fired during production, and
because he walked away from it before the post-production edit and has
shown no desire to assert any sense of authorship via DVD commentaries/
documentaries. Weaver’s involvement in the project was in doubt for some
time and the fact that early drafts of the script, especially by David Twohy,
did not feature the character of Ripley at all, may in part explain why her
character seems almost superfluous at times and by the end, expendable.
The notion of killing off Newt, Hicks, and Bishop was already part of
Ward’s storyline, which Fincher inherited. Swallow bewails the lack of a
fuller version of the film in a rather essentialist position, in which there is
40 David Fincher
the assumption of a perfect model (which is implied would be a much lon-

ger Director’s Cut).33 That said, at least 20 minutes was deleted from
Fincher’s rough cut, including greater detail on the character of Golic
(Paul McGann). In this material, he is not just another disposable victim
but contact with the alien allows him to tap into higher planes of percep-
tion like some kind of idiot savant. He calls the alien ‘‘Magnificent’’ and
acts as a grotesque alter ego of Ripley’s greater knowledge of the creature.
In cut footage, having fallen under the spell of the creature, he releases it
from a toxic waste tank (in early versions they succeed in trapping the
alien), calls it ‘‘brother,’’ and promises to do its bidding in the guise of an
acolyte, which is at least in keeping with Ward’s religious concept. The
cutting of this section does remove a potentially repetitive action sequence
and a weakening of the power of the creature if it can be contained like
this, but the marginalization of Golic is a pity.
The conception of the alien is a little confused but considering that ideas
were being raised and shelved with great rapidity, it is hardly surprising.
Production Designer Greg Pruss declares, ‘‘The movie is called Alien
because it’s about the alien,’’ which may have just been a slip of the
tongue, but he does say Alien, not Alien3.34 The use of a dog (rather than
an ox in earlier drafts of the script) as an initial host certainly evokes the
use of dogs that can sense danger of the alien in both Terminator films
(James Cameron, 1984 and 1991) and John Carpenter’s 1982 remake of
The Thing (which also shows the bringing of a deadly creature into an all-
male enclosed community). However, whereas Carpenter follows that
logic through, giving his alien dog-like features and attributes, this notion
seems to fade from view here, with the creature exhibiting the ability to
run like a bipedal dinosaur. This confusion in concept is reflected in dis-
agreements between Fincher and Fox about the birthing scene, only shot
months after the rest of the film and only after test audiences were unsure
where the alien came from. It is conceived as a literally bigger entity, more
agile but shaking like a gawky giraffe at birth, not just in this slightly
empathetic movement but the speed with which it stands. Although it
looks fearsome, the creature seems to kill more slowly than in the first
two films, repeatedly pulling victims suddenly up out of shot, allowing
Fincher to use lots of trademark low angles, but then there are less credi-
ble sequences where characters apparently struggle for several seconds. In
the final confrontation with Ripley and Dillon, there is an effective whip-
ping sound effect, but like the ubiquitous steam and top lighting, this is a
device to distract the viewer from the fact that we are watching a man in
a rubber suit thrashing about in the dark.
The mess of the plot is reflected in the fact that early teaser trailers sug-
gested aliens making their way to earth (a direction abandoned after the
release of Stephen Hopkins’s 1990 Predator II featuring a similar narrative
and even a direct allusion with an alien skull glimpsed in a trophy case).
Mis-marketed by Fox, desperate to recoup their overspend, trailers fea-
tured the tunnel chase sequences and explicit linkage with the previous
two parts of the franchise. Swallow claims the film ‘‘rediscovers the
haunted house fear of the Alien universe’’ but while this is certainly no
war story like Aliens, Swallow’s generic references do not add up.35 There
is very little fear of place or real suspense in the film and the one time that
Ripley makes the psychic space explicit, her search of ‘‘the basement’’ is
never seen. It is the body in the sense of human existence, which the film
explores, not the supernatural horror sub-genre. It does not offer escap-
ism, but offers up a raw view of human existence as it is. Alien was a
groundbreaking horror/sci-fi hybrid, Aliens shifted this into action movie-
war film, but Alien3 does not attempt a generic transition, more a blunt
juxtaposition.
In all of this, the Conradian elements in Alien3 seem to have been
largely overlooked. The original vessel, the Nostromo, is named after the
1904 Joseph Conrad novel, set in a mining town called Sulaco (the name
of the escape craft here). This evokes a subtle sense of colonial exploita-
tion for material gain, the motive behind the Company; the Company has
the trappings of men of medical science but is really made up of high-tech
colonialists. Conrad was a rare advocate of therapeutic nihilism—the con-
cept that cures do not work and are often worse than the disease. Linked
to this concept is an almost paranoid suspicion of doctors and those pur-
porting to be acting for someone’s greater good—the exact stance adopted
by Bishop at the close and possibly the cynicism underlying the character
of Clemens (whose morphine cure was definitely worse than the condi-
tions he was seeking to treat). Descriptions of Sulaco in the opening chap-
ter of Conrad’s novel suggest a strangely exotic island at sunset, beautiful
but windswept, strikingly similar to the futuristic environment in which
the escape pod crash-lands (the use of oxen here may have been behind
Ward’s original concept to use such a creature as the means of pulling the
craft to safety).36 The post-production exterior shots seem fairly primitive
but the shot of the shoreline and what looks like a shipwreck, alongside a
teetering mast and two setting suns, evoke the Expressionist nightmare of
F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), another tale of a perfect parasite whose
apparent distress following a wreck allows it to pass into an unwitting
community.
42 David Fincher
The Ocean Steam Navigation Company, referred to at times as ‘‘the

Company,’’ is the driving colonial force in the region. The Company, an
unprincipled organization, driven solely by profit to ruthlessly exploit soci-
eties and individuals for material gain, is evoked as a parallel for colonial-
ism, but in Alien3 this only appears, almost as a deus ex machina device
right at the end and is finally given a name (Weyland-Yutani), removing
some of its general metaphoric power and making it more specifically
alien. In an early draft of the script, the name was originally given in
Andrews’ first message, but the final version held it back until the arrival
of Bishop and the soldiers. All the relationships on the planet, economic
and sexual, are unproductive. It is no longer a mine or a functioning
prison (prisoners and their so-called jailers are both trapped), distinctions
of gender have been lost (in the sense of the absence of women), and the
religion which attempts to take the place of such relationships is equally
sterile. Andrews tolerates it because it makes the men calmer, more docile,
and easier to control. There is a passionless status quo. Despite the vitri-
olic language, we see no attempt at revolt and the attempted rape of Rip-
ley is as much a reflection of the men’s boredom (and even possibly
resentment at its interruption) as any expression of lust. It may not be
entirely coincidental that in The Game, the hero’s brother, who provides
the motor for the plot and has an outburst about the hopelessness of
escaping the clutches of CRS, was originally named Connie, but with a
gender switch he becomes ‘‘Conrad.’’
Conclusion
In hindsight, perhaps Alien3 was doomed to be a disappointment not
because of the many production difficulties but for the simple fact it was
not just a sequel, but a sequel with a global franchise. This compounds
the tension inherent in a genre film between change and repetition, origi-
nality and familiarity. As a director who has subsequently gained recogni-
tion for the strength (or pig-headedness, depending on one’s point of view)
of his particular approach to a film, a sequence, a shot, the factor that any
genre film is based on, i.e., compromise, is not an obvious part of Fincher’s
creative aesthetic. One of his key criteria for whether he takes on a project
is what he can do that has not been done before.
On the one side there were Studio executives, such as Jon Landau, who
had huge budgetary pressures, the benefit of precedent (the cost of the first
two films), and greater personal career successes to point to, and on the
other Fincher, without a feature to his name, insisting on meticulous
shoots and challenging creative choices (such as Weaver having her head
shaved and killing off her character at the end), all set against a back-
ground of a revolving door of over 10 writers, so that production began
without a finished script. Even early scriptwriter William Gibson articu-
lates a dominant view of the film as a reduction, a dilution, and a weaken-
ing of the franchise. Thomson cites Gibson on producers Walter Hill and
David Giler’s concept for Alien3—‘‘[t]hey had a choice between opening
this thing up and expanding the meaning of the first two films or going for
closure. They went for closure.’’37 The point is, though, that closure is the
meaning. It redefines what that is.
There is originality here, too—the slow-motion dissolves of the fire
scene or Newt’s cremation, a full physical convergence between a shaven-
headed Ripley, and an evolving creature, whose point of view we explicitly
have for the first time (beyond Scott’s floating Steadicam) all represent an
unwillingness to produce just a genre film. Most particularly, to kill off in
the opening moments all the supporting characters who had survived Ali-
ens directly undermines the value of their sacrifice, and to book-end this
with the self-immolation of the franchise’s central character (even if this
was a suggestion from Weaver herself), signifies a certain commercial per-
versity in Fincher’s nature. Stylistic icons from Alien are retained (dangling
chains, top-lighting, and a metallic, symmetrical set) but with the reduced
influence of H.R. Giger (at an early stage, Ward brought him back; he who
had been sidelined on Aliens, but it is unclear if his art work was ever spe-
cifically used), there is less emphasis on a bio-technological look. Fincher adds
features that become signatures of his own—in the montage preparing the fur-
nace for example, we have frequent use of low angles, and minimal and moti-
vated lighting, such as flashlights shone directly down the camera lens.
Clearly, in a sequel of a film that can be seen as a monster movie, the
monster has already been revealed, so the shock of the first film cannot be
replicated. It is the evolution of the monster’s physical form and the nature
of the franchise that becomes central, i.e., it is a question of genre and
intertextuality. The horror device, so powerful in Alien, of revealing the
monster piecemeal is therefore a more desperate way to try and instill
some suspense but with the likelihood of reduced effect. Often, the presen-
tation of visceral gore is actually quite restrained and achieved more by
flash-cuts and reaction shots, such as the demise of Clemens, which is con-
veyed more by Golic’s wide-eyed gibbering and the slow-motion kicking
of a tray, rather than dwelling on scenes of graphic violence. The tunnel
sequences, frequently used in trailers as the prime action material, suggest
a kinetic viewing experience with an evolving concept of the alien. In
44 David Fincher
actuality, the film is less a sequel than a denial of Aliens. Characters are
summarily dispatched from the outset and there is a return to the ‘‘purer’’
focus of combating a single monster from the first film. Dillon’s words,
‘‘There’s always a new life, a new beginning,’’ rather than reflecting any-
thing uplifting or hopeful, echo the drive in the horror genre for
sequelization.
PANIC ROOM
The basic scenario of Panic Room is effectively an updating of Gene
Saks’ 1967 Barefoot in the Park (based on a 1963 Neil Simon play, origi-
nally set in a Manhattan brownstone) with newlyweds replaced by a
newly divorced independent woman and a child. The film is routinely por-
trayed as a conventional thriller. Linda Ruth Williams briefly notes that it
‘‘unpacks a number of genre staples’’ before using a review as the jump-
ing-off point for a consideration of Foster’s career.38 This, however, greatly
underestimates what is going on in the film. Fincher claims that the film is
just about survival, which would link with the Final Girl notion, but
glosses over the directing vision of the film and the consequent technical
complexity of the project.39
Swallow claims that ‘‘[i]t may not transcend its genre, but it does repre-
sent a finely tooled archetype of it.’’40 Unfortunately, such a comment only
really makes sense if viewers can decide on allocating the film to a particu-
lar genre and have a clear idea of what the conventions of that genre are.
In this case, that is not really so. There seems to be some generic confusion
about the film—Andrew O’Hehir terms it ‘‘an ungainly horror-comedy.’’41
Is it a suspense thriller? A heist/crime movie? A home invasion movie? The
levels of references seem almost targeted at different niche audiences—are
contemporary audiences picking up allusions to Rear Window and Wait
Until Dark or just the more superficial references to Home Alone and
Titanic?
Final Girl
In terms of nomenclature, neither Meg nor Sarah has any masculine
overtones and although their hair is short, it does not approach Ripley’s
shaven masochism. This is an all-female house that is invaded, rather than
Ripley as the sole female entering an all-male community.
It is only as she goes to turn off the light in the panic room that
Meg finally spots the men on the monitor, but generally she is observant
and spots things others miss—she is the first of the many viewers of the
house, according to the agent, to notice that the upstairs room housing the
panic room is smaller than it should be. She has the presence of mind to
take the tapes out of the monitors before exiting the panic room and hurl her
daughter’s medication in before the door closes again, and is prepared to
walk barefoot over broken glass (a small plot detail rather skipped over,
unlike Bruce Willis’s bandaged feet in John McTiernan’s 1988 Die Hard).
She plans a course of action and carries it out, such as the charge at Raoul
behind the door, despite her diminutive size. (One wonders what first
choice for the role, Nicole Kidman, would have done with such a scene).
Later, she plans a trap for the robbers using what firepower she has, plac-
ing the gun in Stephen’s hand. The iconic shot (used by Swallow for his
front cover/in Williams’s Sight and Sound article) of Meg holding the gun
in sharp focus close to the camera is a reverse angle of the shot in Seven
where John Doe holds a pistol to Mills’s head. At this point, the victim of
the crime has trapped the intruders but they hold the girl, so there is a del-
icate power balance, which is constantly shifting as we shift from rooms
as places to constrict or protect.
As Foster has Ripley say, ‘‘I owe the fact that I’m still alive to an under-
standing of spatial relationships.’’42 Whether it is Ripley’s crude plan to
trap the creature in the lead works or Meg’s use of the cameras to inform
herself about the position of her intruders and then gas to attack them,
both heroines apply rudimentary science for their survival. In a rather ster-
eotypical action, Meg can strip wires for plugs, but she can’t do much
more. In the ignition of the gas, she shows quick thinking and a willing-
ness to take risks and as in the failed attempt to capture the alien, Finch-
er’s use of slow motion for the explosion sequence elevates his heroine to
full-fledged action ‘‘hero.’’
Sarah and Meg initially appear opposites, a bold daughter and a cau-
tious mother, but gradually steel in the mother emerges. Sarah shows forti-
tude in not telling her mother how bad she feels, demonstrates to her how
to change the direction of the elevator so that they evade capture when
the men first enter the house, and thinks of the idea of signalling to a
neighbor, drawing on her knowledge of other fictional narratives. Williams
recognizes that the film ‘‘is in part a woman-in-peril movie’’ but that in
taking the initiative from the intruders ‘‘she reprises something of the
‘Final Girl’ aspect of Clarice Starling.’’43 There are key differences here
though—Starling is a trained FBI agent from the outset and is deprived of
an on-screen family. According to Yvonne Tasker, Alien3’s Ripley, impreg-
nated by the queen alien, ‘‘is more important for what she is than what
46 David Fincher
she does; the valuable object that needs to be protected or destroyed—the

classic position for women.’’44 However, in both cases, although Meg and
Ripley carry important status as mothers, they are both more active in
defense of that role than Williams or Tasker suggest—neither is happy to
accept how they are defined by others.
The challenge for Meg is that she has to overcome her fear of being
locked in twice-over—not just within the panic room, but watching the
intruders seal up the house. Koepp’s script has Meg momentarily fainting
(and a vision of Central Park, linking with the coda) but with the change
in casting, Fincher may well have felt that ‘‘helplessness’’ was not a char-
acteristic audiences easily associate with Jodie Foster. Like Ripley, Meg as
Final Girl manipulates space to lure and destroy an invading force. She
makes a plan and carries it out, locking certain doors, converting her liv-
ing space to capture the intruders, and like the alien, the robbers are suspi-
cious but still fall into the trap set for them.
There is even some begrudging (and partly humorous) admiration from
Raoul at her ‘‘blinding’’ them by breaking the cameras—‘‘Why the hell
didn’t we do that?’’—suggesting they had also underestimated her. She is
prepared to use violence when necessary, smashing the cameras one by
one and wielding the sledgehammer in the climactic fight with Raoul. She
does confuse matters of honor with effectiveness, creeping up behind
Raoul and hitting him with all her might, so that he falls over the banister.
He briefly becomes the ‘‘unkillable thing’’ of horror narratives, managing
somehow to crawl up the stairs despite his injuries (including severed fin-
gers from the panic room door), appropriating the hammer from Meg and
using it as a parody of a walking stick to bring him closer to Meg. Vio-
lence is brief but brutal, both in Sarah being punched away and Burnham
reappearing to deliver a simple coup de grâce with the gun to Raoul,
framed in low angle about to do the same to Meg but with the hammer.
But the speed of her conversion to Final Girl, which happens in the
course of a single night, stretches credibility. At the beginning she cannot
set the alarm system properly, but fairly soon we see her stripping wires,
lighting gas to repel her attackers, and organizing an elaborate final trap.
The panic room is described as ‘‘a castle keep in medieval times.’’ Alien3
feels less like Giger’s personal intrauterine nightmare than Foucault’s Pan-
opticon, a model of control by surveillance. Even when Ripley is quizzing
Clemens about the community in what appears an intimate moment alone,
the camera tilts and cranes down past other levels with shadowy
figures, possibly listening in. Panic Room, with its bank of monitors,
also has some elements of the Panopticon, placing the observer in a
position to see any aspect of the house but this is not presented like in
Sliver (Philip Noyce, 1993) as the source of voyeuristic pleasure but the
source of anxiety. Indeed, the small technical deficiency (no sound) seems
odd, given the expense and extent of the technology. The secret door and
the button to open it do seem almost cartoonish, like a plot twist in
Scooby-Doo and Meg’s first real expression is a slight laugh of disbelief.
Like Alien3 where the ‘‘castle keep’’ of an escape pod is breached from
the outset, here the invading forces do finally gain access but the heroine
has escaped. The film assumes a range of knowledge about the panic room
phenomenon from Meg’s ignorance to the agent’s secondhand knowledge
(‘‘I’ve read about these’’) to the senior agent’s grandiose ‘‘They’re quite in
vogue in high-end construction right now,’’ suggesting Meg’s wonder pla-
ces her outside the inner circles of Manhattan’s sophisticated elite. Meg is
visibly unnerved by the closing of the door, requesting immediately that it
be opened and repeating herself twice with rising panic in her voice. She
does not like it, partly through instinct (‘‘The whole thing makes me nerv-
ous’’) and partly through education (‘‘Ever read any Poe?’’). The female
agent’s reply (‘‘No but I loved their/her last album’’) could be deliberately
obtuse or serve to underline Meg’s intellectual superiority. Koepp’s script
suggests stupidity with a further comment showing lack of understanding.
Sarah swoops in and declares the space in which Meg feels so uncomfort-
able as ‘‘my room.’’ The agent slams the door shut again, at which point
the camera rotates 180 degrees around Meg so that she is left looking in
the mirrored front of the cupboard, with its Narnia-like secret.
Family/Parenthood/Motherhood
The senior agent suggests that there has been lots of interest in the
house, claiming ‘‘It’s a very emotional property.’’ At this moment, mother
and daughter are not showing a great deal but through the course of one
night, they will be tested and will need to draw on their combined emo-
tional strength to outwit their attackers. Very like the dialogue with which
Bishop seeks to tempt Ripley, the agent here claims, ‘‘You’ll have another
family. My God, you could have two.’’ The throwaway style suggests a
lack of understanding about the difference between the biological fact of
having children and the notion of ‘‘family.’’ The agent underlines her role
as tempter by attacking Meg’s apparent lack of enthusiasm—‘‘It’s got
everything you told me you wanted and more.’’ Dramatizing the Chinese
proverb about being careful what you wish for, Meg and Sarah are lucky
(in the eyes of the agents) to find their dream house, but are unaware or
48 David Fincher
unwilling to recognize Meg’s deeper instinctive feelings of unease about

the house. It could be said that through the course of the film, she learns
to trust her instincts more fully, acting impulsively and sometimes vio-
lently in defense of her daughter.
There is tension between mother and daughter. From the opening, Meg
rather prissily asks Sarah if she has to ride her scooter, to which she
receives the withering reply, ‘‘Mom, we’re in the street.’’ Meg’s attempts to
stop her riding around the house via gestures and whispered commands
are cast as impotent when juxtaposed with the agent’s brash but effective
command, ‘‘Hey kid, no scooters,’’ and later, ‘‘Kid, no elevator.’’ The dia-
logue is neither addressed to Meg nor answered by her—her role as a par-
ent is entirely marginalized. Meg’s apparent dithering in the house about
the cost is undercut by another withering line, delivered as she scoots
through the shot—‘‘Mom, it’s not Barney’s. You don’t have to pay the
price on the tag.’’ The final version has ‘‘Barney’s’’ instead of Koepp’s orig-
inal ‘‘Saks,’’ making her comment more cutting and catty. There is some
role reversal here as the child seems worldly-wise, even cynical, and the
parent is nervous and apparently a little lost in the adult world. Sarah
explores the house more fully, riding up and down in the elevator. As in
Aliens, a noisy elevator containing a troublesome female interrupts the
dialogue but here it is Sarah, playing. By the climax, Meg will have
learned from her child and be able to use this location to surprise Raoul,
and in turn, save her daughter. The phrase Meg uses when asked about
her circumstances is that she is ‘‘going back to school,’’ suggesting an ele-
ment of role reversal between parent and child but also an openness to
new experiences and the acquisition of knowledge.
Later the conversation between mother and daughter is literally and
metaphorically distanced, carried out between different levels of the house,
and Sarah’s ‘‘Good for you, mom’’ at Meg’s connecting the phone has
more than a touch of sarcasm (Koepp’s script is more explicitly so with
Sarah’s comment ‘‘The crowd goes wild,’’ ultimately cut). Koepp has Meg
popping a pill and expressing more visible nerves about negotiating on the
house and explicit references to her impending divorce and the need to
demonstrate that she can provide a stable home for her daughter. At a
time when she is seeking (or having to seek) a new, independent life with
her daughter, she is defined patronizingly by the agent in relation to her
husband, ‘‘Oh, I didn’t realize you were Stephen Altman’s wife.’’
Meg has a good memory for details, remembering the take-out number,
but the meal itself is punctuated with heavy pauses, suggesting a lack of
connection between Sarah and her, with Meg feeling guilty that she
has not cooked and that the purchase of favorite food is an attempt to
buy favor. What brings them together is Sarah expressing the subtext that
lies between them: the divorce and the behavior of her father. She
expresses this in direct language (‘‘Fuck him’’), but Meg rejects this, sug-
gesting that she is rejecting both aggression and more aggressive forms of
language. When tempted by Sarah’s ‘‘Fuck her, too,’’ she retains her com-
posure, replying, ‘‘I agree, but no.’’ The closeness is expressed by literal
closer shots over the table and a pseudo toast with wine and Coke, sug-
gesting perhaps they are more like each other than seems so at first. By the
time they are ready for bed, old tensions surface: ‘‘You know, you never
asked me what I thought of this house,’’ which is true as far as we know.
However, Meg’s answer, ‘‘I didn’t want you to tell me you hated it’’ has a
certain practical logic to it.
Even their goodnight kiss has some ambiguity. Meg’s ‘‘I love you so
much, it’s disgusting’’ (a Foster improvisation) is quite ambiguous, but Sar-
ah’s dismissive ‘‘Tell me about it’’ has the air of a familiar routine rather
than a challenge. With the forced change of cast due to a knee injury, from
original choice Nicole Kidman to Jodie Foster, there is a change in the
mother-daughter dynamic to how they are similar, rather than different.
Kidman has a residual presence in the voice of Meg’s husband’s new part-
ner we hear on the phone.
Sarah’s clear lack of sense of time (rather clumsily inserted into the dia-
logue about when people were buried alive ‘‘in the ‘20s . . . 20 or 30 years
ago’’) and her request for a light to be left on, underlines that despite her
bullish dialogue, she is still a fairly young child.
However, she is also resourceful—she is the one who thinks of seeking
sanctuary in the panic room. She prompts her mother to say ‘‘Get the fuck
out of my house,’’ which rather bizarrely Meg accepts without question,
suggesting either that Meg is incredibly weak-willed or more likely that
this taps into a deeper pool of instinctive anger and she only needs a few
pointers to access and express this. It seems that linguistically she needs
her daughter’s ‘‘permission’’ to reach beyond the socially polite forms of
discourse with which she is comfortable. Junior patronizingly assumes,
‘‘she’s a woman, she’s used to dealing with decent people,’’ and holds up
the offer ‘‘We will let you go,’’ which prompts Meg and Sarah just to look
at each other in disbelief. No further comment is needed—when Meg
replies ‘‘Conversation’s over,’’ she is not only closing down negotiation
with the robbers but underlining an unspoken bond with her daughter.
Women may be in peril but they are not stupid. Later, she does not need
her daughter’s prompting to mouth ‘‘Fuck you’’ at the camera, having
50 David Fincher
reversed the positions with the robbers, who are now trapped themselves
in the panic room, and she refuses to leave the gun as she is told. She is
even able to improvise and prepared to humiliate herself with the cops at
the door (also exploiting her sexuality) to secure the safety of her daugh-
ter. After the failure of the phone line, Meg and Sarah apologize to each
other, in stark contrast to the bickering and back-biting of the robbers.
Similarities with Ripley

Both Foster and Weaver are powerful figures in Hollywood. Their cur-
rent price tag as leading ladies may rise and fall, reflecting the fickleness of
the market, but they are both A-list stars whose presence is enough to
‘‘open’’ a picture, who both play an increasing role in production, and
who both dominate the films in which they participate.
Meg looks through photos of her family, giving the sense of putting her
life in order a little in relation to her life with her daughter as Ripley did
in Aliens (the Director’s Cut showing a daughter we never knew she had,
long-since grown up and died, using a snap of Weaver’s own mother in a
nice extra-textual touch). Freeland’s dismissive point that Ripley is just
masculinized may be true, but this is simplifying Clover quite brutally and
also she does not explore specific examples. Ripley may appear more alone
in deep space but ironically, although in the midst of a large urban area,
Meg is just as isolated—both are independent women, sorting through the
debris of their lives. Here, Meg is surrounded by the visible wreckage of
her family life—piles of half-opened storage boxes, scattered across the
floor, and the reality behind the facade is the slow, low-angle tracking shot
up to her figure in the bath via the wine glass on the floor—seeking
recourse to alcohol. Loss stands squarely behind both heroines—loss of
what a family life could have been; a loss for which they both weep in
close-up. Ripley at Newt’s cremation and Meg in the bath both represent
moments of complete desolation, when composure breaks and we see in
close-up a powerful image of human loss. More than this, in her face-to-
face scene with the alien, Ripley’s cowering and avoidance of eye contact
convey abject terror, and Meg’s body positioning and instinctive act in
crouching and howling with her daughter after she survives a fit articulate
a range of human misery rarely accorded to male heroes.
The title of Jonathan Lake Crane’s book, Terror and Everyday Life
(1994), is suggestive here. There is a moment where Meg peers round the
corner of an upstairs room, again timidly, not even entering the room
completely, and we momentarily cut to her point of view. Like the opening
shots of the interiors in Alien, there is a similar floating-camera effect as

we pan around the panic room, and track past cases and through empty
rooms. As in the bathroom scene we pass again through walls and track-
ing up to Meg in the bath, all creates a similar sense that an alien presence
already lurks within this living space. However this style is only used spor-
adically. Meg’s anxiety is primarily domestic and socially defined. The
nightmare of urban living as a lone woman is to have your living space
invaded and that even the most expensive security system does not guaran-
tee your security (indeed here, ironically, it is the very source of your prob-
lems). Ripley’s panic is mainly physical and philosophical, about bodily
penetration. Even though one film is set in contemporary Manhattan and
the other in a future prison colony, it is the emptiness underlying quoti-
dian human existence, which is terrifying in both films. Both women wake
to a nightmare given concrete form: Ripley had such a dream in Aliens
and Meg by suggestion in the agent’s remarks about the panic room.
Structure
In a sense Panic Room is ‘‘a problem film.’’ Specifically, from the point
of view of the robbers, it is structured around a series of challenges they
face: how to get in (to the house and then the panic room), how to trick
the girls out, and how to find and silence them. The panic room itself, a
secret space within a house, has a puzzle box element. Their solution to
get into the panic room is to make the rest of the house secure, i.e., con-
struct a prison for themselves too. Climax is followed by anti-climax, such
as Meg’s final acquisition of a phone followed by the realization that there
is no signal in the panic room.
Like the Perils of Pauline sub-genre, the basic structure is extremely epi-
sodic. Further jeopardy twists are signalled in the glimpse of medication in
a bedside fridge unit, Sarah’s watch counting her blood-sugar level, and
Sarah’s reluctant admission that she is feeling dizzy and hungry. The sub-
stitution of Raoul for Stephen was quite predictable, anticipating Koepp’s
similar attempts at revelation in Secret Window, which does not always
work. The first fade-to-black occurs as Meg and Sarah make it to the
apparent safety of the panic room, representing a passing of time and a
breathing space, for both characters and the audience, a chance to take
stock of where we think the action will go. Burnham’s ‘‘Now what?’’ is as
much a challenge to us to anticipate events as an expression of their frus-
tration. Similarly, later Raoul warns Burnham with a question, which is
also a challenge to us: ‘‘Who’s got the gun? . . . Remember that.’’ When
52 David Fincher
Raoul has his balaclava torn off and Sarah sees his face, he declares, ‘‘You
know how this thing’s gonna end,’’ but the knowingness in the dialogue
may not actually be reflected in the level of generic understanding in the
audience’s. Like the viewer, Raoul watches Meg smash the cameras and
articulates our thoughts too when he declares, ‘‘What the fuck is she
doing?’’ We have moved from total to partial omniscience to potential
mystification about what characters’ motives might be.
Williams terms Meg ‘‘the film’s sole repository of responsible adult-
hood’’ but this is not really true.45 Burnham acts as a useful parallel for
Meg in ways that Clemens does not for Ripley. Burnham realizes the need
to write to communicate with the cameras, he senses the danger/Meg’s
plan with the gas first, calmly (at first) telling Raoul to turn it off, he real-
izes the power of covering the cameras and he survives at the end. Ironi-
cally, he has spent the last 12 years making/installing such security devices
and now is frustrated by the very things in which he is an expert. He too
is resourceful—it is his idea, we presume, for Raoul to take the place of
Stephen (Koepp’s script has him making the switch but the idea of Forest
Whitaker being carried upstairs would probably stretch credibility). Even
little gestures link them. Williams asserts that ‘‘I don’t think she [Meg]
smiles in the course of the entire film,’’ but her nervous laugh at first sight
of the panic room is paralleled by his rueful giggle when he reveals the
socket, only for the wire to be whipped away before his eyes.46 He realizes
that if Raoul kills Stephen, they will not be able to trick Meg out of the
panic room. He also has an often-missed harsher edge—he comes up with
the idea of using gas on the panic room, albeit in moderation, and he
refuses to release Raoul’s fingers from the door as long as Meg might be
outside with a gun. Most tellingly, he cares enough about the girl to give
her the injection and return at the end, at risk of his own escape, to stop
them being butchered by Raoul.
Like Meg, Burnham is doing what he is doing for the sake of his family
and a difficult divorce. He balks at having to harm anyone—he had
assumed the house was empty, i.e., it would be a ‘‘victimless’’ crime. While
giving Sarah the shot, he starts to talk about wanting to provide a house
like this for his own child, ‘‘but sometimes things don’t work out the way
you want them to.’’ His own back story is given little prominence but as a
skilled worker, it might not be too much of a leap of intuition to suggest
that had he been born in a different place and with a different skin color,
his chances might have been better. There is also an implicit racial angle in
the coda, where there is no suggestion that Meg and Sarah speak up for
him. We may have some sympathy for Meg, having to start a new life with
an 11-year-old daughter but her former husband was a pharmaceuticals

millionaire—the size of the property suggests she is hardly poor and at the
close they are seen looking for another property, happily continuing with
their life of wealth and privilege while, one presumes, Burnham begins a
lengthy jail term for murder (a crime he committed in order to save them).
If it is an Aristotlean tragedy, abiding as it does by the unities of time
and place (in the body of the film at least), then it is debatable whose trag-
edy it is. We might begin by assuming that it is Meg’s—the scorned
woman, the victim in a painful divorce, forced to move and start a new
life with a troublesome daughter. However, Sarah has been forced to
uproot her life and choose between parents, bound to a life dependent on
drugs. Burnham is forced to partake in a crime that seems to be against
his better judgement due to a costly and painful divorce (forming a bond
with Meg), stumbling on an inhabited rather than an empty dwelling (as
planned), and forced to accept a psychopathic accomplice, Raoul, who
was not part of the original plan.
Conclusion
The difference between Alien3 and Panic Room reflects the change in
Fincher’s status as a director over a decade from rising star without any
real control over the production process to having final cut and complete
control over the production process. A clear legacy from Alien3 was, in
order to avoid the nightmarish problems with Studios, a desire for greater
control; in particular that his vision of a particular project would prevail
and it would be that to which he would ultimately be held to account. In
effect, commercial wrangling leads to a strengthening of auteurist tenden-
cies in his approach to directing.
Ultimately both Alien3, set in a prison colony, and Panic Room, an ex-
ploration of a security feature in private homes, are about notions of shel-
ter as a home or a prison. The key difference is the notion of belonging.
Prisoners, given a modicum of comfort, can resign themselves to a loss of
liberty and despite apparent freedom. By the same token, a homeowner
can feel like a prisoner in his own space, due to external factors like fear
of crime. Modern urban life is portrayed as a series of negotiated impris-
onments, some we might reject, some accept willingly, and others only
under duress. Nomenclature is important; the distinction between ‘‘house’’
and ‘‘home’’ is largely a sense of belonging. Meg is pressured into buying a
house with which she is not fully at ease, in part to get back at her hus-
band and, by implication, win over her troublesome daughter. However,
54 David Fincher
the panic room itself is an object of unease from the outset—Meg shud-
ders at it and is immediately unhappy to be locked inside. It is an
unknown element of the house, not a sought-after feature, rather like a
parasite within a body, an unwelcome element that rather than making
the host safer, invites potential attack. The narrative would seem to sug-
gest that had she listened more closely to her instincts rather than the
social pressures of upward mobility and gender expectations, she might
have avoided the ordeal.
Philosopher Gaston Bachelard talks about the main purpose of a house
as providing a ‘‘protected intimacy.’’47 In Panic Room, this allows Fincher
(now with final cut and working on an enclosed sound stage) to pursue,
undisturbed from outside influences, his own creative agenda. Fellow phi-
losopher Nathan Andersen terms Alien3 ‘‘an open space in which thinking
takes place, enabling new modes of organizing and making sense of expe-
rience and knowledge.’’48 Panic Room fulfills what was really only hinted
at in Alien3 in what might be seen as its ‘‘spatial politics.’’ If a dwelling is
viewed as an extension of the self, then that self here is ‘‘Fincher-as-director.’’
The dwelling space in both films is an imaginative construct for Fincher to
experiment with a film narrative; one experiment produces a Conradian
hymn to Kippleization, the other is a domestic nightmare, but both are
spaces, according to Bachelard, in which he can daydream. What he
dreams about most often, by choice or instinct, is how to expand the
technical potential of the medium of film.
Chapter 3
To Catch a Killer:
Seven and Zodiac
‘‘Good, I can feel your anger. I am unarmed. Take your weapon. Strike me
down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be
complete.’’
—Emperor Darth Sidious to Luke Skywalker
The dialogue above from George Lucas’s 1983 Star Wars VI: Return of
the Jedi (on which Fincher worked as assistant cameraman in the minia-
ture and optical effects unit) strongly foreshadows the climactic scene in
Seven, in which the characters of Doe and Mills are aligned. Critical com-
mentary on the film tends to be dominated by the darkness of Fincher’s
style, noting the ubiquitous rain (entirely fortuitous but often credited to
Fincher); the bleakness of Darius Khondji’s cinematography (in particular
his use of ‘‘silvered’’ processing, adding nuances to apparent darkness);
and the negativity of the film’s vision, particularly the ending. Khondji
continued experiments with unexposed silver in the negative in Alien Res-
urrection (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1997) to give Ripley an ‘‘eerie, steely look.’’1
However, what remains neglected is the originality that lies beneath the
precise characterization and relationship between the detectives, the narra-
tive structure, and the character of the killer, John Doe.
Richard Dyer views the film as ‘‘a study in sin,’’ and talks about his
impression on seeing the film for the first time of being ‘‘in danger’’2 from
the omnipresent nature of sin. However, that is to accept unquestioningly
Doe’s view of humanity—we may know of such cities but we do not nec-
essarily live in them. Our experience of humanity may not match the bleak
vision presented here. Andrew Kevin Walker’s script was inspired by his
56 David Fincher
experience of living in one particular place, New York, and while in some
senses that might be typical of many modern cities, hence the lack of a
given identity to the metropolis in the film, that does not make its vision
universal.
Conventional buddy pictures are usually based around the juxtaposition
of opposites, such as Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in Richard Donner’s
Lethal Weapon series (1987, 1989, 1992, and 1998) or Eddie Murphy
and Judge Reinhold in Beverly Hills Cop I (Martin Brest, 1984) and II
(Tony Scott, 1987). The fact that so often they create a mini-franchise is
highly suggestive of their formulaic nature. At first, Seven too seems like
that. Contrasts of age, outlook, even ethnicity had become staples of the
genre and the central detective relationship (older man becomes fascinated
by a case days before his retirement and replacement by an eager, younger
man) initially looks like just another cliche. Somerset (Morgan Freeman),
of African Caribbean origin, wise, nearing retirement, favoring calm, me-
thodical, and cultured investigation, is contrasted with Mills (Brad Pitt),
white, young, impulsive, impatient, wanting shortcuts and instant respect.
However, the more we learn about them, the more we see weaknesses and
superficialities in Somerset and corresponding strengths and potential
depths in Mills.
THE WORLD OF SEVEN

‘‘How can I bring a child up in a world like this?’’
—Somerset to Tracy
The discovery of the first body sets the tone for their relative approaches
and establishes tension between the pair, Mills resenting Somerset’s ques-
tions and irked by the corners being cut in procedures from the outset: no
one has checked for vital signs. Somerset’s dismissal of Mills from the
crime scene at the time might seem petulant and tactless, but elsewhere
has dramatic weight (foreshadowing the sudden movement of victim
number three, Victor) and represents the action of experience over hot-
headedness. However, the implication of the film as a whole is that his
worldly-wise persona also misses things too and the pair are most efficient
when they work together, intuited by Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow). This is
something that Somerset’s slightly cantankerous nature misses, refusing
Mills’s attempt at a peace offering of a cup of rain-filled coffee. Mills’s prat-
tling at the crime scene is annoying, but Somerset’s ‘‘Please be quiet,’’ while
it underscores his sensitivity to clues, simultaneously ignores the fact that as
To Catch a Killer: Seven and Zodiac 57
the older man, he is quite intimidating and unapproachable to new, younger

colleagues. Mills’s verbosity might be due to nerves as much as arrogance.
There is a similar ambiguity about Somerset’s reaction to Mills being
assigned this serial murder case. His ‘‘It’s too soon for you’’ might seem
arrogantly patronizing and demeaning to Mills or it could also be read as
paternally protective and wishing for the best outcome for the case. Mills’s
subsequent deep breath outside the next crime scene might suggest that
Somerset is right: Mills needs to steel himself not only to face a gory murder
scene but to assume the leadership of an investigation—a challenge to
which he knows deep down he is not yet equal (reflected in his picking up
of a remote control without gloves, contaminating a potentially important
piece of evidence).
Acts of random brutality seem the norm—we hear an anecdote from
Somerset of a man walking his dog who is stabbed in the eyes for no
apparent reason. Against this background—reflected in the almost con-
stant ambient industrial white noise—it is perhaps understandable that
Doe’s actions do not seem to represent a meaningful series of actions. It is
only by a series of supremely cruel acts that he can gain the attention of a
system that is emotionally numb. Somerset reminds Mills that self-defense
classes instruct women to cry ‘‘Fire’’ not ‘‘Help’’ and certainly not
‘‘Rape’’—inciting self-interest is the only way to provoke your fellow citi-
zen to action. Later, Somerset answers Mills’s apparently rhetorical ques-
tion about how photographers manage to reach crime scenes so quickly,
that ‘‘they pay police for the information; and they pay well.’’ Those
entrusted with upholding the law are seen as at best passive (his boss
asserts ‘‘that’s the way it’s always been’’), but often unconcerned (the ini-
tial cop’s annoyance at Somerset’s questions about whether the murder
was witnessed or not), even downright negligent (not checking a body for
signs of life), or as in Somerset’s point, open to corruption. Even Mills,
who seems full of youthful idealism, is prepared to falsify a witness state-
ment to cover for his breaking and entering Doe’s apartment without a
warrant. A lie is used to conceal a flagrant breach of civil rights. He and
Tracy are themselves victims of a deception, having been persuaded by an
agent to view the apartment only briefly, when no trains were running.
The bar scene in which Mills and Somerset explain their philosophies of
life in clumsy expositional dialogue appears to underline their contrasting
natures. Somerset sets out his world-view, effectively not that different to
Doe’s: ‘‘I just don’t think I can continue to live and work in a place that
embraces and nurtures apathy as if it were a virtue,’’ to which Mills
replies, ‘‘I do not agree with you,’’ but then adds ‘‘I can’t.’’ The second
58 David Fincher
part is important, suggesting that he may in some measure agree with

Somerset, but must deny that in order to function. In this sense, the two
are closer than they seem. Rather than opposites, they can be seen as older
and younger versions of the same character. The implication is that Somer-
set too initially wanted to do good and through years of bitter experience,
personal and professional, he has had to accept that change and improve-
ment in human affairs can only be piecemeal and slow, if at all. Tellingly,
after this scene, while Mills goes back to a loving wife, Somerset takes out
his feelings on his metronome, throwing it across the room, suggesting it
can no longer drown out the ambient noise of chaos. He is tired of leading
a lonely life, and perhaps acknowledges that Mills is right: deep down he
also cares deeply; he too rejects apathy and only appears to tolerate cyni-
cism. Perhaps Mills’s idealism is a corrective to his older self.
Looking for Clues

‘‘I want you to watch and I want you to listen.’’
—Somerset
Somerset manages to retain his humanity in the face of unremitting

bleakness: he asks the attending officer of a grisly murder whether it was
witnessed by a child. He is concerned with the effects of violence, not just
in order to find the perpetrator, reflecting wider debates about the effects
of viewing media violence on perpetuating violent behavior. His attempts
to keep himself above the corruption with which he is surrounded might
at times give him the appearance of slightly paternalistic high-handedness,
but he also represents a rare source of calm. We see the toll this takes on
him as he tries to sleep with a metronome, imposing control and meaning
on the chaos that surrounds him as well as capturing his key qualities—a
sense of timing and timely action. Importantly, it is not just the imposition
of regularity but a measured meaning of noise on a soundtrack that feels
at times like a cacophony of destruction, from the rain pattering on plastic
near the opening to ubiquitous traffic noise, overheard conversations, and
snatches of music—while its identity is not specified, it feels and certainly
sounds like ‘‘The City That Never Sleeps,’’ New York. It is a constant bat-
tle not just to see shapes in the darkness of the film’s cinematography but
to hear meaningful sound too. It is consistent that when the phone rings in
Doe’s apartment, it takes Mills several seconds to locate it among all the
papers and material, all deprived of light from windows which have been
painted out. Despite seeming complete opposites, the irony is there is
common ground between the two, sensed almost immediately by Tracy,

who in an action that makes her more plot device than fully rounded char-
acter, invites Somerset to dinner.
We see Mills having his own domestic rituals on waking. He may not
have the sartorial style of Somerset but his set of ties, ready tied, suggests
at least a striving after the kind of order Somerset seems to find with
slightly more ease. He defines himself as a man of action, with everything
within an arm’s reach and with two quick strokes, flattens his hair into
place. Whereas Somerset speaks sparingly (and much of his dialogue was
cut, partly at Freeman’s request), Mills babbles nervously, the aural equiv-
alent of the ambient noise of the city.
Obviously in terms of the ages of their characters and the relative stages
of their careers, one retiring, one just starting out here, there is a father-
son element here (Mills later falls asleep, mouth open, on Somerset’s
shoulder, while waiting for forensic results). Tracy even wipes sleep from
Mills’s eyes, as if he still needs mothering. Somerset takes upon himself
some of the stern disciplinary elements as well as trying to pass something
onto his heir. This makes the denouement particularly bleak, because there
is no one to carry on Somerset’s work and all his attempts to teach his suc-
cessor something comes to naught as shooting Doe, he is drawn into an
act of (self-)destruction.
Somerset’s methodology evokes classic detectives of the Sherlock Holmes
variety—close empirical observation linked to painstaking research and
cogently working out connections between apparently disparate events.
Somerset’s initial exchanges with Mills are dominated by questions—he
asks and listens to why Mills wants to come to this particular department
before making declarations. Mills’s wish to do good sounds sincere but
naı̈ve, and by implication if a figure with Somerset’s apparent integrity is
choosing early retirement, the battle is already lost. Somerset is the first
one to see a pattern in apparently unrelated events: ‘‘unless the act itself
has meaning,’’ and warns ‘‘this is just the beginning.’’ He sees connections
between apparently disparate events, established in his tenacity surround-
ing the first murder especially, and in particular uses the wisdom of others,
writers in particular, to solve the case. His veneration of the library marks
him as representative of the cerebral detective, looking to the resources of
art and literature to understand human behavior.
However, the cynicism of the initial cop is reflected in Somerset’s boss,
who warns him ‘‘Don’t even start that big brain of yours cooking.’’ In an
almost medieval sense, intelligence is seen as suspicious. At the same time,
his boss knows him better than he knows himself, realizing that whatever
60 David Fincher
appearances might suggest, Somerset’s intellectual curiosity will not let

him leave until the case is concluded. Right at the very end of the film,
Somerset’s dialogue, ‘‘I’ll be around,’’ is clearly a sop to review audiences,
struggling to accept the bleakness of such a closed ending, but in a sense it
also is consistent with what we have seen of Somerset. It is hard to imag-
ine him in retirement. A deleted scene showed him looking around a
retirement home, but he really does not look ready for such a lifestyle
change just yet. Reminiscent of the difficulties his character Red has after
being released from a lifetime in prison in The Shawshank Redemption
(Frank Darabont, 1994), he appears here to have no current life outside
the job and is effectively institutionalized. He might feign disinterest, cut-
ting off his boss with a perfunctory request to put a file of new informa-
tion (on plastic left deliberately in the first victim’s stomach) on his desk,
but he immediately picks it up and reads avidly as soon as he is alone in
the room.
While questioning Doe, they both feel that the case is not yet over, lead-
ing Somerset to state ‘‘For the first time ever, you and I are in total agree-
ment,’’ but this is not strictly true. The potential power of Mills and
Somerset working together, really listening to each other and in tune with
each other’s sensibilities, is underlined by Mills’s earlier awareness that
Somerset is not convinced that Victor is the perpetrator and later by the
key deduction about Doe, begun by Mills (‘‘He’s a preacher’’) but then
completed by Somerset (‘‘And his murders are his sermons to us’’). Their
convergence is emphasized by the scene where Mills is shaving his chest in
preparation for a wire to be fitted and jokes with Somerset about shaving
off a nipple. Whereas at the beginning, only Somerset had prepared him-
self meticulously, now both do so.
Intertextuality
‘‘Just because he’s got a library card, doesn’t make him Yoda.’’
—Mills on Doe
Words, including those with a new or amended meaning, punctuate the

narrative, particularly in association with Somerset (named by writer
Walker after his favorite author Somerset Maugham). Somerset’s name is
being scratched off the door while he is still working within the office,
suggesting a tactless erasing of his presence. This is underlined as Somerset
issues a prickly ‘‘Come in’’ after his boss has already entered what still is,
for a few day more, his office. On the other hand, his later request to the
man scraping at the door, ‘‘Could you not do that please?’’ is still said
without raising his voice and a question is delivered as a command in a
firm but polite tone. The close-up of the back of Somerset’s head while
typing evokes the Olivier version of the ‘‘To Be or Not to Be’’ soliloquy in
Hamlet (Laurence Olivier, 1948), underlining in a fairly obvious way the
cerebral nature of a central character. Here the sound of keys being struck
suddenly stops on the word ‘‘greed,’’ suggesting that Somerset is constantly
mulling over connections between events.
A taxi driver asks Somerset where he is headed and looking out at a
body on the sidewalk, he replies ‘‘Far way from here.’’ Spatially, this is not
true—the taxi takes him to the library. However, this is a place of art and
the imagination, a place that offers answers to questions and an escape
from the terrors beyond its walls. The library is a special place, a sanctu-
ary from the outside world, but whereas security guards/cops spend their
time playing cards, he regards it as a citadel of knowledge, not just a
source of information about crimes and their solutions, or a temporary
escape from them, but a bulwark against the lack of meaning in the crime-
ridden streets outside, reflected in the fact that it is one of the few places
exempt from the ambient industrial noise. In this, there is also a nod to
Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987), where the library takes on a spir-
itual role and the pursuit of knowledge is portrayed in a spiritually posi-
tive light as well as performing a valuable social function in allowing calm
thought, thus becoming a communal version of Somerset’s use of the met-
ronome earlier.
He is greeted by the cops as a regular, making the library into a venue
akin to a bar. His criticism that they are unmoved by the knowledge avail-
able to them may seem a little prissy, but Bach’s ‘‘Air on a G String’’ that
bleeds over the shots past bookstands, Somerset’s movement down them,
the zoom in on Chaucer, and the cut to Mills’s looking again at photos of
the crime scenes all suggest that both are pursuing different routes to the
same destination. High and low culture, age and youth, old and new
media are juxtaposed. Mills may give up sooner and watch basketball on
TV, but his way of working has room for other things than police work
and arguably it is the almost obsessive narrowness in Somerset’s approach
that helps him find the name of the killer, but blinds him to how Doe ulti-
mately manipulates Mills’s feelings of anger.
Somerset’s movement around the library reflects his mode of enquiry:
slow, painstaking, and methodical. Of the two detectives, we tend to share
Somerset’s point of view more frequently so that we see him peer, put his
glasses on, and then cut to a shot of Dante’s Divine Comedy coming into
62 David Fincher
focus. Through incremental repetition, we track up to Somerset looking

(at the Dante we assume but the object of his gaze seems less important
than focusing closely on the detective himself, looking). Somerset’s help to
Mills is limited to a stark list of books. Knowing the difference between
them, this might seem sadistic unless the purpose of his mentor role is to
make his heir work. One assumes he would not spend the time in the
library for nothing, so that the motivation of such limited help is to coax,
lure, and guide Mills rather than just frustrate him. In this sense he acts a
little like Doe does toward him, passing on a different sense of the Milton
quote (‘‘Long is the way and hard/ That out of hell leads up to light.’’)
based on a Puritan work ethic of policing. The central point should not be
lost—to be effective in the detection of crime, in the solving of mysteries
in human affairs, one needs a sensitivity to the meanings of written texts.
The FBI system of flagging up suspicious characters on the basis of their
reading habits works by seeing relationships between motivation and texts
as, in a sense, an everyday application of intertextuality.
Like in the murder mystery The Name of the Rose (1983) by Umberto
Eco, a specialist in signs and symbols, the key to a knowledge of texts is
essential, in particular a correct respect for libraries. As Dyer notes,
‘‘While we don’t need to know any of these references to follow the film,
we are invited into a complex relation to those who don’t, represented by
Mills.’’3 As viewers, we are invited to place ourselves along the continuum
of cultural knowledge in how many texts and references we recognize and
understand, feeling smugly superior perhaps to Mills’s mispronunciation
of Sade but probably falling short of Somerset’s full identification of Mil-
ton, Chaucer, and Dante. This is film as a puzzle, not just in the identifica-
tion of Doe but the extent to which we can share the cultural, and more
specifically textual, markers that will reveal him. Our credentials as liter-
ate viewers are at stake. Later, Somerset is framed next to a list of the
Seven Deadly Sins on a blackboard, literalizing the mental checklist of the
audience, so that we have a sense of where we are. Contemporary audien-
ces may not be able to list all seven, like Snow White’s dwarves, without
some thought. This is reflected in marketing material for both posters,
which listed the sins, and TV commercials, which explained each sin in
turn.
Doe and Somerset

There are several links between Doe and Somerset, not just the follow-
ing of literary clues that ultimately lead to a literary discovery: Doe’s
journal. Like Doe, Somerset walks into the police station unannounced, to
bring some help (dropping off a pack of photocopies for Mills), providing
clues which he wants the recipient to decode. Later, he describes Doe as
‘‘methodical, exacting and worst of all, patient’’: all virtues he shares, and
Mills’s sarcastic description of Doe as Yoda due to his possession of a
library card might equally apply to Somerset. Somerset is able to track
Doe down in part because he understands him and the two, even if they
differ in their reaction to it, share a view of the world as irredeemably
mired in sin. However, key here is the casting of Freeman, closely associ-
ated with a number of benevolent roles but particularly his Shawshank
role, making his character, whose point of view we largely share in the
film, a focus of hope. In contrast to Michael Mann’s Manhunter (1986),
where the lead detective, Will Graham (William Peterson), tracks down a
serial killer by not just following clues deliberately left for him, including
photos taken of his victims, but by allowing himself to think and almost
become like the killer, Somerset resists that second level of identification
and convergence. This is reflected in the cutting between Somerset in the
library, where shots linger on Somerset himself looking (and by implica-
tion, thinking) rather than on the texts he is examining and Mills at home
looking at photos, which the camera also pores over. At an obvious level,
there is a connection between Doe and Somerset in that Somerset rather
than Mills understands the clues he is being left (and indeed that they are
clues at all), such as the clear Shakespearean allusion to The Merchant of
Venice in the pound of flesh cut from victim number two, the lawyer.
In searching Doe’s apartment, Somerset picks up one of the homemade
books glimpsed in the opening credits. We have seen the making of texts
and here we see Somerset decoding them. He and Mills are characters in
the narrative that Doe is creating and have been since the beginning of the
narrative/film. They have been pursuing the illusion of free will but all the
time have been manipulated by Doe’s greater twisted plan. Both Doe and
Somerset record their thoughts in writing and in a deleted scene near the
beginning of the film, Somerset was to have cut a sample of wallpaper
from his future retirement home. Later, he was to drop it while at dinner
with the Millses and explain to Tracy, who picks it up, that it represents
‘‘My future.’’ Not only is this a future no longer open to him but the
action itself is strangely parallel to the trophies that Doe takes from his
murder victims. Somerset and Doe share a dry sense of humor or at least
the innate ridiculousness of a situation. After the first victim is officially
pronounced dead, Somerset remains polite but his ‘‘Thank you, doctor’’
has an ironic edge. In the car at the end, they spot a dead dog, to which
64 David Fincher
Doe notes flatly, ‘‘I didn’t do that.’’ This both lightens the mood briefly
but also, like Somerset, shows a character who is absolutely composed
and in control of himself as well as the situation.
Mills plays an important part in this literary process—he is not com-
pletely excluded from it. He also spends time looking and thinking—it is
just that his frame of reference is modern print media rather than litera-
ture. Bach’s music begun in the library bleeds across cuts until the follow-
ing day when Mills is sitting in his car in the pouring rain. His attempt to
read the original texts lasts for all of five seconds before his pure rage
bursts out in a tirade of expletives (‘‘goddamn poetry-rhyming, faggot pi-
ece of shit’’) and violent hitting of the dashboard. The romanticism of the
individual detective using his intellect to grapple with a mystery is under-
cut, first by the sudden knocking on Mills’s window and then the study
guides he has ordered, which are delivered to him like take-out food. The
difference between Mills and Somerset is underlined by conflicting atti-
tudes to study guides (symbolized by Cliffs telltale yellow and black cov-
ers). For Somerset, such books represent a dumbing-down, a gross
simplification that cheats the reader of the challenge and the richness
afforded by the original. For Mills, this packet (the one he really needs
rather than what Somerset gives him) provides the key to unlocking texts
which no longer speak to readers of his generation (for which he offers up
a prayer). Elitism and populism, snobbishness and desire for access to
higher culture both collide here and both carry some dramatic weight.
Mills’s later mispronunciation of Sade (which he says like the singer ‘‘Shar-
day’’) and his giving up halfway through ‘‘Sir Thomas Aqua-something’’
reflect a difference in cultural backgrounds but are also played for laughs,
initially at Mills’s expense, and it is Somerset’s sensitivity to original classic
texts which initially open up the case, but it is Mills’s tenacity that proves
vital, too.
Emotional Literacy
‘‘Yes, we are men. Men is what we are.’’
—Jack in Fight Club
Mills comes into his office, which now bears his name but where Somer-
set remains working. The scene is a great example of masculine inability
to articulate feelings, which might be construed as weakness. Both have a
secret from the other (how much work Somerset has put in on Mills’s
behalf and Mills’s need for study guides and his benefit from them). The
scene is awkward and tense, Mills furtively hiding his Cliffs Notes like
pornography in a drawer. Somerset may be much more experienced than
Mills, but it still takes a female intermediary to help them literally speak
to one another. The call which Mills takes and covers his eyes in embar-
rassment when it becomes clear it is a personal call, despite the intimacy
of a very small office, changes in nature, surprising Mills, Somerset, and
possibly us, when she wants to speak to Somerset, someone with whom as
far as we know she has no acquaintance. Generic markers do not help
here as such an unexpected event belongs more commonly in comedy. The
receiver is returned and Mills tries to continue the conversation but Tracy
has already hung up. At this point, information is withheld both from the
viewer and from one of the key characters on screen, creating the potential
for either comedy or horror, if the outcome is darker. Somerset milks the
uncertainty a moment before Mills expresses our desire to know what just
happened with a belligerent ‘‘Well?’’ only to be told that Somerset has
been invited to supper, clearly without Mills’s knowledge. Mills’s need to
speak to Somerset, his inability to do so, the need for his wife to intervene
without his knowledge all make him look weak and outflanked, struggling
to make sense of what just happened.
Tracy’s function is absolutely explicit as she greets the pair at the door
with ‘‘Hello men,’’ underlining that their emotional illiteracy is gender-
related. It is only at this point in the film and at this stage of their ac-
quaintance that they are made to introduce themselves fully, sharing first
names with each other, and with us (as David Mills and William Somer-
set). In this, she is emulating Katherine ‘‘Kay’’ Lake in The Black Dahlia,
based on a James Ellroy novel, one of Fincher’s aborted projects in which
another homely, blond, struggling inner-city school teacher acts as a piv-
otal point in the triangular relationship with two men, both law enforce-
ment officers and rivals for her attention. It is only through her action as
an intermediary, especially in a domestic context, that the pair can work
together and an uneasy dynamic can be maintained.4
Fincher frames Mills through a window from Tracy’s point of view as
she looks at him, wondering how she can tell him about her pregnancy
and how much she hates the city, and also perhaps wondering what drives
him to such obsessive lengths. He is just as much driven as Somerset but
informed more by an inner anger, like a dog with a bone (which Doe will
later exploit). We later see him happily rolling around with his large dogs,
in a mode of uninhibited playfulness that we, and Somerset, have not seen
up to this point. This scene is prefaced by Mills’s question about ‘‘the
kids,’’ making their substitute function explicit and possibly showing a
66 David Fincher
paternal side of Mills. The concept that key aspects of character remain
hidden to all but spouses is reflected in Tracy’s description of Mills as the
funniest man she ever met, provoking Somerset’s ‘‘Really?’’ in a tone of
disbelief on our behalf.
It is unfair perhaps to see Tracy as a pure cipher but she has very few
lines, little on-screen time, and her primary importance is structural—to
bring the men together and make them talk to each other, to represent the
values of domestic happiness which Mills is putting at risk and thereby
giving greater power to the denouement when we realize what has been
destroyed by Doe’s final murder. Shown in a top-shot, as Mills comes back
and snuggles up to her after talking to Somerset in the bar, she is his sanc-
tuary from a cynical world. We see enough of her to care about her, to see
the bond she has with Mills, and to see her unhappiness at the city life
that Mills has sought out for his career. There is an element of tragedy
even here as Mills, when asked by a club owner whether he enjoys his
work, answers with a tone of resignation that he does not. If he actually
hates this life too then both his and her lives are destroyed for nothing
more than an illusion of social betterment (suggested by their cramped
apartment, shaken periodically by passing trains). Without her, we would
be denied a greater sense of hidden depths in Mills’s emotional potential
and specifically in Somerset’s back-story, delivered directly in expositional
dialogue about previous relationships. Her role is to add a theoretically
triangular element to the pure juxtaposition of Mills and Somerset, in par-
ticular sharing feelings and the secret of her pregnancy with Somerset,
which she seems unable to do with her own husband.
The fact that she asks to meet Somerset later is both a testimony to the
trust that he inspires in others but also her extreme loneliness that she can
only talk to a work colleague of her husband, whom she has met just
once. Once she disappears from the narrative, her presence is maintained
through Mills’s dialogue in the final Act of the film, referring to her a number
of times in apparently casual remarks (he mentions that she is suspicious if he
comes home late and asks Somerset ‘‘Have you been talking to my wife?’’),
which in a different genre might signal a jealous husband or a sense of some
connection between Tracy and Somerset but here it is only to maintain
Mills’s innocence of his own domestic happiness. It also underlines the irony
that she is the prime reason why he is pursuing his career with such tenacity
and yet in doing so, he is making her life miserable, i.e., he is destroying the
very thing he values. Her representational qualities of goodness and hope in
everyday life are precisely why Doe selects her as a victim.
Narrative Innovation
‘‘Honestly, have you ever seen anything like this?’’
—Mills to Somerset
Forensic science appears to offer the illusion of definitive proof when

there is a fingerprint match with a likely perpetrator and the momentum
appears to swing away from detectives to men of action. We have not seen
any of the crimes committed, so as viewers we do not have any reason to
doubt an imminent arrest, except the speed with which Somerset, who has
advocated caution and attention to detail up to this point, is sidelined. His
scepticism, picked up by Mills, runs counter to the handheld camerawork,
the noise, and the pumping testosterone of the raid. However, the narra-
tive provides its first major twist when the prime suspect is revealed as a
victim and the moment of apparently greatest certainty is undermined as
misplaced. The anticipated kinetic pleasures, both for audience and for the
cops themselves, are thwarted. The greater the use of force by the author-
ities, symbolized by the SWAT raid, the less effective they are. Somerset
admits to having drawn his weapon only three times and never having
fired it, while Mills’s admission of shooting a civilian on his first case, and
the timing of it en route to what appears to be a conclusion to the case,
underlines his impetuosity (and Doe’s correct selection of him as a pawn
in his plan). This confession in a car also prefigures the tense scene with
Doe at the end and also challenges the generic conventions of gun-toting
heroes in crime movies.
The raid itself evokes a similar sequence in the climax of Silence of the
Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), where the dynamism of the SWAT raid
and the situation of Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) are suddenly under-
mined by the revelation that the raid and the subject needing rescue are in
different locations. Cross-cutting conventionally conveys simultaneous
action, but the assumption is also that the two lines of narrative will con-
verge. Fincher’s film is not so innovative in its film form, but appearances
prove deceptive in its narrative content—the expected perpetrator is
revealed as victim and the SWAT cop’s offensive challenge to ‘‘Get up you
sack of shit’’ literally becomes true as the apparent corpse suddenly man-
ages one last movement. The Poe-like category error of corpse instead of
living individual and perpetrator instead of victim momentarily disorien-
tates our expectations of where the narrative might lead and the buddy/
cop/detective movie offers us no precedents to refer to here. Instead of net-
ting the killer, the raid provides us with yet another victim.
68 David Fincher
Mills is provoked by a photographer invading the crime scene (later

revealed as Doe himself). The motivation for this act would seem to be a
mixture of the oft-noted desire of killers to return to the scene of a murder,
a wish to almost taunt the police, offering them a prime opportunity to
catch him and in this case perhaps to test his thesis about Mills’s anger.
Doe’s defiant ‘‘I got your picture’’ also carries the sense of having captured
one aspect of his essential nature. Mills’s unnecessarily aggressive manner
toward Doe in the police station later when he gives himself up, would
seem to bear this out. For all his experience, Somerset allows himself to be
separated from Mills at the close (going to check on the box), and he too is
drawn into Doe’s trap. In this context, Somerset’s sarcastic comment that
‘‘It’s impressive to see a man feeding off his emotions’’ seems ill-judged.
At the doorway of Doe’s apartment, a chase begins out of almost noth-
ing and ends with the unexpected and apparently merciful act of the killer
sparing Mills. It is the suddenness of this chase sequence through the
buildings and alleyways that makes it effective. The San Francisco alley
chase in The Game acts as a dress rehearsal, with kinetic camerawork,
low angles, and the flashlights waving directly at the camera, perhaps not
surprisingly, given the same location. Having no clear picture of who their
man is, they (and we the viewers) are unprepared for a routine visit, which
spins into a spectacular chase and near-death experience for Mills. In ret-
rospect, we might realize that the only reason he is spared is because he
has yet to play out the final part of Doe’s plan. It is only at the point of
discovering Doe’s private darkroom, including a photo of Doe that he
(and we) realizes that he is a part of the narrative, a part which he does
not understand, that has yet to fully unfold.
One of the most striking narrative innovations is introduced by the first
scene in bright sunlight, indeed in unambiguous daylight at all, where
Somerset asks Mills if he can remain as a partner for just a few more days.
His character, like the conventional serial killer genre, is yearning for some
form of closure. During this conversation, the shot is blocked by a taxi
drawing up and in a low-level shot we see a figure getting out and follow
his feet across the road and into the same building where they are heading,
unseen by them. Even a detective like Somerset, usually so observant, fails
to notice the object of their enquiries deliberately walking into a police
station in the full glare of daylight and publicly giving himself up. The
case is apparently solved, not through the endeavors of detectives or even
the operation of chance but by the deliberate action of the killer himself.
An event, the apprehension of the killer, is deliberately (and possibly
uniquely in film history) brought forward with still a significant running
time remaining, creating the highly unusual effect of disorientating an au-

dience by a narrative, that is clearly placed within the detective genre but
denying us any generic markers around from which to generate expecta-
tions of its impending direction. Most detective/thriller narratives work
around the basic structure of a crime and its solution, but here the tight
structure of seven specific crimes in as many days at first establishes pat-
tern and inherent regularity only to repeatedly subvert how the pattern
will play out. Mills’s and Somerset’s decision to allow themselves to be led
out into the desert is, like our desire to see the pattern complete, based on
a fundamental human wish to know the end of a compelling story—a
compulsion that Doe knows all too well and that his plan not only
exploits but is actually based on.
Meet John Doe

‘‘Is the Zodiac a sickness?’’
—radio host’s question in Zodiac
‘‘He’s not the devil, he’s just a man.’’

—Somerset
An unnamed cop opines about Doe, ‘‘There he sits. It’s not supposed to
make sense,’’ but unlike in a conventional detective narrative, it is not
enough for Somerset or Mills to simply prove the guilt of an individual.
Initially Somerset, but also Mills through the course of the film, seeks to
understand the meaning of events and the means of doing so is through
written texts and actions (‘‘subtext’’ in a broad sense). In so doing, Somer-
set in particular is acting as a cultural critic, making sense of visual clues
and more precisely like horror theory in Film Studies, he is convinced that
acts of violence have meaning, if only we can deduce subtextual connec-
tions and patterns.
Seven’s opening titles show a figure, whom in retrospect we realize is
Doe, putting his clues together. However, the jagged nature of the editing
and framing or the discordant elements in the soundtrack (‘‘Closer’’ by
Nine Inch Nails, with whom Fincher would later work with for the 2005
video ‘‘Only’’) do not really reflect the self-assured calm of John Doe. The
style encourages us to read Doe, as Mills does particularly in the final car
ride, as simply insane, but this is prefigured at the station when Somerset
urges his colleagues not to dismiss Doe as a lunatic, and like Fincher him-
self, we see a figure with a meticulous attention to detail, creating a series
70 David Fincher
of signs, the combined significance of which may be apparent to him

alone. Indeed, the offer to show Mills and Somerset two further bodies is
on the understanding that he will not plead insanity. Doe describes the
conception as his ‘‘masterpiece,’’ but it could be argued that it is also
Fincher’s. Doe is creating a ‘‘book,’’ one which he wants to be found,
thereby making him an artist. Fincher uses self-conscious cinematic devi-
ces, which draw attention to themselves as such, underlining the control-
ling presence of the director. Somerset acts as a mediating figure for the
audience, underscoring not just the salient points of the narrative but the
artistic way in which they are conveyed.
The literally shadowy nature of the killer, whose identity is held back
from us as well as the detectives until the final section of the film, may en-
courage us to see Doe as a metaphorical rather than a literal figure. Dyer’s
analysis focuses on representational qualities in the racial and sexual poli-
tics of the film but the ascribing of representational status on such grounds
is too blunt as a critical tool. Intertextuality is more useful here. The
choice of name, signifying an anonymous or unknown male in legal or
medical contexts, seems designed to link him to an American Everyman
figure used by Frank Capra in Meet John Doe (1941). Although Capra is
operating within a comic and political context, which Fincher is not, there
are similarities in the notion of an anonymous figure (who in Capra’s film
begins life as a joke by a sacked journalist and does not actually exist)
threatening suicide in order to protest at what is wrong with society and
who is explicitly linked with a Christ figure at the climax (a John Doe fig-
ure from a previous era). Unlike in Seven, this threat of suicide is ulti-
mately avoided, thereby keeping the narrative within the generic codes of
comedy.
Capra’s film also has a greater sense of what the ‘‘Doe philosophy’’ is,
based on what might be termed ‘‘compassionate conservatism.’’ In Seven,
the motivation for Doe’s action, to illustrate the sinful nature of contem-
porary society by committing the ultimate sin, is illogical and perverse, in
the sense that he is adding to the total sum of sin through his actions, and
if his point is that American (and by implication Western) society has
become accustomed to brutality, it is unclear whether his act will change
anything or just exemplify the problem. His justification for killing these
specific individuals is the wider sin they represent (‘‘Only in a world this
shitty could you even try and say these were innocent people and keep a
straight face.’’). However, it is unclear to what degree these particular indi-
viduals are culpable of any ‘‘crime.’’ There is no sense of degree in the
‘‘sins’’ identified and they may seem to contemporary viewers closer to
socially related degrees of transgression, rather than actual sins, i.e., some,
for example gluttony, may be defined as ill-advised social habits. It may be
that Doe is protesting about exactly these attitudes but it is hard to see
how his actions might logically change them. Whether Victor is ‘‘a drug-
dealing pederast’’ as Doe calls him or not, he does not really deserve ‘‘as
much pain and suffering as anyone I’ve encountered’’ according to the
doctor who treats him. There is also a specific flaw in Doe’s assertion that
he personifies Envy in his attitude to Mills’s home life. Without any back-
story for his character, Doe does not really exist in the space or time out-
side the murders he commits. We have no sense at all of what his existence
was seven days earlier. Without any visual corroboration, for him just to
assert that he envies Mills, seems extremely unconvincing.
He may not be the devil, but he is also more than just a man. His name
suggests ordinariness but what he does is extraordinary. Without a clear
sense of where he has come from, and inconsistencies in why he acts,
although he is removed from the narrative at the close, there is little way
to prevent similar events from happening in the future. Indeed, if he is
seen as a product of the dominant culture, then his reincarnation might
seem almost inevitable. Moreover, because the world-view of Doe, and to
only a slightly lesser extent Somerset, is that contemporary society is en-
demically corrupt, it does little to make the world a safer place.
The religious references with which he is surrounded feel like Alien3—
there appears to be a coherent philosophy but actually there are only the
outward forms of one. The authors and texts to which he refers and which
Somerset uses in pursuing him (Milton, Chaucer, Sir Thomas Aquinas) are
poetic and secular, rather than explicitly Biblical. The meaning of the
glimpsed crucifix in his room, which has the look of a piece of pop-art fur-
niture, is no clearer than the ‘‘sermons’’ he is delivering by his murders. Its
excessive nature suggests another planted sign, another serial killer cliche
for the police to find. He refers to himself as ‘‘chosen’’ but when Mills asks
if he is doing God’s work, he looks away with a smirk and delivers the
flippant cliche, ‘‘God works in mysterious ways.’’
His phone message to the police (‘‘I’ve gone and done it again’’) suggests
an act that is both impulsive and childish in its recidivism but actually the
murder to which it refers (Pride) is only one of seven deaths planned with
meticulous care. Victor’s torture and murder in particular requires months
of preparation and is the exact opposite of a crime of passion. Similarly,
Dyer is wrong that Mills’s confrontation with an unknown photographer
‘‘puts Doe’s back up,’’ as this is a staged event, in which his provocation
of Mills’s anger (wrath) is a precise confirmation of his theory, planned
72 David Fincher
long in advance.5 Are we really supposed to believe, as Dyer apparently

does, that after committing five murders which only make sense in a
sequence of seven, Doe suddenly improvises the final two (if we are to
suppose the action takes place over a single week)? The plastic pieces in
the first victim’s stomach, the message written in blood, ‘‘Help me’’—all
have been left as a challenge to the authorities and possibly for Somerset
and Mills specifically. Mills’s role, of which he is unaware until right at
the end, in the crime which he is investigating, not just his photos on
Doe’s pin-board, suggests that Mills was conceived as part of the ‘‘master-
piece’’ from the outset.
Foreshadowing his role in K-PAX (Ian Softley, 2001), Kevin Spacey’s
character appears to be a ‘‘non-person’’ without any credit history or
unemployment records. He is soft-spoken, physically nondescript beyond
his baldness, and draws on Spacey’s realization of the shape-shifting
Keyser S€ oze in The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995), who forms his
‘‘character’’ by incorporating features from his environment and who
walks out of a police station unseen, rather than Doe who walks in. What
is important in Seven is not the character of the killer, but that he is pri-
marily defined by his actions, i.e., what he does (reflected in his name). He
is happy to barely exist. However, the neon crucifix glimpsed in Doe’s
apartment seems closer to the style of a David Lynch-inspired nightmare
like one of the many confused flashbacks in Lost Highway (1997) or the
punishment cell in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983).
Like Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) in Silence of the Lambs, the opening
sequence shows him constructing a book, sewing pages together, using
materials which appear to be paper rather than Bill’s preference for skin.
The allusion is made more specific in the name of the establishment where
Doe buys the vibrator (‘‘Wild Bill’s Leather’’), which also refers to the cen-
tral character Leatherface in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massa-
cre (1974). Like Francis Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan) in Manhunter, he
takes photos of his victims but does not use them as part of the trail for
detectives; as a photo lab worker, Dollarhyde is more closely associated
with visual than written images.
Victor has the stereotypical profile of a serial killer, i.e., what popular
culture has accepted as conventional wisdom of tell-tale features—a
repressed, religious upbringing, a record of petty crime, examples of sex-
ual frustration and mental instability. Along with the ‘‘Help me’’ message
left at the second murder (itself a nod to William Friedkin’s 1973 explora-
tion of spiritual evil, The Exorcist), Doe (and Walker and Fincher too of
course) is amassing all the expectations an audience might already have
about how to recognize a serial killer. With the failure of the raid, we are
forced to question not only our generic expectations but what we know,
or think we know, about the cultural phenomenon of serial killing. Denied
any back-story, applying easy psychological explanations to Doe’s behav-
ior is completely redundant.
If his action is that of a kind of performance artist (an identity that
occurs to the owner of the sex club), there is something of this in the me-
ticulous preparation of his mise-en-scene. His scenes of crime are elaborate
film sets of their own, not just the Christmas tree air fresheners of Victor
but the Warhol-style soup tins of Gluttony and the drama of pills for
Pride. The scenes are precisely choreographed like a set dresser, ready for
the police to come and play their part in the drama he has arranged in
seven acts. Like such an artist, his actions infuriate and puzzle and are
designed with an audience in mind to make them look, think, and perhaps
rethink what they assume about representational art and/or the world in
which it operates. There is a metatextual element to Doe’s apartment,
which is arranged like a props department with all the iconography of the
narrative that we have been watching up to this point, including the War-
hol-like soup tins from the first victim.
ZODIAC
‘‘I am waiting for a good movie about me.’’
—part of the final Zodiac letter
‘‘It’s a luminous work of art.’’

—James Ellroy, on the DVD commentary
On the DVD extras of the Director’s Cut, crime novelist James Ellroy
describes Zodiac as ‘‘one of the half dozen greatest American crime films.’’
Such a claim deserves examination and the following discussion will focus
on the murder scenes, the characterization of the main roles, and the con-
cern with literature in feeding a hunger for knowledge. Zodiac is very
much a generic hybrid. It is a serial killer narrative certainly but it also
has elements of a police procedural, a newspaper story, and even a bio-pic
as its narrative centers around the real-life figures of Robert Graysmith
(Jake Gyllenhaal), cartoonist for the The San Francisco Chronicle, and the
pairing of Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and Bill Armstrong (Anthony
Edwards), both investigating the Zodiac murders. Part of the film’s rich-
ness or incoherence, depending on your point of view, stems from this
74 David Fincher
almost impossible blend of genres, each of which bring its own set of
expectations and pleasures. Amy Taubin rather ambiguously asserts that
‘‘Zodiac is less a film about characters than about processes,’’6 which for
some viewers will represent a deficiency, but it is a rare film in that it gives
full emphasis to the ‘‘procedural’’—characters are defined in the context of
those procedures. Rather than the cliched Dirty Harry–style figure, explic-
itly referenced in the film, we see police officers working within a system
rather than outside it.
Like Seven, Zodiac is premised around the hunt for a serial killer who
murders his victims with regular and apparently predictable frequency.
Also like Seven, Zodiac plays with the narrative expectations associated
with the crime film and the serial killer sub-genre in particular, front-
loading all the crime scenes (three murders and one attempt) into the first
half hour. The two elements of the plot, the two buddy relationships, the
two investigations run parallel for a significant amount of time. The two
do not directly meet until the cinema scene, one hour and 36 minutes into
the film. Furthermore, the bulk of the film is a procession of failures, frus-
trations, and dead ends. The lack of expected climaxes means the theatri-
cal trailer is both strangely muted overall and quite a distortion of the
completed film. It is very hard to imagine a trailer cut in a conventional
style which could show the film in its actual light—the two forms, a
60-second advert and a gradually paced film lasting nearly three hours,
seem fundamentally incompatible. There are also clear differences between
the two films. Taubin asserts ‘‘There is no contemporary US director who
comes close to Fincher’s sense of the kinetic possibilities of movement
within a single shot or across a cut,’’ and while this may be true of the ear-
lier film (in the opening vertiginous drop down to the truck bomb for
example), the mode of camera movement that dominates Zodiac is
resolutely sedate, reflecting the progress of the investigation.7 For critic
Graham Fuller, apart from occasional directorial party-pieces by Fincher,
such as montages or time-lapse sequences, ‘‘the tone is pleasingly flat and
mundane, evoking the demoralizing grind of police work.’’8 A conse-
quence of this is to create set-pieces between the dialogue, where Fincher
indulges his technological imagination a little more freely.
Much has been made about Fincher’s use of the Viper digital camera,
arguably making Zodiac the first completely digital studio movie, but it is
not actually true as the slow-motion sequences were shot on film. It repre-
sents a big technological step forward that allows a director to control the
film process much more and coordinate with different areas of production
simultaneously so that everyone can see the same level of finish at the
same time. It allows re-shooting to be more purposeful and with the

amount of largely unobtrusive effects work in Zodiac, especially making
backgrounds as they might have been around 1969, speed (and thereby
reduced expense) is also a large factor in the Viper’s favor.
The Murder Scenes

Scriptwriter and Producer James Vanderbilt and Fincher both claim that
they tried to focus on events where there is credible witness evidence and
especially where there are survivors (the murders at Blue Rock, Berryessa,
and Kathleen Johns’s abduction), denying that they are augmenting those
scenes cinematically. However, dramatic stylistic devices are used. Taubin
states that the murder scenes use ‘‘a seamless combination of live action,
CGI and matte work.’’9 Vanderbilt may assert that they tried not to make
the murders look like ‘‘horror movie kills’’ and certainly they may not
have that role structurally (although they do give the film an arresting
opening) but they are staged as spectacle nonetheless. Both murder scenes
with handguns involve slow-motion, computer-generated imagery (CGI)
to mimic the splashes of blood and a music soundtrack designed to give
ironic power to what is shown. The first killing uses an extreme low angle
of the shooter, making the gun seem distorted and large in the foreground.
It could be said to be restrained that the killer’s return to the car with a
reloaded gun is shown in long-shot from outside the car (like the later taxi
shooting), due to lack of precise knowledge of how events transpired
inside the cars. Furthermore, on the grounds of realism, Fincher could
have made the sequence more gory; police photos of the actual crimes are
far more gruesome. Yet, strange, even surreal shots of geese running
through the shot, framed by the headlights, perhaps normalize this rural
scene or suggest the occupants of the car have been slaughtered like
animals.
The Berryessa attack is slightly easier to stage in some ways (again with
the testimony of a survivor) as it took place in daylight, had a longer dura-
tion, and it was possible to shoot more or less in the exact spot of the real
events (with Fincher replanting trees that had been cut down). This second
murder is in some ways more horrific than the first. The night time attack
has a slow build-up with a sudden outburst of violence. Here we also have
a slow build-up as the killer comes closer, pauses, and then advances
steadily toward the couple lying by the lake. However, the stabbing occurs
much closer to real time and the distance maintained between the attacker
and his victims and the awkward pauses that occur (stopping behind the
76 David Fincher
tree to put on his executioner-style hood and then standing, failing to

respond straight-away to questions) give the scene a ritualistic quality. The
act itself, donning such a disguise, tying up the victims (and instructing
them to look away), spinning the yarn about being an escaped criminal
who only wants their car keys, showing the loaded clip, shifting from a
gun to a knife—all of this to people whom he is intending to kill—gives
the whole scene an eerie, personal quality. Like the Blue Rock attack, slow
motion is used again here, and CGI for the stabbing action on Cecilia She-
pard (Pell James), but here this seems more motivated by the powerless-
ness of Bryan Hartnell (Patrick Scott Lewis). In an exchange of wide-
angled close-ups we get a sense of the tenderness, fear, and rising panic of
the couple, as Cecilia glimpses what is about to happen to him and then
he cannot bear to look at what happens to her. The sequence ends with a
cut from the close-up of her being horrifically stabbed repeatedly to the
wide shot of the beauty of the scenery and her fading scream. The scene
challenges the notion of pathetic fallacy with evil taking place in a place
of beauty, open nature, and bright sunshine (whereas it must be said the
later basement sequence at night in a thunderstorm is close to cliche).
The taxi murder is accompanied by a radio talk show, reflecting the dis-
semination of the Zodiac myth into the wider culture with different theo-
ries circulating about the class of victims, whether the paper should have
printed the letters and talk of curfews suggests an element of rising panic.
As we do not have the testimony of Paul Stine, Fincher does not give us a
point of view from within the cab but follows its progress from a God-like
top-shot which we cut in from via dissolves to closer shots but still remain
outside. There is no musical accompaniment for the shooting itself—as
soon as the taxi pulls up, the killer shoots the driver in the neck. However,
despite protestations of objectivity from Vanderbilt and Fincher, again we
see a killing via CGI and slow motion for the spray of blood. The camera
rises up outside the cab as the killer appears to take something from the
front seat and then walk away in the opposite direction to the accompani-
ment of ‘‘Ring-a-ring-a-roses.’’
The opening shot of Kathleen Johns, driving on Highway 132, gives us
an apparent helicopter shot across a flat, almost alien, landscape with a
road that seems to stretch almost to the horizon. The attack, which may
or may not have anything to do with the Zodiac killer, uses CGI in the pe-
ripheral detail of the truck by the roadside but also after the opening mur-
der, and creates suspense by having an unseen figure carrying a flashlight
walk up to a car. There are a variety of shots around and down the length
of the car, in the rearview mirror, and even in the reverse shot of Kathleen
herself, all giving only a partial view of the figure. The twist here is the
baby, which has been denied our view (and we assume that of the man).
Later when the man returns to help her after the ‘‘repair’’ is made, the
chilling promise (which can be verified by Johns herself as a survivor) to
throw the baby out of the window, raises viewer’s expectations, especially
after passing the gas station, shown in the window reflection, but there is
a crushing sense of disappointment that we do not see how Kathleen
escapes. There is a definite lacuna here in the plot. It is understandable
that Fincher wants to keep forward narrative momentum and focus, which
is extremely difficult when dealing with the sometimes awkward nature of
portraying actual events, but dramatically this is a huge lost opportunity.
Watching the Detectives

It is only after the taxi murder that we are introduced to the other pro-
tagonists of the film, Dave Toschi and Bill Armstrong. Taubin’s dubbing of
Graysmith, Avery (Robert Downey Jr.), and Toschi as ‘‘nerds’’ is a huge
simplification and really only applies accurately to Graysmith. Armstrong
and Toschi’s buddy relationship is quickly established with some Tarantino-
like banal dialogue about food. In some ways, this is quite a stereotypical
focus of difference (think of burger-eating Dave Starsky in contrast to
health-food-eating Hutch) but here it is relatively subtle: Toschi asks about
animal crackers (Armstrong’s motherly preparedness contrasting with
Toschi’s later partner who does not have any in the car); later Toschi cadges
the remnants of Armstrong’s meal in a bar and ultimately pays for the lunch
he shares with Graysmith at the end in a symbolic act of gratitude and clo-
sure for all the work the cartoonist has put into the case.
The reality of being a policeman’s wife is economically represented by
Toschi’s wife (young but long-suffering) fielding phone calls in the night
and a few scenes in which she takes unwanted calls or leaves the room:
she is never the focus of a scene herself. Although he is a calmer presence
than Mills in Seven, we also see Toschi sitting up late poring over evidence
that he has seen many times before. Armstrong comes to represent a core
of dependability and decency in the film. It is the real Armstrong’s notebooks
that inform much of the factual background to the film and his fundamental
honesty is an important touchstone in the film (he wants to make the threat
to the school buses public), casting him in the role of a Horatio figure: some-
one who will survive to tell the tale for future generations.
It is only at the Stine murder that we actually see the forces of investiga-
tion at the crime scene itself. The speed of their arrival and the immediacy
78 David Fincher
of the experience (possibly even the adrenaline of being so close to the

killer) are conveyed by a rare use of handheld camerawork as they
approach. Within seconds, Toschi is re-enacting the scene, talking it
through with Armstrong, and using a fellow officer on the scene as a prop
in his reconstruction, imagining shooting Stine himself. This works at the
level of action rather than psychology as in Manhunter. Toschi is literally
recreating the killer’s movements, not overtly trying to understand them.
The film only really strays into attempts at psychological explanation dur-
ing Belli’s aggrandizing speech to Toschi and Armstrong, where he talks
about ‘‘killing is his compulsion, it’s in his blood.’’ The unknown and pos-
sibly inexplicable element of motivation in these crimes is perhaps wisely
left open by Fincher, who has enough material to use simply focusing on
documented events.
Toschi’s later presence in a parked car at Washington and Cherry later
in the film goes strangely unmentioned in the DVD commentary. The jux-
taposition of shots in which he drives away at the precise moment that
Graysmith is dropped off by a cab suggests a shared inability to shake off
an obsession with the case and its crime scenes, which seem to gain almost
iconic power with those who have any involvement with the case. As an
example of the ‘‘due process’’ that Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan
ignores and the legal obstacles that the police have to overcome, the scene
in which Toschi and Armstrong, along with their boss Captain Marty Lee
(Dermot Mulroney), lay out the case to obtain a warrant to search Allen’s
trailer, is highly effective. The amount of painstaking detective work that
these individuals have pursued enhances their heroic status in the film.
Furthermore, the idea of staging this scene to an unseen fourth party via a
Charlie’s Angels–style speakerphone is an act of bravura filmmaking on
the part of Fincher. The blend of supportive gestures and glances that fly
between the three mean that the D.A.’s judgement of their legal case
(‘‘that’s pretty good guys’’) might equally apply to the ensemble acting per-
formances here. In conventional thrillers, we often see the heroic detective
as emotionally involved in a case and flawed in their personal lives. Toschi
shows commitment but he has a life outside police work and he recog-
nizes, where Graysmith does not, the realities of gathering evidence that
can be used in court, the difficulties of how this case deteriorates over time
and how with the weight of other crime happening all the time, his job is
about doing the best job he can with the resources and time available and
then moving on. It is Graysmith’s inability to do this which signals a re-
tarded element in his character although it also gives him the energy and
drive of an obsessive, which seems necessary to solve difficult cases.
Like the viewer, the detectives wait for a verdict on the evidence gained
from the raid on Allen’s caravan but when their boss appears, walking
into the shallow focus, all their hopes are dashed. Captain Marty Lee
(Dermot Mulroney) almost barks the offer of a hug and suggests seeing a
movie before we cut to the ironic screening of Dirty Harry (Don Siegel,
1971). It is as if Toschi cannot escape the case or the implicit condemna-
tion of him for failing to solve it. The narrative that he offers is not as
consoling as that provided by Hollywood.
Toschi and Armstrong share some of the communication problems of
Mills and Somerset but do not have a female intermediary to solve them.
As the two detectives are first introduced, Toschi does not know that it is
Armstrong’s birthday and when the two part later, there is still the sense
of words left unspoken. Armstrong’s decision to leave comes as quite a
shock but is made for the sake of his children and softened by slight
humor (‘‘Maybe I’ll get a chance to try your Japanese food—the raw
stuff’’). His main concern is that he has fulfilled everything expected of
him, i.e., done his duty—‘‘I’m not leaving you holding the bag on any-
thing, am I?’’ It feels like the awkwardness of a romantic parting but with
the finality of divorce as Armstrong goes into his apartment to be greeted
by his wife and an entire life that we have not seen (and by implication,
Toschi does not know much about either).
Words
‘‘He was doing pretty much the same kind of thing I was doing with symbols
and imagery and yet with a lethal nature.’’
—the real Robert Graysmith on the Zodiac killer
in the DVD commentary
Avery: How do you go from this . . . to cracking the whole code?

Graysmith: You go to the library.
—James Vanderbilt’s script for the film Zodiac
Like the cross-cutting in Seven by which Doe enters the police station
unnoticed by the protagonists, the main action here begins with the pro-
gress of Graysmith through the Chronicle building and the Zodiac letter
through the mail system. Conventionally, such a sequence might be used
to convey the geography of the building but tight shots on the mail-cart
deny us this. Its greater function is giving a suggestion of inevitable destiny
about their meeting and initiating a key element of the crimes. Zodiac is
about writing. What sets the killer apart from other murderers is not the
80 David Fincher
scale or brutality of his crimes but the relationship, which he initiated with
the police and the press through a series of letters and ciphers. Most of the
attributable killings happen before the letter writing begins in earnest—he
is more powerful as a writer than a killer and literally becomes a man of
letters. It is their iconic power in particular which endures in the popular
imagination (reproduced on the DVD cover of the Director’s Cut) and in a
sense makes Graysmith, a man who earns his living as a cartoonist, i.e.,
from communicating meaning to the masses through select visual images,
a natural pursuer of the killer. Because he sent the letters to the paper and
because Graysmith likes puzzles, seeing them everywhere, he is logically
the true audience for the Zodiac letters.
We see Graysmith even doodling while in traffic as well at his desk at the
Chronicle and much of Jake Gyllenhaal’s demeanor in the film might be
described as ‘‘dreamy’’ (in the sense of distracted, rather than wildly attrac-
tive). As a cartoonist, he is faced with the challenge of taking a known sit-
uation and creating an alternative, possibly satirical, view of it. The
cartoons we see in the film are all real examples of Graysmith’s actual work
and from the editor’s rejection of his work before the arrival of the letter
(‘‘Horrid. Horrid. Slightly less horrid.’’), it appears that he is drawn to a
slightly dark view of current events, which might in part explain his fasci-
nation with the case. It seems almost natural that amateur investigator and
clue should be brought together but there is a slight twist here in the status
that Graysmith holds. He is an almost invisible cog in a machine, which
barely recognizes his existence; he introduces himself to Paul Avery with
the almost throwaway remark that he has been there nine months. In the
opening editorial scene, he follows the editor round the desk, like a little
boy trying please a teacher with his homework, needing adult approval,
and represents a parallel need for the letter, which itself expresses a childish
need for attention with ‘‘Please Rush to Editor!’’ scrawled on the cover.
Graysmith tries to explain to Avery how he seems to know things about
the Zodiac but the fact that his dialogue trails off (‘‘I like puzzles. I see them
. . . ’’) suggests that he does not really understand his own intuitive pro-
cesses. As Avery sits at Graysmith’s desk while he puzzles over the code,
Fincher holds the shot on Avery looking not at the paper but at Graysmith
himself as if he is the source of interest—we are seeing the beginning of a
study in obsession, by the media as well as a lone individual, to under-
stand the workings of the mind of another. It is the solving of this mystery
which completely takes over Graysmith’s life, to the point where he abandons,
without apparent resistance, his marriage and his job to this all-consuming
quest for an answer. He creates a narrative (with changing elements at
times) and we see him desperately searching for objective evidence to fit

that narrative.
There is no buddy relationship here as Graysmith does not really have
the capacity to form such an adult relationship and would be an unlikely
choice of Avery’s. There is instead a contrast, almost at the level of parent-
child, built on antagonism—Avery chides him for ‘‘doing that thing we
discussed that starts with an L,’’ i.e., ‘‘looming.’’ Through the haze of alco-
hol, Avery and Graysmith talk more openly with each other, and Gray-
smith unpacks both his code theory and literally its source—the books in
his bag, suggesting that he goes around with large heavy books all the
time. When asked later by Avery what he does for fun, Graysmith replies
that he reads. Despite seeming a figure of fun to Avery, it is books and
their source, the library, that provide vital material that allows Graysmith
to decode part of the cipher. The action of going through Avery’s trash,
something he does not deny, marks him both as tenacious in his investiga-
tion, starved of factual material, but also acting a little like a crazed
stalker himself. We see him cutting out any Zodiac stories and making a
scrapbook, which like prompts Melanie later as his then-wife to observe,
‘‘No one has more Zodiac crap than you.’’
Graysmith—A Study in Obsession

‘‘What’s the story with the kid? . . . He seems a little touched or medicated.’’
—unnamed editor on Graysmith
Although Fincher and Vanderbilt are mindful of basing their script on

survivor testimony, there is a survivor of the whole affair who is presented
less than completely positively: Robert Graysmith himself. There is a con-
sistently wide-eyed innocence to Gyllenhaal’s portrayal, which makes him
an unlikely hero and in large part defines why the narrative is as low-key
as it is. Although there are clear parallels with other newspaper stories, like
All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976), in which journalists take on
the role abdicated by the police in tracking down a crime through attention
to detail, thereby portraying the profession as a noble seeking after truth,
Graysmith, in real life and in his cinematic representation, is not a figure who
would be credible carrying a gun or indulging in dramatic car chases. It is
Avery who seeks out informants and occupies some of the same milieu of the
criminals about whom he writes. Graysmith has a ‘‘squeaky-clean’’ girl-
friend-then-wife (Melanie, played by Chloe Sevigny), and is portrayed as a
wholesome father, watching his son brush his teeth and taking him to school.
82 David Fincher
Initially he tries to protect his son from TV reports about the killer
(especially the bus threat), providing a useful contrast with later when the
two sit together in nightclothes watching the TV phone-in show or the
later revelation of a new letter, and toward the end when he actively uses,
even exploits, his family as helpers around the small kitchen table in his
increasingly personal crusade. Melanie can do little more than signal her
disapproval (blocking his view of the TV screen at mealtime, oddly paral-
leling the movement of the tennis video game on Avery’s houseboat): she
cannot prevent his obsession running its course or being passed on to new
generations.
The development of the plot is built around a very unusual character de-
velopment—as Fincher says of Graysmith’s character in the film (quoted
by Gyllenhaal on the DVD), ‘‘in the first half of the movie, he’s an extra;
in the second half, he gets to be the star.’’ From the very outset, apparent
foreknowledge of future actions suggests a bond between Graysmith and
the killer, made more obvious by Graysmith’s assertion that ‘‘He won’t
give a name,’’ (an intuition later proven correct) echoing the line of Nick
Curran (Michael Douglas) in Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992) that
suspect Catherine Trammell (Sharon Stone) will not ask for a lawyer.
There is an element of arrested development about Gyllenhaal’s charac-
ter—a man doing a childish job in drawing pictures, unable to assert him-
self in the world of work, and whose interest in the case borders on
fanaticism. He writes and draws with great intensity, his head inches from
the paper, as if already entranced by the Zodiac cipher.
Contrasting with Avery’s growing alcoholism, we see Graysmith stand-
ing next to the cigarette machine but with a little bag of carrots to nibble.
His Boy Scout image, which is meant as a joke by his co-workers, is liter-
ally true, which he confirms via a brilliantly improvised line from Gyllen-
haal himself later. When Mulanax (Elias Koteas) asks him if he smokes, he
snaps out ‘‘Only once’’ and confirms that he was an ‘‘Eagle Scout, first
class.’’ It is tempting to see him as still holding that rank, especially when
‘‘Shorty’’ in the office confides that he is known by the others as ‘‘Retard’’
(of which, typically, he is unaware). If viewers accept one of the film’s nar-
rative premises that Arthur Leigh Allen is the most likely candidate as the
Zodiac, then there is some parallelism here as Leigh too has elements of
arrested development in his sexual preferences for underage children.
Largely excluded from the inner sanctum of editorial meetings, he seems
socially awkward all through the film, from his excessively outstretched
hand to Toschi in the interval at the cinema to his ignored overtures to
Avery’s successor, Duffy Jennings (Adam Goldberg). Excessive politeness
dominates his personal bearing from handshakes, to excessive apologies,

to even waving a thank-you to the taxi driver that drops him off later.
His obsession blinds him to the danger, spotted immediately by Melanie
(Chloe Sevigny), in which he is placing himself and his family by writing
in the Chronicle and appearing on TV (‘‘What’s the one thing we know
about the Zodiac? He reads The Chronicle’’). She is not given the pivotal
function of Tracy in Seven, but Sevigny makes the most of what she has in
the script with sweet little physical details (her fur-lined hood in the phone
box, a red heart brooch, and the big glasses) and her directness comple-
ments his innocence to a degree (so we see her lying asleep on his couch
with him looking at her without any ulterior motive). His extreme naivete
is both engaging and pitiable. Avery’s question ‘‘What’s your angle?’’ only
elicits a puzzled look from Graysmith. Even when he clarifies this with the
observation that the Zodiac case is ‘‘Good business for everyone but you,’’
Graysmith responds with wide-eyed innocence, ‘‘How do you mean busi-
ness?’’ Until Melanie mentions the danger of Avery meeting an unknown
informant, the possibility does not seem to have crossed Graysmith’s mind
and it takes him a second or two to understand Toschi’s hint to go and see
Ken Narlow in Napa. There is a certain blankness about his character—
both Toschi at the cinema and Jack Mulanax ask him, ‘‘Who are you,
again?’’ However, for the film to work, we have to find him engaging at
some level. When he leaves the Vallejo police station, a uniformed officer
on being told that he is trying to solve the Zodiac case declares ‘‘Well,
good for him.’’ Obsessives like him are needed to pursue truths that need
pursuing, but he does not see the cost to himself or those around him. He
is prepared to sacrifice his marriage (with no arguments) and use his chil-
dren, and endangers them and himself (by appearing on TV and later
entering Vaughn’s basement despite being terrified).
When Graysmith tracks Avery down on his houseboat, he seriously
seems to think that firstly Avery would obsessively keep all his Zodiac ma-
terial and secondly that he would entertain the notion of writing a book
about it. His refusal underlines the chasm that exists between Graysmith’s
very personal obsession and the agendas of the news media that has moved
on. At this point, the narrative seems to be running out of momentum—the
killer remains uncaught and both investigating ‘‘teams’’ have broken up.
What remains however is Graysmith’s strength of will and unwillingness to
consign events to a ‘‘footnote’’ in history, declaring to Avery, ‘‘You’re wrong.
It was important.’’ The need to know blends with this sense of validation;
for the victims and more perhaps for himself, Graysmith feels the need to
press on. Thus, instead of taking Avery’s sarcastic comment about the
84 David Fincher
library at face value, it spurs him to return to his previous source of inspi-
ration and now places this personal quest above his relationship to his
family. Eventually, Avery is forced to take back his scorn, breathing from
an oxygen tank at a bar as Graysmith explains on TV how he cracked the
code with the help of library books.
Graysmith develops his own theory, very close to Somerset’s approach
to FBI flagging in Seven: ‘‘If you can track these books, you can track the
man.’’ Toschi tries to dissuade Graysmith, pointing out not just that evi-
dence has been lost and too much time passed, but fundamentally, it is not
his role to act as a policeman: ‘‘Zodiac was my job. It’s not yours.’’ How-
ever, perhaps this is the point. It is only without some of the institutional
limitations suffered by Toschi that a successful investigation is potentially
possible. He continues to feed Graysmith tidbits of information, possibly
sharing a vicarious pleasure in continuing the investigation, sharing the
obsession at one remove.
The Obsessive Need for Knowledge

‘‘I need to know who it is.’’
—Graysmith to Melanie
‘‘Just because you can’t prove it, doesn’t mean it’s not true.’’
—Graysmith to Toschi
Much of the commentary on the DVD by Vanderbilt, Fischer, and Ellroy,

as well as the obvious background documentary material, actually focuses
on the crimes themselves, not on the film depiction of it. Costume De-
signer Casey Storm recounts how production often gave way to heated
debates on set about the latest theory concerning the case. After the raid
on the trailer, Toschi declares, ‘‘You know what the worst part of this is? I
can’t tell if I wanted it to be Allen so bad because I actually thought it was
him or I just want all this to be over.’’ This is increasingly the motivation
behind Graysmith’s own sleuthing to the point where in visiting Darlene
Ferrin (Ciara Hughes) in prison, he screams ‘‘Just say it!’’ desperate for
her to confirm that it was Rick at the painting party, almost bullying the
name out of her. The need to know takes precedence over all other needs.
His wife sees to the heart of the problem: ‘‘When will it end? When you
catch him? When you have him arrested?’’ to which he replies ‘‘Don’t be
ridiculous,’’ suggesting that he knows his search is futile. There are the
contrary drives of the drive to know and the implicit pleasures of the
pursuit. If one need is satisfied, the other is destroyed. His life represents a
limbo, a position of tension between these two pleasures, which are also
inherent in the act of watching a film. We want to know the answer, the
narrative to be completed, but when it is, we expect the experience to end.
As long as the film is running, the two needs can be kept in tension and
the running time and narrative structure of the film reflect Graysmith’s
deluded attempts to keep both forces in play indefinitely. It is a film con-
structed around a series of dead ends, rather than climactic spectacle, and
perhaps Fincher’s technical set-piece scenes (see Chapter 6) are an attempt
to compensate for this.
This need to know overcomes any semblance of common sense or sur-
vival instinct that Graysmith has, arranging to meet Vaughn and agreeing
to follow him home. An earlier Zodiac letter mentions ‘‘a basement for
future use’’ but this sequence almost slips into horror film cliche. There
are earlier cheap horror film devices to create suspense, from the sudden
noise of fire crackers by the car at Blue Rock (whether corroborated by
police reports or not) to the appearance of Melanie through the open door
into Graysmith’s chaotic apartment near the end. However, the basement
sequence is the furthest the film moves into the landscape of horror,
although Fincher manages to hold back from complete immersion in
cliche. Plot elements (creepy individual who might be the killer); setting
(night, pouring rain, and dark basement); strange mise-en-scene (a phone
at the bottom of the stairs and unmotivated noises from above as if other
people are in the house); and camera positioning (tight shots of Graysmith
as he almost sleepwalks down the steps, walking into the camera to make
the cut) all complement the formal element here: we are near the end of
the running time of the film and whatever we may know about the Zodiac
case, we are ‘‘trained’’ to expect some form of dramatic closure.
We sense the dread as Graysmith follows Vaughn down into a shadowy
basement, lit by only three 40-watt bulbs and low angles highlight Alien-
style pipe-work behind him. Fincher gives us only a partial view by cam-
erawork too, using forward- and reverse-tracking shots as Vaughn retreats
behind a shelf, ostensibly to look if a particular film was shown when
Marshall was projectionist. There is a build-up of tension, released when
he re-appears to confirm Marshall would have seen the film, but then
standing directly under one of the few light sources, he pulls a cord,
throwing the room in darkness at which point Graysmith breaks into a
run. At the front door, Graysmith tries to conceal his rising panic and in
the mirrored front of the cupboard opposite, Vaughn suddenly appears, as
if he too had been running. The tension is broken by his reaching forward,
86 David Fincher
not to kill but to unlock the door, releasing Graysmith who bolts into the
night. He goes home to discover the greater ‘‘horror’’ that his wife and
children have gone but even at the point of digesting this fact, he is dis-
tracted by the name on the reverse (Linda Ferrin) of the note. During his
visit, Ferrin observes, ‘‘You got the look,’’ suggesting that the case haunts all
those who come into contact with it. His apartment degenerates with piles of
documents and spilt coffee until he resembles a teetotal Paul Avery.
In the diner, in a parallel with the earlier ‘‘speakerphone’’ scene, Gray-
smith lays out the evidence he has against Allen with the clinching point
about the proximity of Allen’s mother’s house and Darlene’s, made con-
crete by the use of salt and pepper shakers. There is closure of a sort as
Toschi sadly states that this is not enough proof for a court of law and
advises him to finish his book, but Graysmith’s final act (in the film) comes
in the Ontario hardware store. Graysmith approaches Allen, via inter-cut
forward- and reverse-tracking shots, and gives him a lengthy stare but
does not address him directly. Vanderbilt terms the scene one of ‘‘emo-
tional closure’’ and it seems enough for Graysmith to see the man he
thinks is responsible and to let him know that he knows.
The Killer
Toschi: (opening fridge) Jesus.
Armstrong: What?
Toschi: Squirrels.
—James Vanderbilt’s script for the film Zodiac
Like John Doe in Seven, the Zodiac is a serial killer who sends letters to
the police to taunt them. The ‘‘solving’’ of both cases is predicated around
obsessively collecting words and pictures. The fact that the Zodiac case
was never resolved and that letters claiming responsibility for further kill-
ings were sent to the Chronicle, may create the sense that the myth sur-
rounding the events is in a way created by the obsessive interest of
individuals like Graysmith to fill some lack in their own lives. Clearly John
Doe is a fictional construct but his crime has a coherence about it that the
Zodiac’s own ‘‘project’’ lacks. Apart from doubts about the genuine nature
of the letters and claims of responsibility, the concept in an early letter
that he kills so that his victims will be his slaves in the after life sounds
like the ranting of a crazed individual (possibly the writer’s intention). The
writing on the car after the Berryessa killing almost feels like the establish-
ment of a brand as the killer can apparently leave his mark as a sign of
authentication as well as a provocation to the police.
The search of Allen’s trailer provides a moment like the SWAT raid in
Seven, appearing to offer a moment of narrative certainty, especially here
as there is no question of false identity and apparently several items of
damning evidence. The approach to the trailer is accompanied by David
Shire’s twanging guitar theme, extremely close to Howard Shore’s main
theme for David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), with a similar refrain and a
falling note of inconclusiveness (possibly hinting at the outcome of the
search). The raid itself, shot from the dark interior towards the door as
light pours in, illuminating a squirrel in a cage, creates a nightmarish
image of perversity amid apparent normality. What remains just out of
sight is more disturbing than what we actually see. The low angle shows a
glass ceiling, covered by leaves on the outside, hinting at possibly some-
thing on the roof. The shot with the fridge and Toschi’s one word explana-
tion of what is in there and the glimpse of a huge shit-covered dildo and
massive jar of Vaseline, all indicate the presence of a significantly deviant
individual. As the accompanying law officer states, ‘‘Piece of work, this
guy.’’
The interview with Arthur Leigh Allen (John Carroll Lynch) is a dra-
matic high point as the detectives confront face-to-face the man who is
their best suspect, but at the same time keeps the viewer in a state of sus-
pense because we cannot be sure of his guilt either. The film clearly
presents the circumstantial evidence against Allen (the Zodiac watch, fa-
miliarity with ‘‘The Most Dangerous Game’’ story from school, and some
similarities in handwriting). The scene opens with juxtaposed moving
points of view as Allen approaches the cafeteria area where Toschi, Arm-
strong, and Mulanax are waiting. A similar point-of-view shot ends the
sequence as he walks away, having apparently survived the ordeal. As
Allen walks down a ramp, the camera tilts down slightly, emphasizing his
gait and physical bulk. Allen’s body positioning, sitting leaning back with
legs crossed gives every impression of being relaxed, but we cut from
close-ups of his large feet in Windwalker-like boots to mid-shots directly
to camera where Allen holds ‘‘our’’ gaze with composure (anticipating the
final sequence in the hardware store).
Conclusion
Although the Zodiac case is well-known, in taking the decision to opt
for such an unresolved subject, to immerse the production in reflecting the
facts of the case as far as possible, and most significantly to end the film
as we have it, Fincher is making a conscious decision not to follow the
88 David Fincher
path of Dirty Harry, with its less problematic resolution by violence. This
is a murder mystery without chase sequences, shoot-outs, sex scenes, and
a great deal of talk and detail which audiences need to follow to make
sense of events. In Seven, the killer is found and killed but at an extreme
price; in Zodiac, the prime suspect dies before being brought before a
court. In Seven, we see the operation of justice, both Doe’s and that of
Somerset and Mills, but here we only see the justice system as a series of
obstacles placed before Toschi in gathering sufficient evidence that will be
accepted by the courts. Both films show obsession to find a killer but in
Zodiac the obsession is not so much for justice or revenge but a simple
desire to know. On the DVD commentary, Ellroy talks of an audience’s
need for closure: ‘‘People want to be distanced from horror. They want to
partake of it as hyperbole . . . say it can’t happen to them. This film tells
you it’s unlikely to happen to you. But it could.’’
Chapter 4
It’s Only a Game: The Game

and Fight Club
THE GAME
From its opening titles breaking into pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, The
Game is a film that questions its own limits. Ultimately this is the prime
source of its pleasure but also its weaknesses. CRS, the company appa-
rently operating the game, appears to be a shadowy organization, a little
like the anti-smoking ‘‘Quitters Inc.’’ in Stephen King’s 1978 short story of
the same name (filmed as Cat’s Eye by George A. Romero, 1983), offering
Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) a life-changing experience that
spins out of control. Such a notion can be traced back at least to West-
world (Michael Crichton, 1973), which also presents an alternative, lei-
sure-based, fictional universe that apparently spins out of the control of
the protagonist. In its sense of claustrophobic paranoia, there is also a nod
to the conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s, like The Parallax View (Alan J.
Pakula, 1974) or The China Syndrome (James Bridges, 1979), evoked by
the presence of Michael Douglas, except this film is decidedly apolitical.
It is a ‘‘game’’ played more with the audience than the characters within
the fiction. The question in the fiction is whether the shadowy CRS group
is manipulating Van Orton’s life or not, not that life itself is a hollow, exis-
tential nightmare. It is the boundaries of the game that are in play, not
that the entirety of human existence is in question. In that respect, it is a
question about how far fictions, in this case cinematic fictions, can prob-
lematize this boundary. It is a film about filmmaking and its relationship
to the audience.
90 David Fincher
Testing the Limits

‘‘Are we still in the game?’’
—Ted Pikul (Jude Law) in Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999)
The game proper begins when Van Orton brakes sharply in front of his
house at the apparent sight of his father’s body. His memory and current
reality mesh as if one had strangely anticipated the other. Rather than a
clearly separate digression, the style of the memory-as-movie blends with
contemporary action as we have flash-cuts, motivated by flashbulbs, of the
police and press cameras from the past and the elision of Van Orton in
high angle now peering out of the car with his view of a parallel scene as
a boy. Looking around in disbelief and fear (the apparent hermetic secu-
rity of his house, and his life, have been breached), he picks the ‘‘body’’
up, now revealed as a clown mannequin, and in high angle carries him
solicitously indoors, placing him in a chair opposite in a disconcertingly
life like pose. The ‘‘how’’ of this evident prank is blended with the ‘‘why’’
as we appreciate how powerful and sick such a ‘‘joke’’ is for Van Orton.
The power is also achieved by the choice of a clown figure and the eerily
fixed wide-eyed stare. Fear of clownish figures, even having its own term,
coulrophobia, is evident from Batman’s Joker to Stephen King’s Pennywise
in his 1986 novel It (filmed by Tommy Lee Wallace in 1990).
Effective shot composition places Van Orton blurred in the background,
swinging the key on the ribbon he has just removed from the clown’s
mouth, trying to understand the significance of the foreground, where the
dummy is framed in sharp close-up at 45 degrees to the camera. This pre-
pares us for Michael Douglas’s face to loom subsequently into close-up,
trying to see the hidden camera, inter-cut with the reverse angle of an
extreme close-up of the clown’s stare. So far, we are in the area of a practi-
cal joke, but then the TV announcer (the recognizable figure of Daniel
Schorr, adding greater credibility to his role for U.S. audiences) switches
modes to address Van Orton directly. Charles Whitehouse notes ‘‘an esca-
lation towards the fantastic which loses in conceptual momentum what it
gains in dramatic thrills,’’ but what we have here more specifically is the
Todorovian fantastic.1 Tzvetan Todorov developed a number of theories
concerning the struggle to categorize an event, which we cannot immedi-
ately explain, making us consider supernatural causes and therefore
whether we need to re-orientate our view of the known world.2 Briefly,
Van Orton and we the viewers are both a little disorientated but the pe-
riod of Todorovian hesitation here is relatively brief as the newsreader
explains the existence of a camera within the clown (Van Orton’s curiosity,
It’s Only a Game: The Game and Fight Club 91
and possibly guilt over his father, has caused him to breach his own secu-
rity), at which point we can assign a rational explanation to what we mo-
mentarily could not understand. Such brief interludes are effective but
attempts to sustain Todorovian hesitation are highly problematic as we
need to feel some dramatic purchase, some ‘‘believability’’ in a situation. A
key weakness of the film is the overuse of this device and an attempt to
destabilize what might be termed ‘‘binary categories.’’
The binary nature of the narrative structure is underlined when co-
writer John Brancato admits that the logic of the film is based around
‘‘decision trees and game theory.’’3 The point is that the structure is sequen-
tial, not cyclical—once we have decided the on-screen action is a game or
‘‘real,’’ we cannot repeatedly reverse this assumption. The CRS lettering and
logo might appear on patrol cars, the surveillance van, and the taxi but this
does not constitute a satire of corporate corruption. Cronenberg’s Spectacular
Optical in Videodrome (1982) is also a shadowy but clearly political
organization (dealing in spectacles and weaponry for the Third World).
A key scene is in Christine’s supposed ‘‘house.’’ Fincher claims this scene
was what persuaded him to make the film, but his claim that its appeal
was based on Christine’s ambiguous motivation is unconvincing.4 Just like
Cincinnatus in Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, Van Orton
becomes aware that the fabric of apparent reality around him is merely a
façade, and not a very good one at that.5 There is no water in the pipes or
power in the fridge. He finds photos crudely cut out from magazines, the
books are just frontages, and a lamp causes smoke to rise as it catches a
‘‘for sale’’ label left inside. In a sense, we have the, ironic, decorative ‘‘real-
ity’’ of a furniture store, where such presentational strategies are routine.
Instead of an IKEA dream, we have a lower-budget reality: both built on a
different kind of unsubstantiality (one high-tech and fluidly subjective; the
other, low-tech and more literally theatrical). It is the smoke that literally
and symbolically catches his attention and we switch from his point of
view approaching the lamp and peering into the reverse angle of his
bemused gaze. We are on a crudely assembled film set. Christine plays the
part of unwilling accomplice, coming forward and whispering they are
being watched and the cut to an extreme low angle so that we now see a
smoke alarm and the reverse shot, which mimics a surveillance point of
view, seems to suggest she could be telling the truth. He does not believe
this and challenges them (‘‘So, what are they gonna do?’’), and receives his
answer in a hail of bullets from a CRS pseudo-SWAT team. The film drifts
into action movie genre in the following sequence, like the taxi in the river
section, as the pair run for their lives.
92 David Fincher
There are several similarities between Cincinnatus and Van Orton—

Cincinnatus is sentenced to death for the enigmatic crime of ‘‘gnostical tur-
pitude’’ and Van Orton in the opening seems spiritually and socially
‘‘dead,’’ cut off from his peers, unable or unwilling to form lasting per-
sonal relationships, and struggling to place himself within his own family
history (especially in relation to his father). He is distanced from those
around him, by implication in part due to his immense wealth but also
perhaps by his own nature, which he struggles to understand through the
course of the narrative. Cincinnatus’s lawyer Roman shares some features
with that of Van Orton (Sutherland) and like Cincinnatus, he is brought
to question the fabric of the reality around him, often which seems noth-
ing more than a clumsy joke and finally, at the point of death, ‘‘reality’’
dissolves and the fiction around him fades away and is ‘‘cancelled.’’ Van
Orton appears to choose suicide—that is the meaning that he gives to his
action in stepping off the ledge, an act of despair linking him to his father,
but he is actually fulfilling the final part of the CRS ‘‘joke.’’ The final
scenes in the film, where first he walks through the canteen seeing all the
‘‘actors’’ we have seen earlier in the narrative, here at ease with one
another at another level of reality, and the final party where everything we
have seen up to this point is cast as a game, has striking similarities with
the end of Nabokov’s novel. Like Van Orton, Cincinnatus is world-weary,
thinks that he knows more about the nature of his life than he actually
does, and via an existential joke about the fabric of the world around
him, he is forced to re-evaluate his place within it. One possible deleted
ending featured a large neon arrow pointing upward and a sign reading
‘‘Level 2,’’ suggesting an underlying computer game-playing aesthetic.
The problem is CRS either exists or it does not, the game is a game or it
is dangerous, there is a moral purpose behind the actions of CRS or they
are acting for financial gain—in the latter example, both options may be
possible at a given moment but what is not is to attempt to cut back and
forth between them. Our impressions and opinions might change but the
objective reality (if there is such a thing) cannot. Later, when Van Orton
and Christine are attacked by armed gunmen, either the bullets are real or
they are not. The whole of Christine’s apartment could be an elaborate
film set (we see clearly that the interior is fake) with squibs that explode
on cue, mimicking machine-gun fire. Such an effect is used as a twist at
the end of Mute Witness (Anthony Waller, 1994), which deals with
appearance and reality but for specifically corrupt, pornographic ends.
However, this possibility is fairly unlikely, never mentioned as a possibility,
and does not explain the bullets that ricochet off Van Orton’s car. If the
bullets are real, there is no way to guarantee the pair would not be hurt or
killed. Similarly, providing Van Orton with a handle to open the door of a
sinking taxi driven deliberately into a river, does not guarantee his escape.
Either these things are not real or if they are, CRS is effectively prepared to
murder its own clients.
At the close, we are challenged by Christine, as is Van Orton, to rethink
the shootings we have just witnessed: ‘‘What did you really, really see?’’
However, such special effects technology does not fully explain the
‘‘SWAT’’ attack scene or the sinking taxi. Is the man following Van Orton
really a private investigator and how did he know that Van Orton would
not fire the gun at him rather than shoot out a tire? How could CRS know
that Van Orton would track down Feingold and bring him at gunpoint to
CRS headquarters on the very night of the secret party they have appa-
rently organized for him? Even if we are supposed to believe Feingold’s
later admission that if Van Orton had not jumped, he would have pushed
him, the time details on the invitation, specifying 8:17–8:38 pm, seem
fairly hard to believe. These are the kinds of loose ends, which weaken the
overall effect of the concept.
Narrative plausibility is not always paramount—plenty of films do not
bear logical examination. However, the very nature of The Game invites us
to speculate, as we follow Van Orton through the narrative as he is repeat-
edly challenged to understand what exactly is happening and what the
status of CRS really is. Basically, this is not an existential nightmare: we
are presented with mutually exclusive positions. It is a nightmare organized
for financial or hedonistic reasons—this motivation is ambiguous, but like
the game status of the plot, the narrative attempts a switch-back structure,
which is very hard to sustain (and maintain audience interest/credibility).
Christine’s breathless explanation about CRS using the test information to
empty bank accounts seems plausible, verified by Van Orton’s call to his
Swiss account, but then later Sutherland contradicts this by saying the
money is still there. The possibility of the game being real or not is hard to
sustain but possible in brief moments of Todorovian hesitation, but the
motivation of CRS is not so easily accepted and then questioned and then
accepted again—in genres outside the narrow confines of spy movie, trust
in character motivation cannot be picked up and discarded so rapidly
without alienating the audience.
On spotting the ‘‘doctor’’ from CRS, now advertising on TV, Van Orton
murmurs, ‘‘He’s an actor . . . he’s an actor on television.’’ Admittedly we
have seen manipulation of a TV news broadcast, but here there is a
moment of Todorovian decision-making and category allocation. His
94 David Fincher
experiences at CRS now have a rational explanation—he has been part of

a commercial scam. As Van Orton makes his way through the CRS can-
teen, we keep cutting back to his point of view, scanning the room, which
contains virtually the entire main cast from the preceding narrative,
including the cab driver, Christine’s neighbor, and Christine herself, who
eventually spots him. As in eXistenZ, which at the end metatextually
questions its own limits, we see ‘‘actors’’ playing actors within the fiction
of the narrative.
As it turns out, Van Orton’s instincts, like Meg Altman’s in Panic Room,
are sound and, like her, he could have avoided the problems in the narra-
tive had he listened to them. At the end, the man at whom he stared in the
airport is the senior CRS figure who takes the signed check away. The pur-
pose of the CRS questioning is to gain information for use in the game
and ultimately to make money. Like his outburst to Baer, the share price is
all that matters in a purely objective financial sense. However, he is no
longer operating in a purely predictable, objective world. His initial suspi-
cion about Christine is ultimately well-founded: she is an actress in the
employ of a company that organizes elaborate pranks. This undercuts the
power of any moral message the film purports to convey. He questions
straightaway the tramp having a heart attack, ‘‘How do we know he’s
real?’’ and this is a problem for the film. Anyone with Van Orton’s wealth
would naturally be sceptical of those with whom he comes into contact,
suspecting that they are trying some kind of scam (which they are here).
Originally there was a reference to the carjacker in the final canteen con-
frontation, where in a throwaway remark we are told ‘‘he wasn’t one of
ours,’’ losing a potential comic irony. Sutherland is also not a CRS opera-
tive, allowing him to express dismay alongside Van Orton at the end.
The so-called practical joke, at its most elaborate extreme, is an exam-
ple of the Todorovian fantastic but it is a very difficult state to repeatedly
evoke without exhausting the patience and goodwill of the ‘‘victim’’—here
Van Orton but by extension, the viewer too. The character of Conrad
seems childish at first, such as in his reservation of the restaurant table in
the name of Seymour Butt and the fake sneeze onto his neck. Van Orton
recognizes the joke with the name immediately, changing the reservation
to his own. Conrad promises that CRS will ‘‘make your life fun’’ but we
do not really see Van Orton experience much of this. Perhaps, as Conrad
suggests, Van Orton does not really know what this is, so he does not rec-
ognize it when it is in front of him, but being shot at, dumped penniless in
Mexico, and committing suicide, thinking he has killed his brother—how
enjoyable could this really be? The popularity of shows like Candid
Camera in the United States, Game For A Laugh in the United Kingdom,
or MTV’s Punked pander to a certain sadistic aesthetic. It does raise the
question of how ethical it is to make you think you have killed your own
brother, prompting you to commit suicide. The ‘‘defense’’ used by Jim
Feingold (James Rebhorn) to excuse the manipulative (and downright dan-
gerous) games of CRS, i.e., that he was just an actor playing a part,
smacks of the ‘‘just following orders’’ defense of those accused of wartime
atrocities. These are not everyday pranks but major life-changing deci-
sions. Van Orton fully intends to kill himself, even experiencing a fleeting
memory of the two-shot of himself and his father seen at the beginning of
the film. Rather than an exercise in Rabelaisian misrule which is all made
right by the close, the film underlines its own moral queasiness in Conrad’s
T-shirt slogan: ‘‘I was drugged and left for dead in Mexico and all I got
was this lousy T-shirt.’’
A Life of Privilege
‘‘Money pads the edges of things.’’6
—E.M. Forster
CRS tester: We provide . . . whatever’s lacking.

Van Orton: What if nothing is lacking?
—From the script of The Game, credited to
John Brancato, et al.
Michael Douglas’s on-screen persona at this time was still largely associ-
ated with the excesses of 1980s/early 1990s via Wall Street (Oliver Stone,
1987); Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987); and Basic Instinct (Paul
Verhoeven, 1992), giving his role here a sense of deserved payback. Van
Orton is not a likeable character—he interrupts the CRS receptionist with
the arrogance of someone used to commanding instant attention. His reac-
tion to the tests exudes bored, thinly veiled anger. Therefore when his
meeting (defined by his rapid scribbling in red and his imperious manner
with the board) is interrupted, a reversal takes place, especially because
the call he takes is a rejection, without explanation, from CRS. Even when
Christine appears to ‘‘confess’’ in his car and tells him about CRS, he sneaks
a secret call to Sutherland and seems willing to betray her, even though she
seems as much a victim as he is (and symbolically shares food with him).
Like Forster’s celebration of humanism, The Game portrays a central
character who leads a life sheltered by wealth and privilege and who needs
to undergo visceral experiences to reconnect with those around him. The
96 David Fincher
fact that Van Orton contacts CRS at all suggests that at a deeper level, he
senses a void in his life. Although we see a phone call to his ex-wife and a
face-to-face meeting toward the end, from the outset Van Orton is pursu-
ing a very isolated life with only employees for company, both at work
and home, his family home. In effect, he has never left home, is mothered
by his housekeeper and secretary, and is emotionally retarded. Swallow
describes Van Orton’s manner in taking the call as ‘‘studied disinterest’’
but this is only partially true.7 He is also genuinely bewildered by his own
lack of connection to the world. There is an oddly disembodied nature to
Van Orton’s character through much of the first half of the film, not least
because for much of the time, he is aware of this but seems powerless to
connect to those around him. The hollowness of his life and something
uneasy underlying it is conveyed by Howard Shore’s simple but slightly
discordant piano theme used for sequences of Van Orton around his
home. His first shot, splashing water onto his face in the bathroom and
looking down mournfully (following the opening home movie sequence),
suggests his character needs a ‘‘wake-up call’’ and is only living half a life,
ending the scene staring vacantly straight into the camera lens. As he
drives out of his grounds, he looks for several seconds from his window at
something but we do not cut to a reverse angle, suggesting he is looking
for some meaning and stimulation in his life, even if he does not recognize
it himself.
His personal relationships at first are characterised by lack of direct eye
contact and no actual interactive dialogue. He issues his housekeeper and
secretary a series of demands and deals unemotionally with business via
speakerphone, denying he knows the meaning of ‘‘promise’’ (a bond
between people) and the pervasiveness of a TV screen, bringing a continu-
ous stream of business information. It is some minutes into the film before
his first real dialogue exchange. He eats breakfast from a tray, standing at
a bar, and although he thanks his housekeeper, this has the sense of a
much-repeated routine. The low angle of his car speeding through his
automatically controlled gates symbolizes a life of privilege that allows
him to remain aloof from human contact. Forster’s text cited above reso-
nates here because money appears not to only pad the edge of things but
literally stifle the sound of them too—the muffled textures of the sound
quality of the opening sequences of Van Orton suggests a luxurious life
achieved without real struggle. The building that bears his name shows
that his family has literally left its mark on the environment but whether
this is through the endeavors of Van Orton or his father is unclear. Return-
ing home, he starts to tell the housekeeper, Ilsa, about his meeting with
Conrad, spinning out small talk into more details, suggesting that he
wants to talk to someone. The dinner in the oven and the nature of it (a
glorified sandwich and a sad single cupcake with a candle for his birthday)
make him seem like a latchkey child whose development has been prema-
turely arrested. Even later, when Sutherland asks him ‘‘Tell me not to
worry,’’ he seems like a concerned relative, needing reassurance, suggesting
Van Orton is surrounded by dysfunctional relationships.
Van Orton does have curiosity but like Edward (Richard Gere) in Pretty
Woman (Gary Marshall, 1990), he is an amoral yet successful business-
man who has inherited wealth and a distanced relationship with his father
who built up the family company. He also leads a fairly empty life, driving
hard bargains in buying and selling company assets (‘‘I move money from
one place to another’’), irrespective of the human cost. Like Edward, he
visits a failing but long-established family business (Morse Industries) to
deliver the commercial coup de gr^ ace but cannot do so (admittedly, more
from an inability to open his briefcase than any moral qualms).
As he enters the airport concourse, we see Van Orton exude a certain
smugness as we cut to his point of view eyeing up and down all those he
passes in slow motion, as if he has the measure of everyone he meets
whom he now believes could be part of the game, which he casts as a
diverting joke. However, Van Orton’s arrogance is punctured, first by a
clown pin, apparently left next to him as a secret sign but then picked up
by a woman, and then his challenging stare and question (‘‘What is it?’’)
to a man opposite, who gestures that Van Orton should look at his shirt
where his pen (given to him at CRS) has exploded in his shirt pocket.
What he thinks he knows, he does not and what he does not notice, he
should. He is not the observant individual that he takes himself to be and
it is by such small examples that it is clear that his absolute control of the
world around him is gradually slipping away. The world as he knows it
has turned slightly. Strange disembodied hands appear from beneath a toi-
let cubicle (those of cinematographer Harris Savides) but Van Orton bolts,
refusing to give the man some toilet paper. The back-story about Van
Orton’s marriage is delivered in clumsily expositional dialogue and simi-
larly, the dynamic of the brothers’ relationship, driven by resentment,
guilt, and jealousy is mapped out by the exchange on the steps but the film
is ultimately more interesting when it does not try to explain actions by
psychoanalyzing events.
The Mexican sequence is like a vision of life after death. What could be
a Poe-like nightmare of premature burial becomes a vision of surreal resur-
rection as he emerges Nosferatu-like from a coffin but into bright daylight.
98 David Fincher
A small figure, he is humbled by Fincher’s framing, stumbling around the

graveyard, among fires and then poor slum dwellings. This almost seems
like his lowest point, but that occurs as he sits stunned on a bench, hold-
ing newspaper to a minor wound. In close-up, he seems near tears
(although whether from despair or anger is a little ambiguous) until he
suddenly has an idea, and starts to jog through traffic, picking up speed.
He has to bear the indignity of being shushed in the embassy but this is
the beginning of his redemption. He has faced a near-death experience and
survived. All he wants to do now is get back to his old life.
Naı̈ve about how to look after himself (earlier he was unable to cook
for himself or change a tire), he tries an inept lie before the official
observes that ‘‘A man with a watch like that doesn’t necessarily have a
passport problem.’’ Born into money, his father’s inheritance symbolized
by his watch, an 18th birthday present, can secure him safe passage back
over the border. Money still pads the edges of things. Whereas before he
was the single occupant of a luxury car, now we see him forced to endure
the company of his fellows in a crowded bus, then as a hitchhiker, almost
obliterated by the car lights and finally, at the lowest point of his dignity,
he is forced to appeal for a ride in public in a diner and we cut at the
point that faces turn away, uninterested. Without money, he is just another
soul on the road and it is only through the philanthropy of an anonymous
trucker that he gets a lift back to the city.
By the time he actively seeks out his ex-wife (whose company, even on
the phone, he had previously found almost unbearable), he is a changed
man. He is twitchy and paranoid about whether a waitress has opened his
drink or not in a restaurant, but manages to apologize for his behavior
during their marriage. In contrast with being followed earlier, now he is
set upon by an unknown man with an iron bar but what previously would
have terrified him now only makes him laugh as he pulls a gun and
explains that he is ‘‘extremely fragile right now.’’ He is extremely close to
breaking down completely—his experience has brought him to the abso-
lute brink of sanity, all certainties based on his class thrown into confu-
sion, a role we have already seen him play in Falling Down (Joel
Schumacher, 1993).
Like the scene in Christine’s house, when Van Orton confronts Feingold
at the zoo with his children, different worlds collide and he is closer to the
gun-toting character with which we are familiar in the films from the same
era, such as Black Rain (Tony Scott, 1989). Certainly pulling the gun on
the security guard in the elevator of the CRS building, he looks like a
cool-headed cop, not an investment banker. At last, he is in charge of the
narrative, making events happen (or so he thinks) and in turning the

tables, he draws on a game-playing allusion from The Wizard of Oz
(Victor Fleming, 1939), that ‘‘I’m gonna pull back the curtain. I wanna be
the wizard,’’ suggesting that he wants to unmask who is doing this but
also to have some fun of his own perhaps. Tension rises as Van Orton and
Christine make their way to the rooftop with no visible escape, the guards
about to burst through the door at any moment.
The character of Christine appears relatively late in the narrative, appa-
rently sacked for accidentally crashing into him and muttering ‘‘Asshole’’
at him. The harsh sacking for which he is responsible provokes his engage-
ment and from this point on as we follow Christine, in his point-of-view
Steadicam shot, the narrative breaks free from his control. First we have
the tramp having a heart attack and then the bizarre melting away of am-
bulance, doctors, and all the paraphernalia of a medical façade (very like
the end of Invitation to a Beheading). The sudden disappearance into the
darkness of quite so many personnel is not easy to accept and clearly if
such an elaborate prank is possible, as viewers we remain fairly sceptical
from this point on about what we see. There is no Todorovian hesitation
here—explanation is instantaneous—it is a gag. Christine seems plausible
as a fellow victim of CRS but we do not really see enough of her to feel
much empathy either—walking out of the restaurant and away from the
ambulance before Van Orton, or we, can draw much in the way of conclu-
sions about her motives. Jodie Foster was originally due to work with
Fincher, first as Christine and then in the role played by Sean Penn, rewrit-
ten as a sister and even a daughter (possibly making her ‘‘Connie’’) but
scheduling difficulties ultimately prevented this. The role of the brother
was strengthened and he was the source of the CRS gift (originally an old
friend from college).
The casting of Deborah Kara Unger (especially after her erotic roles in
Crash and Sunshine, the latter directed by Istvan Szab o in 1999) suggest
that her character is going to offer a sexually charged element (the plot
originally featured a date between the two) and, in appearance, dressed of-
ten in black and in gesture often turning away, appearing distracted or
nervous, she does evoke her performance in Crash from three years earlier.
Her disclosure that she is not wearing underwear (something we cannot
prove), and therefore wants to follow rather than lead him out of the eleva-
tor, suggests Fincher wants us to view her as a source of potential eroticism
but little is made of this. She flirts with him, calling him ‘‘attractive’’ as he
puts her into a cab, prefiguring the end, but there is no recognition of the
social gulf between them. She may not be a prostitute (as Julia Roberts’s
100 David Fincher
Vivian in Pretty Woman), but there is a similar gulf between their relative
positions in life as with Richard Gere’s Edward in the earlier film, and only
sporadic breaks in Van Orton’s sceptical instincts (which the plot repeat-
edly suggests are actually correct).
She admits that she was paid to crash into him, clearly suggesting she is
a CRS employee and ultimately this is a main weakness of the film; really,
there is no plot twist. What we see is what we get: a game organized for
money. She starts to tell him that Christine is not her real name, which
appears friendly, and he snaps back ‘‘Who fucking cares?’’ suggesting he
has learned nothing and has not mellowed, but then despite offering him
tea, she drugs him. He may seem unpleasant in plotting against her but his
scepticism is entirely justified in retrospect.
A Problematic Narrative
‘‘What are you gonna do?’’
—Burnham in Panic Room and Jim in The Game
Apart from the problematic status of CRS, which we are explicitly chal-
lenged to consider, and the lack of precise reasons why Van Orton’s father
killed himself, there are further plot holes. Twice Van Orton arrives at the
door to his house in darkness despite having driven through the gates in
daylight, suggesting odd continuity flaws or unfeasibly large grounds.
The coincidence that the following day a business meeting just happens
to take him right past the CRS headquarters is a little hard to believe (also
that this is where the ambulance drops them).
The effect with the TV newsreader is a little inconsistent; a hidden cam-
era in the clown is one thing but we see greater interactivity than this
might allow. The newsreader appears to flinch at Van Orton’s touch,
reacts to his verbal cues, and returns to his ‘‘normal’’ mode at the appear-
ance of Ilsa, the housekeeper, as Van Orton murmurs, ‘‘It’s impossible.’’ If
Conrad is supposed to have had his own life-changing experience via ‘‘the
Game,’’ given what we see of how closely his life is bound up psychologi-
cally with Van Orton’s (as his only brother), we might reasonably expect
Van Orton to have already been involved with CRS, and it is unconvincing
why Conrad should spend so much money on his ungrateful brother anyway.
The Mexican digression may be suitably alien in style to the rest of the
film, the only section to take place outside the city, but the problem with
the narrative is that there is a distinctly episodic quality to much of it—the
near drowning in the taxi or waking up in Mexico or being shot at in
Christine’s house could almost have happened in any order, or not at all.
The narrative, like Van Orton’s life, evolves into a series of jeopardy situa-
tions—he escapes from an elevator, is chased by police dogs, breaks into a
room, and eventually drops down into a dumpster, much to the entertain-
ment of Chinese catering workers. Part of this is the nature of ‘‘the Game,’’
creating a noir-ish environment in which the hero is flailing around for con-
trol but it also feels like contrived scriptwriting. In retrospect, we see that
Christine was guiding him through this the dumpster scene and Douglas’s
wisecrack of ‘‘Table for two’’ feels like an evocation of the flash-flood scene
in Romancing the Stone (Robert Zemeckis, 1984), in which he starred
alongside another tall, blond sidekick, Kathleen Turner.
Faced with ‘‘proof’’ of his presence in a hotel, including his credit card
signature and a cropped photo of a woman in a similar bra to Christine’s,
he (and we) are forced to question our understanding of events in a
moment of Todorovian hesitation as well as appreciate what this would
mean for his career if discovered. His attempt to flush away the planted
drugs only leads to his cutting his hand and the toilet overflowing. In the
bathroom and out in the car, the squealing tires and Douglas’s twitchy ges-
tures convey the barely concealed panic just beneath the surface. Later, he
starts to let the wheel run through his fingers as he rushes to meet Suther-
land, his lawyer. With the inclusion of Sutherland as a third party, apart
from Christine, subjective fantasy is now ruled out, and although little can
be proved about CRS in a criminal sense, they do actually exist, shifting
the narrative from the fantastic to an element of conspiracy thriller. Con-
rad shrieking in the car that he is ‘‘a human pi~ nata’’ and then accusing
Van Orton of being complicit with CRS before running off into the night,
all seems a little overwrought. We might well agree with Van Orton, who
advises him to ‘‘Get a grip on yourself. We’ll figure it out.’’ Having sur-
vived the taxi, Van Orton gathers the forces of authority to raid CRS’s
headquarters. However, just as in the police raid in Seven, it is at the
moment of greatest certainty that the narrative twists again. By the time
that Van Orton takes the anonymous call in the Laundromat, which plays
back the conversation he has just had with Conrad, he is increasingly dis-
orientated, reflected in the more rapid camera movement around Van
Orton, denying us spatial markers.
Conclusion
Fincher’s own reading of the film—that we are seriously intended to
leave a cinema and imagine what kind of a ‘‘game’’ we would like—is
102 David Fincher
strangely at odds with the film we have. It is highly debatable whether

anyone would want Van Orton’s experience: surely, if anything the film is
a cautionary tale, not to wish for a life-changing experience because it
may be exactly what you get. Fincher claims the film is about losing con-
trol.8 However, Nicholas Van Orton is hardly an Everyman figure; his
wealth makes his circumstances exceptional. Perhaps the point is that even
such individuals, apparently cosseted from daily anxieties, face the same
existential angst as the rest of us but it is his difference from the norm that
is stressed throughout much of the film. Swallow asserts that the object of
the game is ‘‘to find out what the object of the game is’’ but we actually
see very little of this.9 Van Orton spends much of the film careering from
one nightmarish episode to the next with limited linkage between them,
and it is only right at the very end, striding through the CRS canteen with
a gun held to Jim’s head, that he is actively searching for such answers.
FIGHT CLUB
‘‘Just like Tony Perkins’ mother in Psycho,’’ Marla says. ‘‘This is so cool.’’
—Chuck Palahniuk10
Much of the satirical edge of the film (using fat from a liposuction clinic
to sell back to rich women as soap, the reluctance of car companies to
recall unsafe models if it is too expensive for them to do so) is fairly
obvious. The grisly details of fat burns in a car crash become part of a
conversation that Jack is having with a passenger, who looks aghast at
such revelations, but this feels a little like the dialogue exchange between
Tyler and Jack quoted above. Like the notion of a crisis in modern mascu-
linity, it is foregrounded in repeated (even iconic) physical action and in
Tyler’s lengthy sententious speeches. What is more ambitious and received
minimal critical attention is what the film tries to do with its own form.
Like the ambiguity around CRS, there is a certain lack of clarity around
exactly what Tyler’s project is. The scene in which Tyler goes into a fast
food outlet and holds a gun to the head of Raymond Hessel, a store
worker made to kneel in mock execution until he promises to return study
as a vet, was apparently the scene that sold the idea of making the movie
to Fincher. It is a powerful scene but the ‘‘philanthropic terrorism’’ which
it embodies is not really present elsewhere in the film. The reported speech
of the novel is again transferred into dialogue but the novel’s shift toward
Jack (he commits this act alone) is not yet mimicked in the film. In the
film, the coherence of Tyler’s actions is debatable. Later as he leaves the
house for the last time, we glimpse dozens of cards pinned to the back of
Jack’s bedroom door, but a list of targets does not necessarily constitute a
rationale. Relatively harmless (but nonetheless funny) schoolboy pranks
(the revised aircraft safety warnings) are juxtaposed with acts of petty
criminality (smashing car headlights) and potential life-threatening acts
(blowing up corporate headquarters). There appears a slight element of
discrimination in Tyler selecting prestigious, expensive cars to damage, but
such a choice is fairly subjective. The attack on a building which leaves a
face etched in fire works more effectively in the promotional material for
Terminator Salvation (Joseph McGinty Nichol (McG), 2009), where at
least there is a credible fictional adversary who appears to justify such
extreme violence. There is an element of mindless envy in the attacks on
corporate art and a franchised coffee bar.
The fairly random nature of actions taken in the name of Project May-
hem are apparent from its selection process—a pointless two-day wait out
on the porch and a delegated process, which cannot completely mask the
absurdity of an accepted recruit screaming ‘‘You’re too fucking . . . blond’’
at the next hopeful. The shots of Tyler building a collection of cuttings
suggests he is proud of his anti-establishment pranks, involving an excre-
ment catapult and kidnapping a monkey, only to return it, shaved. How-
ever, the escalation in cost to property or life almost inevitably ends in
Bob’s tragic death. The targets are relatively broad (credit card companies,
corporate art, the rich and successful) and the consequent effectiveness
somewhat scattershot. When Jack screams at the followers of Project
Mayhem (the very name suggests a childish game), we are forced to agree
that ‘‘You’re running around with ski masks, trying to blow things up.
What did you think was gonna happen?’’ The problem with the mixture
of targets is also the sudden and unsignalled escalation from Fight Club as
an underground club for disenfranchised males to hit each other to a full-
blown terrorist organization.
Tyler’s tirade to an anonymous group of fighters is expressed negatively:
‘‘You’re not your job . . . You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re
not your fucking khakis.’’ What he puts in place of these sources of defini-
tion is merely the sense of humankind (and male, working-class individu-
als by implication in particular) as a relatively low status being—‘‘You’re
the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.’’ Whether this is Swiftian
misanthropy or Burroughsian distaste for humankind in relation to other
species is unclear and hardly constitutes a coherent philosophy. Indeed, a
paraphrase of this delivered via megaphone to his acolytes as they work in
the Paper Street garden evokes Kurtz’s empire in Apocalypse Now (Francis
104 David Fincher
Ford Coppola, 1979). Tyler builds himself an army but for what purpose,
other than to do his bidding, is unclear. Tellingly, in contrast to the mantra
he delivers to his followers (‘‘You are not special’’), Tyler himself assumes
a God-like position in Jack’s description: ‘‘In Tyler we trusted.’’ Perhaps
this is intended as a satire on unthinking radicalism but there needs to be
something for the devoted to be attracted to beyond Tyler’s cult of person-
ality. The novel does mention committees having a say in missions but the
film suggests it all comes from Tyler personally. The lacuna at the center
of Project Mayhem is reflected in the automatic responses, which head off
any further questioning and the accommodation of new information in
unquestioning behavior, prompting such as the mindless chanting of
Robert Paulson’s name after his death.
Chuck Palahniuk’s novel also features a sudden shift toward the politi-
cal but his Project Mayhem does at least have a philosophy: ‘‘the goal was
to teach each man . . . that he had the power to control history,’’ and to
‘‘redistribute the wealth of the world.’’11 The film viewer is denied this,
leaving anarchy and nihilism to the fore. Similarly, exactly what the
recruits are doing in the garden is not 100 percent clear in the film,
whereas the book explains that the cultivation is for ingredients for soap
and explosives. This lack of direction is reflected in the politician they
accost at a fundraising dinner. By inhibiting an anti-crime initiative, they
are suggesting that crime (of which they too might fall victim) is part of
an anti-establishment movement for personal freedom, which is quite
ridiculous. Tyler’s rant shifts to first-person plural to include himself: ‘‘We
connect your calls. We drive your ambulances. We guard you while you
sleep. Do not fuck with us.’’ This might be justified if we were talking
about a corrupt politician, vindictively tormenting an underclass (Tyler’s
language evoking debates around illegal immigration).
However, this is not the case and politically the film is really quite mud-
dled. As a lighthearted satire of specific aspects of consumerism, therapy
culture, or disenfranchised masculinity the film works well, but the second
half loses its focus. The lighthearted caper element of this latter scene, par-
ticularly with the waiting costumes, evokes Pitt’s work with the Ocean’s
franchise, but its underlying unfocused violence is ineffective. In the bar,
Tyler declares, ‘‘We’re consumers. We’re by-products of a lifestyle obses-
sion . . .’’ Rejecting crass media-driven commercialism is one thing, but
when Tyler says ‘‘Let’s evolve,’’ it is not entirely clear into what exactly.
Charles Whitehouse describes the film as ‘‘a value-free vessel that offers
conflicting views on Nietzschean ideas about men and destruction,’’ but
the ridiculousness of Project Mayhem hardly seems like progress.12 Tyler’s
gnomic ‘‘The things you own end up owning you’’ is as much empty-
headed ‘‘hippyspeak’’ as anything particularly profound. There is an arro-
gance behind Tyler’s philosophy that assumes it knows what is best for
others and rather than seeking to persuade Jack, he intervenes unasked
and then expects to be thanked. Tyler recruits unquestioning recruits for
Project Mayhem, who all seem to accept the cult of Durden’s personality,
seen clearly in the cropped shot of an underling lighting his cigarette after
being pummelled by Carlo and the mindless chanting after Bob’s tragic
and pointless death.
In the longer cellar scene, Tyler expands a little on what lies behind
Fight Club but it remains unclear exactly what is he grooming them for. If
he bewails ‘‘an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with
white collars,’’ then his address is primarily class-based with an implica-
tion that low-paid, low-status jobs are primarily taken by men, which is
highly dubious in many cultures and hardly anything new. The jobs he
describes have been taken by lower-class workers for generations. What is
new is the false hope offered by the media: ‘‘We’ve all been raised on tele-
vision to believe we’ll all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars.
But we won’t.’’ There is a shift in Jack’s character in the film from mas-
ochistic pleasure to sadistic pleasure, which seems to be reflected by Tyler
in reverse. Jack gets better at fighting and disfigures Angel Face, whereas
Tyler almost lets a mobster beat him to a pulp while laughing. It is only
when the two impulses converge, no longer seen as opposites but alternate
sides of the same coin, that Jack and Tyler’s ‘‘character’’ also converges.
However, attempts to raise the rhetoric to a higher level are only partially
successful. It may be true that ‘‘We have no Great War, no Great Depres-
sion,’’ but there have been other generations who have also been born out-
side these eras and the conclusion that ‘‘Our great war is a spiritual war.
Our great depression is our lives’’ could sound like sanctimonious justifica-
tion for actions whose prime pleasures are really only sadistic and masoch-
istic with the added veneer of political justification.
Palahniuk’s ‘‘When the fight was over, nothing was solved but nothing
mattered’’ does not constitute a coherent philosophy of nihilism, but is
closer to an obliteration of self in the alternate sadism and masochism of
inflicting and suffering pain.13 Also, although the Fight Club ‘‘franchise’’
clearly taps into a wider masculine need, there is a clear demarcation
between fighting and non-fighting lives. Jack’s statement ‘‘who you were in
Fight Club is not who you were in the rest of the world’’ may be intended
to suggest the liberation of a secret society that gives meaning to the week-
day drudgery, but it also underlines the fundamental incompatibility of the
106 David Fincher
two: it represents an alternative, temporary moment of escapism, not a

coherent alternative philosophy and lifestyle. Thus it is hard to reconcile
this with the motives of Project Mayhem, which may be hazy but are ex-
plicitly political and serious.
There is a Nietzschean thread in some of Tyler’s sententious rants, par-
ticularly when he pours the lye over Jack’s hand (‘‘without pain, without
sacrifice, we would have nothing’’). More explicitly, he addresses the ques-
tion not of a godless universe but of an indifferent God. In this sense, we
are examples of sinners who should embrace their damnation rather than
feel guilty about it. However, Tyler’s philosophy does not extend particu-
larly far. The admission that he seeks from Jack before pouring vinegar on
the burn (that he is mortal) hardly seems worth the pain. Slightly more
revealing is Tyler’s following line, ‘‘Congratulations, you’re one step nearer
the bottom.’’ This is a little closer to a Nietzschean view of ‘‘the abyss’’
but even here there is no explicit political aspect as in George Orwell’s
1984 (1948) where Winston Smith must disavow all sense of self and
admit love for a political fiction before he is shot. Unlike Nicholas Van
Orton, Jack does not live a life of pampered luxury. True, he is immersed
in petty materialism, but his crime hardly seems to fit the punishment
meted out by the narrative.
Clearly the film, like the novel, articulates a crisis in contemporary mas-
culinity but most of this is fairly obvious and planted in Tyler’s set-piece
speeches. The feminization of Bob is clear from the opening description
(‘‘Bob had big tits’’) to the first shot of him, in which we cut from Jack
hauled out of shot by Tyler to the crushing embrace at the testicular can-
cer support group. Feminine appearance is complemented by stereotypical
feminine action (crying, talking about feelings, sharing emotion, physically
hugging), all of which Jack finds surprisingly liberating. Having suffered
from insomnia, he now finds a vent, an emotional release; he can cry and
therefore sleep. In this narrowly selfish sense, group therapy works for
him. Bob’s former role as a body-builder casts him as representing an
excess of masculinity, now reduced to a state of confusion. He seems a
highly suggestible character, almost as if a gender identity might even be
imposed on him. The casting of MeatLoaf, whose very name and stage
persona could be seen to reflect a similar ‘‘performance’’ of excessive mas-
culinity, works well, in contrast to Palahniuk’s blond-haired Bob, who is
more feminized from the outset.
The scene in the Paper Street bathroom with Tyler scrubbing himself in
the bath while Jack brushes his teeth feels a little like the intimacy of
Kubrick’s 1960’s Spartacus, with both men here exchanging stereotypically
stupid hypothetical questions (which celebrities would they fight) as well

as Tyler extending his sententious speeches on masculinity when Jack says
he never knew his father—‘‘We’re a generation of men raised by women.’’
There is some sexual role-play here (Jack explains ‘‘Most of the week we
were Ozzie and Harriet’’) as Jack is the ‘‘dad’’ who goes out to work and
Tyler the ‘‘stay-at-home mom,’’ making him coffee before he goes to work,
and in return Jack straightens Tyler’s tie. However, there is an element of
cod psychology here as we only have a brief mention of Jack’s absent fa-
ther, given to fathering a series of children by different women, but we
only have his word for this (something we should be extremely sceptical
about) and it is fruitless trying to explain such a deep personality disorder
by flimsy single details like this.
Taubin claims that ‘‘Tyler’s nihilism and incipient fascism are not the
values Fight Club espouses, though Fincher complicates the issue by mak-
ing Tyler so alluring and charismatic.’’14 Certainly, there is clear hypocrisy
in Tyler espousing a different kind of masculinity and deriding images of
gym-worshipping muscular models (‘‘Is that what a man looks like?’’)
when in the very next scene we see Pitt, shirt off, displaying exactly that
kind of perfect, well-defined musculature he has just scorned. Despite
declaring that ‘‘self-improvement’s masturbation,’’ we see him training,
albeit in a ridiculous fashion, with a pair of nunchucks and a chair.
Transient Modernity
‘‘This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time.’’15
‘‘Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.’’16
—From Jim Uhls’s script Fight Club
In the montage of Jack’s soulless work and home life, Fincher presents
us with a powerful image of millennial ennui and Baudrillardian philoso-
phy that originality has been lost in an ever-spiralling sequence of copies.
Literally, Jack’s work, like most office jobs, involves repetitive tasks, epito-
mized by the copying machine juxtaposed with caffeine as a modern-day
legal narcotic and the Starbucks cup, symbol of globalized capitalism.
The dialogue blends the emptiness of the work with the habit-forming cof-
fee consumption as Jack assumes that his boss has had his ‘‘grand-latte
enema.’’ Global capitalism is portrayed as a mindless, unstoppable all-
conquering force so that ‘‘Management-speak’’ infects conversation
and objective chronology is replaced by apparently-quirky-but-actually-
predictable habits, such as his boss wearing a cornflower-blue tie on a
108 David Fincher
particular day and the softly numbing sound of the copier on the sound-
track complements Norton’s flat, robotic delivery.
Jack’s insomnia gives his world a particular edge of unreality but the
implication is that it is a world that we all inhabit to an extent. Like
Nicholas Van Orton, Jack is only half awake and needs a jolt out of his
old life. The image of Jack lying open-mouthed, remote in hand, is a strik-
ing metaphor for urban life in the late 20th century. The interchangeability
of airports, hotels, and even individual days represents the void in Jack’s
life, when he is unsure if he is asleep or awake, symbolized by the shot of
him suddenly jerking awake mid-flight, in wide-angle close-up, eyes star-
ing straight into the camera. In the later montage, there is an effective
quick shot of Jack passing through the shot on a bus, his zombified face
pressed up against the window. Jack’s explanation of his ‘‘single-serving’’
theory and the later list of designer goods, which the hero feels compelled
to obtain to give his life meaning, expressed in a forceful first-person
voice, both sound extremely like the opening dialogue of Danny Boyle’s
1996 Trainspotting, which lists the consumer items that seem to define
modern life.
We see him ordering a coffee table while sitting on the toilet, reflecting
an illogical compulsion driven by marketing and the sense that such acqui-
sition will give meaning to his life—‘‘What kind of dining set defines me
as a person?’’ Sexual desire is displaced into the acquisition of possessions
designated as desirable by pretentious marketing, in which branding is
more important than its actual source—he is only concerned that objects
are ‘‘crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working, indigenous people of . . .
wherever.’’17 However, like the political motivation behind Project May-
hem, there is little real substance behind this satire of obsessive commer-
cialism. What is Jack supposed to do about his situation? Embracing the
nihilistic pleasures of weekly violence will not change the economic sys-
tems on which Western culture is based. As Henry Giroux notes, ‘‘While
appearing to address important social issues, these films end up reproduc-
ing the very problems they attempt to address.’’18
Like Nick Hornby’s About a Boy (1998), the film uses a fake justifica-
tion for attending a support group to satirize confessional culture and the
constant need to speak about one’s own pain, which here provides Jack
with such voyeuristic (and partly participatory) pleasure. In the film ver-
sion of Hornby’s narrative and in Palahniuk’s novel (but not the film),
there is also a later climactic and comic scene where this illusion is
destroyed by a row played out in front of an audience.19 At Jack’s first
time at the Testicular Cancer Group, Fincher draws on several stylistic
tropes of a high school prom/dance. Bob as an unprepossessing ‘‘girl’’

approaches Jack, who is sitting nervously. We see Bob’s hand extend into
the frame as if asking for a dance, only for it to then haul Jack out of his
chair and after a perfunctory introduction Jack is crushed into Bob’s
breasts like a slow, smoochy dance number. The moment at which he is
invited to cry is accompanied by a few bars of choral monastic chanting,
suggesting a moment of religious revelation, reflected in the pattern his
tears leave on Bob’s T-shirt. His own dialogue reflects this; ‘‘Every evening
I died and every evening I was born again; resurrected’’ and that being
embraced by Bob was his ‘‘vocation.’’
Later in the cellar, Jack turns to look at a pool of his own blood and
there is slight zoom and the shot is held for a few moments, the blood
becoming almost like a stigmata for both Jack and the baying mob that
create a setting, as Jack tells us, ‘‘like a Pentecostal church.’’ Palahniuk’s
novel mentions both imprints but neither carry the strong Biblical over-
tones that Fincher draws from this, producing close-ups on two almost
Turin Shroud–like images.
The blur of therapy groups is conveyed by a montage of coffee, hugs,
doughnuts, and name-badges—the iconography of a confession-obessessd,
therapy-driven culture, especially its anodyne euphemistic language for
medical conditions, which can be horrific and incurable. Rather than find-
ing consolation in an inner, mental sanctuary, a ‘‘cave,’’ we cut to a realis-
tic set (with sirens still audible in the background), complete with
computer-generated breath for Jack. However this is then undercut by the
surreal appearance of a penguin, who then waddles up to him and
addresses him with a voice distorted by helium, telling him to ‘‘Slide’’ (all
of which appears in the book).
A Question of Identity
‘‘An action film that’s all about interiority.’’20
—Amy Taubin
There is a strong element of sexual sublimation in Jack’s dealings with

Marla, but even before he meets her, first the obsession with interior
design and then his newfound ability to cry, which gives him an orgasmic-
like release and blissfully deep sleep, represents this same tendency. The
sense that she is also a less-inhibited reflection of his personality is present
from the outset of their meeting. Subsequently, Marla appears in his place
of inner calm, like a disgruntled tourist, smoking, and tells him to ‘‘Slide.’’
110 David Fincher
Her completion of his dialogue suggests that perhaps this is a relationship

which, given time, could have worked.
He tells us that ‘‘she ruined everything’’ but despite his proprietorial
attitude to ‘‘my tuberculosis’’ group and calling her a ‘‘big tourist’’ and ‘‘a
liar,’’ this of course is exactly what he is. Later, he repeats that she has
‘‘invaded’’ his support groups and extends the possessive pronoun to the
Paper Street house, which may again seem presumptuous but again turns
out to be ironic as it is literally true—it is his house (in the sense he is
squatting there). He fantasizes about grabbing her and telling her to get
out of the group, an ‘‘event’’ to which she refers to later, which should
make us realize the unreliability of the narrator or that he has unintention-
ally spoken these desires aloud. Likewise, Jack’s later rhetorical question
almost paraphrased from the novel, ‘‘If you wake up in a different time
and a different place, do you wake up as a different person?’’ is counter-
pointed with a shot of Jack and Tyler passing on moving walkways, trav-
elling in opposite directions.21 The camera shifts from Jack to Tyler just
before the scene where they ‘‘meet’’ on the plane, underlining a mental
shift as Jack ‘‘creates’’ Tyler’s persona.
The device of placing a promise in the dialogue, whereby Jack says he
will not talk about Fight Club to Marla, motivates his divided self quite
well, but the extended ‘‘twist’’ of Jack’s true identity, especially after the
calls from the police, is less convincing. There is hardly a long list of
potential suspects who might have blown up his apartment, especially af-
ter Tyler prompts him explicitly ‘‘Just tell him you did it.’’ Jack’s ability to
adopt a pose of injured pride (‘‘It wasn’t just a bunch of stuff that got
destroyed. It was me’’) should make it clear how he is deluding himself
and others (‘‘I’d like to thank the Academy . . .’’) at the same time as,
ironically, being literally true. Like the motivation of CRS and Christine in
The Game, we are told the truth from early in the narrative but may miss
the clues, assuming them to be too obvious. Marla’s outburst ‘‘You’re such
a nutcase . . .’’ is as much for our benefit as Jack’s.
The theatricality of Jack speaking simultaneously to Marla on the first
floor, while addressing Tyler at the bottom of the basement steps uses psy-
chic space quite well and at least avoids the kind of confusing devices seen
in David Koepp’s Secret Window (2004) and George A. Romero’s The
Dark Half (1990), which also both use a schizoid split central character
but complicate matters by making the alter ego guilty of murder. In Fight
Club, the climactic ‘‘revelation’’ scene should also make us aware of what
we have really known all along without it also being a disappointment.
Shots like the close-up of Tyler’s face shuddering only make sense as an
image of a projected character breaking down. After the revelation that he

is Tyler, Jack realizes that Marla is ‘‘some kind of threat’’ and puts her on
a bus, i.e., he realizes that the Tyler part of him may hurt her unless he
can remove her from the narrative.
The novel uses a birthmark on the hero’s foot as a literal method of sig-
nalling the convergence of Tyler and Jack but the film does not need such
obvious symbols. Tyler’s status as Jack’s alter ego is fairly clearly under-
lined from their matching briefcases to the look Marla gives him, which
Palahniuk describes ‘‘as if I’m the one humping her.’’22 In calling Tyler, the
camera cuts across the 180-degree continuity line, suggesting a sense of
fractured identity and the book that Jack finds at the Paper Street house
(the very name suggesting its insubstantial nature and vulnerability to sub-
jective hallucination) is a bizarre story told from the point of view of a
bodily organ (strangely evocative of Clive Barker’s 1985 Books of Blood).
Even the books in the narrative contribute to a sense of first personal fluid-
ity and instability. The instability of the hero’s self is made more complex
by his voiced suspicions that Marla and Tyler are actually the same per-
son, whereas it is really he and Tyler.
The plot threads converge as Jack bumps into Bob outside Marla’s
apartment. He confides to Jack that he has found Fight Club and speaks
of it in tones akin to a spiritual conversion. At the airport, a valet asks for
Mr. Durden, at which Tyler waves Jack into the car first and later, Jack
describes himself as being like the hero in Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible
Man (1952), a text about a loss of identity. Eventually, a barkeeper with
extensive dental and facial work, after checking that this is not a test,
praises the founder as ‘‘a great man,’’ prompting Jack to smirk in self-dep-
recating presumption, before the devastating line ‘‘Do you know about
Tyler Durden?’’ At this point, the truth crashes in on Jack’s psyche (‘‘We
have just lost cabin pressure’’). This may not be a complete shock to most
viewers but it works due to the language here, which links with Jack’s
mindless ‘‘single-serving’’ lifestyle, the distorting sound effect like a plane
stalling. A partial safety announcement readies the viewer for the shock of
the ‘‘twist’’ via a montage of previous scenes, Jack now framed alone with-
out Tyler. Like the argument in the car before the crash, two-shots are
avoided and Tyler’s explanation while sitting on a bed opposite underlines
the split nature of Jack’s fractured personality. The novel underlines this
with another reference to the birthmark mentioned earlier but in the film,
the transition in our perceptions as well as Jack’s, is expressed in explicitly
filmic language. Tyler explains, ‘‘It’s called the changeover. The movie goes
on and nobody in the audience has any idea.’’
112 David Fincher
A Faithful Adaptation?
Many of the strengths and weaknesses of the film are actually traceable
to the source novel to which the film (based on Jim Uhls’s script), given its
visual ambition, is surprisingly faithful (even accepting the problematic
nature of using such terms). For example, Fincher’s casting of Bonham-
Carter closely reflects Palahniuk’s conception. Via his narrator, he
describes Marla with ‘‘short matte black hair, big eyes the way they are in
Japanese animation, skim milk thin, buttermilk sallow in her dress with a
wallpaper pattern of dark roses.’’23
The book opens with a first-person reference to Tyler being attributed
with the narrative persona (referred to belatedly as Jack in the film but
never explicitly named in the book). The extensive first-person narration
at the opening grabs the attention of the viewer and reader and establishes
the highly subjective universe of both literary and filmic narratives. Book
and film share the basic concept of a rejection of mindless consumerism
for visceral violence, which turns political and tragic and leads to a colli-
sion of multiple personalities, which begin the narrative as separate but
which by the end converge shockingly and powerfully. Most of the memo-
rable, quotable dialogue derives directly from the novel, often expressed
as punchy, gnomic utterances about the emptiness of modern life.
In book and film, Jack ‘‘prays’’ for an air crash but only Fincher actually
shows us one (in an unsignalled subjective vision). However, there is al-
ready a strongly cinematic element to Palahniuk’s literary aesthetic. Eerily
foreshadowing key images from the 9/11 Twin Tower collapses, he
describes the fall of the Parker-Morris building as a ‘‘five-picture time
lapse series.’’24 After the explosion at his apartment, he invites us to ‘‘pic-
ture’’ the destruction and later the scene at Marla’s apartment.25 In his
afterword, Palahniuk explains that he was searching for a way ‘‘to just—
cut, cut, cut. To jump. From scene to scene,’’ explicitly referencing Citizen
Kane in his search for a framework for his narrative.26
Marla’s role is trimmed a little from the book so that we do not see her
stealing Meals-on-Wheels food meant for her neighbors or a job she has in
a funeral parlor and her line about wanting to ‘‘have Tyler’s abortion’’ (in
the original novel) was ultimately cut as just too alienating and controver-
sial for some viewers. The book features Tyler being fired as a projection-
ist and Jack trying to blackmail a hotel employee about what unspeakable
things he has done to the food, both resulting in beatings. Fincher cuts
both firings and transfers the beating scene to Tyler and the brutal gang-
ster boss.
The film cuts a brief relationship Jack has with Chloe, the woman dying
of cancer. Perhaps to have included the brutal way in which he uses her
and then calls her ‘‘a skeleton dipped in yellow wax’’ would make him
closer to the psychotic Patrick Bateman of Brett Easton Ellis’s American
Psycho (book, 1991; film, Mary Harron, 2000) and thereby less empa-
thetic (important as his voiceover pervades the whole film).27 The narrator
tells us Tyler’s background as a projectionist rather than the film, which
can more easily show it, giving greater life to his character and a stronger,
more problematic sense of him as an independent entity. Similarly, the
hero’s interior monologue in the book, often carried almost verbatim,
becomes Tyler’s film dialogue, such as the lecture on the rules of Fight
Club or much of Marla’s dialogue.28 In some ways the book is too sche-
matic, with its Jekyll-and-Hyde notion that Jack becomes Tyler when he
falls asleep.
The relationship Jack has with his boss in the film is much more unset-
tling and threatening in the film, conveyed through montages of Norton’s
bruised face and his bloodied smile to co-workers in a meeting. There is a
great sense of threat in the speech Norton gives to his boss, painting a
vivid picture of an office psycho, who might just run amok with an auto-
matic rifle. He gradually sidles round the desk and brings the speech to a
climax by noisily snatching the paper from the man’s terrified hand (on
which point the rising music is cut) and then bringing the emotional inten-
sity down by answering a call from Marla in bland, anodyne tones. After
the outburst at his boss and his suggestion that ‘‘Maybe you shouldn’t
bring me every piece of trash you happen to pick up,’’ Jack admits on voi-
ceover that these were ‘‘Tyler’s words coming out of my mouth.’’ His
powerful, increasingly psychotic speech compresses over two pages of the
novel, including what he knows about the company’s immoral insurance
practices, into a chillingly threatening speech that reduces the possibility
of Fight Club’s immediate exposure and scares the boss off for a while.
When Palahniuk’s hero tells us that after a fight, ‘‘everything in the real
world gets the volume turned down,’’ Fincher makes the effect literal,
dropping the sound for a few seconds, which not only conveys the post-
fight reality of damaged hearing but also the sense that Jack filters those
impressions that he wants or not, i.e., we are being presented with a
highly subjective narrative.29 The film takes elements from the book and
regroups them; so, for example, all the rules are placed together and the
dialogue around Jack and Tyler’s first fight which the film spreads out via
flashback and flash-forwards. The repeated action on the porch of the
Paper Street house with individuals keen to be selected for Project
114 David Fincher
Mayhem provides perfect cinematic material for jump cuts, punchy dia-
logue, and quick cutting.
Conclusion
Part of the appeal of both films are the ways in which they challenge
generic categories. In Fight Club, there is a cross-generic feel to the later
argument between Marla and Jack about therapy groups, conducted on
the move between a thrift shop, a Laundromat, and a busy road, with the
dialogue suggesting the division of property following a divorce with some
haggling over custody (‘‘You can’t have the whole brain’’ and ‘‘I want
bowel cancer’’) in front of a bemused storekeeper caught in the middle of
the T-frame (and an improvement on the novel which only uses reported
speech and had no third-party observer). Later when Jack discovers his
destroyed apartment, the doorman asks ‘‘d’you have someone you can
call?’’ in the manner of a cliched bereavement scenario. However, in both
The Game and Fight Club, the prime creative relationship is not between
audience and fictional characters but between the fiction and the director.
Notions of impossibility are played with in both films but the result of this
is not really any deeper understanding of the characters, more a focus on
the director pulling the visual strings.
Chapter 5
It’s Not Like the Book:

The Curious Case of
Benjamin Button
Much of the comment surrounding the film has focused, not surprisingly,
on the special effects that allow Brad Pitt to perform ‘‘through’’ the faces
of first Peter Badalamenti and then Robert Towers via facial capture and
digital compositing. However, this has served to obscure consideration of
wider elements of the film, such as its highly derivative nature, its narra-
tive structure and characterization, and the relationship to its literary
source material.
There are a striking number of similarities with Forrest Gump (Robert
Zemeckis, 1994). At a very basic level, this begins with a common script-
writer (Eric Roth) but extends to a range of form and content—both nar-
ratives chart the life of a slow-speaking hero with a Southern accent,
whose initial physical difficulties are overcome by a miraculous transfor-
mation scene and whose subsequent development challenges the accepted
laws of nature and who spends much of the film trying to work out his
personal destiny against the backdrop of national events. There are slight
differences in that unlike Gump’s close acquaintance with events and fig-
ures on the national and even international stage, chronologically it is
placed earlier (opening in 1919), Pearl Harbor is reported only verbally,
and the focus is more resolutely on the personal with the wider world felt
as noises off. However, in both films, there is a love story with a single
individual, which false-starts but is consummated more completely by the
end; both films end with the death of the beloved. Both narratives are ini-
tiated from a perusal of a collection of personal effects, kept in a small
shoe box. Both films are highly episodic, extremely long, and use the latest
in special effects technology to convey the miraculous nature of their
116 David Fincher
protagonist. There are episodes on a boat (in part related to a war involv-
ing America), the arrival of unexpected wealth, and a mother figure who
holds a pivotal emotional role for the hero (and a strict respect for women
in general, typically addressing them as ‘‘Ma’am’’).
Despite the basic premise of Button’s aging, the film is constructed
from memories, expressed in writing (diaries and postcards) and drama-
tized in a basic linear form. Both heroes are given a nugget of wisdom,
which they repeat to others like a gnomic chain letter and which sup-
posedly their lives embody (but in both cases this is difficult as the basic
premise is ‘‘expect the unexpected,’’ which is hard to convey in dramatic
terms). Gump’s Lieutenant Dan becomes Captain Mike (Jared Harris), a
father figure who imparts the meaning of sacrifice in war. Both charac-
ters’ experience of war is epitomized by the mundane interrupted by
one life-changing event, in which nearly all the hero’s compatriots are
killed.
Despite both narratives being delivered in first-person voiceover (Caro-
line’s shifting into Benjamin’s here), we observe both characters bobbing
through their lives, largely at the whim of external circumstances, and
although the journey can be an interesting one, having reached the end, it
is hard to say whether we really have come to know much about the inner
life of either men. Neither ever becomes ‘‘worldly’’—they pass through life
with an undiminished sense of wonder. Both act as a repository of audi-
ence feelings about a particular situation. Granted, Pitt has the added chal-
lenge of trying to emote through someone else’s face, but a childlike
optimism and, as the title suggests, curiosity are the dominant impressions.
We see heroes who are hungry for knowledge and better still experience,
but what they actually gain from this is unclear. It is this hunger for expe-
rience which predominates, reflecting the narrative drive itself, and this is
one major reason why the films are so episodic—both films are essentially
a series of stories, with an emphasis on actions rather than focusing on
how they are told.
Both end with an airborne, computer-generated (CG) symbol that
appears earlier in the film (one a feather, the other a hummingbird),
designed to enforce and dovetail the main message of the film, although
exactly what that might be is ambiguous. The CG hummingbird that
appears as Button contemplates his survival of the U-boat ramming and
just before Daisy dies might represent the ascent of the soul, of the bond
between Daisy and Benjamin, of the spiritual peace each character gains
at that moment, even the simultaneous ‘‘death’’ of Daisy and New Orleans
at the hands of Hurricane Katrina. Various interpretations aside, the status
It’s Not Like the Book: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button 117
here of the bird as a self-conscious symbol weakens its power, drawing

attention to itself and to the cinematic means by which it appears.
TIME’S ARROW
‘‘We’re meant to lose the people we love. How else will we know how im-
portant they are to us?’’
—Daisy
There is a structural and dramatic weakness in the frame story in that

once established, it is simply unnecessary to keep cutting back to it. The
realization that Benjamin is Caroline’s father and the shift to the postcards
as a source of information, could be useful but the repeated return to
Daisy is absolutely unnecessary and despite Cate Blanchett’s amazing per-
formance under hours of make-up, is an example of where a director loses
sight of his story. This may sound harsh, but what really do the references
to Katrina actually add dramatically? There is no evacuation and there is
no jeopardy. The New Orleans location, if it is important at all, could be
more concisely conveyed with a matte from the window. It feels more like
Fincher is attached to the genesis of his film, which began life before the
advent of the storm and that he wishes to pay tribute to the endurance of
the city and its people. The main problem, apart from the obsolescence of
these sequences, is they repeatedly break the dramatic illusion and erode
dramatic engagement with Benjamin. Ormond and Blanchett produce fine
performances, but that does not detract from the fact that the frame struc-
ture is almost wholly redundant. This is underlined by the ‘‘false dawn’’
scene as Caroline fears midway through the film that Daisy is at the point
of dying but she recovers—the sequence feels like a very contrived injec-
tion of attempted drama in a static situation.
There is an attempt at a causal link in the idea that the work of Mon-
sieur Gateau (Elias Koteas) in producing a clock that runs backward, in
the hope it can somehow bring his dead son back from the war, creates
Button’s condition. However, the opening sequence, which seems slightly
adrift from the body of the film, works better at a purely metaphorical
level, the full significance of which is only reached in the final shot as the
water floods the abandoned workshop and reminds us of the opening
shots. The imagery is certainly striking, such as the reversed trench war-
fare, taking the young infantrymen out of harm’s way, which seems no
more perverse than what actually happened, as well as evoking Time’s
Arrow (Martin Amis, 1991) and Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut,
118 David Fincher
1969), both of which tried to make sense of the incomprehensibility of

war by running their narratives in reverse.
Like the Gateau sequence, Daisy’s elaborate accident sequence is also
theoretically dispensable (certainly Warner and Paramount thought so).
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999) opens with a very similar
sequence, inter-cutting a set of circumstances, which seem to conspire in
an unbelievable way, but Fincher’s vision is nonetheless different. Like the
conception of CRS in The Game, he gives us a binary vision of reality, one
version where laces did break, a man did fail to set his alarm clock, and
where a woman did miss a taxi and a package was delivered, juxtaposed
with another reality where these things did not happen. It is almost as if
both realities, or the multiplicity of possibilities, are held in open tension
for a few minutes before the events coalesce into one particular form.
Fincher refers to the accident sections as his ‘‘Sliding Doors’’ sequence, but
it is perhaps telling that in Peter Howitt’s 1998 film, the device is central
to the whole film, not a peripheral curiosity.
Cinematic time appears to be extended by repetition (the appearance of
Kipling’s book, the hummingbird, Mr. Daws’s lightning stories, and
Gateau’s clock), but is actually extended on occasion by slow motion
(such as when Daisy and Benjamin enter a restaurant, conveying the
beauty of the moment and the avalanche of Daisy’s passionate conversa-
tion about ballet, only snippets of which Benjamin catches). Elsewhere it
is compressed—Caroline’s birth scene is conveyed very perfunctorily by
sound effects alone, the postcards succinctly convey verbal information
complemented by the montage of Benjamin’s Eastern odyssey (shot by
Tarsem Singh, the Second Unit Director). We jump in time to Benjamin’s
return to meet his own daughter, Daisy’s ‘‘new’’ husband, and one final
sexual assignation.
The repeated motif of Mr. Daws (Clay Cullen first; later, Ted Manson)
beginning ‘‘Did I ever tell you . . .?’’ before we cut to a grainy reconstruc-
tion of another lightning strike seems the kind of non sequitur that makes
movie studios nervous. Despite appearances, these episodes are only repe-
titions in kind and actually do not number seven in total. Possibly a nod
to Shakespeare’s ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ speech directly (the whole film is a
basic reverse of this sequence), these quirky anecdotes mark off the pro-
gress through the film, otherwise lacking chronological markers, which are
clear (paradoxically, despite Benjamin noting the date and his age, it is not
easy for an audience to have a precise sense of time in the film). Like the
Gateau sequence, it suggests we experience life as a series of film clips,
which we can rerun when retelling/reliving memories.
One might see all human life as inherently linear and episodic, but But-
ton’s film narrative takes this to an extreme—characters appear, deliver
their moral lesson, and then disappear again, often not to be seen or heard
of again. Mr. Oti (Rampa Mohadi) in the old people’s home initiates
Benjamin into life outside the home, taking him on a streetcar and then to
a brothel. There is the potential for a sense of a chaotic breakout, like Jack
Nicholson’s R.P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos
Forman, 1975), but Oti’s character disappears even before the episode is
complete, with Benjamin forced to make his own way home. It could be
said that Oti has performed his function, and that Benjamin should gain
his own independence, but it does not stop the impression of characteriza-
tion operating primarily at the level of narrative function.
It is an interesting idea to suggest, as the film overtly does, that ‘‘the
people we remember least make the greatest impression on us’’ (often
without our full knowledge). However, it does risk making characters into
mere ciphers, such as the woman who teaches Benjamin the piano, the im-
portance of whom is stated rather than shown. After all, he does not
become a concert pianist and does not play the piano again until returning
as a regressed boy at the end.
So we have a series of characters as ‘‘couriers’’—Captain Mike with his tat-
toos (be an artist if you want to be); Elizabeth and her Channel swim (never
give up on your dreams; persevere and you will succeed; ‘‘Anything’s possi-
ble’’); and Pleasant Curtis (whose only lines of dialogue exact a promise to
send pay back, i.e., ‘‘doing right’’ by your family). The simplified version of
the American Dream represented here finds its apotheosis in Benjamin’s pon-
tificating about stoicism, hard work, and social mobility (‘‘You can change or
stay the same. There are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the
worst of it. I hope you make the best of it.’’)—yet one more link with Gump.
This is picked up right at the end with the final device of a track-up to a
single frame of a number of supporting characters with the voiceover ‘‘Some
people . . .’’ (what Fincher refers to as ‘‘his Little Britain sequence’’), giving each
an iconic status with one defining feature, finishing on Daisy, whose defining
characteristic is that she ‘‘dances’’ in an implicit carpe diem exhortation. Thus
we are encouraged to pursue our destiny, Gump-like, and emulate Benjamin’s
curiosity, although as an adult this trait seems to fall away quite markedly.
RUN THE FILM BACKWARDS—TECHNOLOGY VS. CHARACTER

Like Van Orton’s flashbacks to his father in The Game, Fincher concep-
tualizes memory as inherently cinematic in form. In a digital age, it is the
120 David Fincher
method by which he shows a character thinking about his or her own

past. So we have the sporadic reminiscences of Mr. Daws, who recounts
the number of times he has been struck by lightning, and we cut to a brief
glimpse of the scene in flickering silent film form. The ‘‘Did I ever tell you
about . . .?’’ introduction threatens repetition, but we actually see a new
‘‘clip’’ from his personal archive each time. It is the advent of film and our
internalization of its mechanisms that really allows us to arrest the pro-
gress of time, to re-run past events, and reconsider their significance in the
present. Similarly, the Monsieur Gateau sequence uses grainy and slightly
jerky images to convey not just a memory of a past event but a historic
one—an event worthy of being recorded on film.
There are some great single shots and sequences such as Daisy dancing
in the gazebo, a scene charged with sexual tension, backlit through rising
mist and some amazing body doubles (Jessica Cropper/Katherine Crock-
ett), and some effective computer-enhanced sailing shots (in brilliant day-
light, juxtaposed with the Kennedy rocket launch and swimming around
the boat in moonlight), as well as all the tugboat sequences. The shots in
the ballet studio at the bar, especially the reflected image like a mental
photo, succinctly capture the point at which their ages are nearly aligned.
Juxtaposed forward- and reverse-tracking shots are used to link a former
opera singer with Benjamin in the bath and later convey the sense of Daisy
entering the restaurant as if pursued by Benjamin, who, through the point
of view of the handheld camera, cannot take his eyes off her. Fincher
claims the shot of the handover of money on the tugboat is his favorite in
the film, with a shaft of light supposedly illuminating the symbolic act
of generosity and fellow feeling. However, unlike Steven Spielberg’s
Schindler’s List (1993), which also features such an iconic image, often
featured on video cases and other promotional material, here there is
insufficient substance in the film to see this shot as iconic. Pleasant Curtis
(Josh Stewart), a character whom we barely know, makes an entirely illog-
ical act, giving all his pay to someone he barely knows with no certainty
that Benjamin will not be the one who is killed.
There is a fundamental contradiction between the level of hyper-realism
of Zodiac (typified by the precisely made prop material, produced at
Fincher’s command but remaining hidden, in the drawers of the newspa-
per office) and Benjamin Button. Despite the rigors of the technology
involved in this film, at three distinct points on his DVD commentary
Fincher reiterates ‘‘It’s a movie.’’ The hinge on the boat doors is reversed,
the rocket is in Florida, and an earlier bridge in the background as Benjamin
shows Daisy the boat are CG manipulations to achieve a better shot.
Perhaps Fincher himself has decided to follow Capt. Mike’s advice, ‘‘When
it comes to the end, you have to let go.’’ It may not be the end of Fincher’s
career, but there is the sense that he may have mellowed a little in his need
for apparent verisimilitude, even saying that he both ‘‘fears’’ and ‘‘weeps’’
for those with a pedantic fascination over continuity errors. Such senti-
ments have been present in his work before (think of Tyler Durden’s
exhortation to ‘‘Just let go’’ and Avery telling Graysmith to forget the
Zodiac killer, but sympathy for Graysmith’s obsession outweighs Avery,
who seems weak and overwhelmed by alcoholism by this point), but per-
haps this is the first sign that Fincher himself is open to such a philosophy.
Psychology is made a redundant tool, as not only does Button have no
significant childhood trauma (the experiences of death seem perfectly nat-
ural to him), he has no significant childhood due to his reversed chronol-
ogy. If one wanted to make the case, which this writer certainly does not,
for the validity of psychology here, it would have to be that an event in
old age had a bearing on his move toward adolescence. However, by the
time we meet the preteen Benjamin, he seems to display features of demen-
tia rather than the rebellion of puberty. He is closer to the final stage (‘‘sec-
ond childishness’’) of Jacques’s ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ speech from
Shakespeare’s As You Like It.1 In Tizzy’s recitation of Shakespeare (and
Fincher’s apparent lack of interest in it in the commentary), the superficial
dominates over what such a text might mean. We just see a character dem-
onstrate unexpected knowledge but exactly what and why is unclear. The
text, from Henry VI, part I, describes the death of Mortimer ‘‘like a man
new haled from the rack.’’2 There is some resonance here as he is speaking
in an old people’s home with regular ‘‘departures’’ and there is a sense that
he might be referring to Benjamin, who with his physical appearance, is
not expected to live long. However, it is strangely out of keeping with the
tone of the film (here emphasizing life as a torture from which death is a
welcome release), suggesting both Tizzy and perhaps even Fincher do not
fully understand its substance.
Henry K. Miller talks about a ‘‘weak first act’’ with ‘‘portentous coinci-
dences stacking up without momentum.’’3 Certainly, characters appear in,
and disappear from, Benjamin’s story with little sense that he has necessar-
ily internalized, or even noticed, the lesson they each have to give. After
the most obvious of these, his dalliance with Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton),
there is the clear sense that she regrets not following through on earlier
resolutions (symbolized in the cross-Channel swim), but we do not see
Benjamin acting on this advice. Rather, he later wishes he had not stayed
away from Daisy for so long, suggesting the exact opposite. Somehow the
122 David Fincher
final lightning story prompts him to go back to his father (Jason Flemyng)
and achieve some kind of reconciliation before death, but exactly why this
acts as a catalyst we can only guess.
Bachelard’s notion of the house as a space in which to dream, touched
on in Chapter 2, is developed further here. The young Benjamin tells us
how ‘‘I would listen to the house breathing . . . and myself, safe.’’ We cut
between a series of cutaways of inhabitants at rest in the large womb-like
house, which accepts all comers and which is resigned to a steady stream
of arrivals and departures, both literally and metaphorically. The house
becomes a metaphor for mortality; life as a series of leave-takings. The
maternal, welcoming nature of this giant, sprawling house (reminiscent of
John Irving’s alternative ‘‘family’’ dwelling in The World According to
Garp, adapted for the screen by George Roy Hill, 1982), is stressed
throughout the film, as Benjamin repeatedly comes back unannounced and
yet is accepted back, like the prodigal son. Later in his brief relationship
with Elizabeth, the couple make the empty ground floor of a hotel their
own (which rather improbably features no staff at all). The significance of
the space is only truly apparent when after a series of assignations in the
lounge and kitchen area, Benjamin walks into a series of rooms, empty
except for himself.
Benjamin himself is an ambiguous figure, part ‘‘ET’’-like baby, part
engaging enfant terrible. There are comic moments, verbal gags like an old
lady noting ‘‘he looks just like my old husband’’ or situation comedy as
when he strains to look out of the glass partition in the front door, only to
slip and fall; but what should be moving, his miracle in walking for exam-
ple, is not. The yearning for experience should be engaging in the film more
widely, but there is very little real sustained vigor shown by Benjamin, even
when he has the body of a much younger man. Clearly a huge amount of
time was spent around the figure of Button to create a credible series of
transformations. Pitt himself conveys steadily improving vigor by little
touches, such as a more purposeful gait in walking to the French hospital,
even skipping up a couple of steps. There are times when minimal or lack
of expression can be powerful but his passivity when Queenie (Taraji P.
Henson) announces her pregnancy makes the pseudo-Oedipal moment
unconvincing—we are not sure exactly how much Benjamin understands.
Fincher may have been correct, in commercial terms at least, to have cut a
couple of scenes in Roth’s script that had Benjamin masturbating, but this
would at least have shown that he (Benjamin) had such feelings.
His romance with Elizabeth (Swinton’s casting partly at Pitt’s sugges-
tion) has touching moments, as he is framed before a chiming clock that
interrupts them, Cinderella-like, early on and will be destined to frame the

nature of their whole relationship. A similar shot is used at the moment he
is told of Queenie’s death. They must steal time together at night until
Benjamin is left sleeping on the couch alone downstairs, the passage of
time conveyed by dissolves, jump cut together. However, Fincher talks
about Elizabeth providing the impetus that drives him to war, but there is
little sense of this. Benjamin does not appear bitter and what Fincher sees
as causal, viewers might well feel is purely sequential.
His on-off romance with Daisy is problematic. Exactly why he rejects
her after her gazebo dance is left for us to wonder. He might be intimi-
dated or he might not want to spoil the exquisite nature of the moment,
but we just do not know and are left feeling that credible characterization
is subordinated to thematic concerns. He rejects her so that he can som-
berly deliver the moral, ‘‘Our lives are defined by opportunities. Even the
ones we miss.’’ If this is true, how this event ‘‘defines’’ Benjamin is unclear.
The idea that they are thinking of each other might be conveyed by cutting
between them as they both turn in bed, unable to sleep, by implication
thinking of each other. However, this emotional bond apparently does not
extend to prevent them sleeping with other people. Her parallel rejection
of him after her accident may be the result of self-pity (something she
admits to when she cries later at the pool) but again, we do not really
know. There is the persistent impression here of characters kept apart for
narrative means, a consummation deferred to heighten the drama when
they do finally come together. Even here, her act of dressing, putting on
pantyhose facing away from him, suggests a level of domestic familiarity
but also shame about her body in comparison with his. The final words
they exchange as adults, ‘‘Goodnight Benjamin,’’ Blanchett’s idea, may
seem a more fitting and touching reminder of Elizabeth’s words on parting
as well as Benjamin’s drift toward a second childhood, with Daisy as a
mother figure. Although Daisy talks of ‘‘Kismet’’ later, the film does not
have a coherent view of predetermined fate, focusing more closely on the
possibility of Gump-like self-improvement.
If we are supposed to see Benjamin’s father as something of a coward
for abandoning his child, Benjamin’s decision to walk away from his own
child could be seen as equally reprehensible. He clearly does not take the
decision lightly, trying to spend as much time with his daughter as possible
(played by his own daughter, Shiloh, in long shot), but there is still the
notion of sparing both the pain of loss as if he has a terminal disease.
Daisy does admit later ‘‘You were right. I couldn’t have raised both of
you,’’ but on his first return, she clearly feels he is still old enough to have
124 David Fincher
a final sexual encounter. After this point, when he regresses to a forgetful

child, he becomes a burden but his regret through his postcards to Caro-
line does suggest he made a mistake in leaving when he did. What saves
the decision for Fincher, but not necessarily the viewer, is the knowing
look that Daisy gives Benjamin as he leaves (a suggestion from Blanchett),
suggesting tacit agreement.
THE CURIOUS CASE OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

The Fitzgerald short story on which the script is based was first pub-
lished in 1921 as one of a number of whimsical tales under the section
‘‘Fantasy.’’ Most comments dismiss any linkage with the source text
beyond its basic premise, but there are a number of interesting links here.
Fitzgerald’s tale is more firmly part of the Jazz Age, whereas scriptwriter
Eric Roth wants to be free to use mechanized transport and so he has
updated the setting of Button’s birth from 1860 to Armistice Day in 1918
and from Baltimore to New Orleans. This is also possibly an attempt to
make the tale more resonant with contemporary viewers, if not in its
opening but by its close, bringing it up to the present with the advent of
Hurricane Katrina. Fincher describes the shift as ‘‘not inordinately impor-
tant’’ but it is tempting to see more prosaic factors at play in tax breaks
offered by Louisiana. It is understandable to try and control costs on any
production but the budget here ($150 million) is so huge and largely
driven by the technological elements of the film, that it is hard not to see a
causal connection between location and technology.
Unlike Roth, Fitzgerald does not posit an explanation for Button’s con-
dition beyond the decision to have the baby in a hospital, which is not
really exceptional enough to justify it as a cause. It may however have
prompted Fincher’s suggestion to introduce the hospital as a frame story.
The Studio certainly did not favor the sequence with Gateau’s clock and it
does seem odd to go to the trouble of inserting an ‘‘explanation’’ and then
making it theoretically dispensable and ‘‘magical realist’’ in tone.
A notable feature of Roth’s adaptation is that at no time does any char-
acter go beyond remarking on how young Button is looking in a given
scene, to pondering on the cause and progress of the actual condition
itself. Fitzgerald does not use his narrative point of view to comment ei-
ther but certainly several characters in the fiction do pass judgment (nota-
bly Benjamin’s wife and later son, Roscoe, as well as the New York
papers), usually unfavorably, often blaming him for a socially unaccept-
able process, implying that he bears some responsibility for it. First
Benjamin’s father and later Roscoe (who takes on the mantle of father to
him) both disavow Benjamin’s condition, making him dye his hair and
dressing him so as to disguise his condition. There is a reaction too from
the wider community, seeing the poor child as a social embarrassment. By
contrast, in the film, no one says anything. Not a single character regards
Button as the medical freak/curiosity/exception that he clearly is. Unlike
Fitzgerald’s Benjamin who is humiliated at Yale, Fincher and Roth dis-
avow that Button is part of a wider society at all, which is particularly
unconvincing given the altered timeframe as part of the 20th century and
its attendant mass media. On the one hand, this links the film with texts
like Kafka’s ‘‘Metamorphosis’’ (1915) where it is the very lack of reaction
from the family of Gregor Samsa as he turns into a giant beetle that is
unsettling. Such a device might be termed the ‘‘literary fantastic,’’ if it were
clear that this is part of Roth’s design, but that is not so.
Roth’s screenplay more than differs from Fitzgerald’s—it takes a diamet-
rically opposite view of a number of characters and situations, ameliorat-
ing material en route. The doctor at birth is resigned but understanding in
contrast to Fitzgerald’s overtly hostile figure, Hildegarde’s shrewishness is
translated into Cate Blanchett’s serenity and beauty, and all embarrassing
or potentially nightmarish scenes at school, Harvard, or with the military
are cut. Instead of a family often judgemental and unhelpful, Roth gives
his hero an unconventional extended family who support him at every
turn, providing him with a secure foundation in which to grow up, sym-
bolized by the huge house which seems open for Benjamin to return to at
any point in the narrative.
An inherent narrative feature is copiously avoided by Roth and Fincher.
In Fitzgerald’s story, Button can also speak from birth, logical perhaps
given his accelerated growth. There is therefore from the outset a verbal
dialogue between the child and the figures around him, including his fa-
ther. Roth’s ‘‘abandoning’’ motif sidesteps this completely. Fitzgerald men-
tions ‘‘the slave market’’ and articulates that ‘‘for a dark instant Mr.
Button wished passionately that his son was black,’’ which may have
prompted the shift to a colored family as the pseudo-parents of Benjamin.4
There is only mention in the story much later of a kindly nurse, a Miss Bai-
ley, in Benjamin’s regressed childhood (and ‘‘Nana,’’ who could be the same
person), which Roth expands into the much larger role of Queenie. The
tone of Benjamin’s childhood in the old people’s home (‘‘It was a wonderful
place’’ to be surrounded by ‘‘people who had shed all the inconsequences of
earlier life’’) draws on Fitzgerald’s description of his discussions with his
grandfather with whom he is content to sit and talk for hours.5
126 David Fincher
The tone of the source story, especially the disparity between Benjamin’s
chronological age and the maturity of his speech, gives rise to a comic,
even farcical tone (the child demands more than milk to drink, is fussy
about his clothes, wants a cane to walk with, questions his given name of
‘‘Methuselah’’ and soon gains a taste for cigars as a toddler). This is closer
to the comic absurdity of Paul McGuigan’s The Acid House (1998), fea-
turing a foul-mouthed baby. However, while Roth and Fincher opt for a
more serious-minded tone, they do not replace the inherently absurd na-
ture of the situation with anything more substantial. Fitzgerald’s Button
can walk from birth but Roth puts in a scene of the ‘‘miracle’’ of Benjamin
walking. While resonant perhaps of New Orleans evangelical prayer meet-
ings, the precise significance of this is again unclear—we could see this as
a miracle, a freak show, or irony—the preacher suffers a heart attack at
the moment that Benjamin takes his first steps. Like the film, Fitzgerald’s
story features a couple of scenes before mirrors, where Benjamin becomes
more conscious of his own condition, demanding long trousers symbolic
of adulthood at only 12, and much later as he reverts into his teen years
being aware of how his shrunken form only parodies the military uniform
he is trying to put on.
For someone whose prime characteristic is supposedly curiosity, in the
film we do not see Benjamin reading alone. Fitzgerald has Benjamin list-
lessly reading a collection of adventure stories, The Boy Scouts in Bimini
Bay, but Roth adds scenes with others reading to him and Daisy, in partic-
ular one of Rudyard Kipling’s Just-So Stories (1902), but this is more as a
parallel to Button’s reversed aging, rather than a sign of intellectual curios-
ity in itself.
It is ‘‘The Sing Song of Old Man Kangaroo,’’ an Ugly Duckling–style
tale of transformation which is clearly important because it appears three
times in all, but beyond a child’s story where time appears to move back-
ward, does this mock Benjamin? It could act as a sign that Daisy at some
level responds to his dilemma (she is the one being read to), but Benjamin’s
request for the tale to be told again sounds almost sarcastic. As a literary
parallel to the Gateau frame-story, it might suggest that the story ‘‘how
Benjamin got his condition’’ is as much a leap of imaginative fantasy as
Kipling’s other stories; that we are meant to accept such narratives as
entertainments rather than tragic tales of Elephant Man–like deformity.
Fitzgerald’s Benjamin chooses to work for his father, a character who is
actively present in the narrative, rather than Fincher’s shadowy Dickensian
benefactor figure. Significantly, in the short story, the Button business is
dry goods, especially nails. Roth and Fincher transpose that to the
ridiculously unlikely situation that someone with the surname ‘‘Button’’

would miraculously develop their namesake’s product as the source of
their wealth. It seems strange that Fincher should opt for such literalism
from the outset, constructing the Paramount and Warner Brothers’ logos
from a CG button effect, when effectively buttons are not integral to the
film. Unlike Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), we know the identity of
Benjamin’s ‘‘mystery’’ benefactor from the outset. Apart from giving the
father the veneer of a war profiteer and bringing Benjamin closer to an
object more associated with childhood and possible ‘‘sweetness,’’ rather
than the more prosaic ‘‘nails,’’ this alliterative name change only serves
to underline the Gump-like nature of Benjamin (also in the use of
‘‘Mr. Cake’’ for the French clockmaker).
There is a precursor for Daisy in Fitzgerald’s Hildegarde, who is
described as ‘‘slender and frail, with hair that was ashen under the moon
and honey-colored’’ with whom Benjamin falls in love with at first sight
despite the lack of approval from her family.6 Fitzgerald makes her the
daughter of a general, whereas disapproval in the film comes from the
reaction of the grandmother (Phyllis Somerville) to the midnight assigna-
tion under the table. The jealousy that Benjamin feels later at seeing Daisy
dance with her contemporaries at the after-show party is prefigured in
Fitzgerald too—‘‘He stood close to the wall, silent, inscrutable, watching
with murderous eyes the young bloods of Baltimore as they eddied around
Hildegarde Moncrief.’’7 Like Fincher’s Daisy, Hildegarde is attracted to
the older mature man from the outset but as a young woman, she is able
to articulate this, whereas there is something distinctly uncomfortable
about what precisely is going on in the first meeting between Daisy and
Benjamin, specifically what he is feeling for her. This is not to impose a
grubby reading on the magical tryst beneath the table, nor to say that
older people should not have youngsters as friends, but it is the very nature
of that friendship here which is questionable. He is attracted to a seven-
year-old girl (voiced by Blanchett herself). He may not have any particular
sexual designs on her but his attraction in itself should give viewers reason
to pause. The sudden shift in the grandmother from kindly figure to censori-
ous matron either seems inconsistent or a signal that we should share some
of these sentiments. Hildegarde is less knowing than Cate Blanchett’s Daisy,
disavowing Benjamin’s regression and becoming more shrewish in the proc-
ess, as Fitzgerald uses Benjamin’s condition to motivate the couple growing
apart rather than Fincher’s attempt at transient harmony.
Fitzgerald emphasizes Benjamin’s industriousness and status as the driv-
ing force of the family firm, doubling its value. He is given the vigor of a
128 David Fincher
successful businessman, being the first man in Baltimore to own a car

and later a medal-winning military hero. Perhaps this latter episode
would make the parallels with Forrest Gump just too overwhelming and
Fincher’s Button is not work-shy, volunteering to go to war on the tugboat,
but we see him take little pleasure in any kind of work, which further lends
his character a slightly soulless feel. He may be gentle (Fincher refers to
similarities with his own father), but there is a crushing passivity to his
nature, which, over nearly three hours, struggles to carry a narrative.
In the film, Benjamin’s increased physical strength is emphasized with
subtlety and craft by Pitt but to no great purposeful end apart from a
rapid montage of his sexual conquests, played more for laughs. Iconic
shots of Pitt on a motorbike might look good on a trailer but it literally
and metaphorically does not take him anywhere.
Extra filmic factors impinge on both narratives. Fitzgerald himself wrote
the original story not long after becoming a father himself, while Roth’s
own experience watching his mother die of cancer informs his presenta-
tion of Daisy and specifically Caroline’s question ‘‘Are you afraid?’’
answered by Daisy’s ‘‘I’m curious.’’ Roth claims that the source for the
hummingbird was partly that one appeared outside his window while he
was writing but it should also be noted that after a dreamy first meeting
with Hildegarde, Fitzgerald describes Benjamin going home, aware that
‘‘the first bees were humming’’ and a few lines later ‘‘an oriole yawned
piercingly,’’ which may have also provided Roth with the inspiration for
the symbol.8
Fitzgerald traces Benjamin’s regression from Harvard to a wish to go to
prep school and then finally kindergarten. He eventually lives with his son
and described as he ‘‘moped about the house in adolescent mooniness,’’
before attempting to rejoin the army, only to be rejected humiliatingly.9 In
the film, we glimpse Benjamin playing with lead soldiers but Fitzgerald
only mentions them at the opposite end of his development as a senile
young boy. However, in Fitzgerald’s story, Benjamin’s regression is not
really tragic as the boy he becomes appears to remember nothing of the
life he led, having peaceful dreams as his language degenerates to nothing.
As a baby, he fades away, becoming only dimly aware of sense impres-
sions, like the protagonist in Sydney Carter’s poem, Run the Film
Backwards.
Many other narratives in print and film have attempted to manipulate
chronology, but often this has been to create momentum toward the
solving of a crime, such as in David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) or
Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000). The Stephen King miniseries Golden
Years (1991) has an element of government conspiracy too, but it does also,
like Benjamin Button, examine the possibility of a male protagonist reversing
the aging process and what that might mean to his loved ones. The Time
Traveller’s Wife (novel by Audrey Niffenegger, 2003; film adaptation by
Robert Schwentke, 2009) as the title suggests has an explicit time-travel
element, missing here, but like Button, it features a central love story in
which a couple are destined to meet at mismatched ages (an older man
and very young girl) and snatch a brief period of happiness later, only for
processes beyond their control to separate them again.
CONCLUSION
There is a slightly tragic element in the film, but the sheer inevitability
of the process means that the hero can plan for it. Although missing Daisy
in younger days, the pair experience a period of idyllic time together and
live long lives with a substantial element of personal fulfilment in each.
When Benjamin’s father does reveal himself, the son has no reason to
berate him, for his absence has not marked the boy in any noticeable way
(except in the positive sense of being brought up by Queenie in a house
dominated by love). The lives of Daisy and Benjamin parallel one another,
both living into their 80s and both making their peace with relatives
before dying. The extremely allusive (some might even say derivative) na-
ture of the film’s plotting, the passivity of its hero, and its inherently epi-
sodic nature, are all problematic. However, the tone of Daisy’s death and
the degeneration of Benjamin close the film with a quiet dignity and the
final impression of a life (supposedly) dominated by curiosity will be filled
with experiences. This curiosity is perhaps felt less in the emotional lives
of the characters than in Fincher’s technical presentation of them as he
continues to push the boundaries of what is possible to convey on film.
Chapter 6
The New De Palma?
‘‘Without the case, I had nothing.’’

—‘‘Bucky’’ Bleichert in The Black Dahlia1
Clearly director Brian De Palma’s career stretches over five decades and
his body of work is much greater than Fincher’s, including genres which
Fincher has not yet touched, including gangster film. However, in some
specific ways David Fincher might be viewed as the natural heir to De
Palma as they share a number of similarities in style and approach. In par-
ticular, Fincher shows a consistent interest in film noir, the use of bravura
camerawork, an intertextual knowingness, and an attraction to the tech-
nology of moviemaking.
Like De Palma, Fincher is not averse to using some standard generic
tropes to create suspense, such as the rubber oxygen mask in Alien3 that
suddenly falls from the roof of the Sulaco escape pod just after we have
seen a ‘‘face-hugger’’ crawl out of sight in a previous scene. The never-go-
back cliche is used but with effective picture composition in depth that
creates some short-lived suspense, as Kevin drops a torch while climbing a
shaft and returns to retrieve it, keeping his gaze downward, unaware of
the alien appearing in the top right hand corner of the frame at the head
of the shaft, waiting for him. In The Game, the hand that drops onto Van
Orton’s shoulder is not a threat but that of his trusty lawyer (Sutherland)
who has been looking for him, and later Conrad suddenly banging on the
glass door behind him, just after he discovered the break-in.
Even in his video work, there are a number of De Palma echoes. In
Billy Idol’s Cradle of Love (1990), there is a continual cutting back to a
132 David Fincher
voyeuristic, male point of view, often in soft focus, as the nerdy hero
approaches a Lolita-like girl (a 19-year-old Betsy Lynn George; the lyrics
mentioning ‘‘a child bride’’). She turns in slow motion, glass in hand,
thereby spilling red wine down her blouse which she then has to also take
off. Subsequently he spies on this scantily clad girl, who just happens to
be wearing a short skirt and black tights, walking like a catwalk model.
There are several disorienting close-ups of the girl’s body, shot in slow
motion, inviting our eye to linger on her (especially from tilt and rising toe-
to-head shots). The fact that she throws her jacket right at the door where
he is, suggests an element of complicity in the performance, i.e., she knows
she is being watched. After Paula Abdul and Madonna, Fincher seems adept
at capturing a girl performing dance moves and emphasizes the climactic
kiss with a De Palma favorite: a 360-degree rapidly rotating shot.
FILM NOIR
Generically and consequently stylistically, Fincher, like De Palma, seems
attracted to film noir. Fincher worked on The Black Dahlia, initially envis-
aged as a four-hour mini series, before being replaced by De Palma, and a
similar fascination with unsolved, real-life crime with a noir-ish twist is
reflected in Zodiac. Ellroy’s crowded ‘‘bullpen’’ of the Homicide squad
finds a parallel in Fincher’s newsroom in Zodiac that becomes dominated
by a grisly series of murders. Ellroy’s novel (but not De Palma’s film) also
includes a series of teasing letters sent to the police with supposed clues,
apparently from the killer. Zodiac features a case taking over the lives of
two investigators, one formal, one personal, and dramatizes an obsessive
desire to know at all costs the truth about a crime.
Obsession lies at the heart of many of De Palma’s best-known works,
especially in following, often literally, a lead in a murder. This is reflected
in the title of one of his early films, the Vertigo-inspired Obsession (1976),
and while this pursuit often has a sexual or political emphasis, there is
also a resolute focus on film as the real topic of his story. In The Black
Dahlia, the site of the crime is the crumbling shacks beneath the iconic
Hollywood sign, used as a location for the production of low-grade por-
nography (the film industry explicitly built on corruption). This tendency
can be traced back to Blow-Out (1981), which although primarily politi-
cal, still features an aspiring actress whose real-life death scream is finally
used as an effect in a horror film; Body Double (1984), which is centered
on the deception in filmmaking (especially the linkage between porn and
horror); and the lengthy point-of-view tracking shots both here and
The New De Palma? 133
throughout his career, from Dressed to Kill (1980) to Snake Eyes (1998),
explicitly foreground the apparatus of filmmaking; and Femme Fatale
(2002), where a murder takes place at the Cannes Film Festival.
Panic Room specifically echoes Steven Soderbergh’s neo-noir Out of
Sight (1998). A robber, not as brutal as those around him, unable to avoid
re-offending and trapped by his domestic circumstances, tries one last
giant robbery, a home invasion of a super-rich mansion which also houses
a secret room. The character make-up is very similar—an intellectual/
thinker with some sense of morality (he prompts Junior to cut the gas,
although this is also for the practical reason that they cannot open the
door if they are dead), a psychopath, and a ridiculous figure whose sudden
death verges on the absurd (White Boy Bob [Keith Loneker]) tripping and
shooting himself, paralleling Junior dispatched after a childish tirade and
an unfortunate trigger-finger salute. Fincher suggested that Whitaker use
elements from Bogart’s Frank McCloud from Key Largo (John Huston,
1948), particularly the notion of a character at war with himself who is
drawn into crime despite himself—very close to Clooney’s Jack Foley.
Burnham’s dismissal of Raoul (‘‘I don’t want any help from Joe Pesci
here’’) is a fairly clear intertextual reference to Home Alone (Chris Colum-
bus, 1990), a comic version of a home invasion narrative, which this
plot threatens to become as the robbers do touch on the absurd at times.
However, it also suggests the genre with which Pesci is more closely asso-
ciated—crime drama. It is when Raoul refuses to turn off the gas that
we realize for certain that we are dealing with a ruthless psychopath. Like
Out of Sight, there is a blend of absurdity and sudden, brutal violence
(evoking the home invasion and gratuitous murder in the earlier film, after
which the gang, also in balaclavas, laugh and joke).
Junior screams at Raoul, ‘‘Don’t start spouting some Elmore Leonard
bullshit you just heard because I saw that movie too.’’ Characters are
aware of other fictional counterparts and measure their dialogue against
it—they are in some measure aware of themselves as contributing to a
genre, but the irony of fictional characters talking about themselves as if
they were ‘‘real’’ looks forward to The Game but also alludes to the films
of Quentin Tarantino, often commonly associated with banal but self-
aware dialogue between gangsters, particularly in work like Reservoir
Dogs (1992). In a sense Junior’s outburst also punctures the sense of gran-
deur that Raoul may foster as a master criminal but in another way, it
shows Junior to be fatally deluded. Raoul may only be a ‘‘bus driver’’ from
Flatbush in real life, but he is also in a perverse way true to himself; he is a
killer. The narrative resists simplistic fracturing along racial lines—clearly
134 David Fincher
Meg is from a rich family to be able to afford the house and Raoul has a
‘‘white trash’’ element, but Burnham is a skilled security specialist and Junior
is a privileged, rich kid prepared to steal from his own family.
The ‘‘villains’’ here are noir-ish figures by way of Elmore Leonard and
Quentin Tarantino. The figure of Junior is characterized by actions which
seem weak or impotent—from banging on the elevator or panic room
door to ranting while Burnham and Raoul act. Junior is an absurd, comic
figure so that when Burnham points out that his rants at the cameras are
pointless, he blusters ‘‘I know. I’m just scaring her.’’ When Burnham has
the idea with the gas, he just acts and Junior is reduced to petulantly
claiming ‘‘I’m in charge here,’’ although patently he is not. A bond is im-
mediately struck here between men of action, Raoul and Burnham, despite
the instability of the former, and the two set about practical details with
the gas canister (Burnham throws Raoul the tape) without a word to the
impractical Junior, who is clearly bemused by what they are doing and left
trying to save face by emptily asserting moments later, ‘‘I was just thinking
we should do something like this.’’ Williams dismisses the ‘‘three comic-
book villains’’ who are only ‘‘formulaically defined by comic idiocy’’ and
O’Hehir terms them ‘‘B-movie cliches,’’ but there is some wit and even pa-
thos in the disparity between Junior’s elevated style and its prosaic and
criminal context.2 He tries to assure Burnham that Raoul can ‘‘administer
that part,’’ referring to looking after the female inhabitants, but Burnham
immediately realizes that could well be a thinly veiled euphemism for rape
and murder.
Later, after having blurted out that there is actually much more money
in the panic room than he had admitted previously and having revealed
that he is a member of the owner’s family, he refuses to share the spoils
more equitably, ‘‘just because you have a problem relating to others.’’ He
underestimates massively the cruelty that underlies his euphemism about
Raoul’s psychopathic tendencies. There is something of Joey from Friends
in his laughable attempt to change the subject (‘‘It’s totally fucking moot’’)
after deceiving his accomplices and Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow in his
absurd posturing and periodically elevated language, talking about himself
with detachment as ‘‘not a person who needs to be involved with anything
quite so harrowing or perilous at this point in my life.’’ His repeated
‘‘Ow’’ after being burned by the gas is derided by the others and looks car-
toonish, particularly when seen on the monitors without sound. While the
other two are fighting a battle of wits with Meg to obtain an outside
phone line and Burnham races to the basement (very nimbly for a large
man) to rip out the phone wires (to right an oversight on Junior’s part), he
is talking to himself in the bathroom, trying to find something to salve his

burns.
In Fight Club, Marla is characterized even before we see her by the clip
of heels and shadows on a stairwell and then by dark glasses, ubiquitous
cigarettes, and sporting a fashionable, wide-brimmed hat. In combination
with her all-black clothing and make-up, her rapid, witty dialogue, her
transgressive behavior (stealing and then selling clothes and walking in
and out of traffic apparently at will), the source of disruption to the hero’s
life and Fincher’s tendency to shoot her opening few scenes in high angle
all contribute to an impression of the iconography of a classic film noir
femme fatale. The fragmented nature of the narrative means that her char-
acter tends to disappear from sight for periods at a time but whenever she
reappears, she is instantly ‘‘branded’’ with the same iconography—when
she rings Jack to tell him that she has taken some pills, she is framed in an
overhead shot, lying off the edge of the bed, and delivers her dialogue in a
voice which is deep, breathless but seductive.
Kevin McNamara has argued that the detective in film noir, from Philip
Marlowe to Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner is ‘‘a man
who has seen everything but is powerless to change much of anything.’’3
This description fits both Somerset in Seven and Toschi in Zodiac. This is
also complemented by the conception of the urban landscape in Seven as
unforgiving, possibly even unknowable (reflected in the chase sequence,
set adrift from easily identifiable spatial markers), and with the potential
not just to direct the hero’s progress but to overwhelm it.
‘‘THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME’’—MOVIES ARE ALL

ABOUT MOVIEMAKING
The Game’s CRS and The Company of the Alien films might both be
read as metaphors for the corporate nature of the Hollywood studio
machine, which can manufacture its own alternative reality for entertain-
ment or commercial purposes. The scanner scene in Alien3 evokes the
reframing sequence in Blade Runner as Ripley, like many new parents,
tries to make sense of a fetal scan, technology helping by enlarging and
rotating the image, culminating as in Scott’s film with a freeze-frame and
an instruction to print. Capturing a clear, photographic image appears to
make the existence of a phenomenon more ‘‘real.’’ Ripley states bluntly ‘‘I
have to see it.’’ The scene evokes the credit sequence with a momentary,
reflected image of the alien superimposed over Ripley’s face, evoking both
a nightmarish version of fairy tale image of Sleeping Beauty in her glass
136 David Fincher
casket and Slavoj Zi zek’s critical notion of the ‘‘metasuturing of the inter-
face,’’ in which a shot contains its own reverse angle.4
To say, as Swallow does, that the game-playing narrative is ‘‘just like
the film industry’’ can seem fairly glib—there is more going on here.5 The
Game opens with a scratchy, jumpy, over exposed 16 mm home movie,
providing back-story on Van Orton’s childhood. This reflects Fincher’s
ongoing interest in the apparatus of producing visual images, so that we
see cameras and images manipulated on screen that he has shot himself,
but are presented within key scenes with a distancing level of technology
that appears to bestow greater objectivity on the film text. Thus we have
Alien3’s scanning machine and photo of Ripley’s daughter, Panic Room’s
video monitors, Tyler Durden’s job as a playful projectionist in Fight Club,
The Game’s endless psychological tests, Benjamin Button’s opening
sequence, and Mr. Daws’s lightning anecdotes.
The concept of memory-as-a-film is not original, but in The Game it
gives Van Orton a lonely, isolated, almost tragic aura. His personal ‘‘film’’
mixes posed shots, motivated from within the scene with point-of-view
shots of key moments at a party—an event which seems to have had a
formative effect on Van Orton. A man, revealed subsequently to be his fa-
ther, is shot in silhouette with his back to the camera or looking off-frame
distractedly when posed with his wife. Key relationships are established:
the young Van Orton carrying his younger brother, the toy boat as a last-
ing symbol of attachment/curse between father and son (it appears in the
background in his living room later); and the father, a distanced and
depressed figure, walking away into the darkness of the house.
Driving back home later, more memory-as-film, clearly not a party here,
is inter-cut with a car running in the opposite direction, breaking continu-
ity conventions in a strange sequence. Eye-line matches link Van Orton
looking up with a figure, his younger self, running in slow motion toward
the house and then glimpsing a silhouetted figure on the roof (the shot
associated with his father, suggesting some crisis of identity). The figure is
distorted in Cinemascope style, linking a historic filmic signature with an
event in the past and a literary allusion to Henry James’s Turn of the
Screw (1898), with its setting in a large house, ghostly figures glimpsed on
a rooftop, unexplained past events, and isolated children. Later at home,
he looks up as earlier and again we cut to a closer shot of the figure on
the roof, now clearly his father falling, and a shot of the aftermath with
policemen gathered around the body from within the house—the point of
view of his younger self looking out, blocked by the door closing inward
like a prison.
Fincher lists among his favorite films Sleuth (Joseph L. Mankiewicz,

1972); The Last of Sheila (Herbert Ross, 1973); and The Stunt Man
(Richard Rush, 1980); and Roger Ebert’s description that ‘‘the movie is
like a control freak’s worst nightmare’’ is a little ambiguous as it could
refer both to Van Orton or Fincher himself.6 Several friends and colleagues
appear in cameos, such as Spike Jonze as a medical technician, who
returns the favor, allowing Fincher to play an uncredited editor in Jonze’s
Being John Malkovich (1999). For small-scale, independent filmmakers,
such strategies may be born of financial necessity but here there is an ele-
ment of a knowing game-playing element, a spot-the-celebrity game for
aficionados, such as the fleeting glimpse of Linda Manz (Christine’s flat-
mate) placed among the photos in the cafe. Several actors reappear from
Seven (Rachel Schadt, John Cassini, Mark Boone Jr., and Michael Massee).
Fincher is perhaps not unique in re-using familiar cast members, but he
tends to use the same actors in minor or non-speaking roles only, giving
Seven and The Game especially a sense of a shared creative gene pool.
Some of this is due to scheduling (The Game project pre-dated Seven), but
it does suggest on the one hand Fincher is someone who values loyalty
and high levels of professionalism and once he has seen work he values,
he tends to come back to its source again. Given the stress in making any
film but especially the kind of films Fincher tries to make, it is perhaps
understandable that he should draw on known personnel to deliver his
vision of how a particular film should be. However, on the other hand, for
his critics it also suggests a difficulty to win his trust and a certain incestu-
ous nature to his inner coterie and a lack of patience with people who
need to learn how he works.
In a sense, in The Game CRS puts Van Orton in a movie of his own life,
filled with extras, special effects, and planted props (the key for the eleva-
tor and the handle for the taxi door). It is a chance for him to be the star
(hinted at right in the beginning in the shot when he walks toward the
projectionist’s booth during the exhaustive testing). However, attempts to
cast Christine as some kind of extra who cannot escape the film rather
skates over the fact that she is a knowing and willing participant in the
narrative, not the victim of a conspiracy theory (as she tries to portray her-
self to Van Orton). Fincher’s comments appear to take her motivation at
face value. Similarly, Fincher talks of CRS as a sect of actors on 24-hour
call but this is not as coherent as Crash, where the cultish element of a se-
cret group drawn to crash reconstructions, their own kind of fiction, is
much clearer.7 The motivation of CRS employees seems no different from
that of any other actors, i.e., money.
138 David Fincher
Fight Club plays with moviemaking conventions, in particular the rela-

tion of the film to the audience. Fincher is playing with fictional borders,
not just within the narrative but in its relation to the audience. From the
outset, we are addressed by Jack’s first-person voiceover but in giving us
back-story with the explicit digression ‘‘Let me tell you a little bit about
Tyler Durden,’’ Jack effectively ‘‘pauses’’ his narrative with a freeze-frame
35 minutes into the film.
The first digression, just before their first fight, also features Jack talking
on screen directly to the camera in the guise of a TV presenter. He walks
through Tyler’s workplaces (a projectionist’s backroom and a hotel din-
ning room and kitchen), apparently invisible to all except Tyler himself,
who steps out of the fiction to deliver his own comic aside. The two inter-
act on screen, completing each other’s dialogue, and the work of film pro-
jection is explained by Tyler himself for our benefit, not directly face to
camera but via gesture, pointing to the top right corner at the so-called
‘‘cigarette burns’’ when a reel needs to be changed.
The omnipresent voiceover and the final pornographic frame, spliced
into action as Jack describes earlier, make the film we are watching a tale
told by Jack (subsequently revealed as Tyler Durden). In this sense, the
splicing of single frames of Tyler into early scenes, in both the hospital
and the cancer support group, act as metatextual jokes by the filmmaker,
Fincher-as-schizoid Tyler. The first example in the hospital corridor behind
the doctor is almost too quick for the naked eye but like the later example,
standing behind the group leader, represents what Fincher terms ‘‘DVD
moments,’’ constituting a marketing tool to justify the price of DVDs
rather than a genuine exercise in subliminal communication. The sublimi-
nal appearance of Pitt, especially in the support group (a frame or so lon-
ger), portrays him almost as a mischievous devilish character, appearing
on the shoulder of an expert, the orange leather jacket contrasting espe-
cially with the dark setting of the cancer group. Hopping into an open-top
sports car and screaming out into traffic represents everything Jack is not
in his inhibited nature.
In Zodiac, the process of constructing film images is something in which
Fincher is clearly interested and we see the police framing several close-up
shots of the cipher letters. It is the photographic potential of the letters as
both iconic pieces of evidence but also the means to increase circulation of
a paper that makes them particularly fascinating. Unlike the rather dull
captions in typescript, these letters and symbols invite discussion—
challenging the police, the newspaper staff, and even the public more
widely to be involved in an interactive process of semiotic interpretation.
The shots of the cipher letter being framed and focused by the police pho-
tographer are paralleled by Graysmith’s more humble domestic version,
pinning his copy up on a notice board and a slow zoom in, mimicking his
peering at it. The sense of simultaneous, even competitive action is con-
veyed by dialogue which is not attributed to a specific speaker but which
applies to all three scenes at Naval Intelligence, the FBI, and the CIA, and
which bleeds across cuts. More precisely, there is the notion of successive
conclusions and a narrowing in on a solution, the discovery of which
seems inevitable. There is the sense of the best brains in the country being
directed to a code written by an individual who, judging by handwriting
alone, seems to be of relatively limited educational means. However, the
cut to Donald and Bettye Harden’s ‘‘breakfast nook,’’ while perhaps hu-
morous on paper, just makes the authorities look ridiculous. The fact that
a history teacher and his wife can crack what Graysmith later calls ‘‘a sim-
ple substitution code,’’ achieving in only three days (approaching the prob-
lem as a leisure-time hobby) what the combined intelligence services of the
United States of America cannot, does not bode well for the likely appre-
hension of the killer.
Film plays an important part in cracking the Zodiac’s first letter in the
film as Graysmith racks his brain in trying to think where he has heard of a
similar phrase describing man as ‘‘the most dangerous animal.’’ Graysmith’s
sudden rushing out of the room seems absurd, almost comic, until he
returns with a book showing a picture from The Most Dangerous Game
(Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1932), based on Richard Con-
nell’s 1924 short story. Avery’s observation that the name of the protago-
nist Zaroff also begins with a ‘‘Z’’ underlines the parallel. Later, in
Graysmith’s own investigation, he follows the trail of Rick Marshall, a for-
mer film projectionist and possible suspect, whose guilt depends on the
handwriting on film posters. It is Vaughn’s admission that the handwriting
is actually his that gives the scene at his house a sudden twist into the do-
main of horror and the search of his basement dimly yields rows of dusty
film canisters. The final Zodiac letter wonders who will play him but
Toschi already has the strange experience of seeing himself at a special
screening of Dirty Harry.
Supposedly the inspiration for Callahan’s character, Graham Fuller
describes Ruffalo’s portrayal of Toschi as playing him ‘‘like a less eccentric
Columbo.’’8 Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1970), while largely a distortion of
precise facts for mass entertainment, does pick up on the suggested meet-
ing at a church and the bus threat, and the scene shown focuses on hand-
writing analysis. Unfortunately Toschi walks out before he sees that actually
140 David Fincher
Harry Callahan is also frustrated by ‘‘due process’’ leading to the release

of the killer, Scorpio. Exactly why Graysmith, a cartoonist, is at a special
screening for the police might suggest an element of role-playing in his
imagination, getting close to Toschi and following him out at the interval,
like an obsessive fan. When Melanie later asks him when the whole affair
will end, her suggestion that Graysmith could ‘‘arrest’’ the Zodiac is
greeted with ‘‘Don’t be ridiculous,’’ but there is a sense of wish fulfilment
here, of playing at being a detective.
Fincher juxtaposes two fictional versions of a real event and like Toschi,
we may reject the gun-toting spectacle of the earlier film, but at the same
time critical and commercial reaction to Zodiac underlines the pressure on
directors to suggest simplistic answers to narrative problems and resolve
narratives cleanly, preferably with scenes of climactic violence in which
the source of evil is definitively destroyed. The interplay of fictional
universes deepens with the 2007 premiere of Fincher’s film, attended by
the real Dave Toschi, effectively watching an actor playing himself, who
in turn is watching a fiction of himself in the figure of Callahan. In the
lobby, one alter ego (Toschi) passes a cardboard cut-out of another
(Callahan).
De Palma is also known for use of slightly gimmicky devices such as
split screen in films like Carrie (1976) and Snake Eyes (1998), usually
designed to show simultaneous action. In Panic Room, as Junior tries to
open the elevator in which Meg and Sarah are crouching in fear, we effec-
tively have a split-screen effect as Fincher gives us a cutaway view of what
is happening inside the elevator. In Zodiac, an actual split screen effect is
used as we see an expert examine two samples of handwriting that Toschi
desperately wants to match.
Self-conscious Camera Set-ups/Movements

‘‘I am now in control of all things.’’
—final Zodiac letter
Fincher shares De Palma’s use of dissolves, soft focus, and slow motion
for dramatic scenes, which threaten to become intrusive devices, but he
also uses them to link scenes, such as in Alien3 with the death of Clemens,
the outbreak of fire, the death of the alien, and Ripley’s own final demise.
This also produces a slightly anachronistic feel at times too. At the crema-
tion, Fincher superimposes a succession of close-ups of Weaver and Dut-
ton, which seems quite sentimental and more typical of a family drama or
pop video. However, the sequence showing the outbreak of fire indicates
Fincher’s strengths as a director. Looking forward to Seven, it blends lim-
ited light sources with motivated water sources (here, the sprinkler sys-
tem). Low-angle, slow-motion shots show survivors trudging through the
steam, some dragging a cart, like medieval collectors of plague victims.
Weaver is framed by a wall, exhausted, and then slowly walks toward the
camera, blurring the image as she invades the focal distance before her
torso blocks the shot completely, at which point there is a cut. Like the
slow motion used for the final shot of the water falling on the alien, it is
the kind of stylistic bravura which Fincher’s detractors use as evidence of
a prevalence of style over substance, but used sparingly as it is here, it is
effective and dramatically powerful.
zek, who see Fight Club as positioning the
Critics such as Slavoj Zi
viewer in an essentially fascist position, seem to be taking the film’s vio-
lence at face value.9 What is groundbreaking is not Tyler’s often over-
blown, gnomic dialogue, nor the basic premise of supposedly escaping
consumerist conformity through regimented violence, but the film’s form.
Shortly after the powerful picture composition of Tyler shot from outside,
looking out through the window at the buildings about to be destroyed,
which are shown in reflection overlaid on his shot, there is a trademark
Fincher sequence. Taubin notes ‘‘one needs a new vocabulary to describe
the vertiginous depiction of time and space in Fight Club. Pans and tilts
and tracks just won’t do.’’10 The camera drops vertiginously down the
exterior wall of the building into the basement and our omniscience as
viewers exceeds filmic norms as we can pass, ghost-like, through walls
until we see explosives ready and primed in a number of underground
locations. Later, when Jack discovers his destroyed apartment, we fly into
a close-up of the stove and follow the progress of gas along the pipes until
we reach the electrical device that sparked the explosion. Such movements
of point of view extend what is possible with a physical camera and can
only be achieved digitally. In such sequences, Fincher is challenging our
notions of impossibility but in doing so, he is also drawing attention to
the means by which he does so and the person who is doing this, i.e., him-
self as director.
Like De Palma, Fincher is drawn to rotating camera movement, either
of a fixed pair which allows us to see both their faces and their ‘‘real’’ feel-
ings, while these remain hidden to one another (such as Jack and Bob hug-
ging), or of a single character, usually Jack, apparently stealing around
behind them, often while they are sitting (such as Jack in the pews of his
cancer group, while delivering a glare of absolute hatred at Marla across
142 David Fincher
the room as she ‘‘muscles in’’ on his tuberculosis group or later to reveal
Tyler is sitting next to him on the plane). In The Game, the camera moves
around behind the sofa as Nicholas talks to his ex-wife—a similar move-
ment to the bath shot in Panic Room, where we appear to creep up on the
central character in an intimate, private moment. Also later in the club
the same movement comes round behind Nicholas as he sits intrigued by
the hints and clues he is picking up about CRS, perhaps encouraging us to
see him as a more rounded character than we might otherwise. Fincher
uses the same camera movement in Seven, sidling around from behind a
character as if peeping in on a private act, when he shows Mills looking
through photos.
Fincher’s films often feature examples of what Strick calls his ‘‘eye for
the potent single shot,’’ such as the close-up of the sale ticket inside the
lampshade in The Game.11 In Seven, a low-angle reverse-tracking shot
reveals a myriad of Christmas tree air fresheners hanging from the ceiling,
mixing a scene of childish delight with the gruesome reason for it—a foul-
smelling virtual corpse whose point of view we inhabit as guns and torches
are pointed toward the camera. In a dull meeting in Fight Club, we cut to
Jack giving a snarl of bloodied teeth—a great shot for a trailer but this
was actually a specially posed shot, which was better than any subsequent
takes and therefore found its way into the final film.
The frequent use of fade-to-black as a means of closing a scene does
suggest the passing of time but because conventionally it often appears at
points of significant changes in a narrative, especially signalling an end of
major action, there is a feeling of repeated endings, of hope raised and
then frustrated—the overall narrative feeling is sequential rather than ac-
cumulative and climactic. The use of fade-to-black reaches an extreme in
the aural montage, where we see absolutely nothing on screen and we are
forced to listen to the mixture of sounds denoting other criminal and polit-
ical changes through the early 1970s. The montage also underlines that
other serial killers have come and gone in the popular imagination, but
the Zodiac myth endures. There is almost a perversity about Fincher’s de-
cision as if he realizes that audiences will associate a lengthy black screen
with the end of the film, but he still denies us the possibility of closure.
There is an element of ‘‘muscle-flexing’’ here too. In contrast to Alien3,
where Fincher’s every directorial move was hemmed in by pressure from
the studios, this sequence is Fincher effectively saying that he can hold an
audience while showing nothing on screen for several minutes. It is a
potent image of his changing status with the studios which may not have
liked the idea but ultimately accepted it.
Intertextual References
‘‘I was never tempted to pay any kind of homage to specific movies.’’
—David Fincher12
De Palma has been frequently accused of ‘‘borrowing’’ motifs, devices,

even whole plot lines from particular directors, especially Hitchcock. Tau-
bin claims that Alien3 ‘‘doesn’t make allusions or tributes’’ but even here
the shadow of the alien rising up behind the plastic curtain is a small nod
to Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and the two-shot of Ripley and Aaron
in conspiratorial whispering evokes the exchange between Bowman and
Poole in 2001 (Stanley Kubrick, 1968).13 David Koepp, the writer of
Panic Room, for whom De Palma was a supportive mentor and critical
friend, cites Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) as his all-time fa-
vorite film and The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960) as another favorite as
a writer; in relation to Polanski’s film, there is a similar sense of claustro-
phobic menace in Panic Room perhaps particular to New York, albeit not
from a supernatural source. In Panic Room, Meg asks ‘‘Where d’you learn
that?’’ to which Sarah replies succinctly ‘‘Titanic.’’ Other fictional narra-
tives are a legitimate source of knowledge that can save your life. The
irony here, of course, is that attempts to survive in James Cameron’s film
largely fail. Steeling himself to inject Sarah, Burnham admits that ‘‘all I know
about this is what I see on TV’’ (originally with a specific reference to ER).
Those who survive (including Meg and Burnham) do so in part because they
apply their knowledge of fictional narratives. The individual who derides
such a connection so openly (Junior) becomes a casualty of its brutality. If he
knew Out of Sight better, he might have seen the threat posed by Raoul.
There are several links between Fight Club and Cronenberg’s Crash
(1996). It is only through the fantasy impact in a plane or the actual one
later with Tyler in a car that Jack feels truly alive. Like the Ballards in
Cronenberg’s film, Jack is passing through life in a comatose state,
numbed emotionally by the blandness of his consumer-orientated lifestyle.
Tyler’s philosophy, especially clearly articulated before the car crash that
he initiates, suggests that life is only truly lived/meaningful in conjunction
with a full awareness of mortality. As Tyler pulls the survivors from the
car, they flop out like the survivors of the reconstruction in Cronenberg’s
film, and Tyler underlines the point that they have ‘‘just had a near-life ex-
perience.’’ Somerset’s taxi ride to the library echoes Crash with a camera
mounted outside the car at an exaggerated angle, so that half the frame is
down the length of the vehicle and we have the carefully constructed shot
of the reflection of streetlights playing across his face.
144 David Fincher
The shooting style of the car crash also mirrors Cronenberg’s film quite
closely—the scene is shot at night in the rain with cameras placed on the
car itself, shooting down its length as it wanders over the lane markers. A
very close shot of Tyler’s shoulders and the back of his head (also used in
Cronenberg’s Crash, before the hero’s first accident) creates a sense of
being watched, literally of someone breathing down his neck. The same
device (used in the Cops TV series, Fox 1989-present) is used in Seven by
the close forward-tracking shot behind Mills as he enters the building
housing victim number two, conveying a sense of pressure bearing down
on him, and again in Zodiac as Graysmith pores over boxes of evidence,
suggesting both tiredness and the pressure of trying to remember salient
details when prevented from writing details down. Howard Shore’s
lengthy chords over the interrogation of the man forced to kill a prostitute
with a specially sharpened metal vibrator (evocative of Abel Ferrara’s
Driller Killer, 1979; Brian De Palma’s Body Double, 1984; or more pre-
cisely, Anthony Perkins’s psychosexually deviant character Reverend
Shayne in Ken Russell’s 1984 Crimes of Passion) is also reminiscent of the
melancholic closing scene of Crash, produced within a year of Seven.
However, any attempt to impose a similar carpe diem–style reading on
the crash scene via Tyler’s closing dialogue does not work. The occupants
in Fight Club purposely buckle up, whereas in Crash the husband of Helen
Remington (Holly Hunter) deliberately unbuckles so that he can die in the
process (a close-up on his scarred hand suggests he has tried this before).
In Fight Club the risk is minimized; in Crash, the possibility, indeed the
attraction of death, is an intrinsic part of the philosophy of Vaughan (Elias
Koteas). Crash only involves those who consent—it may seem perverse
but it is a shared, consensual perversity. Tyler crashes into an apparently
broken-down parked car, willing to accept the possibility of injuring or
killing any occupants, clearly without their consent.
TECHNOLOGY
‘‘The greatest technician I’ve ever worked with.’’
—Jodie Foster on Fincher14
Like De Palma, with whom Koepp worked on the gadget-filled Mission

Impossible (1996), Fincher is fascinated by the machinery of filmmaking.
It is noticeable that a large proportion of the comments that Fincher
makes on his DVDs are based around technical aspects of filmmaking,
rather than about what an actor is doing. Actors seem, if not the
‘‘cattle’’ as Hitchcock dismissively called them, at least secondary in his

scheme of things.
Brad Pitt struggling to convey emotion through image capture and facial
composites, the silvering process in Seven, Mark Ruffalo staring up at San
Francisco ‘‘Presidio’’ street scenes that are not there, Sigourney Weaver
delivering dialogue to a creature that (to our knowledge at least) has never
existed—Fincher’s narratives are inherently enmeshed with the technical
means to tell the story. Attention is drawn to the often geeky element of
technological processes, rather than considering the ends to which they
are put. Such technology shows Fincher as uncompromising perfectionist
but also one slightly divorced from his audience: as he devised it, Seven
was shot with a kind of film that only certain theaters can show, i.e., most
audiences will not see a silver print on a cinema screen.
The reference to The Wizard of Oz in The Game is telling. This is the
world of manipulative fantasy which Fincher creates, and anyone who
works with him repeatedly remarks on his capability as a technical wizard
in showing us the apparently impossible. He has a vision of what he wants
(at times he may be the only one who really knows, as a crew member
admits on the DVD for Panic Room) and exerts maximum control to
achieve that. It is a very driven method of working, which does not endear
him to everyone, as he expects the same standards from those around him
that he sets for himself and this level of control leaves little room for col-
laboration, ensemble work, and definitely little improvisation. Working
with experienced actors, particularly those with directing/producing
experience (Sigourney Weaver, Jodie Foster, Forest Whitaker, Sean Penn,
Michael Douglas, and especially Brad Pitt) this works, but one wonders
how he would possibly ever work with a cast of unknowns or non-profes-
sionals. CGI is used in Panic Room to add the whipping wind effect of the
bonds at the end, the gas explosion, and even some gunshot wound
effects, which arguably could have been achieved with make-up. Some of
the motivation for these shots is practical—the final desired shot in the
rain is very difficult to catch and the implicit danger of the gas scenes is
clear, but the wounds do raise the question of whether CGI becomes intru-
sive and a first recourse, rather than a solution to problems.
Light sources are often motivated from within the screen and after the
initial break-in, knocked-over lamps allow the shadows of the intruders
(and later Meg as she carefully creeps out of the panic room) to be thrown
up on the walls. This complements Fincher’s preference for extreme low
angles, including some shots of ceilings and the Altmans’ normality is
turned upside-down. Fincher opines that ‘‘To my way of thinking, most
146 David Fincher
movies are way over-lit.’’15 In talking of The Game, he refers to the work
of cinematographer Harris Savides and wishes that viewers could ‘‘appre-
ciate how much work went into making it look as if very little work went
into it.’’16 However, this denies the viewing pleasures involved in seeing
and enjoying spectacle as spectacle and is strangely contradictory in rela-
tion to how his films are very self-referential in other ways. Fincher has an
end credit on Wall-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008) in part due to the help that
Savides provided in inspiring the use of shallow focus in this animated fea-
ture. Fincher often uses the motif of flashlights piercing the darkness, fea-
tured in Fight Club’s first crime scene, the SWAT raid of Victor’s house,
and the search through Doe’s apartment too. It works as a literal light
source, motivated from within the scene but also metaphorically, and one
might even say spiritually, seeking to shed light on sinful, dark human
deeds. In The Game, strong backlighting in the airport scenes and in the
meeting at the publishing firm make Van Orton into a virtual silhouette,
suggesting that his world is becoming unpredictable and even possibly
threatening his sanity (in connection with thoughts about his father) as we
see him manically trying to smash open his own briefcase on a bench in
the rain.
Although cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth was removed by Fox
before the end of the film, Fincher (having worked with him on Madon-
na’s ‘‘Oh, Father’’) would go on to collaborate with him again on Seven,
The Game, and Fight Club. Swallow talks of Cronenweth’s ability to
evoke ‘‘medieval shading’’ without explaining what that might mean.17
Fincher himself refers to Cronenweth’s ‘‘tonal range’’ as being like ‘‘Ansel
Adams.’’18 Adams, whose work such as The Tetons and the Snake River
(1942), is known for his ability to convey a range of perspectives and
tonal depth within a predominantly monochromatic palette and the use of
light as a temporary phenomenon rather than a fixed entity. Although
Fincher thus far has chosen urban subjects (Adams is often associated with
wide shots of the American landscape, the West especially), there is a simi-
lar concern with discovering depth in apparent simplicity, a favoring of
black and white (reflected in Fincher’s music videos), and the meticulous
nature of shot composition.
One prime device associated with De Palma is extended takes (such as
the opening of Bonfire of the Vanities, 1990). Fight Club features a
lengthy take through the bar where potential fighters hang around and
will not go home until led behind the bar by Tyler and down to the base-
ment room. Even here, Fincher’s camera placement is suggesting a frac-
tured sense of reality with a shot from directly above the cellar doors as
they are opened and particularly at the end of the following scene where
the camera ‘‘flips’’ backward from Tyler beaten to a pulp on the ground,
overhead 180 degrees, to an upside-down shot of the frustrated gangster
going up the stairs. In releasing the adrenaline from fighting, Jack’s sense
of fractured identity is reflected in the editing. We are ‘‘told’’ explicitly the
source of the film’s narrative instability when the first detailed fight
sequence is initiated by the camera flying past Tyler’s head. The set-piece
tracking shot out of the bin casts Jack as if literally he is in the bin, a piece
of office trash. The set-piece bin shot is relatively quick in terms of on-
screen time but we see the micro-nature of modern capitalism. As in
Alien3, the future is Kipple and it seems to be taking over. A slow zoom
into a magazine image actually becomes Jack’s home, onto which text
appears and finally into which he steps himself, all suggestive of a process
of Baudrillardian replacement, in which simulacra and non-simulacra can-
not be distinguished. By converting his apartment into the one on offer, he
effectively has disappeared into the magazine, metaphorically in his moti-
vation and literally on screen. Whether at that moment we are supposed
to be looking through the magazine or on a journey through his fantasy
apartment becomes indistinguishable.
At the center of Panic Room lies a three-minute long take. Evoking the
title of Jonathan Crane’s 1994 book The Terror of Everyday Life, the cam-
era tracks from the window, to the clock, to the wine glass (now empty)
before tracking back from the bed, through the banisters via CGI, and
cranes down the stairwell, rotating in one vertiginous movement. Without
a visible cut, we track up to the windows on the ground floor, where a car
pulls up, and then plunge into the lock mechanism. This same shot
appears in 1408 (Mikael Hafstr€ om, 2007), also predicated around the ten-
sions between escape and captivity. The camera then pulls back again,
tracking across to a face at the window, and then follows the progress of
the attempted intrusion at different points of entry, from the kitchen win-
dow up to the skylight via the fire escape. Passing over the table top and
through the handle of the coffeepot, the ability to pass through apparently
impossible physical barriers’ makes this feel like a demonstration of a new
editing tool. We are being shown the current limits of motion technology.
We rise up through the ceiling, as permeable to our view as the walls ear-
lier, and the point of view pulls back to remind us where Meg lies and
then tilts up to the skylight, which offers the robbers their point of entry.
Burnham at the window, the tracking shot out of the lock, and Burnham
jumping the fence—these are all non-CGI elements embedded in a sequence
driven largely by CG technology, which neither establishes spatial geography
148 David Fincher
nor the relationship of those outside to those inside (because neither knows
about the presence of the other). We can appreciate distance, i.e., that Meg
cannot hear the robbers’ conversation but that is not the same as precise
geography—most viewers would struggle to produce a detailed map of the
house, despite the fact that we spend nearly the entire film within its walls.
It actually has the opposite effect, giving us a single, claustrophobic point of
view where we appear to be following some noise from outside. As she is
asleep upstairs, it is the view from within ‘‘Meg’s worst nightmare’’—hence
the threats from outside are shadowy and vague rather than personal and
specific. Fincher’s point about a voyeuristic relationship does not really hold
true either. Apart from a single shot of Burnham at the window, we have lit-
tle sense of the house being watched and certainly none of the sadism
implicit in the fishbowl metaphor—none of the robbers know that the house
is inhabited. They are looking for a point of ingress, not looking to see what
is inside.
This three-minute long take through the house, longer than the credit
sequence, was part of the film’s conception from the outset (although
Koepp’s script talks of moving through the ceiling so that we can see the
strength of the panic room immediately after Meg and Sarah make it to
safety the first time) and lasted longer than the production schedule as a
whole.
Eventually, due to the complexity of the sequence, there were eight live-
action sequences blended with CG sections. The DVD extras on Panic
Room direct attention to Dario Argento’s use of a technocrane (or a
Louma or Luna crane as it was termed then) in Tenebrae (1982), also in
an apartment and passing through walls but doing so from outside the
house before invading the living space via an open window. Fincher
needed many sections, using CG to conceal bumps from the apparatus
and maintain the fluidity of the shot. Argento’s sequence, only around
30 seconds shorter than Fincher’s, was shot in three days—Fincher’s took
14 months. Tenebrae uses extremely bright lighting throughout, in a rejec-
tion of German Expressionism, whereas Fincher via developments in cine-
matography embraces darkness as the prime medium of the film. The
camera leads the human figures slightly, as if we are following a noise
before the robbers appear. This gives us a slight God-like sense of fore-
knowledge but it does not feel like we are the victims of a threatening
invasion—the floating CG omniscience clearly places us outside the frame
of reference of human movement.
Koepp’s ‘‘impossible’’ forward-tracking shots (later following the pro-
gress of the gas through the pipe) foreshadow similar experiments in the
opening of Secret Window (2004), which he also directed. There we go

through a window, into a room, and through a mirror into the subjective
world of the protagonist. Such sequences or when Burnham looks through
the banisters and the camera tracks forward through the banisters to the
night-light is like a more high-tech version of the conventional shot of the
hero looking at an object, usually in the distance, a reverse cut to them
squinting and then the ‘‘impossible’’ closer shot of the object under scru-
tiny. Fincher’s single, fluid shot via CGI draws attention to itself as an
effect, and thereby the presence of the director. Cutting-edge effects tech-
nology is being showcased almost like a virtual design program, giving
viewers a tour of a fictional dwelling.
Fincher’s use of digital storyboards allows him to plan and ultimately
execute sequences that conventional storyboards cannot manage but it
also arguably pushes film in an aesthetic direction akin to a video game,
such as the long take including the coffeepot shot. The plan for the bath
sequence (available on the film’s official website) shows originally a mirror
image of the final shot in which bath, glass, and the figure of Meg are all
simultaneously revealed, whereas the sequence as actually filmed is more
effective for approaching from behind and from lower angle.
Zodiac’s opening tracking shot through the Vallejo suburbs may on one
level suggest suburban normality (Fincher’s avowed intent on the DVD
commentary) but the extremely washed-out color palette and more partic-
ularly the gliding motion of the car (via an extended dolly track) convey a
sense of unreality or even hyper-reality. Either way, they signal the pres-
ence of directorial intrusion. The effect is more alienating and sinister than
‘‘normalizing’’ and the first-person point of view in combination with the
setting initially makes the sequence feel more like a build-up to a drive-by
shooting or a Halloween-style stalking narrative. The reverse shot, reveal-
ing the driver to be Darlene and the boy who bounds down some house
steps before speaking through the window as her date, Mike, reduces this
tension but not completely. Despite his claims of realism, Fincher’s recrea-
tion of Presidio, necessitated by the difficulties of filming on location,
actually give the whole scene a sense of unreality. The dominant color of
greenish-brown still looks like a visual effect, especially when Toschi
walks a few paces away from the cab, ironically in the wrong direction
from the killer. It powerfully conveys his longing and almost ability to
‘‘scent’’ his prey but such action and framing is highly theatrical—we are
left wondering why is he framed against a long shot of apparent urban
normality and the prime answer seems to be to show us that, via CG,
Fincher can do this.
150 David Fincher
Watching Fincher’s 36 takes for the scene where Jake Gyllenhaal tosses
his cartoons on the passenger seat does make you wonder if Fincher is
Kubrick’s spiritual heir. Like the Panic Room scene of the thrown bag con-
taining drugs, there seems an almost obsessive attempt to impose order on
an action, which defies such control. Performances cannot be as fresh on
the 20th or 30th take and there is the feeling with the set-piece shots like
the approach to the San Francisco waterfront that there is so much that
can now be created digitally in post-production (even down to seagulls
and little figures fishing), that what we experience is the cinematic equiva-
lent of a music album produced entirely in the studio that could never be
performed live. Perhaps it is unfair to apply the text as a subheading for
this section, possibly from a serial killer, to a film director, but it is notice-
able that in interviews and commentaries a significant proportion of
Fincher’s own words and those on message boards and throughout the vir-
tual community focus on technical aspects of his work, rather than other
areas such as acting performances. As he admits on the DVD, ‘‘I tend to
think things through to the point where wooden Indians can show up and
I could at least finish the day’s work.’’
The huge amount of research that went into the production in many
ways constitutes a further investigation into the case, such as discovering
the real Mike Mageau via private investigators. Fincher’s own knowledge
of the case is impressive, correcting Narlow (an officer directly involved in
the case) when they were scouting out the Berryessa location that they
were not in precisely the right spot. However, complete devotion to verisi-
militude would produce a documentary and there is a shifting tension
between ‘‘realism’’ and entertainment here. Mageau claims that at Blue
Rock he saw the car and said ‘‘I’m not getting shot for this’’ but the inclu-
sion of such a line would lend his character a more cynical, adult weight
and possibly make the scene absurd or even comic. However, once the
facts as known start to be edited, it is debatable at what point the film
could be said to be realistic. In relation to The Game, Fincher claims that
avoiding dramatic music cues for sequences when Van Orton is trapped in
the taxi, when he is attacked in his car, or his final suicidal jump, problem-
atizes whether we are part of a narrative or in a ‘‘real’’ scene or not.19
However, there too it is debatable whether it makes those scenes any less
‘‘filmic.’’ Slow motion and a range of effects technology in the latter exam-
ple clearly mark this as a dramatic fiction.
It is debatable to what extent absolute authenticity to real life events is
important. If the Berryessa scene had been staged in an adjacent spot,
would it really have mattered? There is the sense that Fincher shares some
of Graysmith’s obsessive nature and the ‘‘need to know’’ is an important

part of his nature and creative processes too. The actor playing Mageau
being made to wear three layers of clothing on a hot summer’s night is a
good example of an irrelevant truth which adds nothing to the film, but
seems to be part of Fincher’s approach to privilege accuracy to factual
sources at all costs. The accompanying documentary extras detail new,
previously ignored and contradictory evidence (Mageau claiming they
were chased by the killer, the suspect on foot in the Stine murder seen
going up to a house, and testimony from Allen’s family), only underlines
the subjectivity of Fincher’s version.
Like Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, released the same year, in Zodiac Fincher
goes to unbelievable lengths to show viewers a ‘‘realistic’’ dramatic render-
ing of an experience. One is a possible future, the other, a possible past,
but both take an almost educational view of film in a commitment to au-
thenticity (one by an immersion in scientific projection, the other in well-
researched reconstruction) that threatens to lose sight of the needs of its
audience—both received lukewarm box-office returns. This is not the only
measure of success or artistic value of course and it could be argued that
art of any real value should challenge and possibly disappoint the expecta-
tions of audiences; that it should risk being misunderstood. However, in
the case of Fincher, his desire to orchestrate a series of perfect moments
(reflected in his use of CG and multiple takes of many scenes) means that
we are presented with a kind of hyper-realism. There is a contradiction in
wanting to be as accurate to source material as possible and yet using CG
rather than squibs so that there is a built-in assumption of multiple takes
(an antipathy he restates on the Benjamin Button commentary). There is
some sensitivity in not fabricating dialogue or action from within the cab
before the Stine murder, but when the camera rotates in time with the taxi
(achieved by a mixture of real photos, CG imagery, and even some stop-
motion animation), the point of view drops closer via dissolves and we
have the ironic comment on the radio talk-show ‘‘So what d’you think
he’ll do next?’’; we get the strong sense that he is talking about the direc-
tor, a God-like figure who is, through such overt effects, reminding us of
his presence.
It is debatable whether at times Fincher’s shots have a purpose beyond
their demand to be looked at. In Zodiac, Vanderbilt and Fincher claim
they did not want cinematic means to distract from the dialogue. One con-
sequence of this is sporadic set pieces featuring no dialogue where Fincher
can indulge his technical imagination, particularly in partnership with
Matte World Digital, which composed several of the special effects
152 David Fincher
sequences. The swinging tilt shot from the top of the Golden Gate Bridge
may suggest the passing of time but so might one of the dozens of captions
and the setting hardly varies greatly, except when jurisdiction is important.
It is hard not to see such shots as a director acknowledging his love of a
city, its iconic bridge and bay, a love that endures despite some of the hor-
rors perpetrated within its limits as well as indulging his love of precise
shot composition, creating depth via CG mist and boats.
Fincher claims the time-lapse sequence of the Trans-Am building is to
convey the passage of time and certainly time-lapse sequences can work to
compress an action of a known duration. However, the film contains doz-
ens of captions that fulfill that precise chronological function. Moreover,
by speeding up time, any sense we might have of how long a process
actually takes is completely distorted. Time-lapse sequences invite us to re-
examine the ordinary and known but from a different perspective—they
are essentially an alienating technique, distancing us from the narrative
and reminding us that we are viewing a cinematic effect unavailable to us
in the real world.
The sequence in which Toschi and Armstrong enter the Chronicle build-
ing, again despite protestations by Fincher that this is intended to show
chronological transition, is hard not to be read as a piece of cinematic arti-
fice in itself. Fragments of Zodiac letters, police photographic procedures,
and the progress of the men through the building are all edited together in
a montage, in which the writing does literally appear to be on the wall for
the paper. We see the men’s progress through Graysmith’s point of view,
suggesting his own growing obsession in which the calligraphy of the let-
ters seems to appear all around him. Rather than conveying the passage of
time, we are drawn to admire the artistry of the shots, the ubiquitous
iconic power of the Zodiac lettering, and perhaps link Fincher with other
filmmakers, like Peter Greenaway, who use text on screen as an alienating
device, that make audiences aware they are watching a piece of art rather
than drawing them into emotional identification with characters via the
conventions of continuity editing.
Several of the wider establishing shots, such as the Fourth of July open-
ing with Blade Runner–like fireworks across the town or the wide shot of
Rodeo as Toschi and Armstrong visit Allen at his workplace at the glisten-
ing Richmond oil refinery, seem to suggest San Francisco as place of man-
made beauty and a glittering example of modernity rather than a scar on
the landscape. Fincher describes the opening Miami Vice–style water shot
up to the ferry terminal area as his favorite, which is perhaps telling. So
much of what we see is CG from tugboat, to people fishing to cars moving
along the Embarcadero Freeway (destroyed in 1989); there is the feel of a

man playing with a giant technological train set, in which it is the means,
the technology, and the control of this, that is striking.
HITCHCOCK
‘‘I saw a lot of Hitchcock when I was a kid.’’
—David Fincher20
Fincher uses specific Hitchcockian allusions. In Panic Room, the flash-

light sequence is a clear allusion to Rear Window, in an attempt to be
seen by a ‘‘Sleepy neighbor’’ (played by Andrew Kevin Walker, writer
of Seven). However, this is only a brief interlude, and more a plot refer-
ence than a lengthy suspenseful element of the film. Elsewhere there is a
similarity of character situation. In relation to The Game, echoing John
‘‘Scottie’’ Ferguson (James Stewart) in Vertigo (1958), Van Orton’s life is
dominated by the suicide of a family member by jumping from a building,
initiating a sense of an unstoppable, tragic fate and events repeating
themselves.
Locations evoke Hitchcock too. In The Game, the spatial geography of
San Francisco (a setting associated with detective narratives like Vertigo
and The Maltese Falcon) also reflects its class divisions with Michael living
above and outside the city—he has to drive down into work. As Fincher
says, ‘‘the movie is about descent.’’21 Like the hero of Bonfire of the Van-
ities (the novel, Tom Wolfe, 1987; adapted by Brian De Palma, 1990), Van
Orton is drawn out of his ‘‘ivory tower’’ into the ‘‘real’’ world, the source
of his wealth and privilege. When he phones the police, he describes where
he lives as ‘‘the biggest house on the street,’’ but he is set adrift from the
geography, class, and environment of fawning acquiescence with which he
is familiar, plunged into a hellish region of uncertainty.
‘‘Hitchcock’’ is often used as a synonym for ‘‘suspense,’’ leading to his
name being unthinkingly evoked if suspense is involved. Swallow describes
the comparison with Hitchcock as ‘‘inevitable’’ without elaborating on
what this might mean.22 This links the genre and Hitchcock with
Douglas’s own career, often playing detectives—Van Orton’s BMW emerg-
ing over the bumps in the road evokes one of Douglas’s earlier small-
screen incarnations in The Streets of San Francisco (ABC, 1972–1977).
This possibly casts Christine as a femme fatale. She certainly has the beauty
and the breathless delivery of a noir-ish femme fatale but her narrative role
as a temptress is more ambiguous. In referring to the plausibility of Jim
154 David Fincher
Feingold (James Rebhorn), Fincher naturally refers to James Mason in

North by Northwest as symbolic of the kind of obviously untrustworthy
charm that he was looking to avoid.23
Superficially, the set of Panic Room appears to have some overtones of
Vertigo with high angles and corresponding reverse low-angle shots up
and down the stairwell. The shots up the stairwell to the senior agent ask-
ing sarcastically if he can show them the property before having to leave
establish the geography of the house but also feature in the right of shot
the skylight with its web-like design that will not capture its prey but
ironically be a means of allowing its entrance to the house. That said,
camera movement is mostly fluid, emphasizing forward motion around,
over, and through objects, rather than positioning the stairwell as in itself
a danger. Here, the stairs tend to represent a static location, where the
robbers bicker or pause in searching for something. We do see them on
the monitors progressing up or down but there is little sense of an object
or person likely to fall down the central space in the house.
There is also an important point here that this opening appears to estab-
lish the geography of the house but it is performed fairly quickly and
brusquely (in keeping with the agents’ characters) and with fluid camera-
work that often focuses on Meg’s lack of certainty rather than the precise
bearings of the house. As in the first Alien film, there appears to be an estab-
lishing sequence but this does not actually provide us with a specific sense of
place, more a ‘‘mood’’ of a house, its size, the fact that it ranges over many
levels and that the most important rooms are on the upper floors.
Fincher describes Panic Room as ‘‘Rear Window meets Straw Dogs,’’
which is revealing in a number of ways.24 Clearly, the film evokes
Hitchcock in its intensity, the single setting, the meticulousness of Fincher’s
preparation, and the sense of residential space as a voyeuristic trap. How-
ever, the elements of Peckinpah’s style are less evident. Fincher does not
favor the widespread use of guns in his films or indeed violence at all, par-
ticularly perpetrated on women. There is no real hint of sexual transgres-
sions as a motive of the robbers (unlike Kenneth in Out of Sight), or
simmering resentments or acts of revenge of such magnitude. Where there
is a slight reference is in the more ambiguous endings—closure is rarely
complete—an edginess remains. Fincher cites Hitchcock’s premise that
‘‘suspense was the product of the audience knowing more about the plot
than the characters on screen.’’25 However, this is only a partial view; such
an approach also creates dramatic irony, where we may feel superior to
characters who seem stupid in not anticipating threats that we can clearly
see coming.
Like Hitchcock, Fincher’s preparation of shots is meticulous, declaring

‘‘I don’t wing stuff.’’26 In relation to Panic Room, Ron Frankel, a pre-
visualization supervisor, suggests that Fincher’s use of digital storyboard-
ing meant that ‘‘[b]efore he even began filming, he had an edit of about
two-thirds of the film in his head and on videotape that everyone could
watch.’’27 In Rope (1948), Hitchcock experiments with extended long
takes, places the action in a single setting, in a limited time frame (suppos-
edly real time), and focuses on a pair of murderers who act to see if they
can get away with it. While clearly not murder, Fincher’s motivation as a
director seems similar—trying ground breaking techniques to see if they
will work (arguably rather than serving the needs of the narrative). Like
Panic Room, the setting, apparently Manhattan, serves as a backdrop for
the film placed within a single set, apart from an opening street scene.
Brandon Shaw (John Dall) and Phillip Morgan (Farley Granger) murder
a former classmate, David Kentley (Dick Hogan), in their apartment.
Their former teacher, Rupert Cadell (James Stewart), is also invited so that
he can appreciate their crime, which they see, like John Doe in Seven, as a
‘‘work of art.’’ Meticulous planning was needed for the lengthy takes with
state-of-the-art Technicolor cameras and rollaway scenery. Hitchcock’s
elaborate cyclorama of effects to suggest the passing of time (involving
models of buildings, smoke, neon signs, and clouds all shifting position),
at the time the largest ever used on a sound stage, parallels Fincher’s CG/
live action mix in attempting to create a credible long take, both directors
seeking to extend the bounds of film technology. Hitchcock attempts to
hide cuts every 10 minutes when magazines of film run out, and three
times uses a black-out on a character’s back (twice on Brandon, once on
Philip), a similar effect that Fincher also uses in the panic room door clos-
ing into the camera. Hitchcock, like Fincher, was an absolute perfectionist,
and similarly ordered lengthy reshoots (here of the final four segments, as
he was unhappy with the color of the background sunset effect).
It could even be said that Walker’s cameo as the neighbor parallels
Hitchcock appearing on a neon sign, both visible from the window of the
main setting. In both cases, there is also an absurd jokiness to the refer-
ence—in Hitchcock’s case referencing the weight-loss product ‘‘Reduco’’
his cameo was associated with in the newspaper ad in Lifeboat (1944)
and Walker, creator of Seven and contributor to The Game, both complex
narratives about looking for clues, seems unobservant and uninterested.
With the limited setting, cast, and dramatic action, there is a theatricality
to both films (Rope was originally a 1929 Patrick Hamilton stage play)
and like reaction to Panic Room, some critics felt the human drama was
156 David Fincher
merely an excuse to experiment with technology. Both Fincher and Hitch-

cock chose a very precise, technologically based method to show an appa-
rently perfect crime—one meticulous plan reflects the other but whereas
Fincher has continued to experiment, Hitchcock himself felt the experi-
ment was not worth pursuing.
Howard Shore talks of ‘‘certain imagery’’ in Panic Room that evokes
films from the 1950s and 1960s but he does not state explicitly what.28
The tone is set from the experimental opening titles, a feature of both De
Palma and Hitchcock. The clearest reference here is to Hitchcock’s North
By Northwest (1959). The idea that according to Swallow only a BBC
journalist spotted this allusion almost beggars belief. The fact that both
films introduce tense suspense films with huge lettering over buildings, at
an oblique angle to the camera, and most clearly in the same city, i.e.,
New York, designated as such to non-American viewers by iconic yellow
cabs visible in the reflection of a skyscraper, cannot be purely accidental,
especially because special effects houses Picture Mill and Computer Cafe
spent nearly a year on its production. The dramatic value of this however
is debatable because at least 95 percent of its running time is inside the
house, and the landscape beyond, apart from in the opening scenes with
the real estate agents, is barely referred to. The technique, later also used
on J.J. Abram’s TV show Fringe (Fox, 2008), creates a sense of unease as
the shiny Copperplate lettering appears to float within the landscape,
rather than being superimposed over its surface (Jodie Foster’s name, for
example, cast in partial shadow from a nearby building). The title shots
have a chronological element, moving through the working day so that
the first scene is established in mid-late afternoon, creating a sense of time
pressure on Meg to sign up for the house.
It creates a sense of transgression, of things not being in their rightful
place, almost like metallic graffiti. It literalizes the cliche ‘‘the writing’s on
the wall’’ and with visible human movement at the lower part of the
frame, it seems as if human society is busying itself, oblivious to the literal
warning signs above their heads. The placing of titles over expansive, open
space does counterpoint the claustrophobia of the film that follows and
that more widely this suggests that we, in Western urbanized society, are
all effectively in our own panic rooms by cutting ourselves off from direct,
interpersonal communications, but that we are not as securely compart-
mentalized as we might like to believe. The titles, at times almost ‘‘hidden’’
at the edges of the frame (especially the frame carrying Jodie Foster’s
name), although literally huge, suggest a need to look closely into the cor-
ners of urban space. Like Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), also evoked by
Howard Shore’s score, the titles problematize the usually distinct bound-
ary between audience and on-screen action. No human figures within the
screen seem to be able to see these embedded titles. It is for our benefit
alone and establishes a pact between director and audience that we will be
placed in the best position to see everything. However, the notion of a
‘‘linguistic blimp,’’ like Fincher’s fluid but ‘‘impossible’’ camera movements
through the house, draw attention to themselves as effects, and thereby
draw attention to the presence of the director.
Fincher talks about trying to build a sense of ‘‘dread through distance’’
and at various times there are certainly different planes of knowledge
being played with but it is highly debatable whether this produces dread.29
He claims, ‘‘What we were trying to do with CG was to say, there’s no
camera operator, there’s no crew, there’s no track, and the camera can go
everywhere.’’30 However, apart from the fact that nearly all the tracking
shots are forward ones so a track would not be visible anyway, such
sequences do not suggest, as Fincher claims, a lack of agency but precisely
the opposite. Audiences are sufficiently cine-literate to know that when we
move forward through banisters, we are only doing so under the direction
of a CG team creating such shots—it is their very impossibility which
draws attention to them as effects. Furthermore, to talk of distance does
not really mesh with forward-tracking motion, which inherently is a cam-
era movement normally associated with looking closer or further, i.e., with
satisfying narrative curiosity.
Swallow claims that Meg’s increasing engagement through the course of
the narrative, from passive observer to active heroine to controller of the
narrative, means that her character arc ‘‘can be read as a representation of
the audience-author relationship.’’31 However, it is not as straightforward
as this two-dimensional, linear expression would suggest and the multi-
faceted relationship also features the competing expectations of genre, stu-
dios, and cast members (Foster and Whitaker having had experience as
directors themselves). The extra-filmic factor that Whitaker passed on the
script adds an extra dimension to his role—he could not see what he could
do with the film, but Fincher could.
Chapter 7
A Sense of an Ending—No
‘‘Happily Ever After’’?
‘‘Can you guarantee that ending?’’

—Tim Robbins as Griffin Mill in The Player,
Robert Altman, 1992
It is debatable to what extent Fincher’s films constitute a particular world-

view. It might at first seem a straightforward issue. From the bleakness of
Alien3 to the ubiquitous cynicism and indifference that permeates Seven
so that idealism (Mills) and curiosity, integrity, and sensitivity (Somerset)
are extremely rare, antagonistic to the world around them, and arguably
defeated by it, Fincher shows us a world where we are not safe inside our
own houses (Panic Room) or where killers roam to strike apparently at
will and go uncaught (Zodiac), and a world where the criminal justice sys-
tem seems to be failing its citizens. Tracy’s doubts in Seven about being
pregnant are not so much linked to fears about the reaction of her hus-
band but the more philosophical doubt about the wisdom of bringing a
child into this world at all. For much of The Game we are careering
around a world apparently out of the control of the protagonist, who is
acted on rather than shaping the course of events. Only really in Benjamin
Button do we have a kinder, gentler milieu for the protagonist and perhaps
ironically many critics saw that lack of tension and conflict around the
hero as a source of the film’s main weakness.
However, in looking at his main features film by film, we might often
also see lighter, redemptive elements which question the dominant view of
his films (reflected in Phillip Swallow’s title, Dark Eye). In particular, it is
instructive to consider the endings of the films, which often contain a sum-
mation of what the film is trying to say or at least represent the lasting
160 David Fincher
impression of the film as audiences leave the cinema. Furthermore, the

endings often lead to a re-evaluation of the film we have seen up to this
point. Also, the role of DVD technology is significant, as this often
includes alternative endings as part of the extras package, with the impli-
cation, especially for so-called ‘‘Director’s Cuts,’’ that this alternative was
what the director would really like to have used.
ALIEN3
‘‘This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off.’’
—From the ship’s log in Ridley Scott’s Alien
Weaver gained a Best Actress nomination for Aliens, the significance of

which, as Thomson notes, was largely missed at the time—this was the
first female nomination for an action, horror, or sci-fi movie. In a sense,
this is part of the critical/audience reaction against Alien3 which superfi-
cially seemed to squander this legacy. However, on closer examination, the
opposite is true and Weaver has to portray a narrower but more intense
range of emotions in the face of inexplicable evil.
At the climax of Alien3, Morse crawls toward the camera in close-up
and we expect the creature to strike at any moment, but instead he stum-
bles into Ripley’s feet, rather evocative of the coda of William Golding’s
Lord of the Flies (1954) where the hero Ralph falls at the feet of a naval
officer who suddenly appears in a similar guise as rescuer. In both texts
the implication is that this sudden rescue is merely a wish-fulfilment fan-
tasy and that a painful death is a much more likely outcome. Aaron
(Bishop in an earlier draft) also refers to the xenomorph with some awe as
‘‘the beast,’’ the term used for the mythic projection of evil in Golding’s
novel.
Taubin declares that ‘‘the film charts Ripley’s emotional course from de-
spair to beyond despair.’’1 At only one point does Ripley momentarily sub-
mit to despair, when she actively searches for the creature, and even this is
short-lived. She is linked to the droid Bishop in being apparently unable to
self-terminate—she asks Dillon to kill her and although the film does finish
with her death, it is more a sacrifice to kill the alien within her than extin-
guish her own life. A key feature of a Final Girl is this drive to survive. It
could be said that she relinquishes this by her swan dive or indeed that the
notion of Final Girl is developed here. There is no need for a Horatio-style
survivor to tell the story. In an electronic age, the final transmission from
the first and third films fulfills this function. The sacrifice gains a semblance
A Sense of an Ending—No ‘‘Happily Ever After’’? 161
of revenge and justice for the ‘‘rape’’ of Ripley in the escape capsule. True
victim and perpetrator (at one remove) both die but it is the only way to
exterminate her offspring, which she would never want to live anyway.
Whereas the first film ended with the self-destruct sequence on the Nos-
tromo, here the narrative itself self-destructs with characters removed as
soon as they threaten to become a source of empathy or hope. It appears
that Fincher wanted to destroy the possibility of any further sequel—killing
off all the main characters and most of all, the heroine that has held the
sequence together. He also knows the nature of Hollywood and it almost
seems as if he knows that there will be further installments in the fran-
chise, but that he wants to make it as difficult as he can in a narrative
‘‘crash and burn’’ policy. Thomson dismissively refers to ‘‘crass talk at Fox
of mixing the Alien and Predator franchises together’’ and yet in 2004
Paul W.S. Anderson was to direct just such an entity.2 It is hard not to see
the monolith of big Hollywood studios as elided in nature with ‘‘the Com-
pany,’’ desperate above all else to keep their product alive for future ex-
ploitation and rendering any human individual who gets in their way as
expendable. The Company also has a name, we learn—Weyland Yutani—
but like the revelation of ‘‘Ellen’’ it comes too late to humanize its owner.
A measure of closure is achieved when the monster is blown to smither-
eens by low-tech resourcefulness, just like the main model for such action:
Steven Spielberg’s 1977 Jaws. Lacking any working technology, this is
ironically achieved (as it is in Steve Sekely’s 1962 version of Day of the
Triffids) by application of a simple element, water, usually associated with
its life-sustaining properties. This destruction from within, shown in slow
motion, has precursors in Clive Barker’s and David Cronenberg’s aesthetic
of bodily eruption and particularly the close of Brian De Palma’s The Fury
(1978), where Childress (John Cassavetes) is shown to explode sequen-
tially, almost in an Eisenstein montage, from several different angles.
Although Taubin cannot imagine anything like the final shots of Ripley
with her newborn alien (‘‘[a] most complicated gesture, and quite unlike
any other that I’ve ever seen in movies),’’ there are precursors for this
sequence.3 Thomson notes a similarity between Ripley and Renee Jeanne
Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Dreyer, 1928), but this is
not expanded on. The script says she ‘‘smiles like the Mona Lisa’’ and as
Foster describes it, ‘‘A beatific smile crossed her face.’’4 Clearly, there is a
physical similarity between the two actresses, both with shaven heads, but
there is more than that. Both are sacrificing themselves to die by fire on a
point of principle and both, in a sense, evade their pursuers by an act con-
veyed as heroic and transcendent. There is a simple grace in Ripley’s final
162 David Fincher
wordless, slow-motion dive, where words appear to be redundant and her

final action, that of clutching her offspring to her breast, is the defining
moment of the trilogy. For a few brief seconds, she has her child.
The ending used in the theatrical release of Alien3 is not Fincher’s pre-
ferred version; he originally did not want the creature to emerge at all.
Earlier takes showed the alien bursting from Ripley’s chest before she
dives or her falling but only blood starting to show. Interestingly, Fincher
talks of not wanting ‘‘to do the Carrie ending’’ but this seems a strange
way to describe what we see.5 De Palma’s film does have leisurely slow
motion but the shock is caused by the sudden movement of a hand from
the grave, of the supernatural bursting into a scene, which admittedly is
dream-like, stylized, and with deliberately unsettling features (cars moving
backward in the background) but predominantly naturalistic in action,
unlike any of the versions of this scene in Fincher’s film. It could be that
although audiences associate a ‘‘Carrie ending’’ with shock, a sudden
twist, and the notion of an ongoing nightmare, Fincher is referring to the
religious overtones which he feels are too obvious. He dismisses his sec-
ond, stigmata-like version as ‘‘too religious, and to be honest, I thought it
was vulgar.’’6 There is still a strongly transcendent element to the whole
scene. In Foster’s novelization, Morse intones, on viewing Ripley’s fall,
‘‘Those who are dead are not dead. They have moved up. Moved higher.’’7
The final moments of Ripley on screen are both a death and a birth
scene. Like the alien in the chase sequences, we see her fall through the
shot, and facially she seems at peace as she clutches the creature to her in
both a gesture of maternal affection and a vise-like grip to ensure that it
cannot escape. She has not only joined her surrogate daughter Newt in
death, but the shot of Ripley disappearing into the flames echoes the previ-
ous cremations with the same momentary firing up of the furnace and the
same swelling orchestral theme by Elliot Goldenthal. As a gesture of epic
sacrifice, it is difficult to match in modern cinema. Followed by a shot of
the sun breaking round the planet, it is hard not to read this as a new
dawn, in which the forces of mercenary capitalism have been kept at bay,
and like a tomb, the facility is sealed.
However, the sentiment is short-lived and the words of the lone survivor
Morse, ‘‘Fuck you,’’ hardly reflect the suggestions of his name as convey-
ing some coded message. The final words we hear are Ripley’s, replaying
the message from the first film (‘‘This is Ripley. Last survivor of the Nos-
tromo. Signing off.’’). It almost feels like a final favor from Bishop the
droid, in effect putting her affairs in order. However while aurally there is
a sense of heroic and elegiac closure, visually the camera roams around
the garbage under the tarpaulin. Ripley is the sole survivor across all three
films but her narrative survives through a mixture of technology and art.
The last words seen on screen read:
Work prison Fury 161

Closed and sealed
Custodial presence terminated
Remaining refinery equipment
To be sold as scrap
End of transmission.
The final break is technological as the signal ends. This writer at least
cannot think of another example where a sequel in the sci-fi/horror genre
uses the exact same dialogue to close a narrative, perhaps exemplifying
Stephen King’s notion, expressed by Andre Linoge (Colm Feore) in Storm
of the Century (Craig Baxley, 1999), that ‘‘Hell is repetition.’’ It is the ulti-
mate ironic answer to critics who claim that sequels only repeat pleasures
with diminishing returns, to use exactly the same text verbatim. It almost
casts the original message in the guise of a suicide note, as if she always
knew things would turn out like this. In contrast to the heroic marines of
Aliens, it is the final example of Alien3’s immersion in a fin de siecle sense
of atrophy, of things running down and of inevitable closure, almost by
exhaustion. ‘‘Fury’’ suggests unfocused anger, but ‘‘sealed,’’ ‘‘terminated,’’
and ‘‘to be sold as scrap’’ delivered by an abandoned log on a disused
scrap-heap underline humankind’s future as Kipple.
SEVEN
‘‘You know this isn’t going to have a happy ending.’’
—Somerset
Little details make the viewer rethink the preceding narrative. Although
it is not the ending of the film, the premature ‘‘conclusion’’ of the hunt for
John Doe when he gives himself up has some of the elements of a coda, al-
ready making the alert viewer think back. The blood on Doe’s shirt and
hands when he gives himself up and while he is being questioned (about
which nobody asks him, rather strangely) must logically be that of his last
victim: Tracy.
The climax in bright sunlight and open, rolling countryside is a stark
contrast with the dark, claustrophobic, urban environment up to this
point, ironically making this scenery seem alien. The pylons, symbols of
164 David Fincher
communication links, prevent close surveillance by the helicopter and

interfere with the listening devices; confidence in technical superiority is
rendered useless. Like the previous SWAT raid, the final preparations for
Doe’s supposed revelation of further bodies are characterized by shows of
noisy and ostentatious military hardware, particularly when housed in
some form of flying vehicle, giving a God-like omniscient point of view
and creating an impression of invulnerability, which dramatically disorien-
tates the viewer all the more powerfully when this is suddenly rendered
ineffective (also seen in James Cameron’s 1986 Aliens). In an extreme re-
versal of expectations, Doe, a lone individual, bound and held at gun-
point, outwits the greater numbers and forces of those around him,
through his own twisted intelligence and the power of his words (in the
car, Doe responds dryly to Mills’s taunts that ‘‘You won’t miss a thing.’’).
The light, the open nature of the setting, the superiority of forces—all
prove to be illusory. In the moral darkness of the denouement, Mills is the
one trapped rather than Doe and supposedly superior firepower cannot
prevent Doe’s verbal wit provoking an irascible part of Mills’s nature.
On Doe’s instructions, the three head away from the given route, a bad
idea in most fairy-tale narratives, Doe jogging, Mills with his gun drawn
but held low, and Somerset following behind. Moving more slowly, gener-
ally more observant, less given to impetuous action, it is fitting that he is
the one who spots a van approaching in the distance but makes the fatal
error of splitting off from his partner and approaching the van to investi-
gate. Doe is exploiting not just Mills’s propensity for anger but one of
Somerset’s dominant characteristics: curiosity. Without Somerset’s calming
influence, Doe is able to provoke Mills verbally without restraint. As Som-
erset waves the chopper away, he clarifies that ‘‘John Doe has the upper
hand.’’ In extreme low angle with the sun framed behind him, Doe speaks
calmly and slowly, never losing his temper or raising his voice. In his body
positioning, his self-sacrifice, and his broader philosophical aims, he could
be seen as a kind of mock Christ figure and he certainly sees himself as
engaged in a scheme with a moral purpose. As Somerset warns Mills, ‘‘If
you kill him, he will win,’’ and the state’s murder of Doe is a key part of
his self-scripted narrative.
At the van, we see Somerset displaying a new mode: indecision. He
looks back twice at the other two and although shot in low angle, which
would normally increase his on-screen stature, he appears unsure what to
do. At this point, it could be said that because it might be a bomb and
because Doe has not commented on the parcel, it would have been better
not to open it, but like the viewer, curiosity gets the better of him. From
Somerset’s visibly shocked reaction and Doe’s dialogue about visiting

Tracy, we can deduce what is in the box (although it might have been a
nice touch to have had an empty box, which is only opened after Doe has
provoked Mills by suggesting what is there). Like the other victims, we do
not see the act of murder but even more here we do not even see a
corpse—a head-sized box and Doe’s cruelly provocative words are suffi-
cient. Interestingly, what motivates the final shot is not just the murder of
a beloved spouse but Mills’s future child and the key fact that Somerset
knew and he did not. It is this challenge to his professional status (and his
personal pride) which finally pushes him over the edge, accompanied by a
flash-cut of Tracy (a device also used at the end of Fight Club) as a symbol
of potential goodness destroyed, and makes him pull the trigger.
The denouement, added at the insistence of Fox, anxious not to end the
film on a note of unremitting bleakness, sees Mills, now in the position of
Doe, in the back of a police car being driven away. However, Somerset’s
‘‘I’ll be around,’’ far from reassuring, suggests an inability to find closure and
rest and that he will be haunted by the case as much as he will continue to
haunt the police station. Because he was looking to retire voluntarily at the
outset of the film, rather than having to stop work due to his age, this sug-
gests that he is tired of the daily battle with the darker sides of humanity.
Closure is achieved, not by the forces of law and order, not by chance,
but by the wicked actions of the perpetrator—he initiates the action and
ends it too. Tracy and her child are dead, Mills’s career and his life are
destroyed, and Somerset’s plans for retirement and a smooth transition to
his spiritual heir are wrecked. It is hard to take any positives from the end-
ing, except the poignancy of Tracy’s death, illustrating the possibility as
well as the fragility of goodness in the world. Dyer declares that ‘‘Somerset
can be separated from Mills and Doe, from sin, only at the cost of not par-
ticipating in the world.’’8 However, as indicated in Chapter 3, the charac-
ter of Somerset is not the polar opposite of Mills or even Doe, as at first it
might appear. It is true he survives, a lonely stoical figure, but he is impli-
cated in their deaths too. The choice of the Hemingway quote as an
attempt to provide a modicum of consolation is a strange one, as it only
underlines the accuracy of Doe’s and Somerset’s view of the world as
hopelessly corrupt. Somerset intones the lines from For Whom the Bell
Tolls (1940), ‘‘‘The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.’ I agree
with the second part.’’ Melancholic darkness is falling, the noise of the city
returns via the helicopters, and the scratchy credits roll with Bowie’s ‘‘The
Hearts (sic) Filthy Lesson,’’ complementing what Dyer calls ‘‘a landscape
of despair.’’9
166 David Fincher
It was actually a mistake which led to Fincher being sent the script fea-
turing the head in the box and Mills shooting Doe. Fox tried to persuade
him to accept alternatives, including a race to save Tracy and Somerset
shooting Doe instead as a means to save Mills. This latter version, with
Somerset answering the question of what he would do now with ‘‘I’m
retiring,’’ would be strangely reminiscent of Blade Runner, a film that is
also set in a rain-dominated, dirty urban landscape, in which ‘‘retirement’’
is used as a euphemism for state-sanctioned murder. However, Pitt insisted
that the original ending remain and felt so strongly that he had it written
into his contract. So what we have is essentially a compromise. Fincher
and Pitt held out for the head in the box and the Studio insisted on altera-
tions after test screenings to a softer, supposedly final moral. Dyer suggests
the film is a powerful statement that ‘‘the world is beyond both redemp-
tion and remedy.’’10 This world perhaps, that of urban millennial America,
but it is worth pausing before assuming that this bleakness is true of all
cultures.
THE GAME
In an earlier version of the script, Michael killed Christine, but this did
not provide adequate motivation for his subsequent suicide. His wistful
question (‘‘What happened to that waitress . . .?’’) suggests the beginning
of a re-engagement with the world, followed by his decision to chase after
her and have something he only has a couple of times in the whole film: a
conversation. She chides him for never asking her name, which she now
reveals as Claire (Fincher claims there is a clue in the music that accompa-
nies her first scene, Claire de Lune, but that can only be read retrospec-
tively). Like the belated introductions at Tracy’s dinner party in Seven, the
two main characters introduce themselves to each other right at the close
of the narrative.
In a sense, the narrative is necessary for the introductions to take place
at all, but it does seem a little unlikely that we can easily embrace a Forster-
like ‘‘Only connect’’ moral here. Her comment ‘‘You don’t know anything
about me’’ is still true. They start to talk and flirt a little and she invites
him, with the taxi door open, on what might be seen as a ‘‘date’’ at the air-
port but as he looks up and down the street, exactly how much redemption
has been gained in his character is ambiguous. Michael’s earlier staring at
the cropped pictures of a woman’s torso (that might be Christine) could
suggest worry of involvement in a crime as much as a distracted interest in
her. She is jaded from all the game-playing (‘‘I’ve been in this too long’’), to
the point where the actress Unger actually fluffed her line in reality about
where she comes from and Fincher decided to keep it in. Perhaps she was
tired of this narrative too, which exhausts both its own imaginative re-
sources and the audience’s limited capacity to suspend disbelief in a repeti-
tive empathy-destroying process. Intellectually viewers can respond to the
ending, but emotionally, I suspect most do not really care whether this turns
into a Casablanca-style ‘‘beautiful friendship.’’
When his secretary, receiving a list of refusals to invitations, rather
bluntly declares ‘‘Honestly, why should I bother?’’ Van Orton issues the
rather patronizing claim that ‘‘You don’t know about society. You don’t
know the satisfaction of avoiding it.’’ The action of another secretary in
wishing him a happy birthday is enough to prompt a Scrooge-like ‘‘I don’t
like her.’’ The course of the film does seem to make him re-evaluate his life
so that he seems a calmer, more socially engaged individual by the end.
His ex-wife’s similar rhetorical question later (‘‘Why do I call?’’) is met
with a mixture of rudeness, indifference, and genuine incomprehension
(‘‘Honestly, I don’t know’’). Like Scrooge, an unlikeable, inward-looking
materialist is shown a ghost from his past (the memories of his father); his
present (his merciless banking activity); and his future (a possible relation-
ship with Christine/Claire).
If the film is seen as a moral journey, then it is by little narrative shocks,
steadily increasing in severity, which jolt Van Orton out of his compla-
cency. Casting Douglas in the role also means intertextual references can
be made to his openly avaricious Gordon Gekko character from Wall
Street (Oliver Stone, 1987) and his ‘‘Greed is good’’ mantra. In current
economic times, perhaps there is more schadenfreude to be gained from a
banker brought low, suggesting a retributive pleasure in the narrative. His
character arc is expressed in distinctly cinematic terms—he goes from
being the center of his own universe to being the star of his own movie,
but one in which he is no longer the controlling, guiding force.
The narrative is structured around whether Van Orton will literally fol-
low in his father’s footsteps and commit suicide at the age of 48, the sug-
gestion being that he too possesses much of the depressive melancholy
that seems to have overwhelmed his father. It is only after the humiliation
of the failed raid on CRS that Van Orton asks Erica ‘‘What was my father
like?’’ which she notes is the first time he has ever asked. Clearly worried
that he is heading the same way, he asks if he was ‘‘morose’’ (we have seen
Van Orton eat a sandwich with garnish for a main meal, symbolic of his
cold existence). Erica suggests his father just worked too hard and that
‘‘his manner was so . . . slight. You could spend time in a room and not
168 David Fincher
even know that he’d been there the whole time,’’ suggesting an innate
inability to impose himself on the world, which Van Orton appears to
partly inherit in his aversion to personal relationships.
He articulates his deepest fear: ‘‘I wonder how much of him there is in
me,’’ meaning whether he too will be drawn to suicide, but even here Erica
replies noncommittally ‘‘Not much,’’ avoiding complete denial, leaving the
possibility of suicide still open. She answers the question about his father’s
suicide with the almost throwaway remark that ‘‘Nobody ever worried
about your father.’’ By the end, there is the suggestion that at least Chris-
tine (now known as Claire) is prepared to form some kind of relationship
with him, one that he initiated in chasing after the taxi.
Despite all the CG effects, the overall impact of the final fall though the
L.A. landscape is not that great. Matte shots, stunt doubles, and minia-
tures evoke The Wizard of Oz rather than the feeling that we are watching
anything particularly groundbreaking. The progress of Van Orton’s fall,
seen from a number of different angles, again strangely evokes the end of
the middle section of Cat’s Eye (Lewis Teague, 1985) where the fall of
Cressner the blackmailer is conveyed in a farcical, even comic, style sym-
bolized by the honking of a horn. Here, tragedy is avoided by the provi-
sion of fake glass and a giant crash-mat. Helped up and brushed down,
Van Orton not surprisingly expresses a range of emotions: bemusement,
shock, and relief at the emergence of his brother, clearly not dead. Faced
with a line up like a wedding and a parade of smiling well-wishers, the
one emotion we do not see but which he would be fully justified in
expressing is anger. Instead, he seems calmer, managing an amicable
exchange with his ex-wife and promising to call her. As Nicholas finally
breaks down and cries, hugging Conrad, the comment ‘‘maybe it’ll stop
you becoming such an asshole’’ may be true but for all its interesting
game-playing, some viewers may be left with the feeling that multimillion-
aires might learn something about themselves without spending huge sums
in manipulative and cruel jokes on each other. The ends scarcely seem to
justify the extravagant means.
FIGHT CLUB
The ‘‘twist’’ of Tyler as the alter ego of Jack is perhaps not entirely a
surprise but like in The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999), the coda
still packs a punch, requiring a revisionist flash back through previous
scenes, now seen in a different light. The opening and ending effectively
‘‘book-end’’ the film, casting it all as Jack’s schizoid flashback, and this
arresting of forward motion happens in a number of places in the film,

such as after the first fight and after seeing Bob for the first time, when
Jack corrects himself ‘‘No, wait a minute, back up. Let’s start over here
. . .’’ The spectacular opening shot, reverse-tracking through Jack’s synap-
ses, should make us aware from the outset that everything is filtered
through his perspective, but our attention may be more drawn by the bra-
vura nature of this opening computer-generated shot, which is apparently
a long take through a body, along the barrel of a pistol and ending on the
blurred trigger in the foreground with Jack’s face, wide-eyed in panic in
sharp focus in the background.
The scene where Jack wakes to Tyler’s whispered description of a
generic urban future (cited above) is a strange scene out of sync aestheti-
cally with the rest of the film. Fades to black, conventionally used at the
ends of scenes or even ends of films, here suggest the passing of time but
when we fade back up we are still in the same place with Tyler’s speech
continuing, suggesting either lengthy pauses or a confusion between sleep-
ing and waking that had characterized Jack’s opening section of the film
before he found the therapy groups. Tyler’s dialogue, barely audible on the
soundtrack, includes a description of looking down and seeing tiny figures,
stalking elk around the ruins of Rockefeller Center in a speech which is a
strange mixture of urban fantasy, J.G. Ballard–style, and Richard Mathe-
son’s I Am Legend (1954; and particularly its 2007 film adaptation by
Francis Lawrence).11 The novel explains this as symbolic of the destruc-
tion of civilization but its precise meaning in the film remains enigmatic
and could be seen as a more positive view of a possible future based on
the imagination rather than narrowly acquisitive capitalism.
At the climax, the narrative returns us to the beginning, Tyler holding
the pistol in Jack’s mouth. A surreal battle of wits follows, in which,
rather unconvincingly, Jack wills the gun into his hand, so he can destroy
his alter ego. The subsequent sequence is the first time that Tyler’s on-
screen ‘‘impossibility’’ is confirmed. The final scenes take on a surreal as-
pect as Jack continues to function despite apparently shooting out some of
his brain, causing Tyler to breathe out the smoke of the gunshot before
falling dead. Tyler is shot at point-blank range and disappears from the
scene with the explosives in the van, only for his influence to persist, as
we see the security footage of Jack now apparently being hurled around
by himself. It is a very hard scene to describe because we are witnessing
something literally impossible, the visualization of a schizoid mind.
Palahniuk’s novel closes with Tyler and Jack both apparently dead and
a dialogue between the soul of the hero and God, trying to explain why he
170 David Fincher
did what he did, which can also be read as the musings of a surviving
mental patient. In Fincher’s film, having apparently exorcised his alter ego,
Jack stands hand in hand with Marla, framed from behind almost in sil-
houette, looking out as the buildings fall, in an image that is partly apoca-
lyptic and partly innocent, as if these two lovers, who have finally found
one another, can begin again. There is even a religious sense of divine jus-
tice here—the symbols of corporate greed (credit card headquarters) have
been destroyed, the world purified to a degree, and if the destruction has a
God-like intent (Tyler certainly takes on a megalomaniac God-like aura),
then perhaps this is a moment of Eden-like renewal.
PANIC ROOM
Before the clumsy coda, there is a complex final sequence of shots.
Sarah appears to be looking at her injured father, saying ‘‘Everything’s
going to be fine,’’ the kind of empty platitude that a parent might use to
comfort a child. Meg walks forward and only gives a brief glance in their
direction, saying nothing herself. This gesture is inter-cut with Burnham
also looking down, suggesting a link between the two, as if he and Meg
are thinking of each other—she of his sacrifice and he of why he has done
this. The overwhelming impression is one of vacant shock at what she has
proven herself capable of and the unexpected heroism of Burnham. This is
the place where logically and aesthetically the film ends, signalled by the
lengthy fade to black at its close.
Koepp’s original script has Raoul killed by the slamming door of the
panic room and Meg initiating the final fight after attacking the room via
the shared wall with their neighbor’s. Raoul’s demise is almost accidental
and Burnham is also shot making a run for it back into the house. With
additional dialogue (‘‘Monster hand’’) and the money falling like cards,
Koepp underlines Burnham’s back-story of gambling debts. However
Fincher creates a moment of heroic sacrifice as Burnham returns to save
Meg, rather than achieve his own escape. He is apprehended in Christ-like
crucifix pose and the bonds, the actual goal of the whole robbery, almost
feel like the ‘‘McGuffin’’ in the plot (the apparent focus of character
action, ultimately revealed as a false trail), as they blow away via a CG
effect. He has sacrificed material gain and his own personal life for a
greater moral principle.
In the book-ended sections, the only sequences in daylight, Meg conveys
a look of measured control, the stereotypical look of a Manhattan intellec-
tual. The opening was re-shot several months after the body of the film
due to Foster’s pregnancy, which extra-filmic factor does lend her a differ-
ent look, possibly calmer. The tone of the final scene is strangely low-key,
with Sarah putting her head in her mother’s lap, the two apparently more
reconciled now, even though Meg has returned to her cool, distanced man-
ner of the opening. Educated at an elite French school, it is in keeping
with Foster’s own background that she should correct her on-screen
daughter’s pronunciation of ‘‘concierge.’’ Glasses back on, bruises mostly
hidden, she once again gives the impression of bookish ‘‘mouseyness’’ bely-
ing the powerful, action heroine that we have seen. We know now the
extent to which she would act, specifically that she would be prepared to
kill, in order to protect her daughter. Like in Seven, the close is a rare
example of a scene in daylight, suggesting a more optimistic future but
also suggesting its fragility and possibly its delusive quality. Significantly,
neither character seems sufficiently traumatized by their experience to
want to move away from the city. We might attribute this to tenacity,
courage, stupidity, or a reckoning that lightning rarely strikes twice in the
same place. This is a different conclusion than the world-view of Seven or
Alien3 which, rather than see evil as an isolated phenomenon, repeatedly
underscores the endemic cynicism and corrupt nature of the society in
which they are set.
Like the opening credits, which suggest unease beneath the surface,
technology undermines any sense of clear borders we might feel. The shot
appears to open out but there seems to be a slow track back at the same
time as a zoom in, conveying a sense of distortion, that we are not seeing
a simple straightforward scene of family reconciliation. There was pres-
sure from Columbia Studios to feature Burnham in this final scene, due to
negative reaction in audience testing to the bleak abruptness of the ending.
However, sets had already been destroyed and the costs of rebuilding
deterred the Studios from pushing further for this.
ZODIAC
If the hardware scene does not take place until 1983, it suggests that
Graysmith has been searching for Allen in all the intervening years. The
fact that he has written two books on the subject and is still talking about
the case nearly 40 years later suggests the continuation of a lifelong obses-
sion. There is a sense of validation in the success of the book, glimpsed at
the end on an airport bookstand. Arguably, it is because of the book that
Mageau is re-interviewed and identifies Allen. The final scene in which
Mike Mageau picks out Allen’s picture provides a neat way to book-end
172 David Fincher
the narrative with a survivor from the initial murder and raising the possi-
bility of justice at least (although this is then denied by the closing cap-
tions describing Allen’s death). Ultimately, there is a sense of a lack of
complete closure in the film, reflecting the denial of justice to the families
of the victims and the detectives involved in the case.
Donovan’s ‘‘Hurdy Gurdy Man’’ appears on the soundtrack at the end
of the first murder and at the close, reminding us of the unsolved murders
that began the film, Mike Mageau’s suffering through the years, and the
relatively few definitive facts about the Zodiac Killer, whose mythic per-
sona threatens to cloud the narrative of the latter two-thirds of the film as
we drown in detail and dead ends amid Graysmith’s obsession. Key sec-
tions of the lyrics seem ironic in that the killer is not ‘‘bringing songs of
love’’ and although survivor descriptions vary, by including a ‘‘roly-poly
man’’ this may encourage us to share Graysmith’s theory of Arthur Leigh
Allen as the prime suspect.
COMIC ELEMENTS
‘‘I got this key out of the mouth of this clown.’’
—Van Orton in The Game, trying to explain to
Christine their escape from a faulty elevator
Although often taken to be a filmmaker with a dark world-view, Finch-

er’s films are also punctuated with a playful edge. This often takes the
form of absurd situations or witty one-liners that provide some comic
relief, such as in Alien3, Aaron repeating ‘‘Don’t call me that’’ when
referred to as ‘‘85’’ (his IQ). Small unexpected examples of humor pepper
the script, often seen as unremittingly bleak, such as Morse and Gregor
bumping into one another while being pursued down the tunnels and
faced with imminent death in a ridiculous moment that lightens the mood
momentarily, especially with Morse’s impression of the monster. Later
Morse clips Jude round the ear (the script talks of ‘‘like Laurel and
Hardy’’) for running while holding scissors the wrong way, parodying
safety advice for children. There are certainly many deaths as the inhabi-
tants are picked off one by one. However several are quite absurd in na-
ture, such as Murphy, the first victim who stumbles back into a fan on
being startled by the alien, which spits acid in its face.
There is an inherently ridiculous element in the plan to lure the alien
into the furnace, articulated fairly soon by David (Pete Postlethwaite),
who does not like the part of the plan ‘‘where we’re running around in a
dark fucking maze with that thing chasing us.’’ This is the first time we
have seen the monster being taunted and there is some humor in David
calling ‘‘Kitty’’ to taunt the creature and Jude’s ‘‘Hey fuckface, come and
get me.’’ The childish pleasure of teasing and being chased, an almost-
cartoonish cat-and-mouse game, and the more classical, mythic overtones
of Theseus and the Minotaur all combine here. When the CGI alien leaps
across the corridors through the furnace, there is even an element of a
game of peek a boo. In a deleted scene, the scissor-carrier (Jude) dies by
failing to heed the warning and impaling himself on them, uttering ‘‘For
fuck’s sake.’’ The final draft has Jude slipping clown-like in some alien goo
but using the same line. In all this there is something of Phillip Brophy’s
notion of ‘‘horrality’’ here—the idea that you respond to moments of great
trauma not by fear but through the disavowal of laughter.12
Even Seven, hardly thought of as a comedy, features the dinner scene
where the fragility of Mills’s facade of normality and family cohesion is
undercut by the subway train making the whole house shake and setting
off Somerset’s outburst of laughter. In a shot ultimately cut from The
Shawshank Redemption (1994), Frank Darabont gives Morgan Freeman a
lasting close-up of him laughing until tears roll down his face, and the
actor brings the same infectious humor to this scene.
The Game is usually seen as a dark film, but here too we have Michael
Douglas as Van Orton bursting into a hotel room of a businessman, whom
he (wrongly) imagines is trying to use CRS pranks to avoid foreclosure on
a loan, delivering the memorable line ‘‘You can have pictures of me wear-
ing nipple rings, butt-fucking Captain Kangaroo. All that matters is if the
stock goes up or down.’’ Cutaways of Anson Baer’s bemused family,
calmly sipping tea, underline how badly he has miscalculated, assuming
that everyone operates according to his warped sense of morality. As his
hypothesis crumbles in front of him, with Baer’s composure (played with
great presence by Armin Mueller-Stahl), puffing a cigar and declaring that
he has already signed his acquiescence to Van Orton’s terms and is going
sailing, the usual high/low angle denoting status is reversed and suddenly
without a rational explanation, the plot is plunged back into the fantastic
(symbolized by the following shot of Van Orton venting his rage on the
briefcase which inexplicably will not open, representing his environment,
which seems to be conspiring to thwart his designs).
Most comments about Fight Club focus on the portrayal of violence but
it is also a very funny film. The character of Tyler Durden not only repre-
sents the brutal side of Jack that he suppresses but his inhibited comic side
too. In particular, Brad Pitt in either pink dressing gown and fluffy slippers
174 David Fincher
or flying over the handlebars of a bike he is ridiculously riding around the

Paper Street house, practicing nunchuck routines on a chair while howl-
ing, or even taking four bouncing jumps before Jack hits him the first
time—these are all acts of engaging eccentricity. In the final fight with
Jack, he adopts a ridiculously stylized Kung Fu pose, finds time to take his
jacket off, and even checks his reflection in a battered wing-mirror. He
delivers his admission that Jack’s answer to the question of which celebrity
he would he fight (Gandhi) is a ‘‘good answer’’ with surprised admiration
for its perversity. The incongruity of choices for fantasy fights (Hem-
ingway or William Shatner), Edward Norton’s running style (which we see
in slow motion) is inherently ridiculous, especially when only dressed in
boxer shorts and his instinctive flinching from a cigarette Marla flicks
away very close to his face—these are all light hearted moments. There is
some wit in the dialogue too, albeit of a fairly dark variety. Jack describes
Chloe, a sufferer of terminal cancer, thusly: ‘‘Chloe looked the way Meryl
Streep’s skeleton would look if she made it smile and walk around a party
being extra nice to everyone.’’
There are inherently comic situations—the airport employee explaining
the procedure about discovering a vibrating dildo in luggage, Marla sitting
back and falling off the bed, the snagged bag of fat pouring over Jack, and
the pointless golf driving range that Jack and Tyler improvise, smashing
golf balls into the urban night, which is both funny and highlights the real-
ity of areas of urban wasteland develop (evocative of John Carpenter’s
1976 Assault on Precinct 13). There is some slapstick comedy in Tyler’s
‘‘homework’’ of starting a fight with a stranger, with its montage of pro-
vocative behavior—a hose sprayed at a vicar, even on his Bible when it
falls to the ground, security footage of a man chasing a figure on a bicycle,
and a car showroom. The absurd scene of Jack sitting, doll-like, punching
himself in the face and throwing himself around in his boss’s office is cer-
tainly bizarre (his boss drops the phone in disbelief), but powerful too as
we clearly see just how disturbed Jack really is, and foreshadows the final
fight with ‘‘himself’’ seen on the basement security monitors. Small ges-
tures and body language add to this sense of a world slightly out of kilter
through Pitt’s and Norton’s performances—Pitt slamming his money down
on the bus in a melodramatic gesture or Norton’s fey, bouncing gait as he
climbs the steps to the Paper Street house for the first time. After the ear-
lier section to camera where Jack explains Tyler’s tendency to pee in food
he serves, later when he is sitting with Marla, Jack mutters to the waiter
that he wants clean food. Jack’s dialogue seems laughably absurd in
threatening the cops with ‘‘a lead salad’’ if they try to follow him out
the door. The final flash-cut of a penis reminds us we are still watching
Tyler’s movie; Tyler may have been removed from the narrative but his
influence lingers on in the manner of its telling. Alternatively, this might
suggest a remaining Fight Club member is at work as a projectionist in
showing us this film and that the underground group endures.
Similarly, Panic Room, generally a tense narrative, features some edgi-
ness in Junior’s absurd pompous dialogue, the awkward sparring of
mother and daughter at the opening, and the wry smirks that link Meg
and Burnham, on being faced by fresh challenges (when Meg first has
the panic room revealed to her and later when she pulls the wires before
Burnham’s very eyes). O’Hehir suggests that Panic Room contains ‘‘a mel-
ancholy new to Fincher’s work,’’ but this is misleading and makes it
unclear if he has actually seen Alien3.13 The repeated use of Brad Pitt as a
leading character in three out of a relatively small number of feature films
(Seven, Fight Club, and Benjamin Button) is in part because of the humor-
ous edginess which Pitt can bring to a role (in Seven, improvising the mis-
pronunciation of the Marquis de Sade like the singer ‘‘Sharday’’). This
unpredictability in his on-screen roles is clear from the twitchy instability
of his role as Jeffrey Goines in Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (1995),
which is as funny as it is unsettling.
CONCLUSION
Most Fincher films seem to have quite a strong bond between opening
and closing, following a movement which appears to be cyclical but is
actually spiral in nature, not returning to exactly the same point at which
we began. Alien3 moves from nihilism to salvation, The Game develops
from separation to engagement, Panic Room reprises its opening at the
end but with an underlying unease, and Fight Club ends with the actual
completion of the scene with which the film opened. Zodiac returns to the
first murder victim but now he can make a positive identification of Allen,
and Button begins and ends with a baby, but at the opening it is unwanted
and abandoned and at the end the same baby is loved right up to the
moment of its death.
It is hard to generalize that Fincher has a consistently bleak world-view.
He is certainly drawn to dark subject matter and uses literally dark means
to convey that in his cinematography. In Seven, Somerset reminds Mills
that rape victims are advised to scream ‘‘Fire’’ not to call for help and in
Panic Room the emergency services are not seen to be effective, putting
Meg on hold when she does get through. However, one might add that he
176 David Fincher
is interested in finding light within that darkness and that there are exam-
ples of both humor embedded in his narratives and some cause for hope in
denouements that are often assumed to exclude this. The individual cops
who show up at the door in Panic Room are shown as tenacious and
doing a very difficult job with professionalism (unlike the prevalent atti-
tude in Seven) and to his credit, Meg’s former husband does at least
respond to her call. The dialogue that Swallow uses as a subtitle for his
chapter on Panic Room, ‘‘you can’t overcome chaos,’’ is rather mislead-
ing—you can, and Meg and Sarah do exactly that.
Conclusion
‘‘Really, what I was writing was The Great Gatsby, updated a little. It was
‘apostolic’ fiction—where a surviving apostle tells the story of his hero.’’
—Chuck Palahniuk1
Palahniuk’s description applies to most of Fincher’s films, too. A similar

structure is followed in Panic Room; Benjamin Button (via the diary);
Zodiac (via Graysmith’s book); and even to an extent in Alien3 (via the
final video log). To a greater or lesser extent, all of Fincher’s films are
structured around a central dynamic pairing (Ripley and the alien, Mills
and Somerset, Nicholas and Christine, Meg Altman and Burnham,
Benjamin and Daisy, and of course especially Jack and his alter ego, Tyler
Durden), in effect following one of his favorite films as his inspiration:
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969). The excep-
tion is Zodiac, but Graysmith and Toschi fulfill this function in place of
the ‘‘real’’ pairing of Graysmith and the killer.
The standard criticism of Fincher is that he privileges style over sub-
stance. This study would suggest that his style is the substance of his art
but not in a superficial way. He has the bravura audacity of Argento, espe-
cially in slow, forward-moving crane shots, and the interest of De Palma
in what a camera can do. But his extreme, some might say obsessive, plan-
ning and execution of shots puts him closer to Hitchcock, especially in the
meticulous preparation to the point where actors can seem incidental. Fur-
ther similarities include an obsessive interest in film technology (particu-
larly the possibilities of long takes) and the archetypes from film noir,
especially the femme fatale and an uncontrollable noir-ish universe in
178 Conclusion
which the hero is at the mercy of apparently unpredictable circumstances.

The explicit Nietzschean references in Hitchcock’s Rope focus on the act
€
of murder and the Ubermensch, but it could be said that Fincher’s film-
making approach has elements of this, too—in production, he is abso-
lutely ruthless in seeking what he wants, driving those around him to
distraction and exhaustion at times. In this, there is a certain ‘‘will to
power’’ in an aesthetic context, not for personal gain or in any criminal
sense, but to ascend new artistic levels in an individual film and in the art
form itself. There is a groundbreaking element in every one of Fincher’s
films, even examples like Panic Room or The Game, which may at first
seem apparently quite mainstream genre pieces. Here, too, there is a drive
to transcend what has gone before and to produce ‘‘movies that scar.’’
Literature often provides a key piece of information or solution to a plot
problem. Alien3’s log reveals the presence of the creature inside Ripley. In
The Game, when Van Orton is virtually penniless, he sells an old copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird to raise cash. In Seven, the key clue to solving the
identity of John Doe comes through close reading of classic texts, making
the library an iconic place of enlightenment. In Benjamin Button, the Just-
So story (seen three times in all) illustrates Benjamin’s bizarre chronology
and his inevitable regression to childhood.
Like the eponymous panic room, Fincher appears interested in artifacts
in contemporary upper-middle-class culture. The development of ‘‘experi-
ences’’ as gifts for the super-rich in The Game reflects an exhaustion in
consuming goods, a tiredness with things, and a similar acquisitive search-
ing for novelty. He expresses the terror of everyday middle-class life—like
Meg Altman, we see Van Orton settle down for the night, imagining that
he is safe, setting his alarm, and causing ‘‘House secure’’ to appear on the
display panel but undermined by Shore’s discordant piano theme. Later af-
ter reporting the burglary, the police telephonist says, ‘‘Are you sure there’s
not still someone in the house somewhere?’’ articulating the nightmare to
which Meg wakes. In Fight Club, Jack is trapped in a banal environment
in a coma-like state, induced not just by lack of sleep but lack of engage-
ment with his work or his home, beginning to literally resemble an IKEA
catalogue.
A growing personal nature to his films might be detected in Zodiac where
there are clear biographical elements in Fincher’s own childhood and
upbringing in San Francisco, his father as bureau chief at the Time-Life
Building and a slightly obsessive alter ego for Graysmith, and personally
remembered settings like Mr. Ed’s diner and contemporary media coverage,
such as the threats to school buses and their effect on the area at the time.
Conclusion 179
The somewhat submissive character of Benjamin Button also has similarities

with his father in allowing events to happen to him rather than being a
more active ‘‘shaper’’ of events (although this also reflects Fincher’s interest
in a noir-ish universe, which seems out of the control of the protagonists).
Although credited as Director of Photography, Darius Khondji left after
only a few weeks of principal photography on Panic Room. In discussing
their differences, Fincher makes an important distinction: ‘‘Darius makes
films, and Panic Room is a movie. There’s a big difference—a movie is
made for an audience and a film is made for both the audience and the
filmmakers. I think that The Game is a movie and I think Fight Club’s a
film.’’2 This study suggests that Fincher is edging ever closer to his defini-
tion of ‘‘film.’’ Centrally all Fincher’s work focuses very explicitly on what
movies can show and how they do that—the three-minute sequence in
Panic Room, around which the rest of the film is built; the opening ‘‘home
movie’’ in The Game, drawn on by Van Orton as a personal memory (and
its style used to express other memories) at key points in the film; the
sequence with the birth scanner in Alien3; or any scene featuring the pro-
tagonist in Benjamin Button. To call Fincher a technical artist is not to
damn him with faint praise. However, it is probably fair to say that
Fincher sees his characters through the medium of technology rather than
Kubrick who could be said to have viewed technology through the me-
dium of people.
It is telling perhaps that Fincher’s next project, provisionally titled The
Social Network, focuses on social network Internet sites. The prime rela-
tionship in a Fincher movie is not between characters or even between the
characters and the audience but between the actors and the technology—
how they interact with, and often through, the technology that surrounds
them. In discussing Benjamin Button, Fincher seems happier talking about
animatronic babies than character motivation and about blue-screen
effects than the difficulties of using twins. It feels a little that to Fincher,
children are just another production problem. On the DVD commentary,
he reiterates his loathing of squibs, which seems symbolic of a loss of con-
trol, which he cannot abide—literal mess preventing easy retakes. Fincher
certainly has an intense personal vision of what he wants on screen but
that seems to come at the expense of being able to ‘‘stand outside oneself.’’
As Benjamin says, ‘‘I’m always looking out my own eyes.’’
It seems ironic that he is prepared to make actors repeat scenes endlessly
and then use ‘‘found’’ footage, such as the diner scene in The Game
where Van Orton drops change on the floor, which was a real mistake by
Douglas but looked better than subsequent takes and so was kept in. The
180 Conclusion
digital technology that allows him to see numerous takes almost instanta-
neously ironically allows him to erode (and possibly destroy) the freshness
of performance for which he appears to be looking.
At the 2009 Oscars, Benjamin Button was in competition with Danny
Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire in several categories. If Fincher really
believes ‘‘When you look at a great cinema performance, you’re seeing
somebody who knows what the camera’s doing,’’ how would he have
dealt with the unpredictability of children, non-actors, a large cast, and
location shooting?3 Clearly the two directors are making different
kinds of films, but if we are busy watching matte backgrounds and
appreciating computer-generated trickery and apparently ‘‘impossible’’
camera movements, it becomes harder to engage with characters and to
care about them. When Fincher’s obsessive attention to detail does not
lose sight of its audience, we have Fight Club, but when it does, we have
Benjamin Button and parts of Zodiac. The worrying trend from a fan of
Fincher’s work, which this writer certainly is, is that the tendency is to
ever more self-consuming narratives, where emotional engagement with
character and action seems to be secondary to extending technological
possibilities.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000399/bio.
2. Swallow, Dark Eye, 8.
CHAPTER 1
1. Longworth, blog.spout.com.
CHAPTER 2
2. Strick, ‘‘Alien3,’’ 47.
3. Ibid.
4. Taubin, ‘‘Invading Bodies,’’ 9.
5. Creed, Monstrous Feminine, 16–31.
6. Browning, David Cronenberg, 9–15.
7. Creed, Monstrous Feminine, 25.
8. Ibid., 17.
9. Ibid., 16.
10. Ibid., 23.
11. Ibid., 17.
12. Mulhall, On Film, 2–3.
13. Ibid., 16.
14. Ibid., 24.
15. Ibid., 104.
16. Ibid., 2.
17. Ibid., 91–92.
18. Ibid., 17–18; Cavell, World Viewed.
19. Palahniuk, Fight Club, 22.
182 Notes
20. Thomson, Alien Quartet, 107.

21. Dick, Do Androids Dream, 53.
24. Ibid., 10.
25. Foster, Alien3, 4.
28. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws, 35–41.
29. Freeland, Naked and the Undead, 64.
30. Wood, ‘‘American Horror Film,’’ 9–10.
31. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 43.
35. Ibid., 61.
36. Foster, Alien3, 11, 96.
37. Ibid., 97.
38. Williams, ‘‘Mother Courage,’’ 12.
40. Ibid., 173.
41. O’Hehir, ‘‘Panic Room,’’ 51.
44. Sullivan, ‘‘Punch and Jodie.’’
46. Ibid.
47. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 5.
48. Andersen, ‘‘Is Film the Alien Other?’’
CHAPTER 3
2. Dyer, Seven, 8, 16.
3. Ibid., 72.
4. Ellroy, Black Dahlia, 70–71.
5. Dyer, Seven, 25.
6. Taubin, ‘‘Nerds on a Wire,’’ 25.
7. Ibid., 24.
8. Fuller, ‘‘Zodiac,’’ 82.
9. Taubin, ‘‘Nerds on a Wire,’’ 25.
CHAPTER 4
1. Whitehouse, ‘‘Fight Club,’’ 46.
2. Todorov, Fantastic: A Structural Approach.
Notes 183
4. Ibid., 105.
5. Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading.
6. Forster, Howards End, 72.
8. Ibid., 91.
9. Ibid., 89.
11. Ibid., 122, 149.
12. Whitehouse, ‘‘Fight Club,’’ 46.
14. Taubin, ‘‘So Good,’’ 17.
16. Ibid., 21.
17. Ibid., 41.
18. Giroux, ‘‘IKEA Boy,’’ 97.
22. Ibid., 68.
23. Ibid., 18.
24. Ibid., 14.
25. Ibid., 42, 59.
26. Ibid., 213.
27. Ibid., 20.
28. Ibid., 48–49, 59.
29. Ibid., 49.
CHAPTER 5
1. Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, scene vii, l. 165.
2. Shakespeare, Henry VI, part I, Act II, scene v, l. 2.
3. Miller, ‘‘Benjamin Button,’’ 56.
4. Fitzgerald, Benjamin Button, 5–6.
5. Ibid., 10.
6. Ibid., 15.
7. Ibid., 5–6.
8. Ibid., 17.
9. Ibid., 22–23.
CHAPTER 6
1. Ellroy, Black Dahlia, 362.
2. Williams, ‘‘Mother Courage,’’ 13; O’Hehir, ‘‘Panic Room,’’ 51.
3. McNamara, Urban Verbs, 177.
4. zek, Fright of Real Tears, 39.
Zi
6. Ibid., 110.
184 Notes
7. Ibid., 101.
8. Fuller, ‘‘Zodiac,’’ 82.
9. zek, ‘‘Masochist Social Link,’’ 118–119.
Zi
11. Strick, ‘‘The Game,’’ 42.
15. Ibid., 163.
16. Ibid., 102.
17. Ibid., 52.
18. Ibid., 52.
19. Ibid., 103.
20. Ibid., 168.
21. Ibid., 94.
22. Ibid., 172.
23. Ibid., 100.
24. Ibid., 162.
25. Ibid., 169.
26. Ibid., 50.
27. Ibid., 151.
28. Ibid., 166.
29. Ibid., 145.
30. Ibid., 158.
31. Ibid., 173.
CHAPTER 7
3. Ibid., 10.
6. Ibid.
8. Dyer, Seven, 77.
9. Ibid., 78.
10. Ibid.
11. Palahniuk, Fight Club, 124–5.
12. Brophy, ‘‘Horrality,’’ 2–13.
13. O’Hehir, ‘‘Panic Room,’’ 51.
CONCLUSION
2. Swallow, Dark Eye, 157–158.
3. James, ‘‘Face to Face,’’ 28.
Bibliography
Andersen, N. (August 2003) ‘‘Is Film the Alien Other to Philosophy?: Philosophy as
Film in Mulhall’s On Film,’’ Film-Philosophy 7:23; <http://www.film-philosophy.
com/vol7-2003/n23anderson>.
Bachelard, G. (1969). The Poetics of Space. Beacon Books.
Brophy, P. (January–February 1986). ‘‘Horrality: The Textuality of Contemporary
Horror Films,’’ Screen, 27:1, pp. 2–13.
Cavell, S. (1979). The World Viewed. Harvard University Press.
Clover, C. (1992). Men, Women and Chainsaws. BFI.
Crane, J. L. (1994). Terror and Everyday Life: Singular Moments in the History of
the Horror Film. Sage Publications.
Creed, B. (1993). The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis
(Popular Fictions Series). Routledge.
Dick, P. K. (1968). Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Grafton Books.
Dyer, R. (1999). Seven. BFI Modern Classics.
Ellroy, J. (1988). The Black Dahlia. Arrow Books, 1993; originally published by
Mysterious Press.
Fitzgerald, F. S. (1922). The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Juniper Grove,
2008); originally published in Tales of the Jazz Age. Charles Scribner’s
Sons.
Foster, A. D. (1993). Alien3 (a novelization). Warner Books.
Freeland, C. A. (2000). The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of
Horror. Westview Press.
Fuller, G. (June 2007). ‘‘Zodiac,’’ Sight and Sound 17:6, pp. 81–82.
Fuller, G. (March 2009). ‘‘Up The Hill Backwards,’’ Sight and Sound 19:3,
pp. 26–27, p. 29.
Giroux, H. A. and I. Szeman. (2001). ‘‘IKEA Boy Fights Back: Fight Club, Con-
sumerism, and the Political Limits of Nineties Cinema,’’ in Jon Lewis (ed.),
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The End of Cinema As We Know It: American Film in the Nineties. New
York University Press, pp. 95–104.
Golding, W. (1954). Lord of the Flies. Faber & Faber.
Hornby, N. (1998). About a Boy. Gollancz. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000399/
bio.
James, N. (March 2009). ‘‘Face to Face’’ (An Interview with David Fincher), Sight
and Sound 19:3, p. 28.
Kipling, R. (1902). Just-So Stories. Puffin Books, 1987; first published in 1902.
Longworth, K. http://blog.spout.com2007/10724-the-close-ups-of-david-fincher/.
Miller, H. K. (March 2009). ‘‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’’ (a review),
Sight and Sound 19:3, pp. 54–56.
Mulhall, S. (2002). On Film. Routledge.
Nabokov, V. (1935). Invitation to a Beheading, trans. Dimitri Nabokov. Weidenfeld
and Nicolson, 1960; originally published in Russian.
O’Hehir, A. (May 2002). ‘‘Panic Room’’ (a review), Sight and Sound 12:5, p. 51.
Orwell, G. (1949). 1984. Secker and Warburg.
Palahniuk, C. (1996). Fight Club. Vintage.
Rothenberg, M., A. D. Foster, and S. Zi zek (eds.). (2003). Perversion and the
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Strick, P. (August 1992). ‘‘Alien3,’’ Sight and Sound 2:4, pp. 46–47.
Strick, P. (November 1997). ‘‘The Game’’ (a review), Sight and Sound 7:11, p. 42.
Sullivan, C. ‘‘Punch and Jodie,’’ The Observer (April 14, 2002).
Swallow, J. (2003). Dark Eye: The Films of David Fincher. Reynolds and Hearn.
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Sound 2:3, pp. 8–10.
Taubin, A. (November 1999). ‘‘So Good It Hurts,’’ Sight and Sound 9:11,
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Index
Abdul, Paula, 10–11 Cronenweth, Jordan, 146

Alien Resurrection, 55 Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The:
Alien3: authorship of, 32, 39–42, as an adaptation, 124–128; the
Christianity and religion in, 31–32; derivative nature of, 115–117;
Conradian overtones in, 41–42; characterization flaws in, 120–124;
ending of, 160–163; film style of, film as memory in, 119–120;
131, 135, 140–141, 143; relationship narrative structure of, 117–119
to horror/sci-fi genre, 42–44; humor
in, 172–173; evolution of the De Palma, Brian, 131–157
monster in, 32–33, 40; philosophical Dirty Harry, 74, 79, 88, 139–140
embodiment and technology in, Dyer, Richard, 55, 62, 71–72,
26–28; Ripley as Final Girl in, 165–166
34–37, 160
Fight Club: as an adaptation, 104,
Bachelard, Gaston, 54, 122 111–114; ending of, 168–170; film
Black Dahlia, The, 132 style in, 135, 138, 141–144,
Blade Runner, 8, 16, 18, 135, 166 146–147; humor in, 173–175;
identity in, 109–111; modernity in,
Carrie, 162 107–109; Nietzschean politics in,
Cat’s Eye, 168 102–107
Clover, Carol, 34 Film noir, 132–135
Commercials: Apple, 7–8; Coca Cola, Film technology: vs. realism,
8; Heineken, 3–4; Levi’s, 4–5; 150–153
Nike, 5–7; Softbank, 3 Fincher, David: biographical details,
Crash, 137, 143–144, 156 x–xi, 55, 149–150; filmmaking
Creed, Barbara: weaknesses in theories techniques, 7–9, 17–22, 131,
of ‘‘the monstrous feminine,’’ 24–26 135–153; similarities to other
188 Index
filmmakers, 115–117, 135–157; Manhunter 63, 72, 78

themes, 26–28, 31–32, 47–50, Meet John Doe, 70
64–66, 90–95, 102–109, 119–120 Michael, George: Freedom 90, 16–17
Fitzgerald, Scott F., 124–128 Mulhall, Stephen, 26–28
Forrest Gump, 115–117, 119, 128
Freeland, Cynthia, 35 Out of Sight, 133
Game, The: Christine in, 99–100; Palahniuk, Chuck, 111–114

ending of, 166–168; film as memory Panic Room: comparing Ripley with
in, 136–137; film style in, 131, 142, Meg in, 50–51; ending of, 170–171,
146, 153; game-playing in, 90–95; 175; family and motherhood in,
humor in, 173; Van Orton in, 47–50; as film noir, 133–135; film
95–99 style in, 147–149; influence of
Hitchcock in, 154–157;
Henley, Don: The End of Innocence, intertextuality in, 142–143, 145;
21–22 Meg as Final Girl in, 44–47;
Hitchcock, Alfred: 143; North by structure in, 51–53
Northwest 154, 156; Rear Window Passion of Joan of Arc,
153–154; Rope, 155–156; Vertigo, The, 161
153–154 Pretty Woman, 97, 100
Hopper, Dennis, 7
Hornby, Nick: About a Boy, 108 Savides, Harris, 146
Seven: detective genre in, 55–56;
I Am Legend, 169 John Doe in, 69–73; Doe and
Idol, Billy: Cradle of Love, Somerset in, 62–64; ending of,
131–132; LA Woman, 18 163–166; emotional literacy and
Invitation to a Beheading Tracy in, 64–66; film style in, 142,
(Vladimir Nabokov), 91–92, 99 145; Mills and Somerset in,
56–60; narrative structure in,
Jackson, Michael: Who is It?, 15–16 67–69
Silence of the Lambs, 67, 72
Kafka, Franz, 125 Slumdog Millionaire, 180
Khondji, Darius, 55, 179 Springfield, Rick: Bop Till You Drop,
‘‘Kipple’’ (P.K. Dick), 28–31 9–10, 20–21
Sunshine, 151
Lucas, George: Star Wars VI: The
Return of the Jedi, 55 Tenebrae, 148
Long takes, 146–149 Time Traveller’s Wife, The, 129
Lord of the Flies, 160 Todorov, Tzvetan: The Fantastic and
hesitation, 90–94; 101
Madonna: Bad Girl, 13–15; Express Turn of the Screw, The, 136
Yourself, 11–12; Oh Father, 12–13;
Vogue, 13 Wizard of Oz, The, 145, 168
Magnolia, 118 Wood, Robin, 35
About the Author
Dr. Mark Browning has taught Film Studies in a number of schools in

England and was a Senior Lecturer in Education in Bath. He is the author
of David Cronenberg—Author or Filmmaker? and Stephen King on the
Big Screen and currently works in Germany where he is writing books on
Danny Boyle and Wes Anderson.

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1. Opposites Attract: Commercials and Pop Videos 1

David Fincher is arguably the leading ﬁlmmaker of his generation, with a

criticism and de facto proof of a superﬁcial aesthetic. However, to the con-

Opposites Attract: Commercials

Given the often tortuous gestation process of ﬁlm production (something

to). Many of his commercials were made in collaboration with special

American Cancer Society—‘‘Smoking Fetus’’ (1984)

‘‘Stand Up to Cancer’’ (2008)

Heineken—‘‘Beer Run’’ (2005)

reporters is captured in overhead shots—ﬁrst the stairwell of the opposite

Levi’s—‘‘The Chase’’ (1996)

Terminator II (James Cameron, 1991) and Indiana Jones’s exploits in

Nike—‘‘Fate’’ (2008) and ‘‘Referee’’ (1994)

In Nike’s 1994 ‘‘Referee’’ series, we see Dennis Hopper at his lunatic

The Evolution of a Style

from nonexistent bullets, the postman tossing newspapers as if they were

Early Work: Springﬁeld and Abdul

Messiah-like as their savior but also demonstrating the pleasure of stage-

Mature ‘‘Gun for Hire’’: Madonna, George Michael, and

reﬂecting lyrical content). Camera positioning is mostly high or low angle

Michael Jackson—Who Is It? (1993)

shadowy nature of the sex industry is certainly reﬂected in Fincher’s cine-

George Michael—Freedom 90 (1990)

The Evolution of a Style II

rain-spattered, and we see Idol cross between speeding motorbikes. The

video. Johnny Hates Jazz’s Heart of Gold (1988) is relatively uninteresting

In a clear departure from MTV norms of pacing, shots of stationary

in extreme angles. He rarely uses overt narratives, and where they do

Woman in Peril or Final Girl?

primarily as a knowing parody of the primal scene and an ironic counter-

biologically redundant. In referring to the ﬁrst two ﬁlms, Creed suggests

Alien3 was certainly marketed as a sequel, which led in large part to

The ﬁlm begins with a genre-defying challenge. Within minutes, the

‘‘smashed beyond repair’’). The negative, the refusal of genre expectations,

with the base used as psychic space, as an actual phenomenon (underlining

that the men share as ‘‘some kind of apocalyptic, Millenarian, Christian,

completely by the desire to procreate.’’25 However, we do not know at this

A Battle for Survival

When Andrews enquires of Clemens about the state of Ripley’s health

Perhaps we should not be so hasty to ascribe to Fincher a particular

the assumption of a perfect model (which is implied would be a much lon-

The Ocean Steam Navigation Company, referred to at times as ‘‘the

she does; the valuable object that needs to be protected or destroyed—the

unwilling to recognize Meg’s deeper instinctive feelings of unease about

Similarities with Ripley

shots of the interiors in Alien, there is a similar ﬂoating-camera effect as

an 11-year-old daughter but her former husband was a pharmaceuticals

THE WORLD OF SEVEN

the older man, he is quite intimidating and unapproachable to new, younger

part is important, suggesting that he may in some measure agree with

Looking for Clues

Somerset manages to retain his humanity in the face of unremitting

common ground between the two, sensed almost immediately by Tracy,

appearances might suggest, Somerset’s intellectual curiosity will not let

Words, including those with a new or amended meaning, punctuate the

focus. Through incremental repetition, we track up to Somerset looking

Doe and Somerset

Forensic science appears to offer the illusion of deﬁnitive proof when

Mills is provoked by a photographer invading the crime scene (later