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The Conversations: David Fincher

It is only underneath, beneath the striking visual effects and Gumpian narrative, that Fincher himself is revealed.

The Conversations: David Fincher
Photo: Paramount Pictures

tting, (lack of) characterization and underdeveloped themes tend to turn me off. I view the film now as an experimental interlude for Fincher, a transitional effort that, on the whole, doesn’t quite work but has the seeds of some good ideas. What do you think?

David Fincher

JB: I think it’s rather remarkable that Panic Room was released only a few months after 9/11 (March 29, 2002, according to IMDb), because in so many ways it feels like a response to the post-9/11 climate of fear. If Fight Club, unaware that terrorist attacks were around the corner, was a coincidental snapshot of a mindset that would come down with the Twin Towers, Panic Room is a coincidental snapshot of the mindset afterward. In the scene where Jodie Foster’s Meg Altman is shown the house by the realtor, he says of the panic room: “One really can’t be too careful about home invasion.” If that doesn’t nail the vulnerability that was preached to all Americans, and genuinely felt by many of us, I’m not sure what does. Just after that line, Meg steps out of the panic room and the realtor closes the sliding door behind her, causing the full-length mirror hiding the concrete bunker to fall back into place. That leaves Meg to stare at her own reflection, and in that moment it’s as if she looks into her own eyes and says: “Admit it, you’re afraid.” And she is.

So, Panic Room is about fear and vulnerability. It’s another dark theme, but it’s Fincher’s lightest fare, to be sure, primarily because Panic Room’s depiction of evil is only marginally terrifying: Forest Whitaker’s character outright announces that he won’t hurt people. Jared Leto’s character is a buffoon. Which leaves Dwight Yoakam’s character as the only unflinching baddy of the three, though he pales in comparison to Se7en’s John Doe. (Furthermore, Panic Room undercuts the severity of Yoakam’s character by having him introduced as “Raoul,” an against-expectations name that’s funny on principle and downright hilarious as delivered by Leto.) Still, for well-to-do Meg, who we can assume is as cut off from society’s dark underbelly as was The Game’s Nicholas, these men are menacing enough. In another film, the fact that Meg is claustrophobic would be nothing more than a cheap device to maintain suspense while mother and daughter are locked away in the protection of the panic room. Instead, that detail fits perfectly into Fincher’s established worldview, which implies that as ugly as things are, they get uglier when you withdraw in fear. Hiding gets you nowhere.

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As for technical wizardry, you have it right that this is the Fincher film in which style most overshadows substance—a charge perhaps best illustrated by the way Fincher repeatedly ogles the high-tech splendor of Foster’s cleavage-bearing tank top. But as you indicated in mentioning the scene in which the robbers show up at the house, Fincher’s style is never just style for style’s sake. Er, almost never. Using CGI to make it seem as if the camera passes through the handle of the coffeepot? That’s just a “Hey, look at me!” trick. But by putting “the camera” inside the lock of the house’s front door, Fincher underscores the flimsiness of our supposed protective measures, as if ridiculing our false sense of security (another unintentional comment on 9/11). On a larger level, I’m guessing that what drew Fincher to Panic Room was a desire to do with modern effects what Alfred Hitchcock does in Rear Window. I wouldn’t call Panic Room “Hitchcockian,” of course. But similarly to Rear Window, Panic Room is a one-set play in which the geography is so well established that it manages to seem vast. It takes skill to pull that off, and Fincher’s computer-based techniques come in handy—unnecessarily flashy though they might occasionally be.

David Fincher

EH: I’m glad you mention the silliness of these robbers; I thought I was the only one who found them hard to take seriously. It’s bad enough that Jared Leto turns in one of his worst-ever performances—an accumulation of tics and affectations ripped off from Brad Pitt’s turns in both Fight Club and 12 Monkeys—but the whole idea of the killers who are supposed to be simultaneously threatening and endearingly bumbling is a bit much. It all reminds me of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, which I mentioned before in connection with Se7en. Unlike Se7en, though, which genuinely engages with the morality of its killer and his pursuers, Panic Room seems like exactly the kind of movie that Haneke set out to deconstruct: the home invaders who provide comic relief even as they torment their victims, the comfortable bourgeois family whose private space is violated, the sledgehammer that replaces Haneke’s golf club. But if both Funny Games and Se7en create problems of audience identification by putting the killers in the driver’s seat, Panic Room removes identification from the equation: we don’t care about any of these characters, all of whom are so badly developed that I kept laughing every time poor Forest Whitaker has to deliver those heavy-handed expositional lines about how he’s really a sensitive father of two.

The result is schematic Fincher, with all the characterization and depth drained out of it. The usual class struggle subtext is there, but it doesn’t have nearly the weight or complexity of the last three films we’ve been discussing. And in terms of the narrative, it’s frequently just ridiculous: the lame drama drummed up by the daughter’s diabetes (talk about “a cheap device to maintain suspense”), the ridiculously unkillable Raoul, and that groan-inducing money-flying-away ending that rips off any number of genre fiction forebears, from Kubrick’s The Killing to Bresson’s L’Argent to Don Siegel’s TV remake of The Killers. Ultimately, though I keep invoking some pretty heavy films in comparison, the film it reminds me of the most is actually Home Alone, with Foster standing in for Macaulay Culkin, fending off the robbers by setting traps to burn, maim and chase them away.

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David Fincher

JB: OK, so Macaulay Culkin and Peter North in the same Fincher conversation. I can’t say I saw either of those guys coming. I mean, um. Well, let’s just move on, shall we? I think it’s safe to say that you felt the off-the-rails disengagement with the entirety of Panic Room that I felt with the latter half of Fight Club. I have no ammunition to return fire on any of your apt criticisms, other than to say that with the exception of Fincher’s artistic flair, Leto’s totally absurd performance is my favorite thing about the film—so terrible it’s brilliant. I mean, the dude has cornrows and makes MacGyver references. You’ve gotta like that, right? Well, no. You don’t. And you didn’t. And I don’t blame you. But Leto tickles me, and I think it’s intentional and helps to define Panic Room as deliberately less severe. Perhaps after all the midnight moodiness of his previous films, Fincher needed to cleanse the palate.

If so, it worked. Because what followed is Zodiac, which we seem to agree is the pinnacle of Fincher’s career to date. What’s interesting is to note how Zodiac feels like new territory for Fincher despite the fact that it borrows so many themes and tricks from his previous works. Zodiac is a police procedural leading toward an only slightly satisfying catharsis, as is Se7en. It’s a film alive with paranoia of the unknown, as is The Game. It’s a film at least in part about a man with an almost split personality and delusions of grandeur, as is Fight Club. It’s a film that relies on Fincher’s ability to establish a specific geography, each corner of which is clouded with threat, as does Panic Room. There are other similarities, certainly, and I’m sure we’ll get to those. But for the moment I’ll ask you: In which ways does Zodiac most significantly separate itself from its predecessors?

EH: You do a great job of delineating the ways in which Zodiac exists on a continuum with Fincher’s other work. And yet you’re also right that it feels like this stunning, sui generis departure for him, unlike anything else he’s ever done. Why is that? We’ve already talked about how Zodiac evokes a specific historical time and place for the first time in Fincher’s oeuvre. And we’ve already talked about how its themes set it apart from the concerns of materialism, commercialism and class that flow through the other four pictures. But if I could express, in just one word, what separates the film most conclusively from anything else that Fincher has done, it’d be: pacing. I think it’s fair to characterize all of Fincher’s other films—no matter what their sizable ambitions or the complexities of their emotional and thematic undercurrents—as compulsively forward-moving, action-packed thrillers. Whatever else they have going for them or against them, they are at least viscerally exciting and suspenseful. In short, the emphasis in these films is on delivering ripping good stories. That they are also thematically complex and aesthetically interesting films, in all of the ways we’ve been talking about here, would be almost incidental to anyone trying to categorize them in simple genre terms. They could pretty much all be called, with some justification, thrillers.

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Now Zodiac, purely in terms of subject matter, could easily be confused with a thriller on its surface—and certainly for its first hour or so it functions kind of like one. But it’s not paced like a thriller. It’s not a propulsive narrative in which we are left gasping for the next bit of the story. Partly, this is because it’s a historical film, and most people already know at least the broad outlines of what happened: a killer terrorizes a city, then begins fading away, his crimes just stopping after a while; he is never caught. So there’s a certain inevitability to the film, in that it could never be a conventional whodunit. There can be no conventional dramatic ending in which the killer is confronted and caught. Fincher gets as close as he can to that moment, but as you say, it’s not really that satisfying as dramatic resolutions go: at least in Se7en, we see the killer, we understand his purpose, and we see the heroes match wits with him. In Zodiac, the film is structured so that the ostensible narrative becomes fuzzier, less dramatically rigid, as the film goes along. As long as the killer is committing his crimes, they at least provide some forward momentum, a chance for some action/suspense set pieces. Once he stops, the film becomes about dramatizing internal processes: obsession, paranoia, self-destruction, loneliness, the desire for resolution.

Even then, the pacing is much more than a result of its historical narrative or the unconventional structure it necessitates. You can see it in the opening, that gorgeous slow motion tracking shot down a suburban street, with the sparklers sizzling in the darkness. It’s beautiful, but it’s a purely extraneous moment in terms of the narrative. So is the black-screen audio montage that Fincher wanted to insert—and which he did insert into his DVD director’s cut—of popular songs from the time, blending into one another to signify the passage of the years. It’s obvious that what Fincher is really interested in here is not the serial killer at all, certainly not in the way he was intensely interested in John Doe. Instead, he’s interested in mood, and time, and memory, and the ways things used to be. His sense of pacing is languid, and his storytelling is elliptical, sometimes settling in for a lengthy, moody evocation of a short period of time, at other times eliding years with a crisp montage. The pacing and the intentionally anticlimactic structure create a very different impression from the narrative drive of Fincher’s earlier films, all of which are quite linear and direct in their storytelling.

David Fincher

JB: I think you’re on to something when you say that Zodiac is about “the way things used to be.” That’s true on many levels. First, given the themes we’ve identified in his previous films, Zodiac seems to be almost nostalgic for a time in this country when hysteria could be caused by a single madman. In Se7en, John Doe, as his name suggests, is just one of many faceless forms of evil in the generic city. There’s no indication whatsoever that the general public knows this guy is at work—the implication being that there’s too much evil in the world to care. That’s part of the reason Somerset suggests they give up, realize they are helpless to stop the killings and just move on to the next wacko. By contrast, in Zodiac the actions of just one man instill fear in the entire Bay Area.

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Are there still Zodiacs in operation? Sure. But since 9/11 the boogieman has had a flip-this-house-sized makeover. It’s hard to get worked up over a lone nutcase when the government is reminding us that al Qaeda could strike at any moment, killing hundreds or thousands with one blow. I bring this up because Zodiac, released in 2007, is the first Fincher film with enough distance to be able to comment on the post-9/11 world, so I don’t think it’s an accident that he gives us a fishbowl-sized recreation of our country’s post-9/11 fear and paranoia. When Jake Gyllenhaal’s Robert Graysmith panics in the basement of a man he has come to question, convincing himself that he hears footsteps upstairs, he might as well be the scared white American who sees two men in typical Arab garb dragging fertilizer into a cellar and jumps to the conclusion that they’re making a bomb.

But there’s yet another way that Zodiac seems to romanticize the past, and that’s in its depiction of good old fashioned detective work. Consider that if the Zodiac struck today, the case might be solved in 30 minutes with a pair of tweezers and a DNA lab. Open and shut. And what’s the fun of that? Instead, here’s a drama that relies on handwriting samples, timelines, informants and alibis. This is factual, of course, and many of the details come from Graysmith’s novel and James Vanderbilt’s screenplay, but there’s no question that Fincher is fascinated by the significance of the minutiae—not that it should come as a surprise. As his previous films have shown, Fincher admires those willing to slog through the unpleasantness. He likes guys who get dirty.

David Fincher

EH: He also loves documenting the processes involved in all this hard work, the step-by-step systematic operations behind the stories he’s telling. We’ve seen this before in isolated moments from his earlier films—the tracking shot of the break-in from Panic Room; the processes of making soap or projecting films in Fight Club; the credits of Se7en with their breakdown of John Doe’s daily activities—but Zodiac is entirely about process. It takes these moments that had always been there in Fincher’s work and makes them the center of the movie, the structural foundations for everything else that happens. Again, it’s not a surprise by any means, but it’s working on a different level than the similar elements in Fincher’s other films.

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I think the nostalgic tendency you’ve teased out here is similarly a magnified version of threads that have woven through all of Fincher’s work. There is often a sense in his films that we have lost something, that there is a possibly apocryphal past that was better (morally superior, less debased or degraded) than the world we have today. Thus his characters are always rooted in the societal climate in which the film is made. And his villains reflect the elements of modern society that Fincher wants to call to his audience’s attention: the abuses of marketing, corporate greed, the invisibility of poverty. It is very rare that he represents what might be thought of as a timeless evil, the kind of evil represented by Javier Bardem’s merciless hitman Anton Chigurh in another great 2007 movie, No Country For Old Men. These two films, which came out in the same year and arguably represent their directors’ responses to the post-9/11 climate of fear and violence, actually display very different interpretations of the concept of evil that is so central to both films.

In the Coen brothers’ film, the sheriff, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), views Chigurh’s shadowy killer in the same way as Fincher’s heroes tend to view their opposite numbers, as reflections of a degraded modern age that is much, much scarier than anything encountered in the past. In many ways, Bell is that film’s Somerset, feeling overwhelmed and outmatched by this new, modern evil. He feels incapable of dealing with what he sees, and is forced to retire, having been made obsolete by a changing world. The film doesn’t stop there, though, which is possibly where it would stop had Fincher made it. Instead, the Coens, following Cormac McCarthy’s original novel very faithfully, go further, suggesting in the film’s meditative coda that Bell is wrong, that Chigurh is not a specifically modern evil but simply the same old ancient evil in modern guise. Zodiac’s villain is, ironically, far less of a concrete presence than Chigurh, but he’s more of a flesh-and-blood person: Chigurh is an archetype, a metaphor with a pageboy haircut, while the Zodiac Killer, whoever he might be, is an actual person, most likely with psychological and emotional motivations for what he does. One thing I may have glossed over in my discussions of Fincher’s themes during this conversation is that his films are always, no matter what else they might be, about people first and foremost.

David Fincher

JB: They are indeed about people. You know, from a historical perspective I’m a tad uncomfortable with Zodiac’s final scene, which could be misread as a case-closed conviction of Arthur Leigh Allen, when in reality it only means that for Graysmith the case is closed. But I’m not sure I can think of another film that humanizes a killer as effectively as Zodiac does when it shows the simple Leigh in the simple hardware store, wearing his simple vest and nametag. A ruthless killer Leigh might be; Anton Chigurh he isn’t. Meanwhile, in Zodiac we also feel the geeky obsession of Gyllenhaal’s Graysmith, who is otherwise so ordinary. And we feel the frustration of the all-too-average David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), who was cool enough that Steve McQueen’s Frank Bullitt was modeled after him, but who still doesn’t have the detective smarts to bring down a killer arrogant enough to dangle clues in his face. And we feel the loneliness of Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.), whose initial swagger is eventually obliterated by his ever-mounting fear.

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Appropriately enough, this actually brings us back around to our initial discussion of Benjamin Button, because so much of what I feel is missing in that film can be traced to Benjamin’s un-humanness (and I’m not referring to his backward aging). You can call Benjamin a cipher, and that’s fine. I don’t dispute the point. But 166 minutes is a heck of a lot of time to spend with someone who has all the emotive range of the Terminator. There are exceptions to this, the hotel romance with Swinton’s Elizabeth being the most significant, but they are few and far between. So I think my disappointment in Benjamin Button’s lack of mood is a byproduct of the hollowness of Benjamin behind his (frequently CGI-animated) skin. In contrast, think for a moment of Mills’ face as he tries to figure out what to do with John Doe in the field. Think of Nicholas’ face on that bench in Mexico. Think of Jack’s face when he sits in those self-help meetings, seething with disdain over “tourist” Marla. Think of Meg’s face … ah, screw it, we’re always looking at her boobs. So instead think of Graysmith’s face when he excitedly confronts Toschi with yet another clue. These are the very visceral, very human emotions present in most of Fincher’s work. And I don’t see that in Benjamin Button. I wish I did.

EH: Maybe this pinpoints what constitutes a completely “Fincherian” film. You’re making a joke about Panic Room there, but it says something (and not something good) if our most tangible impressions of the film revolve around a tracking shot through a coffee pot, Jared Leto’s cornrows, and several leering shots down Jodie Foster’s tank top. By the same token, part of what makes Benjamin Button feel so distinct from Fincher’s other work, even the already-distinct Zodiac, is its treatment of characters and situations as almost entirely symbolic rather than realistic. It’s an emotional film in many ways, but its emotion functions in the abstract: it makes us feel for ourselves and our own connections to mortality and loss, rather than for Benjamin’s experience of these things. He is a stand-in for the audience, a blank slate, to an extent that few other Fincher heroes are. Now I think this actually works pretty well despite the film’s significant problems, while you don’t, but either way it’s not characteristic of Fincher in general. All of his films and characters do, as we’ve been discussing, have deeper thematic and symbolic implications, but this rarely obscures the person at the film’s center. Nicholas is a metaphorical construct, a composite of uncaring, self-absorbed corporate executives everywhere, but he’s also a sympathetic, fully developed character in his own right. The same is true even of Fincher’s most symbolic pre-Button character, Jack/Tyler in Fight Club, who manages to project an impressive emotional range even through the intervention of a narrative gimmick that might have been emotionally crippling if employed by another director.

This brings me back to Zodiac, in which you’re right that even possible killer Arthur Leigh Allen is humanized in interesting ways. I agree with your reservations about the film’s implicit endorsement of Allen as the killer; it’s a bit too tidy, and I know that many Zodiac historians disagree vehemently with the real Graysmith’s conclusions about Allen. It feels like Fincher is reaching for that resolution, that he wants that moment so badly that he’s willing to limit himself to one man’s interpretation of the historical events. In a way, though, I’d say it’s all worth it for that scene where Graysmith faces down Allen at the hardware store, and there’s this intense silent communication passing between them. What does this scene mean? The film’s ending suggests that it’s the showdown between the killer and his most dogged pursuer, but it may not even be that if Allen was not actually the Zodiac. It may be simply the ultimate consequence of Graysmith’s misplaced obsession. As much as I love the film, I do wish Fincher had preserved that ambiguity, had resisted the temptation to deliver even this partial, unsatisfying resolution. The most interesting aspect of the film, and of the real Zodiac case, is its indefinite status, the idea that decades of hard work and investigation have added up to, well, not very much.

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JB: And having said that, I suppose now it’s time to ask ourselves what this conversation has added up to. It’s done a few things for me, the most significant of which is to confirm what I already believed: that Fincher is a director of substance. Yes, many of his films have a dazzling style that sometimes draws our attention like the Fourth of July fireworks at the beginning of Zodiac, so that in the moment we see nothing else. But the longer you look at a Fincher film, the more there is to consider. His remarkable ability to subtly pack the margins of his films with narrative subtext and sociological commentary, without even slightly reducing the propulsion of his film’s hook or gimmick, is arguably what leads to his inability to shed the derisive moniker of “MTV video-maker.” But the depth is there for those of us willing to get dirty to explore it.

Over the course of this discussion, my adoration of Se7en has held firm; my respect for The Game has increased; my frustration with Fight Club has subsided just a bit; my hardly unaware delight with Panic Room has remained; and I continue to think Zodiac is Fincher’s most complex and most complete picture. As for Benjamin Button, the sad truth is that I’ve almost forgotten it over the course of this conversation. With my disappointments expressed, it’s as if its already-shallow impression faded away. Perhaps, as with other Fincher films, a second viewing will reveal something more. But I’m afraid the opposite will be true. Benjamin Button, for all its attempts to showcase 20th Century history, is the first of Fincher’s films to leave me adrift: geographically, thematically and certainly emotionally. If I’m being too hard on it—and maybe I am—it’s because of something you suggested. The film might be by Fincher, and his fingerprints might be all over it, but Benjamin Button doesn’t feel Fincherian. Maybe next time.

EH: Jason, like you I’ve come away from this discussion with a renewed and newly focused appreciation for Fincher’s films—and for the question of what the adjective Fincherian might mean. I think you’re right to emphasize the director’s penchant for subterranean thematic tunneling as one of his most salient characteristics: I can only guess that the late Manny Farber might have recognized in Fincher the quality that he so appropriately (and appreciatively) called “termite art.” In revisiting these films within a short period of time, it has become clear just how deep Fincher often tunnels within his own art, just how much he packs into the multiple layers hidden beneath his slick surfaces. My admiration for his work has only grown in the process: for films I thought I knew well, and now know and love even better (Fight Club and Se7en), for a fine film I had previously only hazily remembered from a long-ago viewing (The Game), and even for a film I hated whose virtues have proven to be tightly interwoven with its failings (Panic Room). And of course, for Zodiac, the film we both regard as the director’s masterwork thus far, crystallizing his aesthetic and thematic tendencies even as it definitively sets off in a new direction.

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As for Benjamin Button, the film that initiated this discussion in the first place, I retain my mixed, complicated feelings for it. I admire its ambition and its willingness to embrace abstract concepts, even as I’m disappointed by its clichéd framing narrative and the fatally limited scope of its political engagement. It may be that I’m still struggling to come to terms with Fincher’s latest film because, whatever its other merits and missteps (and there are plenty of each) I can’t entirely disagree when you declare it to be Fincher’s least characteristic work. And yet, if we were to define the Fincherian film as a morally complex parable in which a sheltered individual is forced to come to terms with the frightening larger world—a thumbnail description that nevertheless summarizes a typical Fincher narrative—then Benjamin Button might be much closer to its predecessors than expected. Aesthetically, the film dips into a wholly different (but, in terms of mainstream filmmaking, much more familiar) palette than Fincher’s previous work, and as a result its surface seldom actually feels like a Fincher film. It is perhaps fitting then, for a director who we have described as frequently working far below the surface, that it is only underneath, beneath the striking visual effects and Gumpian narrative, that Fincher himself is revealed, working hard as always, getting his hands dirty within the very workings of the film.

This article was originally published on The House Next Door.

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