Brett's Fincher Notes (1)

Notes on David Fincher

Background

Fincher, a Gen X’er, did big pop music videos and his artistry was thus not respected like that of, say, Spike Jonze and Michael Gondry. So there was this artistic-commercial battle even within an essentially promotional medium, as music videos had developed into a bona fide art form.

As for religion, he professes atheism (?) but is a client of guru and alleged “Yeshua”-channeler Carissa Schumacher.

Fincher’s 26 favorite movies interview: Fincher as a kid liked to watch movies with “darkness” in them, movies “with an edge.” Dark transgression—self traumatization creating the master manipulator/cultural engineer traumatizer who, at the level of artist, does it for “the looks on their faces” and even for the love of the game (Borden).

Approach

“The Game is a movie; Fight Club is a film.” I would add: Se7en is a film.

Panic Room he calls a “footnote movie,” a “guilty pleasure” movie. Panic Room is merely the sum of its parts (whereas Fight Clubis more). But maybe it’s the “footnote” movies that reveal darker truths (maybe unconscious?) about his worldview.

Tries to achieve a “flawlessness” in image-making (artofthetitle.com interview, 2012); cf. Snyder, but Fincher privileges image over concept, which distinguishes him from Nolan and even Snyder (also image and problem-solving/puzzle-solving approach to filmmaking as opposed to a broad conceptual approach, although the latter more auteurish in a sense). Fight Club unique in his corpus as a sort of concept film about image-making, so image and concept coincide there.

But the purpose behind these images remains

Looks at direction as to a great extent about problem-solving.

From artofthetitle.com interview: “I think all filmmaking is sleight of hand — the most basic form of low magic.” Later in interview says “the ultimate magic trick” is the way that films present a chronology of events even though they aren’t filmed in that order or timeframe:

It was the ultimate magic trick. The notion that 24 still photographs are shown in such quick succession that movement is imparted from it — wow! And I thought that there would never be anything that would be as interesting as that to do with the rest of my life. (Inspired by a documentary he saw as a kid on the making of Butch Cassady and the Sundance Kid)

NEED TO DISCUSS THIS QUOTE(particularly with reference to magic and the Method) from artofthetitle.com interview, proving that what we call the Method is at least an ambition of master manipulator filmmakers:

When you look at film literature — not only criticism but when people write about movies — for the most part, people are drawing inferences and connecting dots in a very personal way. For somebody to be so interested in a movie that they want to write about it is a rare thing, but when it does spark something in them and they put pen to paper to say why it moved them and to talk about the connections they saw — those connections aren’t always intended.

A lot of what people don’t want to talk about is that when a movie works in a giant way, for millions of people, and it becomes a phenomenon, you’re seeing something that’s connecting in a way that is irresistible [Bruno’s idea of magic as “bonds” created through desire, eros?]. And a lot of people don’t want to think about movies in those terms because it conjures all these ideas of mind control like in The Manchurian Candidate or subliminal messages or…

The Parallax View?

Yeah, exactly. I’ve never seen anyone master the form enough to be able to do that, but let’s get beyond that: as a filmmaker, you’re the ringmaster. You don’t have control over every performance, every hair being in place, wardrobe, the importance or potential importance of your actors, but you have a discipline and a craft that you bring to the problem solving of telling a story. The pictures are a quarter of that package — what people are wearing, where they’re standing, how they’re lit, what their makeup is like — and all that stuff’s important. Then there’s the sound, and that’s another quarter of it and that includes the music, the density of the surrounding world. There’s the amalgam of those two, and that’s only half of the movie experience.

And THEN there’s the audience, and what they bring to it. You’re trying to do your magic trick, you’re laying down all your cards, but there’s something that the audience brings to it: their gullibility, their willingness to participate. If you’re telling a story in a very similar way that a lot of stories are told, that can be one of two things: it can be very comfortable in its familiarity or it can be very dull in its familiarity. You’re gambling on something two years before an audience is going to see it and it’s such an important part of cinema.

So, anyway, like it or not, I have a behavioural barometer that is either a curse or a gift. The idea of an aesthetic signature is kind of inevitable because everything that you present to an audience is going to be colored or tempered by your personal likes and dislikes. It’s not about remaking the world the way that I’d like to see it; rather, I look at it based on a character’s purpose in the story. The mere act of decision-making inflicts your worldview on the proceedings, and you can’t hide that. You put your fingerprint on your film.

Proud of being cruelly demanding of actors. 2014 Playboy interview:

“When Rebello mentions that actors such as Daniel Craig, Robert Downey Jr. and Jake Gyllenhaal have publicly commented about how hard he worked them, Fincher replied, “If you didn’t get hugged enough as a kid, you won’t find what you’re looking for from me. That’s not my gig and I’m not attuned to it.”

Dodgy in answering questions, reluctant to give interviews.

Themes

Fincher is interested in celebrity, in infamy. In Gone Girl explores the media side of the serial killer/tabloid crime phenomenon, and how criminals adapt their actions to that media narrative.

Preoccupied with sexual perversion/depravity. Believes people are fundamentally perverted. Is he a pervert?

Related, “in order for something to be evil, it almost has to cloak itself as something else” (2017 Esquire interview).

Serial killers

One thing to take from Fincher’s serial killer films is how the rise of the serial killer correlates with the disintegration of American culture in the sense of moral standards and unifying values.

True Crime interview:

I think serial murder or psychosexual sadism has existed for forever. In Eastern Europe, the mythology of the vampire or the werewolf is probably a by-product of this kind of behavior. A mutilated body found in the forest had to be attributed to something. We've allowed it to become the mythology of horror, but that activity probably had more to do with psychosexual sadism than it does with lycanthropy.

I don't know that there was more of it. But there was really a public disturbance where people suddenly began to understand their own vulnerability to aberrant behavior. I remember Zodiac. I definitely remember thinking, "What's going on? Why is this person who's writing letters to the Chronicle so angry at kids at Lover's Lane? What did they ever do to deserve this?"

What do you make of the true crime boom, from podcasts to TV?

I think there are a lot of people who see themselves as detectives. Certainly, when you see things like The Keepers or listen to Serial, you can see that some people just get their righteous indignation stoked. Some people are always fascinated by puzzles and the political obfuscation of solutions, because ultimately investigations do bear the weight of political ramifications.

You've previously chafed at this notion that you are the "serial killer director." Did you worry at all that doing this show would bolster that image?

I took on this project in spite of that, because this show is not about serial killers. This show is about FBI agents, and how they were able -- through the application of empathy -- to understand those people who were so difficult to understand. That was what was intriguing to me. I don't need another serial killer title on my resume. This was not about that. It's like in Zodiac -- you never know who this person is. And in this show, he's right there and he might talk to you.

Notes on Cultural Nihilism

From a 2010 National Affairs article by Eric Cohen about Irving Kristol:

In a 1991 speech before the American Enterprise Institute, he offered a diagnosis and a warning about our moral and cultural ­condition. It is worth quoting at length, especially given the current economic breakdown:

This cultural nihilism will have, in the short term, only a limited political effect— unless we have a massive, enduring economic crisis. The reason cultural nihilism will not prevail — this is still the good news — is that a bourgeois, property-owning democracy tends to breed its own antibodies. These antibodies immunize it, in large degree, against the lunacies of its intellectuals and artists. The common people in such a democracy are not uncommonly wise, but their experience tends to make them uncommonly ­sensible. They learn their economics by taking out a mortgage, they learn their politics by watching the local school board in action, and they learn the impossibility of "social engineering" by trying to raise their children to be decent human beings. These people are the bedrock of bourgeois capitalism, and it is on this rock that our modern democracies have been built.

But a society needs more than sensible men and women if it is to prosper: It needs the energies of the creative imagination as expressed in religion and the arts.It is crucial to the lives of all our citizens, as it is to all human beings at all times, that they encounter a world that possesses a transcendent meaning, in which the human experience makes sense. Nothing is more dehumanizing, more certain to generate a crisis, than experiencing one's life as a meaningless event in a meaningless world.

In a sense, it is all Adam Smith's fault. That amiable, decent genius simply could not imagine a world in which traditional moral certainties could be effectively challenged and repudiated. Bourgeois society is his legacy, for good and ill. For good, in that it has produced through the market economy a world prosperous beyond all previous imaginings — even socialist imaginings. For ill, in that this world, with every passing decade, has become ever more spiritually impoverished. That war on poverty is the great unfinished task before us. The collapse of socialism, along with the vindication of a market economy, offers us a wonderful opportunity to think seriously about such an enterprise. Only such an enterprise can ensure a capitalist future.

At present, it seems unlikely that the current economic downturn will become a "massive, enduring economic crisis." But we should not grow too sanguine. If years pass when recent college graduates cannot find the work they believe they deserve, and when men and women in their sixties and seventies cannot afford the retirement they have truly earned, then it is hardly impossible that democratic capitalism might again be shaken to its foundations. A new generation of embittered nihilists could arise with its own destructive program to remake American ­society, and a new generation of collectivists might be emboldened to use the market's temporary failures to advance vast new government takeovers of the private economy.

Music Videos

Madonna, “Express Yourself”

One-eye shots, Madonna identifying as a cat (sex kitten), BDSM-elite trafficking stuff, woman as rich man’s wind-up toy suggestion. Promoting a very primal sexuality. Strobe lighting. Whoa! Video ends with quote from Metropolis. whole video is Metropolis-inspired, futuristic, men enslaved to machines. Opening Shot deliberately modeled on Metropolis.

From a Yahoo.com article:

Inspired by Fritz Lang’s dystopian film Metropolis, the clip starred Madonna as a crotch-grabbing doyenne of a factory filled with enslaved shirtless Adonises, most notably model Cameron Alborzian (who’s now a noted yogi). Not surprisingly, “Express Yourself” was an instant sensation on MTV — and, at the time, the most expensive video ever made — raking in accolades for its flipping of gender norms.

Supposedly Madonna approached Fincher with the Metropolis idea. But cf. the Metropolis-inspired worker drones here to the prison colony in Alien 3 and the “space monkeys” of Project Mayhem in Fight Club.