On David Fincher

I’m thoroughly convinced that David Fincher is one of if not the single most important directors working today. Oh sure, he’s easy to deride, especially after the less than epic Panic Room. And there are legions of geeks out there who hold him at least partly responsible for decimating the Alien series, leading us to the point where Paul “Mortal Kombat” Anderson can drag it down into the mudpits of cheesy genre crossovers and PG-13 classlessness. God help us when the Anderson produced sequel is the first film to actually deliver on Fincher’s Alien 3 promise of bringing aliens to Earth.

Still, if Fincher didn’t quite live up to his film’s teaser trailers, he gave us a far better entry than pretty much anyone—even Fincher himself—realizes. Brooding, somber and just as deconstructive of masculine stereotypes as Cameron’s celebrated Aliens, Alien 3 is a dark and dusty gem of moody genre filmmaking. Fanboys complain because it lacks the machine gun machismo of the previous film; critics complain because of the film’s relentlessly dour outlook and focus on slickly produced image; Fincher himself complains because he was locked out of the editing room, leaving us with a theatrical print that lost almost 25% of his original.

But looking at the extended cut of the film that was based on his notes, I suspect it’s only Fincher that would’ve been more pleased if he’d been allowed more control. The film is just as grim, just as hopeless, and just as lacking in the sort of warrior theatrics that Aliens proffered (if also subtly mocked). The main improvements come in the film’s structure and development of supporting characters, as the crew of ugly prisoner dwellers becomes more than just a chorus of shaved heads spouting crude epithets. With the addition of an extra major plot development (it doesn’t change the final outcome, just takes a different, longer route to get there) and the fleshing out of some of the prison planet’s scraggle-toothed uglies, we can finally see some narrative reasoning behind the actions of the prisoners. They’re not just crazy, cruel, or peculiar for the sake of being crazy, cruel, or peculiar; they’re given their personalities in ways that actually help develop the storyline. Fincher may be remembered most for his complicated, obsessively created images, but at his core, he’s first and foremost a storyteller.

For all his photographic wizardry, Fincher works best as a curious chronicler of human folly, a patient investigator into moral decrepitude and the apathy of modernism. You walk away from his movies thinking about his immaculately designed images and acrobatic camera work, but these experiments with image are never merely showing off—they’re always in service of character and story. The long, computer aided take in Panic Room that follows the movements of the intruders outside the house isn’t just there because it’s neat (though, no doubt, it is), it’s there because it shows us the real time arrival of the three invaders, their quickness, their thoroughness (or lack thereof), their purposefulness. The frantic camera in Fight Club reinforces the idea that this story is being told from inside the brain of the narrator; it cuts erratically, making spontaneous visual connections, showing locations with giant, showy swoops of motion. In other words, it moves the way he thinks. Thus, when the final twist is revealed, it makes perfect sense: after all, we were seeing everything from the vantage of a jittery, unfocused mind to begin with.

All this is to say that for all the accusations of flashy shallowness that have been lobbed at him, I’m convinced that he’s got plenty of depth in addition to show. And I’m elated to see these reports at AICN suggest that his next film, Chronicles, which takes on the Zodiac serial killer, looks to be equally interesting and intense. One reviewer compares it to The Wire in its methodical detailing of police procedure. The reviewer seems surprised, but people seem to forget that for all of Se7en’s artfully muddy imagery and hints of shocking violence, it was in many ways a slow, patient film that posited the character of the detective as a record keeper, a librarian, whose job it is to wait and see rather than act. It was about the way that life is boring, even for a detective on the trail of a serial killer, and finally, it was about what that boredom can cause the unhinged among us to do. Call Fincher a slick commercial hack if you want, but it takes a genius to make a movie that not only inverts the excitement paradigm of the detective/action-hero, but manages to make a movie that eloquently, hauntingly, captures boredom—and yet is nonetheless as intensely engaging as any movie I’ve seen.