When I can\u2019t sleep I\u2019ll often say to myself \u201cYou\u2019re going to step into your cave and you\u2019re going to find your power animal.\u201d A line from the scene in Fight Club where Edward Norton\u2019s character attends a meditation class and fantasizes of finding his power animal, a CGI penguin, inside an icy cave. Sometimes I\u2019ll even quote the penguin to calm myself: \u201cSlide.\u201d
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When I count to five on my hand I\u2019ll often start by counting on my pinky. Probably a leftover from watching Se7en one too many times when I was younger. Morgan Freeman counts the seven deadly sins like this.
When I watch tv commercials promoting some useless product, I\u2019ll often hear myself whispering \u201cYou\u2019re not your fucking kaki\u2019s!\u201d or \u201cWe\u2019re the all singing all dancing crap of the world.\u201d Quotes from Tyler Durden\u2019s fourth wall breaking monologue in Fight Club.
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And sometimes, but only sometimes, I\u2019ll look at my girlfriend and think \u201cWhat are you thinking? How are you feeling? What have we done to each other?\u201d A quote from the beginning (and ending) of Gone Girl.
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Only in writing this podcast introduction I was once again reminded of how David Fincher is one of my favourite directors. A somewhat strange realisation because I started wondering what that says about myself. His films being these pessimistic, somewhat empathy lacking, meticulously crafted pieces of browns-and-beiges. And green, a lot of green, because David Fincher really hates pink. In a recent interview he said that he hates pink because it makes people look healthy and that, to him, is unrealistic.
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Fincher is, not unlike myself, an obsessive perfectionist. Known for his, to quote Ben Affleck, \u201crelentless\u201d number of takes. His opinion is that if you spend $250 million to build a set, get the crew in and line-up the actors, you better use all the time you need to get the best result.
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This obsessive nature can also be traced back to his Pandora\u2019s Box of themes. \u201cWhat in the box?!\u201d you might ask. Well, if you take characters like John Doe (Se7en), Mark Zuckerberg (The Social Network), Jake Gyllenhaal’s journalist (Zodiac), Michael Douglas\u2019 banker (The Game) or the fucked-up couple in Gone Girl, his core set of fascinations seem to be concepts like obsession, social alienation, anti-consumerism, chaos, narcissism and hubris. I\u2019ll hereby thoroughly deny any links between these themes and my own character! But it\u2019s clear Fincher has something to say about the condition humane and it\u2019s not pretty. His worldview, not unlike his colour scheme, is bleak, grim and gritty. And he also has an opinion about his relationship to you, the audience, watching his films. In a making of featurette for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo he grimacingly says: \u201cI think people are perverts. That\u2019s the foundation of my career.\u201d
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Another key ingredient of Fincher films are their endings. They\u2019re not necessarily unhappy endings as much as they are almost always open-ended. For a man who structures his camera movements like they\u2019re a top of the bill ballet performance, he sure likes to keep his endings loosey-goosey; he likes to keep us guessing. And maybe, while the world is crumbling around us, I\u2019ll do the same. [cue Where\u2019s My Mind by The Pixies]<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A personal essay about the specific seduction of David Fincher’s films \u2014 beginning with a line from Fight Club the author still uses to calm herself down. What is it about Fincher’s protagonists, these obsessive, brilliant, deeply damaged men, that makes them so compelling to follow? The essay traces this fascination through Se7en, Zodiac, and The Social Network: an honest account of falling for a filmmaker whose films are, on close examination, about the very seduction they enact on their audience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1329,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"page\/page-gutenberg.php","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cold-open"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebratingcinema.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebratingcinema.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebratingcinema.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebratingcinema.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebratingcinema.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1328"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/celebratingcinema.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1893,"href":"https:\/\/celebratingcinema.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1328\/revisions\/1893"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebratingcinema.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebratingcinema.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebratingcinema.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebratingcinema.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}