David Fincher Films That Scar

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, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. 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 978-0-31337773-0 (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 14

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This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. Praeger An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents Introduction 1. Opposites Attract: Commercials and Pop Videos

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2. Woman in Peril or Final Girl? Alien3 and Panic Room

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3. To Catch a Killer: Seven and Zodiac

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4. It’s Only a Game: The Game and Fight Club

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5. It’s Not Like the Book: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

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6. The New De Palma?

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7. A Sense of an Ending—No ‘‘Happily Ever After’’?

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Conclusion

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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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 reasonably 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 generalized and from mainstream sources, and bald financial figures of opening 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

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Swallow is not really putting one forward. Dark Eye is full of useful information and interesting observations, but it does not really cohere into an argument (neither does it really try to), reflected in the lack of a conclusion. 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 directors 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 interviews 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 toward 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 franchise. 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

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criticism and de facto proof of a superficial aesthetic. However, to the contrary, Fincher’s experience with shorter film forms makes him acutely aware of the potential of every single shot, in which he needs to show sensitivity to a different sense of storytelling rhythm based around the threeminute 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 discussion 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 unnecessary 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-production 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 videos 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 moving images, high and low culture, and the classically artistic with a medium often associated with crude commercialism. COMMERCIALS Adverts are not only a stepping stone in Fincher’s career but a touchstone 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

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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 soundtrack, 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 commercial 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

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voice heard—all three are relevant here as all the recognizable figures, although known globally, are American. Camera movement is gradual, often 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 restaurant, 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 debris 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 piece 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 Steven 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 apartment 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 shotreverse/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

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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 hopping 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 building-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


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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, ‘‘Gamebreakers’’ (2003), but in ‘‘Fate’’ it works with more finesse. Cinematographer 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 famous 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 diaper runs into a typical suburban hallway (looking a little like the closing shots of John Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween), but here there is absolute fearlessness 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 movement, in particular of kinetic pleasure, not just of running but especially jumping and humankind’s ability to (albeit momentarily) defy gravity (and

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film’s ability to manipulate time and space). The camera is rarely still, often 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 sportsmanship 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 (computer-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 subjects. 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 silhouettes, 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 spontaneity and is actually very contrived).


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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 punctuate the account, Fincher creates a powerful, ‘‘water-cooler’’ moment. Follow-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 character 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 metallic 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

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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 unmotivated 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 performance 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 movies 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 parody of cheesy Godzilla movies with a deliberately unconvincing monster, unmotivated female screams, and Metropolis-style cityscape but in papiermâche. 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 continue 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 continues to come back to are known for their innovative technology, such as Motorola (see the 2006 PEBL) and Apple.


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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 material 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 melodramatic 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

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Messiah-like as their savior but also demonstrating the pleasure of stagediving 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), featuring a very young Elijah Wood. Although often attributed to Fincher, Opposites Attract was actually directed by husband-and-wife-team Candace 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 choreographer, 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 trademark 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.


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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 hallmarks 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 stereotypical femme fatale (we see her smoking, in fitted suits, and with 1940sstyle 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 simultaneously. Through a predominance of low angles and forward camera movement, 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 political 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 sideon shot of Madonna crawling under the table, links her with the cat, the link

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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 musical 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 opening from the snowscape into the house. However, the child-centered narrative 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 abusive 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 cinematography. 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


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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 ‘‘clowning,’’ parcours, and video dance machines in 2008’s Hung Up. Here she is giving the fashion of dancing in exaggerated posing movements, or ‘‘vogueing,’’ 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 particular song and videos increasingly seek to underline the entertainment credentials of musicians, via concert footage or pseudo-performance scenarios. In Bad Girl (1993), post-Alien3, Fincher shows greater directorial assurance. 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 character’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 potential 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 reversetracking 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

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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 skipping 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 opposite 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 together 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


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lighting, Madonna making herself up, while visible in four mirrors simultaneously, the sweeping searchlights, and the momentarily glimpsed miseen-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 business, 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 wheelchair and taking oxygen to control his arousal, all of which has unpleasant overtones of Dennis Hopper in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1983). ‘‘Celeste’’ 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

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shadowy nature of the sex industry is certainly reflected in Fincher’s cinematography but it is so unremittingly dark that the quick cutting and dissolves 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 Evangelista), all dressed in black and white to complement the limited color palette 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 outstretched 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 sexual ambiguity that still surrounded Michael’s own sexual orientation at this point in his career, thereby still addressing both gay and straight elements 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 gravity 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


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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, depending 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 sensibility 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 cinematography of Idol’s flat is close to the living space of Scott’s hero; Deckard 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

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rain-spattered, and we see Idol cross between speeding motorbikes. The drug den he enters is partitioned by sheets of plastic like the imagery surrounding 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 telegraph 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 dissolving 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 forward 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 Hitchcock’s 1951 Strangers on a Train) but its effect is completely dissipated by its subsequent repeated use, seven times in all, which not only disorientates 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


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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 archway 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 special effect. Explicit promos for movies, i.e., blatant commercial tie-ins, are also rare with the exception of Mark Knopfler’s Storybook Story (1987),

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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 Springfield’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 forward 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 crumbles—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.


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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 Reaganite posters, a generic politician in low angle addressing apparently no one, and a track past a small mobile TV showing Oliver North testifying, followed by a male hands washing, suggest a lack of accountability. The falling 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 resonance 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 ceiling 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 running through frames like at the end of a reel, the ‘‘jagged’’ rhythm of cutting, often avoiding cutting on the beat, strong backlighting, extreme angles, and relatively few close-ups. Clearly this is not a promo for individuals 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

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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 important as Alien.’’ —David Fincher1

ALIEN3 The time has come for a reconsideration of Alien3 (1992). Conventionally, the film is described in terms of deficiency and therefore as a weakening 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-fiction film with the stark originality of the first film. Much has been written about the tortuous production processes of Alien3, such that it seems miraculous 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 often 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 certain 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

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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 ‘‘monstrous feminine.’’ Generically, it can be seen as a complex blend of Hollywood franchise movie and a technologically enhanced 1950s B-movie. Ten years later in Panic Room (2002), Fincher again puts a heroine at the center of a battle to the death in an enclosed space, effectively using both conventional 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 reluctantly by Fox in post-production and can be quite confusing, acting

Woman in Peril or Final Girl? Alien3 and Panic Room

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primarily as a knowing parody of the primal scene and an ironic counterpoint to Newt’s cremation. Even an apparently positive act is rendered negative as Dillon’s intoning that ‘‘for within each seed there is the promise 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 Ripley’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 combination 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 offcamera. 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 appearance represents a form of doubling or multiplication of the ‘phallus’ pointing 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 interpretations. 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 Ripley 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 furtherance of life. Without a need to mate, establish territory, or procreate with males, the alien represents the ultimate negation of males—they are

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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 previous 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 changing 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 identity 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 creatureliness.’’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


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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 explicitly 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 penetration, especially by a male, that is both alien to her and yet a natural process. 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 undergone 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 satisfactory answers to the questions it raises, and that indeed those very questions 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 dismisses at the outset. Furthermore, although several ideas in the film are certainly interesting, it is debatable whether they advance our understanding of them in a new way. There are several assumptions lurking behind Mulhall’s assertion that the Alien series works ‘‘in just the ways’’ philosophers 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 conclusions drawn stand on limited specific evidence and as a result seem ultimately less convincing.

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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 numeral, but only after subjecting it to a radical displacement . . . as if Fincher feels that anything he might do with his film will be superscriptural, 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 previous films, and an idea of the film as a denial, an obliteration of the previous 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 resurrecting 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 communication 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 perception 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 heroism, 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 summarily and brutally dismissed. Even Bishop, the droid, is covered with flapping plastic, the equivalent of a burial shroud (Andrews later describes him as


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‘‘smashed beyond repair’’). The negative, the refusal of genre expectations, is apparent from the opening. However, Fincher’s desire to carve out a distinctive niche in the franchise by removing Newt, Hicks, Bishop, and later Clemens after only a relatively brief time, also denies Ripley the opportunity to develop emotionally except in definition with the alien. As Thomson 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 Electric 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 community (waste disposal), the fabric of its nature (looking much like a scrapheap), 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 working 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 basement.’’ 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 distances 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 basement,’’ there is the suggestion that this is as much an idea of monstrosity,

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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 needle 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 fluids 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 plumbing intertwined,’’ but without birthing references to eggs or Giger’s biomechanical 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 homosexual 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 question 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 agitated,’’ it is tempting to read this as the presumption, in an all-male society, 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 scatological 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


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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 underlines 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 together. The personal queasiness that Fincher and Weaver have about firearms 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 custodians, 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 situation. 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 experience 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’’

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that the men share as ‘‘some kind of apocalyptic, Millenarian, Christian, fundamentalism,’’ sounds almost like a random piling up of adjectives. Religion 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,’’ suggesting 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 ambitious 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 elements too like the male chorister’s vocals running under the opening synthesizers. 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 ‘‘tolerate 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 rituals 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 juxtaposition 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 victims 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


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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 creatures 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 negation 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 emptiness. 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 sympathy 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 symbolically 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

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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 originally 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 closing 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 subgenre, 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 episodic, 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 presence 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


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‘‘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 regime. 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 further 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 overseer, 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 profound case of Otherness: ‘‘In a male-dominated culture . . . woman as the Other assumes particular significance . . . Woman’s autonomy and independence are denied.’’30 Certainly she is viewed with suspicion as the one

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who brought the creature with her and outright hostility, reflected in Morse’s threat to put her head through a wall and the subsequent nearrape, 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) confrontation between Ripley and the xenomorph but to cut away from what arguably 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-reliance, ability to survive) which mark her as the best candidate. Most obviously 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 vestiges 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


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mark a greater convergence of monster and heroine. The very fact that she reverses the hunter/hunted dynamic marks her as having the courage necessary 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 Dietrich 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-filmic 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 himself 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 franchise (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 previous film and the elegiac punch of the opening of this one, is the ultimately forlorn attempt to save Newt.

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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 evolving 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 followed 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. However, this is only slightly distorted and here slow-moving, so Fincher establishes 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


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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 contributes 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 desirable, which is an understandable enough reaction if we are given enough dramatic purchase to believe it, and perhaps she expresses her sexual nature 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 little 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

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the assumption of a perfect model (which is implied would be a much longer 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 perception 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 allmale 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 disagreements 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 credible sequences where characters apparently struggle for several seconds. In the final confrontation with Ripley and Dillon, there is an effective whipping 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.


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The mess of the plot is reflected in the fact that early teaser trailers suggested 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 featured 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 escapism, 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 moviewar 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 exploitation 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 concept 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 purporting 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 conditions he was seeking to treat). Descriptions of Sulaco in the opening chapter 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.

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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 societies and individuals for material gain, is evoked as a parallel for colonialism, 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 vitriolic language, we see no attempt at revolt and the attempted rape of Ripley 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, originality and familiarity. As a director who has subsequently gained recognition 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


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shoots and challenging creative choices (such as Weaver having her head shaved and killing off her character at the end), all set against a background of a revolving door of over 10 writers, so that production began without a finished script. Even early scriptwriter William Gibson articulates a dominant view of the film as a reduction, a dilution, and a weakening 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 shavenheaded 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 Aliens 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 perversity 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 specifically used), there is less emphasis on a bio-technological look. Fincher adds features that become signatures of his own—in the montage preparing the furnace for example, we have frequent use of low angles, and minimal and motivated 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 presentation of visceral gore is actually quite restrained and achieved more by flash-cuts and reaction shots, such as the demise of Clemens, which is conveyed 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

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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 anything 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, originally set in a Manhattan brownstone) with newlyweds replaced by a newly divorced independent woman and a child. The film is routinely portrayed as a conventional thriller. Linda Ruth Williams briefly notes that it ‘‘unpacks a number of genre staples’’ before using a review as the jumping-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 represent 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 particular 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


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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, placing 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 delicate 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 understanding 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 stereotypical 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 willingness to take risks and as in the failed attempt to capture the alien, Fincher’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 cautious mother, but gradually steel in the mother emerges. Sarah shows fortitude 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, impregnated by the queen alien, ‘‘is more important for what she is than what

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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 characteristic 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 living space to capture the intruders, and like the alien, the robbers are suspicious 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 fingers 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. Violence 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 Panopticon, 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


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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 places 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 nervous’’) 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 uncomfortable 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 emotional 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

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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 violently 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 dialogue is neither addressed to Meg nor answered by her—her role as a parent 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 original ‘‘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 element 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


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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, suggesting that she is rejecting both aggression and more aggressive forms of language. When tempted by Sarah’s ‘‘Fuck her, too,’’ she retains her composure, replying, ‘‘I agree, but no.’’ The closeness is expressed by literal closer shots over the table and a pseudo toast with wine and Coke, suggesting 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 Sarah’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 partner we hear on the phone. Sarah’s clear lack of sense of time (rather clumsily inserted into the dialogue 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

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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 daughter. 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 current 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-toface 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


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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 tracking 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 sporadically. 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 guarantee your security (indeed here, ironically, it is the very source of your problems). 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 quotidian 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., construct 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 episodic. 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 substitution 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 frustration. Similarly, later Raoul warns Burnham with a question, which is also a challenge to us: ‘‘Who’s got the gun? . . . Remember that.’’ When

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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 adulthood’’ 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 realizes the power of covering the cameras and he survives at the end. Ironically, 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


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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 tragedy 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 tendencies in his approach to directing. Ultimately both Alien3, set in a prison colony, and Panic Room, an exploration of a security feature in private homes, are about notions of shelter 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 imprisonments, 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 husband and, by implication, win over her troublesome daughter. However,

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the panic room itself is an object of unease from the outset—Meg shudders 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 suggest 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 philosopher Nathan Andersen terms Alien3 ‘‘an open space in which thinking takes place, enabling new modes of organizing and making sense of experience 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 miniature and optical effects unit) strongly foreshadows the climactic scene in Seven, in which the characters of Doe and Mills are aligned. Critical commentary 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 Resurrection (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 narrative 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 necessarily live in them. Our experience of humanity may not match the bleak vision presented here. Andrew Kevin Walker’s script was inspired by his

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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, methodical, 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 questions 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 hotheadedness. 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 prattling 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

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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 constant 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 citizen to action. Later, Somerset answers Mills’s apparently rhetorical question 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 initial 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 statement 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

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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 Somerset too initially wanted to do good and through years of bitter experience, personal and professional, he has had to accept that change and improvement 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 cynicism. 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 battle 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


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common ground between the two, sensed almost immediately by Tracy, who in an action that makes her more plot device than fully rounded character, 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 equivalent 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 fatherson 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 successor 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 naı¨ve, 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 surrounding 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

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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 imagine 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, cutting off his boss with a perfunctory request to put a file of new information (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, leading Somerset to state ‘‘For the first time ever, you and I are in total agreement,’’ 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 himself 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


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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 sanctuary 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 crimeridden 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 spiritual role and the pursuit of knowledge is portrayed in a spiritually positive light as well as performing a valuable social function in allowing calm thought, thus becoming a communal version of Somerset’s use of the metronome 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 available 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 ultimately 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

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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 Milton, Chaucer, and Dante. This is film as a puzzle, not just in the identification of Doe but the extent to which we can share the cultural, and more specifically textual, markers that will reveal him. Our credentials as literate 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 audiences 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 following of literary clues that ultimately lead to a literary discovery: Doe’s


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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 associated 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 implication, 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

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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 completely excluded from it. He also spends time looking and thinking—it is just that his frame of reference is modern print media rather than literature. Bach’s music begun in the library bleeds across cuts until the following 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 piece of shit’’) and violent hitting of the dashboard. The romanticism of the individual detective using his intellect to grapple with a mystery is undercut, 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 attitudes to study guides (symbolized by Cliffs telltale yellow and black covers). 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 ‘‘Sharday’’) 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 Somerset 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


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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 embarrassment 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 genderrelated. It is only at this point in the film and at this stage of their acquaintance that they are made to introduce themselves fully, sharing first names with each other, and with us (as David Mills and William Somerset). 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 pivotal point in the triangular relationship with two men, both law enforcement 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

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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 sanctuary 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 particular 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.


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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 narrative 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 authorities, 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 undermined 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 converge. 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 manages one last movement. The Poe-like category error of corpse instead of living individual and perpetrator instead of victim momentarily disorientates our expectations of where the narrative might lead and the buddy/ cop/detective movie offers us no precedents to refer to here. Instead of netting the killer, the raid provides us with yet another victim.

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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 nothing 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 retrospect, 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


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time remaining, creating the highly unusual effect of disorientating an audience by a narrative, that is clearly placed within the detective genre but denying us any generic markers around from which to generate expectations 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 pattern 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, Somerset 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 connections 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 himself, we see a figure with a meticulous attention to detail, creating a series

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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 devices, which draw attention to themselves as such, underlining the controlling 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 encourage us to see Doe as a metaphorical rather than a literal figure. Dyer’s analysis focuses on representational qualities in the racial and sexual politics 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 figure from a previous era). Unlike in Seven, this threat of suicide is ultimately 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 contemporary 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 individuals are culpable of any ‘‘crime.’’ There is no sense of degree in the ‘‘sins’’ identified and they may seem to contemporary viewers closer to


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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 drugdealing 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 backstory for his character, Doe does not really exist in the space or time outside 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 endemically 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 furniture, 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

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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 ‘‘masterpiece’’ 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 primarily 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 central character Leatherface in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (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 sexual frustration and mental instability. Along with the ‘‘Help me’’ message left at the second murder (itself a nod to William Friedkin’s 1973 exploration of spiritual evil, The Exorcist), Doe (and Walker and Fincher too of course) is amassing all the expectations an audience might already have


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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 behavior 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 meticulous 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 Warhol-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 concern 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 richness or incoherence, depending on your point of view, stems from this

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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, explicitly 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, frontloading 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, frustrations, and dead ends. The lack of expected climaxes means the theatrical 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 earlier 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 consequence 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 represents 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


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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 duration, 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

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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 Shepard (Pell James), but here this seems more motivated by the powerlessness of Bryan Hartnell (Patrick Scott Lewis). In an exchange of wideangled 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 dissemination of the Zodiac myth into the wider culture with different theories 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 accompaniment 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 peripheral detail of the truck by the roadside but also after the opening murder, 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


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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 protagonists 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 Tarantinolike 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 closure 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: someone who will survive to tell the tale for future generations. It is only at the Stine murder that we actually see the forces of investigation at the crime scene itself. The speed of their arrival and the immediacy

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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 during Belli’s aggrandizing speech to Toschi and Armstrong, where he talks about ‘‘killing is his compulsion, it’s in his blood.’’ The unknown and possibly 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 juxtaposition 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 performances 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 recognizes, 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 retarded element in his character although it also gives him the energy and drive of an obsessive, which seems necessary to solve difficult cases.


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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 condemnation 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 anything, 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 progress 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

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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 attractive). As a cartoonist, he is faced with the challenge of taking a known situation 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 fascination 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 processes. 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 understand 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


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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 parentchild, built on antagonism—Avery chides him for ‘‘doing that thing we discussed that starts with an L,’’ i.e., ‘‘looming.’’ Through the haze of alcohol, Avery and Graysmith talk more openly with each other, and Graysmith 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 investigation, 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 consistently 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’’ girlfriend-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.

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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 paralleling 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 development—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 character—a man doing a childish job in drawing pictures, unable to assert himself 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 standing 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 literally true, which he confirms via a brilliantly improvised line from Gyllenhaal 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 narrative 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


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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 complements 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 business?’’ 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 children, 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 material 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

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library at face value, it spurs him to return to his previous source of inspiration 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 evidence 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.’’ However, 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 Designer 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


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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 constructed 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 survival 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 Alienstyle pipe-work behind him. Fincher gives us only a partial view by camerawork 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,

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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 distracted 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, Graysmith 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 concrete 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 ‘‘emotional 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 killings were sent to the Chronicle, may create the sense that the myth surrounding 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 establishment of a brand as the killer can apparently leave his mark as a sign of authentication as well as a provocation to the police.


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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 something on the roof. The shot with the fridge and Toschi’s one word explanation 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 dramatic 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 suspense because we cannot be sure of his guilt either. The film clearly presents the circumstantial evidence against Allen (the Zodiac watch, familiarity 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, Armstrong, 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

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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 apparently 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 Westworld (Michael Crichton, 1973), which also presents an alternative, leisure-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, existential 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 problematize this boundary. It is a film about filmmaking and its relationship to the audience.

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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 security 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 prepares 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 practical 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 escalation 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 immediately 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 period 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

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and possibly guilt over his father, has caused him to breach his own security), at which point we can assign a rational explanation to what we momentarily 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 cowriter 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 sequential, 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 ‘‘reality’’ 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.

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There are several similarities between Cincinnatus and Van Orton— Cincinnatus is sentenced to death for the enigmatic crime of ‘‘gnostical turpitude’’ and Van Orton in the opening seems spiritually and socially ‘‘dead,’’ cut off from his peers, unable or unwilling to form lasting personal 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 nothing 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


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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 apparently 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 repeatedly 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

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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 canteen, 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 narrative 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 purpose 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 suspicion 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 confrontation, 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 operative, allowing him to express dismay alongside Van Orton at the end. The so-called practical joke, at its most elaborate extreme, is an example 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 recognize 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


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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 dangerous) 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 decisions. 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 associated 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 reaction 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

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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 pursuing 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 continuous 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 resonates 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. Returning home, he starts to tell the housekeeper, Ilsa, about his meeting with


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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 prematurely 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 businessman 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 toilet 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 similarly, 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 resurrection as he emerges Nosferatu-like from a coffin but into bright daylight.

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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, holding 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. Naı¨ve 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 absolute brink of sanity, all certainties based on his class thrown into confusion, 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


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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, apparently sacked for accidentally crashing into him and muttering ‘‘Asshole’’ at him. The harsh sacking for which he is responsible provokes his engagement 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 ambulance, 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 conclusions about her motives. Jodie Foster was originally due to work with Fincher, first as Christine and then in the role played by Sean Penn, rewritten 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 often 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 elevator, 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

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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 repeatedly 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 challenged 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 camera 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 appearance 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 psychologically 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


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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 situations—he escapes from an elevator, is chased by police dogs, breaks into a room, and eventually drops down into a dumpster, much to the entertainment 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 control 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 gestures 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 Sutherland, 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. Conrad 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 survived 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 disorientated, 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

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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 control.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 masculinity, 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


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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 Mayhem 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 excrement catapult and kidnapping a monkey, only to return it, shaved. However, 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 fullblown 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 definition is merely the sense of humankind (and male, working-class individuals 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

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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 personality. 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 political 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 muddled. 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, particularly 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 obsession . . .’’ 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


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gnomic ‘‘The things you own end up owning you’’ is as much emptyheaded ‘‘hippyspeak’’ as anything particularly profound. There is an arrogance 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 implication 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 television 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 masochistic 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 Depression,’’ but there have been other generations who have also been born outside these eras and the conclusion that ‘‘Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives’’ could sound like sanctimonious justification for actions whose prime pleasures are really only sadistic and masochistic 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 weekday drudgery, but it also underlines the fundamental incompatibility of the

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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 explicitly political and serious. There is a Nietzschean thread in some of Tyler’s sententious rants, particularly when he pours the lye over Jack’s hand (‘‘without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing’’). More explicitly, he addresses the question 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 particularly 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 masculinity 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 cancer 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 masculinity, 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


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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 father, 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 making 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 philosophy that originality has been lost in an ever-spiralling sequence of copies. Literally, Jack’s work, like most office jobs, involves repetitive tasks, epitomized 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 coffee consumption as Jack assumes that his boss has had his ‘‘grand-latte enema.’’ Global capitalism is portrayed as a mindless, unstoppable allconquering force so that ‘‘Management-speak’’ infects conversation and objective chronology is replaced by apparently-quirky-but-actuallypredictable habits, such as his boss wearing a cornflower-blue tie on a

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particular day and the softly numbing sound of the copier on the soundtrack 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 striking 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 staring 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 acquisition 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 Mayhem, there is little real substance behind this satire of obsessive commercialism. What is Jack supposed to do about his situation? Embracing the nihilistic pleasures of weekly violence will not change the economic systems on which Western culture is based. As Henry Giroux notes, ‘‘While appearing to address important social issues, these films end up reproducing the very problems they attempt to address.’’18 Like Nick Hornby’s About a Boy (1998), the film uses a fake justification 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 version 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


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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 overtones 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 finding consolation in an inner, mental sanctuary, a ‘‘cave,’’ we cut to a realistic 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 orgasmiclike 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.’’

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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 unintentionally 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 counterpointed with a shot of Jack and Tyler passing on moving walkways, travelling 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 after 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 psychic 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


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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 signalling 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 underlined 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 subjective 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 fluidity 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 person, 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-deprecating 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 without 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.’’

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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 BonhamCarter 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 collision of multiple personalities, which begin the narrative as separate but which by the end converge shockingly and powerfully. Most of the memorable, 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 already 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 ‘‘picture’’ 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 controversial for some viewers. The book features Tyler being fired as a projectionist 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 gangster boss.


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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 empathetic (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 schematic, 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 unsettling 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 automatic 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 intensity 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 voiceover 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 postfight 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

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Mayhem provides perfect cinematic material for jump cuts, punchy dialogue, 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 narrative 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 scriptwriter (Eric Roth) but extends to a range of form and content—both narratives chart the life of a slow-speaking hero with a Southern accent, whose initial physical difficulties are overcome by a miraculous transformation 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 figures 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 initiated 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

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protagonist. There are episodes on a boat (in part related to a war involving 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 dramatized 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 supposedly 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 characters’ 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 (Caroline’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 audience feelings about a particular situation. Granted, Pitt has the added challenge 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 experience 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

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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 important 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 performance 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 structure 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 injection of attempted drama in a static situation. There is an attempt at a causal link in the idea that the work of Monsieur 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 warfare, 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,

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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 conversation 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 reconstruction of another lightning strike seems the kind of non sequitur that makes movie studios nervous. Despite appearances, these episodes are only repetitions 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 progress 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.


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One might see all human life as inherently linear and episodic, but Button’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 characterization 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 importance 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 tattoos (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 possible’’); 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 pontificating 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 conceptualizes memory as inherently cinematic in form. In a digital age, it is the

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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 progress 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 Crockett), and some effective computer-enhanced sailing shots (in brilliant daylight, 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 illogical 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 newspaper 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.


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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 sentiments 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 perhaps 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 natural to him), he has no significant childhood due to his reversed chronology. 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 dementia rather than the rebellion of puberty. He is closer to the final stage (‘‘second 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 demonstrate 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 coincidences stacking up without momentum.’’3 Certainly, characters appear in, and disappear from, Benjamin’s story with little sense that he has necessarily 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

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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 example, 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 suggestion) has touching moments, as he is framed before a chiming clock that


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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 intimidated 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 somberly 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

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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 Caroline 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 published 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 important’’ 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 condition 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 character 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 either but certainly several characters in the fiction do pass judgment (notably Benjamin’s wife and later son, Roscoe, as well as the New York papers), usually unfavorably, often blaming him for a socially unacceptable process, implying that he bears some responsibility for it. First


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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 disavow 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 diametrically opposite view of a number of characters and situations, ameliorating 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, symbolized 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 father. Roth’s ‘‘abandoning’’ motif sidesteps this completely. Fitzgerald mentions ‘‘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 Bailey, 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

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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), featuring a foul-mouthed baby. However, while Roth and Fincher opt for a more serious-minded tone, they do not replace the inherently absurd nature 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 meetings, 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 listlessly reading a collection of adventure stories, The Boy Scouts in Bimini Bay, but Roth adds scenes with others reading to him and Daisy, in particular 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 curiosity 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 backward, 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


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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 assignation 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 sevenyear-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 censorious 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 process, 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 driving force of the family firm, doubling its value. He is given the vigor of a

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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 presentation 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 impressions, 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


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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) nature of the film’s plotting, the passivity of its hero, and its inherently episodic 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 particular, Fincher shows a consistent interest in film noir, the use of bravura camerawork, an intertextual knowingness, and an attraction to the technology 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-goback 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

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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 toeto-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 envisaged 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 pornography (the film industry explicitly built on corruption). This tendency can be traced back to Blow-Out (1981), which although primarily political, 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

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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 Columbus, 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 associated—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 selfaware dialogue between gangsters, particularly in work like Reservoir Dogs (1992). In a sense Junior’s outburst also punctures the sense of grandeur 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

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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 immediately 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 comicbook villains’’ who are only ‘‘formulaically defined by comic idiocy’’ and O’Hehir terms them ‘‘B-movie cliches,’’ but there is some wit and even pathos 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 cartoonish, 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

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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 character 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 entertainment 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

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zek’s critical notion of the ‘‘metasuturing of the intercasket and Slavoj Zi 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 father, 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 lasting 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 continuity 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.

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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 element of a knowing game-playing element, a spot-the-celebrity game for aficionados, such as the fleeting glimpse of Linda Manz (Christine’s flatmate) 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 incestuous 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 elevator 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 herself 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 secret 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.

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Fight Club plays with moviemaking conventions, in particular the relation 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 dinning room and kitchen), apparently invisible to all except Tyler himself, who steps out of the fiction to deliver his own comic aside. The two interact on screen, completing each other’s dialogue, and the work of film projection 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 subliminal appearance of Pitt, especially in the support group (a frame or so longer), portrays him almost as a mischievous devilish character, appearing on the shoulder of an expert, the orange leather jacket contrasting especially 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.

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The shots of the cipher letter being framed and focused by the police photographer 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 conveyed 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 humorous on paper, just makes the authorities look ridiculous. The fact that a history teacher and his wife can crack what Graysmith later calls ‘‘a simple substitution code,’’ achieving in only three days (approaching the problem as a leisure-time hobby) what the combined intelligence services of the United States of America cannot, does not bode well for the likely apprehension 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 Connell’s 1924 short story. Avery’s observation that the name of the protagonist Zaroff also begins with a ‘‘Z’’ underlines the parallel. Later, in Graysmith’s own investigation, he follows the trail of Rick Marshall, a former 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 domain 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 meeting at a church and the bus threat, and the scene shown focuses on handwriting analysis. Unfortunately Toschi walks out before he sees that actually

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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 effectively 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 cremation, Fincher superimposes a succession of close-ups of Weaver and Dutton, which seems quite sentimental and more typical of a family drama or

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pop video. However, the sequence showing the outbreak of fire indicates Fincher’s strengths as a director. Looking forward to Seven, it blends limited light sources with motivated water sources (here, the sprinkler system). 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 violence at face value.9 What is groundbreaking is not Tyler’s often overblown, 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., himself 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’’ feelings, while these remain hidden to one another (such as Jack and Bob hugging), 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

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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 movement 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 foulsmelling 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 accumulative 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 political 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 decision 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.

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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. Taubin 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 favorite 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 claustrophobic 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 narratives 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 experience.’’ 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.

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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 precisely, 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

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‘‘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 collaboration, 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-professionals. 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 intrusive 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

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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 ‘‘appreciate 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 relation 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 feature. Fincher often uses the motif of flashlights piercing the darkness, featured 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 Madonna’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 similar 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 basement room. Even here, Fincher’s camera placement is suggesting a fractured sense of reality with a shot from directly above the cellar doors as

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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 onscreen 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 cannot be distinguished. By converting his apartment into the one on offer, he effectively has disappeared into the magazine, metaphorically in his motivation 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 camera 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 tensions 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 window 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 earlier, 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

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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 little 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 liveaction 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 rejection of German Expressionism, whereas Fincher via developments in cinematography 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 foreknowledge 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 progress of the gas through the pipe) foreshadow similar experiments in the

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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 scrutiny. Fincher’s single, fluid shot via CGI draws attention to itself as an effect, and thereby the presence of the director. Cutting-edge effects technology 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 particularly 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 presence 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, revealing 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 recreation 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.

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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 containing 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 equivalent 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 noticeable that in interviews and commentaries a significant proportion of Fincher’s own words and those on message boards and throughout the virtual 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 verisimilitude 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 inclusion 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, problematizes 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 example 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

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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 rendering 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 authenticity (one by an immersion in scientific projection, the other in wellresearched 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 expectations 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 stopmotion 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 director, 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 consequence 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

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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 horrors 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 dozens 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 reexamine 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 building, again despite protestations by Fincher that this is intended to show chronological transition, is hard not to be read as a piece of cinematic artifice 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 letters 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 opening 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 glistening Richmond oil refinery, seem to suggest San Francisco as place of manmade 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

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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 flashlight 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 reference 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 Vanities (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 emerging over the bumps in the road evokes one of Douglas’s earlier smallscreen 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

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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 asking 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 establish the geography of the house but it is performed fairly quickly and brusquely (in keeping with the agents’ characters) and with fluid camerawork 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 establishing 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. However, 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, particularly perpetrated on women. There is no real hint of sexual transgressions 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.

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Like Hitchcock, Fincher’s preparation of shots is meticulous, declaring ‘‘I don’t wing stuff.’’26 In relation to Panic Room, Ron Frankel, a previsualization supervisor, suggests that Fincher’s use of digital storyboarding 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 (supposedly 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 closing 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 reference—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

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merely an excuse to experiment with technology. Both Fincher and Hitchcock chose a very precise, technologically based method to show an apparently perfect crime—one meticulous plan reflects the other but whereas Fincher has continued to experiment, Hitchcock himself felt the experiment 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 compartmentalized 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 corners of urban space. Like Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), also evoked by

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Howard Shore’s score, the titles problematize the usually distinct boundary 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 camera 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 multifaceted relationship also features the competing expectations of genre, studios, 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 worldview. 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 system 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 husband 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 summation of what the film is trying to say or at least represent the lasting

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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 implication, 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 superficially 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 stumbles 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 fantasy 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 despair to beyond despair.’’1 At only one point does Ripley momentarily submit 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 extinguish 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

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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 Nostromo, 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 franchise, 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 Company,’’ desperate above all else to keep their product alive for future exploitation 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 smithereens 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 sequentially, 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 conveyed as heroic and transcendent. There is a simple grace in Ripley’s final

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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 preferred 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 second, 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 previous 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 conveying 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 Nostromo. 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


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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 ultimate 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, already 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

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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 disorientates the viewer all the more powerfully when this is suddenly rendered ineffective (also seen in James Cameron’s 1986 Aliens). In an extreme reversal of expectations, Doe, a lone individual, bound and held at gunpoint, 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, generally 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 investigate. 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 Somerset 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


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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 sufficient. 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 suggests 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 ending, 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 participating in the world.’’8 However, as indicated in Chapter 3, the character 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 implicated 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

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It was actually a mistake which led to Fincher being sent the script featuring 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 alterations after test screenings to a softer, supposedly final moral. Dyer suggests the film is a powerful statement that ‘‘the world is beyond both redemption 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 accompanies her first scene, Claire de Lune, but that can only be read retrospectively). 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 Forsterlike ‘‘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 airport 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


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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 resources and the audience’s limited capacity to suspend disbelief in a repetitive 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 relationship 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 complacency. 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 follow in his father’s footsteps and commit suicide at the age of 48, the suggestion 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

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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 Christine (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 miniatures 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 symbolized by the honking of a horn. Here, tragedy is avoided by the provision 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 multimillionaires 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


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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 synapses, should make us aware from the outset that everything is filtered through his perspective, but our attention may be more drawn by the bravura 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 aesthetically 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 sleeping 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 Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954; and particularly its 2007 film adaptation by Francis Lawrence).11 The novel explains this as symbolic of the destruction 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 onscreen ‘‘impossibility’’ is confirmed. The final scenes take on a surreal aspect 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

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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 silhouette, looking out as the buildings fall, in an image that is partly apocalyptic 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 justice 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 intellectual. The opening was re-shot several months after the body of the film


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due to Foster’s pregnancy, which extra-filmic factor does lend her a different 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 manner 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’’ belying 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 pressure 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 obsession. 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

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the narrative with a survivor from the initial murder and raising the possibility of justice at least (although this is then denied by the closing captions 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 persona 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 sections 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, Fincher’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 inhabitants are picked off one by one. However several are quite absurd in nature, 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


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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 almostcartoonish 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 wearing 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 represents 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

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or flying over the handlebars of a bike he is ridiculously riding around the Paper Street house, practicing nunchuck routines on a chair while howling, 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 (Hemingway 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 reality 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 provocative 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 certainly 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 gestures 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 earlier 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


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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 edginess 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 melancholy 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 humorous edginess which Pitt can bring to a role (in Seven, improvising the mispronunciation 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

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is interested in finding light within that darkness and that there are examples 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 attitude 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 misleading—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 exception 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 substance. 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, especially 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, planning and execution of shots puts him closer to Hitchcock, especially in the meticulous preparation to the point where actors can seem incidental. Further similarities include an obsessive interest in film technology (particularly the possibilities of long takes) and the archetypes from film noir, especially the femme fatale and an uncontrollable noir-ish universe in

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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 filmmaking approach has elements of this, too—in production, he is absolutely 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 JustSo 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 ‘‘experiences’’ as gifts for the super-rich in The Game reflects an exhaustion in consuming goods, a tiredness with things, and a similar acquisitive searching 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 after 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 engagement 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.

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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 definition 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 protagonist 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 medium of people. It is telling perhaps that Fincher’s next project, provisionally titled The Social Network, focuses on social network Internet sites. The prime relationship 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 control, 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

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digital technology that allows him to see numerous takes almost instantaneously 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 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Swallow, Dark Eye, 43. Strick, ‘‘Alien3,’’ 47. Ibid. Taubin, ‘‘Invading Bodies,’’ 9. Creed, Monstrous Feminine, 16–31. Browning, David Cronenberg, 9–15. Creed, Monstrous Feminine, 25. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 17. Mulhall, On Film, 2–3. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 104. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 91–92. Ibid., 17–18; Cavell, World Viewed. Palahniuk, Fight Club, 22.

182 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

Notes Thomson, Alien Quartet, 107. Dick, Do Androids Dream, 53. Thomson, Alien Quartet, 127. Taubin, ‘‘Invading Bodies,’’ 9. Ibid., 10. Foster, Alien3, 4. Thomson, Alien Quartet, 116. Foster, Alien3, 57. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws, 35–41. Freeland, Naked and the Undead, 64. Wood, ‘‘American Horror Film,’’ 9–10. Ibid. Thomson, Alien Quartet, 101. Swallow, Dark Eye, 61. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 61. Foster, Alien3, 11, 96. Ibid., 97. Williams, ‘‘Mother Courage,’’ 12. Swallow, Dark Eye, 148. Ibid., 173. O’Hehir, ‘‘Panic Room,’’ 51. Foster, Alien3, 147. Williams, ‘‘Mother Courage,’’ 13. Sullivan, ‘‘Punch and Jodie.’’ Williams, ‘‘Mother Courage,’’ 13. Ibid. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 5. Andersen, ‘‘Is Film the Alien Other?’’

CHAPTER 3 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Thomson, Alien Quartet, 136. Dyer, Seven, 8, 16. Ibid., 72. Ellroy, Black Dahlia, 70–71. Dyer, Seven, 25. Taubin, ‘‘Nerds on a Wire,’’ 25. Ibid., 24. Fuller, ‘‘Zodiac,’’ 82. Taubin, ‘‘Nerds on a Wire,’’ 25.

CHAPTER 4 1. Whitehouse, ‘‘Fight Club,’’ 46. 2. Todorov, Fantastic: A Structural Approach. 3. Swallow, Dark Eye, 111.

Notes 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

183 Ibid., 105. Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading. Forster, Howards End, 72. Swallow, Dark Eye, 89. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 89. Palahniuk, Fight Club, 173. Ibid., 122, 149. Whitehouse, ‘‘Fight Club,’’ 46. Palahniuk, Fight Club, 53. Taubin, ‘‘So Good,’’ 17. Palahniuk, Fight Club, 29. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 41. Giroux, ‘‘IKEA Boy,’’ 97. Palahniuk, Fight Club, 196. Taubin, ‘‘So Good,’’ 18. Palahniuk, Fight Club, 33. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 42, 59. Ibid., 213. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 48–49, 59. Ibid., 49.

CHAPTER 5 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, scene vii, l. 165. Shakespeare, Henry VI, part I, Act II, scene v, l. 2. Miller, ‘‘Benjamin Button,’’ 56. Fitzgerald, Benjamin Button, 5–6. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 5–6. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 22–23.

CHAPTER 6 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Ellroy, Black Dahlia, 362. Williams, ‘‘Mother Courage,’’ 13; O’Hehir, ‘‘Panic Room,’’ 51. McNamara, Urban Verbs, 177. zek, Fright of Real Tears, 39. Zi Swallow, Dark Eye, 87. Ibid., 110.

184 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Notes Ibid., 101. Fuller, ‘‘Zodiac,’’ 82. zek, ‘‘Masochist Social Link,’’ 118–119. Zi Taubin, ‘‘So Good,’’ 18. Strick, ‘‘The Game,’’ 42. Swallow, Dark Eye, 104. Taubin, ‘‘Invading Bodies,’’ 9. Swallow, Dark Eye, 161. Ibid., 163. Ibid., 102. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 103. Ibid., 168. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 172. Ibid., 100. Ibid., 162. Ibid., 169. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 151. Ibid., 166. Ibid., 145. Ibid., 158. Ibid., 173.

CHAPTER 7 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Taubin, ‘‘Invading Bodies,’’ 10. Thomson, Alien Quartet, 133. Ibid., 10. Foster, Alien3, 217. Swallow, Dark Eye, 55. Ibid. Foster, Alien3, 218. Dyer, Seven, 77. Ibid., 78. Ibid. Palahniuk, Fight Club, 124–5. Brophy, ‘‘Horrality,’’ 2–13. O’Hehir, ‘‘Panic Room,’’ 51.

CONCLUSION 1. Palahniuk, Fight Club, 216. 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; . 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, Consumerism, 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. zek (eds.). (2003). Perversion and the Rothenberg, M., A. D. Foster, and S. Zi Social Relation. Duke University Press. Shakespeare, W. Henry VI, part I (1598–1590, approx.). Shakespeare, W. As You Like It (1600, approx.). 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. Taubin, A. (July 1992). ‘‘Invading Bodies: Alien3 and the Trilogy,’’ Sight and Sound 2:3, pp. 8–10. Taubin, A. (November 1999). ‘‘So Good It Hurts,’’ Sight and Sound 9:11, pp. 16–18. Taubin, A. (May 2007). ‘‘Nerds on a Wire,’’ Sight and Sound 17:5, pp. 24–27. Thomson, D. (1998). The Alien Quartet, Bloomsbury Movie Guide No. 4. Bloomsbury. Todorov, T. (1975). The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard. Cornell University Press. Whitehouse, C. (December 1999). ‘‘Fight Club,’’ Sight and Sound 9:12, pp. 45–46. Williams, L. R. (May 2002). ‘‘Mother Courage,’’ Sight and Sound 12:5, pp. 12–14. Wood, R. (1979). ‘‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film,’’ in Andrew Britton, Richard Lippe, Tony Williams and Robin Wood (eds.), The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film. Festival of Festivals, pp. 9–10.

Index Abdul, Paula, 10–11 Alien Resurrection, 55 Alien3: authorship of, 32, 39–42, Christianity and religion in, 31–32; Conradian overtones in, 41–42; ending of, 160–163; film style of, 131, 135, 140–141, 143; relationship to horror/sci-fi genre, 42–44; humor in, 172–173; evolution of the monster in, 32–33, 40; philosophical embodiment and technology in, 26–28; Ripley as Final Girl in, 34–37, 160 Bachelard, Gaston, 54, 122 Black Dahlia, The, 132 Blade Runner, 8, 16, 18, 135, 166 Carrie, 162 Cat’s Eye, 168 Clover, Carol, 34 Commercials: Apple, 7–8; Coca Cola, 8; Heineken, 3–4; Levi’s, 4–5; Nike, 5–7; Softbank, 3 Crash, 137, 143–144, 156 Creed, Barbara: weaknesses in theories of ‘‘the monstrous feminine,’’ 24–26

Cronenweth, Jordan, 146 Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The: as an adaptation, 124–128; the derivative nature of, 115–117; characterization flaws in, 120–124; film as memory in, 119–120; narrative structure of, 117–119 De Palma, Brian, 131–157 Dirty Harry, 74, 79, 88, 139–140 Dyer, Richard, 55, 62, 71–72, 165–166 Fight Club: as an adaptation, 104, 111–114; ending of, 168–170; film style in, 135, 138, 141–144, 146–147; humor in, 173–175; identity in, 109–111; modernity in, 107–109; Nietzschean politics in, 102–107 Film noir, 132–135 Film technology: vs. realism, 150–153 Fincher, David: biographical details, x–xi, 55, 149–150; filmmaking techniques, 7–9, 17–22, 131, 135–153; similarities to other

188

Index

filmmakers, 115–117, 135–157; themes, 26–28, 31–32, 47–50, 64–66, 90–95, 102–109, 119–120 Fitzgerald, Scott F., 124–128 Forrest Gump, 115–117, 119, 128 Freeland, Cynthia, 35

Manhunter 63, 72, 78 Meet John Doe, 70 Michael, George: Freedom 90, 16–17 Mulhall, Stephen, 26–28

Game, The: Christine in, 99–100; ending of, 166–168; film as memory in, 136–137; film style in, 131, 142, 146, 153; game-playing in, 90–95; humor in, 173; Van Orton in, 95–99

Palahniuk, Chuck, 111–114 Panic Room: comparing Ripley with Meg in, 50–51; ending of, 170–171, 175; family and motherhood in, 47–50; as film noir, 133–135; film style in, 147–149; influence of Hitchcock in, 154–157; intertextuality in, 142–143, 145; Meg as Final Girl in, 44–47; structure in, 51–53 Passion of Joan of Arc, The, 161 Pretty Woman, 97, 100

Henley, Don: The End of Innocence, 21–22 Hitchcock, Alfred: 143; North by Northwest 154, 156; Rear Window 153–154; Rope, 155–156; Vertigo, 153–154 Hopper, Dennis, 7 Hornby, Nick: About a Boy, 108 I Am Legend, 169 Idol, Billy: Cradle of Love, 131–132; LA Woman, 18 Invitation to a Beheading (Vladimir Nabokov), 91–92, 99 Jackson, Michael: Who is It?, 15–16 Kafka, Franz, 125 Khondji, Darius, 55, 179 ‘‘Kipple’’ (P.K. Dick), 28–31 Lucas, George: Star Wars VI: The Return of the Jedi, 55 Long takes, 146–149 Lord of the Flies, 160 Madonna: Bad Girl, 13–15; Express Yourself, 11–12; Oh Father, 12–13; Vogue, 13 Magnolia, 118

Out of Sight, 133

Savides, Harris, 146 Seven: detective genre in, 55–56; John Doe in, 69–73; Doe and Somerset in, 62–64; ending of, 163–166; emotional literacy and Tracy in, 64–66; film style in, 142, 145; Mills and Somerset in, 56–60; narrative structure in, 67–69 Silence of the Lambs, 67, 72 Slumdog Millionaire, 180 Springfield, Rick: Bop Till You Drop, 9–10, 20–21 Sunshine, 151 Tenebrae, 148 Time Traveller’s Wife, The, 129 Todorov, Tzvetan: The Fantastic and hesitation, 90–94; 101 Turn of the Screw, The, 136 Wizard of Oz, The, 145, 168 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.

David Fincher Films That Scar

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