Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

Warning: contains spoilers

Give David Fincher some credit: he may have cemented his name as the man who converts grim bestsellers into self-consciously removed, “arty” films, but he loads an early shot of Gone Girl with board games like Mastermind, Sorry! and Let’s Make a Deal, portents so obvious that they can only be taken as a self-deprecating lark. Even when Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) plays a quick game of Life with his twin sister, Margo (Carrie Coon), their overly precious exchange—”Life. I don’t remember the point.” “Hmm, deep Hasbro thoughts.”—is too silly to give the impression that anyone means it seriously.

The sense of playfulness surprisingly holds even after Nick returns home on the morning of his fifth anniversary to find his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), missing, kicking off an investigation that only ever points in his direction. Soon, Nick is constantly flanked by Detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens) and Officer Jim Gilpin (Patrick Fugit), forever debating amongst themselves not so much the question of Nick’s guilt but how much evidence they need to accrue before confidently arresting him. Affleck’s star power is hilariously used against him, casting his All-American good looks, stiff performance, and inoffensive charm as inherently suspicious, fleets of trailing photographers evoking memories of the actor’s own relationship-based ordeals with constant media surveillance. This slippery distinction between actor and character is only compounded when Nick eventually turns to sleazy lawyer Tanner Bolt (Tyler Perry) for help, leading to a scene in which Bolt, played by the director Perry, resembles director Fincher as he coaches Nick for an interview, conducting numerous “takes” to erode Nick’s normal behavior and delivery in order to remold it to his liking.

The usual Fincherian tics are all on display. Jeff Cronenweth’s sickly yellow hues infect perfectly ordered scenes in the present scenes along with the memories visualized from Amy’s diary, heightening the sense of toxicity as Nick deals with his wife’s absence as well as perverting the usual, sepia-toned wistfulness of Amy’s interspersed recollections. It gives the sense that something is off, as much as the too-tidy crime scene left in the Dunnes’ living room, not to mention the irritating buzz of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score, which replaces the vaguely clubby beat and textural flavor of their Social Network and Dragon Tattoo soundtracks, respectively, for an intrusive, willfully banal composition. Kept at the sidelines of the surround system, the score is the sound of a refrigerator humming, or an HDTV left on after a cable box or Blu-Ray player is shut off, something you don’t register until, all of a sudden, it’s the most grating, distracting thing in the entire world. The antiseptic crispness of everything allows unease to build less at the expense of Nick than an unplaceable feeling of malaise that cannot quite be articulated until the rug is pulled out from under the viewer.

Yet if the common line on Fincher is that he wrests paperbacks to his will, it’s worth noting how sharply this film diverges from his other work. Where his films often unfurl through a procedural collection of clues and raw data, Gone Girl reduces its knottiest Rube Goldberg plans to swift montages, and it rushes the book’s endless series of precisely timed twists and reversals to steamroll past revelations of infidelity, fabrication, and any other clues that make its characters look worse and worse. Instead, the film creates a kind of emotional process, propelling the film less by its series of clues than by the private and public response each revelation entails. You could even argue that the defining moment comes not with the twist that upends the film at the halfway mark but Nick’s early, awkwardly smile for photos in front of an inflated poster of his missing wife, the slip-up hammered home with a blink-and-miss-it insert shot of Margo seizing up with dread at how the media will spin it. Fincher and editor Kirk Baxter draw out the film with dissolves that slightly protract otherwise brief scenes, the slurred transitions helping to obscure the line that separates early reminiscences of kissing in a fogbank of baker’s sugar to Nick’s later outbursts as he comes to grips with how thoroughly his life has been ruined. For all the talk of the director’s usual iciness, this is perhaps his most intimately stylized work.

I made no secret after I read Gillian Flynn’s novel that I hated the book, but in fairness, her self-adapted screenplay deserves as much commendation as Fincher and the cast for the quality of the film. First on the chopping block of necessary cuts is the majority of the Dunnes’ first-person thoughts, a change that drastically improves both characters. In the book, Nick’s every single thought and utterance served to make him look guilty, which primes anyone who has ever read a mystery to immediately dismiss him as a red herring, and thus his terrifying character defects, including outright misogyny roiling just under his thin veneer of polite calm, were ultimately subsumed by the pity the story inadvertently forces a reader to feel for him as he is pilloried for a crime he didn’t commit. However, by reducing any knowledge of Nick’s personality to fleeting images of his almost imperceptible chauvinism, dejected sloth, and obliviousness toward his wife’s feelings and desires, it is actually far easier to hate the man.

Even better, Amy has been pared down from a complete psychopath at war with anyone who crosses her into a woman who restricts her chessmaster torture to the men who presume to understand her. This revised Amy makes good on the phenomenal “Cool Girl” monologue she gives to the reader when the extent of her deceit is unveiled, an extreme, avenging spirit who who turns all the preparation, observation and self-discipline needed for women to live up to men’s warped and unreal standards into a weapon against that casual sexism. The character always represented this, of course, but the excision of muddying ideas and even whole characters maintains Amy’s formerly blunted edge. Once again, simplification paradoxically leads to complication, and Amy 2.0 comes closer to the villain of Takashi Miike’s Audition, a young woman who attracts an old widower with her beauty and supplication but who reveals a ruthless, wrathful side when lovers fail to uphold their own image of commitment. Still, Pike does not play Amy as a monster, instead reacting in each moment to the men around her, whether it’s trying to please Nick while taking tabs, or dealing with the unctuous hanger-on Desi (Neil Patrick Harris), a rich man-child still nursing a crush, promising to take Amy away from Nick’s neglect and abuse while gently insisting that she exist as his own hallowed image of her.

Like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the Gone Girl novel suffered from a plurality of half-formed ideas: satire of speculative punditry, hat-tip to laid-off colleagues in the publishing industry, resentment for a generation of yuppie parents who profited on their children’s childhood and left their kids a world of debt, and a muddied, high/low attempt to illustrate a grotesque exaggeration of the pitfalls of marriage. And as with the movie version of Tattoo, this film either removes or redirects all these miniature themes to focus on a single essence, in this case the surface tensions between people either trying or willfully refusing to live up to their partner’s idealized vision of them. It is a mordant comedy about the battle of the sexes, one that redefines the term “bloody climax.” (“He came and went at the same time,” as the old Pryor bit goes…) But battle is too soft a militarized term for the endless war that the film envisions, divided between women who know the gains and losses that will accompany every slight gesture and vocal inflection, and men too safely ensconced in fortresses to realize they’re even being shelled. Perhaps the funniest joke in the movie is how overwhelmed Nick feels at having to compete with Amy’s sick genius, when in truth he’s closer to the hare who suddenly snaps awake from his nap during the race to see the tortoise about to cross the finish line.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher, 2011)

Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is to sexism what Kathryn Stockett's The Help is to racism. Both work less as attempts to grapple with serious topics than shallow wish-fulfillment fantasies by those unaffected by the subject matter. For Stockett, a white woman, it was the harshness of the Jim Crow era as catalogued by an author stand-in so emphatically not racist that black people not only trust her but risk their lives to secure her book deal. For Larsson, who helplessly witnessed a gang rape as a teenager, it is Sweden's startling patterns of sexual abuse as catalogued by an author stand-in so emphatically not sexist that the avenging fury of violated Woman herself not only trusts him but screws him. Furthermore, as it was written while Larsson was in hiding over his reporting, the book also addresses his longstanding issues with toothless investigative journalism and Sweden's lingering extreme-right element.

Yet David Fincher's adaptation is not really about any of those things. Tossing out Larsson's self-righteousness entirely, the film also reduces protagonist Mikael Blomkvist's almost comically active sex life—it's amusing that the novel's version of Blomkvist gets laid as much as James Bond, and he's played here by the man himself, Daniel Craig. But Fincher even hacks out the questionable feminist empowerment of Lisbeth Salander, presenting her violence with a coldness that robs her vengeance of its bloodlust. Instead, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo acts as a retroactive bridge between several of Fincher's films: it links the religion-tinged carnage of Se7en with the analytical anti-whodunit of Zodiac, as well as that film's painstakingly slow-going, interpersonal analog with The Social Network's ultra-fast, beyond-humanity digital. If Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is about the late author's preoccupations, then Fincher's is about his own.

Second Thoughts: The Social Network

[Warning -- This post contains massive spoilers.]

Apropos of the film's subject matter, The Social Network has inevitably resulted in an Internet firestorm, prompting various discussions about its themes, what great work to compare it to (I've fallen in line with the consensus with Kane and threw out The Godfather Part II, Jason Bellamy ingeniously traced Mark Zuckerberg to Daniel Plainview) and the inevitable argument that accompanies David Fincher's work, the question of what side the director takes with his characters.

The blogosphere, an incestuous love pit at the best of times, went into a cross-posting frenzy, and a number of my favorite bloggers did me the kindness of mentioning my own review. In an attempt to express my gratitude without devolving into the sort of back-patting that makes linkage such an empty gesture at times, I've decided to use these other reviews to aid my own desire to examine the film further, as it's yet to slip my mind.

I've now seen the film twice, and I've also gotten access to the screenplay and the soundtrack -- both of which, incidentally, I found through my friends' links on Facebook. With Sorkin's script at my side and some more vivid memories of visual touches, I'd like to focus on several aspects of the film that make it one of a gifted director's finest achievements and the most memorable mainstream film since Inglourious Basterds. Let's start at the top, shall we?

What is this film about?

It is the height of reductive pointlessness to say that The Social Network is a movie about Facebook, especially when that simplification is used as justification to avoid the picture. As Jim Emerson so masterfully put it, "What commenters think they mean when they say it's 'about Facebook' is not precisely clear. Is that like saying you don't want to see Chinatown because it's about public utilities?"

The Social Network is not about the "how," nor even, to be honest, the "why," but the "what." It is about Facebook itself, about its effects on the world via the microcosm of individual and group usage. Aaron Sorkin cares not for the accuracy of the founding of Facebook, almost certainly a mundane story even with the controversy that surrounded the site then and now. Instead, he uses a broadly fictionalized vision of Mark Zuckerberg to get at the heart of social networking. Mark is the brain behind Facebook, and Sorkin makes him into the soul of it as well, and what a rotten thing it is.

The real Zuckerberg does not, by any account, seem as single-minded and obsessive as his big-screen counterpart, but the two share a certain apathy for privacy rights. Zuckerberg continues to be plagued by privacy issues, and we see Eisenberg's Mark casually hacking into the photo databases of Harvard's dorms to create the precursor to Facebook. Sorkin's playwright style leads him to create a circularly charted movie, with the first major action of the film being a woman calling Mark an "asshole" and the final line coming back to that to say that Mark isn't one but is "just trying so hard to be one." It's a clunky move on Sorkin's part and not even Fincher can inject cinema into it, but the message underneath is relevant. As we've seen throughout the film, everyone's conflicting perspective has one common trait: Mark is the problem.

Social Parameters: A Digital Sheen on Old Codes

That Facebook created a social revolution is undeniable, having reached the 500 million user plateau this year in just over five years. Yet as Jim Emerson argues, The Social Network does not show how Facebook changes people so much as it simply gives them a new avenue to pursue old social and legal codes. Emerson's essay approaches the film from this perspective by starting on a line of dialogue in the initial flurry between Mark and Erica Albright. At one point, Erica desperately tries to steer the conversation out of the dark realm of Mark's insecurity and misreadings by saying "I'm not speaking in code!" Mark does not understand this because he always speaks in code, whether literally doing so as he describes programming Facemash and Facebook or attempting to navigate the social norms he cannot master. Erica speaks honestly with Mark, but he's trapped in a mode of conversation he thinks will impress, even when it clearly doesn't. Mark tries to project an alpha male mentality, mixing sexual supremacy and career ambition in a way that males have done for decades, if not centuries -- imagine a young Julius Caesar telling his first consort, Cornelia, that he was going to conquer the world someday to get an "in" with the people. When he fails, he creates an online world where he writes the codes, the codes that make the site work and the codes that dictate socializing.


Compounding this thread, the film revolves around two concurrent lawsuits, bringing legal codes into the narrative. Without even diving into the myriad of privacy laws Facebook has at least tested, if not outright violated, the intellectual property theft Mark uses against the "Winklevii" and the twisting, treacherous legalese he uses to force out his best and only friend structure the film's language in complicated jargon. One almost sympathizes with Mark when he arrogantly mocks phrases like "answer in the affirmative" and the spoken-aloud addition of simple figures meant to drive a point home.

To complicate matters even further, most of the action occurs in Harvard University, one of the oldest institutions in the country. Cameron Winklevoss understands and appreciates that legacy, and he initially refuses to let his brother and their business partner, Divya Narendra, sue Mark in court or smear him in the Harvard student paper. Yet he does exploit the almost aristocratic entitlement of his father's connections to win an audience with the Harvard president. "This building is 100 years older than the country it's in," warns a secretary before the twins walk in to a president who proves how well-suited he is to his job when he instantly dismisses their sense of self-importance. As the Winklevii play on monetary social codes to get their way, the president taps into Harvard's history to demonstrate how offensive it is for students to burden him and the people who run the school with minor squabbles.

Mark is right when he notes that the Winklevii are incensed less because their similar idea was appropriated and expanded into something far greater than they are indignant that they didn't get their way. At the same time, the twins are right to feel offended and wronged, and their legal action is justified even if the sum they seek borders on the absurd. But that action also leads to the amusing scenario of old men with decades of legal experience representing twentysomethings who use these depositions as means to sling crap at each other. They're not unlike the investors Mark offends so much that they end up being impressed by them. As much as all these young men like to consider themselves game-changers, they fit neatly into the expectations of the elders who cannot understand them. Mark Zuckerberg could buy out the Winklevoss' father and shut down daddy's pro bono work, so the lawyers have to treat a pissing match as a matter of court record. The investors, on the other hand, know that the real geniuses are the ones who, like Mark dress and act without any regard for social propriety; by showing up 20 minutes late to meet with Mark, Sean Parker convinces our protagonist that he's the real deal, and Mark's own lateness and rudeness to billionaire investment firms wins him serious backing.

Then, there's the matter of Facebook itself. Returning to Emerson's point, is the site "just one more (online) face that we display to our social network of contacts, family, friends and 'friends'"? The final addition Mark makes to the code of TheFacebook is the display of "relationship status" and "interested in." This makes researching any crush object easy, but as Mark notes, people have always tried to figure out whether people they like are taken. If college students pick their classes and seating arrangements to try to be closer to people they do not know, can Facebook really be blamed as a stalking enabler?

Regarding the darker side of Facebook as a tool for torment-- evidenced recently in the horrible case of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi -- older social codes can also be seen as the motivating factor in cyberbullying. Mark's drunken blog about Erica's breast size has boys coming to her dorm to mock, but the only difference between this an an analogue harassment is that Mark can be back at Harvard instead of gossiping among B.U. students.

Cyberbullying runs on rumor, which doesn't need the Internet to spread like wildfire. Look at the way the Harvard Crimson sparks discussion even as everything that makes the student paper is old news because it involves online events. In the film's oddest and cleverest subplot, Eduardo inadvertently embarrasses Facebook when he must care for a chicken to get into an exclusive final club. In the ultimate display of the dissonance in knowledge between generations, Eduardo is a business and math whiz but never bothers to figure out what chicken eat, so he feeds his bird tiny pieces of fried chicken, leading to charges of "forced cannibalism." That article later comes back as evidence in the suit between Eduardo and Mark, leading Eduardo to wonder if the story was planted, first suspecting the Winklevii and in retrospect fearing Mark. Late in the film, Parker and some Facebook interns are arrested for cocaine possession the night of a PR bonanza for the site, and a coked-out Sean tries to blame Eduardo for somehow alerting the cops.


Even if Sorkin himself doesn't spotlight it in his crabby old man mode, the clear implication of The Social Network is that Mark Zuckerberg never succeeded in doing anything more than he dreamed: he put socialization online, and in the process he made it possible for us to conceive just how terrible and conniving even the average, unassuming person can be. When Mark breathlessly tells Eduardo, "We don't know what [Facebook] can be," he's absolutely right, but that's because it fulfills its purpose so well that it must always evolve. For some, it's a way to extend conversation with friends; for others (including the movie's version of Mark), it is a way to re-frame reality on a more manageable level.

Facebook as Mark Zuckerberg's Tyler Durden

David Fincher loves doppelgängers, a natural outgrowth from his tendency to break his plots down into their parts and rearranging them back in order. John Doe provides an emotional foil for Detective Mills -- Doe is the embodiment of the lack of control bubbling underneath the detective -- and a moral contrast for Somerset, reacting to the same sense of nihilism by destroying the world Somerset seeks to save in spite of himself. The three characters who most pursue the Zodiac killer also play off each other, Graysmith's Eagle Scout attitude colliding with Avery's alcoholic disconnect and Toschi's exasperation. Benjamin Button is seen in the various people he meets in his travels, all of them providing glimpses of normalcy that seems so fantastical when seen through the eyes of an extraordinary man. And do I really need to go into the doppelgänger structure of Fight Club?

In The Social Network, the Mark's natural intelligence and earned wealth is contrasted with the Winklevii's "natural" wealth and earned intelligence. He envies their athleticism and physical attractiveness, but he knows that he can do things on a computer they cannot fathom. When he says under oath that he never used the basic code the Winklevii provided him, we sense he swears this not because he's trying to avoid being caught out but because he would sully himself with their feeble attempt at trying to indirectly compete with him on an intellectual level after besting him on a physical one. Fincher also pits Mark against Eduardo, who at least pretends to be more professional despite his own frat boy attitudes. Eduardo is gifted, but he's also a generation behind in his thinking and doesn't understand how sites work in the way that Mark does. Thus, when Sean Parker arrives to take the place of the tiny devil on Mark's shoulder, he successfully plies Zuckerberg by (accurately) pointing out Eduardo's flawed business plan.

The fundamental contrast in the film, however, is between site and creator. Facebook is Mark's Tyler Durden, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that Mark Zuckerberg, indeed anyone who uses the site, is Facebook's foil. In restructuring society for the Internet, Facebook makes us define ourselves, and it adapts to the trends and shared interests that grow as more users join. And for everything we put on Facebook that isn't a completely accurate representation of ourselves -- even something as innocuous as "Liking" something you only marginally enjoy because someone you like is a fan -- the simulacrum of Facebook adjusts to the simulacra we feed into it, separating it further from reality even as the site's influence spreads to the real world. When "Facebook me" enters the lexicon, the symbiosis is complete. Old social codes inform Facebook, are then exaggerated by being online and return to reality stretched and distorted. It's almost like downsampling caused when one routinely rips mp3 files from CDs and then burns CDs from the lower-quality mp3 files than the original disc: each iteration makes a proper, physical copy from a digital compression, which is then blown back up in an inferior form. If Facebook has any real impact on social codes, it's that: it rerecords the tape so much that eventually all you hear is static and hiss.


Besides the doppelgängers within the film, Mark has already drawn comparisons to other figures. I've already discussed Charles Foster Kane in my original post and I would direct you to the Jason Bellamy piece I posted earlier to get a good sense of the Plainview comparisons. My new favorite comparison, though, is Jay Gatsby, not only because it allows one an even more tangible link to Fincher's previous film, the Fitzgerald adaptation, but because it's just so fantastically accurate. F. Scott Fitzgerald had a gift for digging under the partying side of society to show the rotting soul and aching loneliness belief. I was actually converted to liberalism by two things: the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, and The Great Gatsby. His literature survives today because we continue to labor under the false image of prosperity given off by the rich while class gaps widen and average income plummets. The situation of his Jazz Age resurfaced in the '80s and it's here again, evidenced here by the incessant partying of the young elite that only just outpaces their sense of emptiness.

In The Social Network, Fitzgerald's influence can be seen as plainly as it is in the actual movie based on the author's work. Mark walks around in a hoodie and sandals, even to meetings with billionaires, and life is just one frat house social for him as the economy slouches toward Bethlehem in the film's timeframe. He ends up the youngest billionaire in the world, but his final act in the movie is to try to reconnect with the woman he never got over. But does that make Erica his Daisy? That brings us neatly to the following:

Is The Social Network sexist?

I had not originally planned to talk about this, but a significant outgrowth of discussion of the film has centered on the role of women. Jezebel, a magnificent feminist site, ran an almost embarrassingly reductive review that focused entirely on the subject. It charges the film with painting women as saints or whores and then shifts gears to become a much more readable and thought-out piece on the film's accuracy. I do not think the review is reductive because I don't agree: I just cannot fathom how they decided the film agrees with the male view of these women.

The review is entirely fair in objecting to besmirching Zuckerberg's name by painting him as a misogynist, but the film version is so vile that you cannot sympathize with his or any other man's view of ladies. Fincher and Sorkin emphasize that we're not supposed to pity Mark because he's a nerd, not only with Erica's scathing line at the end of the opening scene but with the magnificently edited piece that juxtaposes Mark coding Facemash in a drunken, misogynistic tear to one of the final clubs hosting a disgusting party-cum-orgy in which women are literally bused in to strip and screw. These men are all entitled and arrogant, and they all view women as the ultimate sign of their status, and Mark's violation of their privacy is no different than whatever violation might occur in a backroom of a frat house.

Let's focus on Erica for a moment. She doesn't fit the "saint" role because she's not in the film enough to be its moral compass. She's simply the splash of water to the face that comes along whenever we might start rooting for Mark. Interestingly, sex isn't as big a priority for Mark as it is for others, though he's certainly not above exploiting them. When two groupies take him and Eduardo into bathroom stalls, the camera stays with Eduardo, which A) shows that Saverin isn't a goody two-shoes either and B) allows Fincher to show Mark's mental state, especially when paired with the next scene. Outside the bathroom, Eduardo sports a shit-eating grin, but Mark sees Erica with some friends and moves to talk to her. He prioritizes her over the blowjob he just received.


I believe he does this less because he has a romantic or even sexual fixation on Erica but because he's dumped all of his insecurities into her. He always fears being inadequate, yet everyone treats him with reverence. For God's sake, lawyers have to answer to him. The Winklevii he feels so threatened by greet him initially with respect, only turning on him after he betrays them. But Erica is the one person we see to accurately see who he really is before he makes her miserable. Saverin and the Winklevii don't hate him until further down the road. And where Mark can convince himself -- with some truth -- that Eduardo and the Winklevii are just jealous, he has nothing to pin on Erica, no way to diminish the thought of her rejection. He certainly tries, and the fact that she's a woman allows him to vent his sexism, but she's no more the motivation for Facebook than Rosebud is the raison d'être of Kane's unhappiness. She, like Rosebud, is just the encapsulation of everything nagging the protagonist, the key not to the puzzle but the puzzle pieces.

What I find disappointing about the line of criticism from Jezebel and like-minded writers is how their arguments throw out so much context and analysis of the film itself. I think Jezebel is a fantastic site, and one that is desperately needed in the rank misogyny of the blogosphere, and this was a rare miss. Worse than their reaction, though, is the reaction to that reaction. I've seen the word "shrill" tossed around so many times I wonder if there's enough vomit in the world to convey my nausea over the sexist defenses of the film's non-sexism. In fact, I went to see the film again partially to re-examine the role of women in the movie because I was so embarrassed to even be tangentially related to the defenders. Even a second time, I could not see the women as any more flawed than the men, and while there are certainly gold diggers, that's only because these men seek out those women to prop up as trophies. As for Eduardo's girlfriend, she represents the dangerous side of putting relationships online, and her behavior brought nervous laughs of recognition from male and female audience members who either know couples engaged in this kind of behavior or have been in relationships that squabbled over similar matters related solely to Facebook and what significant others posted.

I will say that sexual dynamics are easily the least complex side of the film's script, and I do think that it's quite easy for incredibly intelligent and analytical writers to fall into the big hole Sorkin left that implies that everything in the film can be tied to sexual frustration. Ed Howard, one of my favorite film writers, argued for this reading, and I think it's valid even if I clearly disagree. I also think that Jezebel's argument -- that inventing misogynists out of seemingly nice men to vilify that misogyny is unfair to those men and potentially simplifying of the women involved -- is also an intriguing line of inquiry. I just find a lot of the arguments made to support it too simple and void of deeper readings of the movie. Were the defense stronger, I could quite easily throw at least partial support around the actual thrust of the argument. There is certainly sexism in the movie, but that's an outgrowth of the male characters, not a projection of the writer.

Man, those performances are really good, huh?

Moving away from the subtextual readings for a time, I'd also like to say that, with two viewings under my belt, even the surface elements of The Social Network are more enticing than they were the first time. My opinion of Jesse Eisenberg dramatically rose when I revisited Adventureland late last year, but his turn here is wildly unexpected even though he's shown a darker side before. As much as I loved his performance the first time, I needed to see it again to make sure Fincher wasn't doing the work for him. To be sure, Fincher helps Eisenberg's cold stares by shadowing his eyes when showing Mark at his most contemptuous, but Eisenberg's eyes cut through the shadow by being even blacker, as if his pupils emitted the darkness. I stand by my opinion that the film suggests Mark has Asperger's, because "suggests" is just a kind of saying "does everything but come right out and definitely 'answer in the affirmative,'" but there's something more sinister here. Eisenberg displays a remarkable ability to walk that line between an elitist asshole with pure contempt for everyone he considers his intellectual inferior (so, everyone, basically) and a softer, more regretful side of a man who, when he lets his guard down, looks as if he really doesn't want to be that jerk.


Mara, recently tapped to play the lead in the American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, has a believable fire entirely separate from the spark Sorkin wrote in Erica. I've seen her in movies before but not focused on her, yet I was as transfixed in a way by her brief appearances here as Mark was. I still can't get over how much Andrew Garfield looks like a mid-1960s Jean-Pierre Léaud, but this time I focused on his brilliant naïveté. Craig Simpson mentioned Garfield had already showed this talent in the Red Riding Trilogy, but I was amazed by how well he got across not knowing what was going on without resorting to playing Saverin like a bumbling fool. Garfield instead focuses on what is almost a generation gap between two men of the same age, and he stresses how obsolete even the young can be in this new world. Armie Hammer might pick up an Oscar nod for flawlessly playing two characters (Fincher clearly retained a few things about digitally inserting heads that he'd used for Ben Button), but he'll have to face off against Timberlake's mesmerizing performance as Parker. Never before has Timberlake used his innate charisma in such a way that I was glad I couldn't take my eyes off him. He has Eduardo's charm and Mark's savvy, allowing him to seduce Mark more completely than any woman every could. The only time I ever truly felt sorry for Mark comes at the end when Sean gets busted for possession. As much as Mark was silly to let Sean manipulate him, you feel bad when Sean turns out to be the creep you know he is but still want to have around.

That score is pretty swell, also.

I have always enjoyed the "idea" of Trent Reznor more than his output. For a supposed perfectionist, Reznor's work with Nine Inch Nails has always been remarkably inconsistent, filled with intriguing sonic arrangement and occasionally irresistible pop sensibilities but also meandering and the kind of lyrics that an adult man should really have outgrown.

Yet Reznor was the perfect choice to score the film, not only because his ambient, post-industrial material is well-suited to the atmosphere of the film (and even narrative touches like coding) but because of his own status as a pioneer of social networking and music distribution with his fans ties him to the subject matter. I don't have much to add to my original thoughts of his and Atticus Ross' phenomenal work, only to say that my appreciation has deepened considerably after playing it for nearly a week. If nothing else, it delivers on the unfulfilled promise of Ghosts I-IV, Reznor's ambient project, cutting the waffle and developing all those interesting musical strands that never followed through to satisfying, full arrangements. But it does a great deal more than work as a Nine Inch Nails album: Mark's life revolves around Facebook, around code, and the bubbling electronic hums could be the sound of his synapses firing, or the music of his electronic soul. So many ambient scores are, in cases good and bad, sparse, but what's most entertaining about Reznor and Ross' score is how busy it remains even when it fades back and lets the dialogue and visuals work.

The Social Network: Fincher in a nutshell

The yellow-green palette is certainly nothing new in Fincher's canon, but The Social Network softens the image just enough to allow for ambiguity. Fincher's other films are more meticulous, more analytical of the evils he captures in sick clarity. He's no less probing here, but the matters of intellectual property are much more vague than murder or fascism, so the film looks hazier than any other Fincher movie. The disconnect, however, remains. Fincher isolates characters in the frame even as he typically places multiple characters along the same plane. They're all in the same position, essentially, yet they're still so separated.

Strangely enough, his minimalism makes for a compelling and, most importantly, cinematic realization of Sorkin's stage-oriented writing. Fincher's a gifted enough stylist that he can streamline Sorkin even as he steps aside and lets the fantastic dialogue do its part. He flawlessly navigates the Rashomon-like structure, pointing out the inconsistencies of each perspective and never presenting one as the likely reading. He lets the Winklevii's petulance implicate them, Saverin's shame regarding his disappointed father taint his own testimony and Mark's ignorance of the world call into question anything he says not directly related to coding.

I was also amused to see how the occasional flash of color can stand out so sharply from the dulled palettes of Jeff Cronenweth's cinematography. Like those bright blue Aqua Velvas in Zodiac, the fluorescent green of the appletinis Parker orders for everyone make you snap to attention just to listen to drunken business talk. It's a lovely bit of mischief, which can be seen in all its naked glory in the rowing scene. In the comments of my first review, Craig Simpson referenced another writer who compared the sequence to one of Kubrick's own sense of peevish delight. Indeed, the electronic version of "Hall of the Mountain King" recalls the warping of classical music in A Clockwork Orange, and the sequence is brazenly unnecessary even as it's the most fun moment of the movie. Plus, it gives us one more chance to laugh at the Winklevii, which is always welcome.

Miscellanea

- Someone told me that in the shot where Mark puts up art photos on a Facebook account to cheat on an exam, he does so under a profile for "Tyler Durden." I tried to spot it the second time but missed the moment.
- I seriously love the scene with the Harvard president. At one point, he responds to a question of his business sense by pointing out that he was the Secretary of the Treasury, and I couldn't help but wish this guy took his job back from Tim Geithner.
-One of my oldest friends went to see the movie with her dad, who's currently working on his MBA and was interested in the film's depiction of entrepreneurship. While the film provides a pretty clear example of how not to behave ethically as a businessman, I too was interested to see how Facebook succeeded by avoiding traditional advertising for as long as possible and exploring newer options tailored directly to the web. With so many sites essentially being run out of pocket, and as someone who will enter a field currently in extreme flux because of the Internet, I wonder if other sites could follow Facebook's strategy and turn even a fraction of the profit.

Final Thoughts

I have my eye on some foreign films that will probably be my favorite of the year -- Certified Copy, Carlos, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives -- but The Social Network is easily one of the best mainstream American films in years. I worry about the overhyping, which I do believe has befallen the film even as I no doubt contribute to it. Do I for example, think it's on the level of Citizen Kane? No, you silly person. I simply see the narrative and thematic threads between the two and am curious to see how the social communication has changed. (It's no Gatsby, either). But I enjoyed the film even more a second time, both with the shaggy-dog thriller narrative and the more complex elements. Zodiac stands as Fincher's crowning achievement as a film artist, and Fight Club is his most thematically bountiful, but The Social Network strikes the balance between the two, of minimalistic visual analysis and thought-provoking subject matter. Not many directors could take a concept widely derided as a joke when announced and silence nearly all his critics, and Fincher's growth continues to excite and impress me.

The Social Network

David Fincher's growth as a filmmaker has been both nuanced and startling. His initial pictures are confrontational, reliant upon his experience as a music video director that make pictures like Se7en and Fight Club draining exercises in style. Far from a nihilist, Fincher crafted himself into a deep pessimist who nevertheless fought to find the good in life. He brought an old detective out of despair by ironically plunging him into the heart of darkness. He ruthlessly mocked the fascistic conformity of the emasculated male even as they supposedly rebelled against a false image, but Fincher managed to spare some sympathy for those who felt a sense of cultural disconnect.

In recent years, Fincher has not drastically altered his course so much as punched through to the other side of his bleakness. His stories are no longer stomach-churning but atmospheric and chilling, but the hearts of Zodiac and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button are essentially no different than that of Se7en: they are stories about people who are ultimately doomed but soldier on, because the alternative is even more terrifying. With The Social Network, "Fincher 2.0" develops this thread even further, and the greatest kick of the film comes from watching the preconceived notions of its two auteurs -- Fincher and West Wing maestro Aaron Sorkin -- completely invert. Here, Fincher is, for the first time, nakedly sympathetic to the ambition of a morally dubious man (though he's as critical as ever of Mark's actions), while the ever-optimistic Sorkin pens a critique of the entire idea of social networking. In fact, were a director without Fincher's confidence and commitment to his own vision attached to the project, The Social Network likely would have ended up as nothing more than the ramblings of a curmudgeon woefully behind the times.

The contrast brings out the best in both the script and the direction. Sorkin's pessimism checks Fincher's willingness to excuse some of Mark Zuckerberg's behavior, while Fincher's atmospheric direction adds layers of complexity to Sorkin's style, which relies upon people who speak like playwrights to make characters who are both abhorrently unrealistic yet bizarrely plausible and believable. His overly verbose style lends itself well to the Harvard boys who invent and squabble over Facebook: all of them put on airs, exploit family connections and ready themselves for lucrative futures that they pretend to work hard for so it doesn't look embarrassing when their trust funds mature. They believe themselves to already be the superior of everyone their age, yet they behave like the frat boys they are.

Fincher and Sorkin even manage to trace Facebook back to a childish, misogynistic stunt. We meet Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) on a date with a young woman named Erica from Boston University. Mark monopolizes the conversation, fixating on the reputable clubs that he wants to get into because the most powerful people in the world joined them in their college days. He talks so much and speaks so condescendingly to Erica that she finally calls him an asshole and leaves. In a huff, Mark returns home, drunkenly blogs about the breakup and subsequently hacks into the photo databases of Harvard's various dorms and creates a site where male students vote on the hotness of Harvard women. At four in the morning, the site gets so many hits that the university's servers crash.

The Social Network is structured around two separate lawsuits over the ownership of Facebook. One pits Mark against Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both Armie Hammer), wealthy, Olympic-level rowers who came to Zuckerberg after his stunt with an idea to create a social networking site for Harvard students. They intended it as a casual dating site, but Mark went home and set about making not "Match.com for Harvard" but a place that allows him to take all of collegiate socializing and place it on the Internet. A month later, Mark tells the Winklevoss brothers he cannot complete the assignment, shortly before he launches The Facebook in its infancy.

The other lawsuit finds Mark being sued by his best friend and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield, looking uncannily like a young Jean-Pierre Léaud), who alleges that Mark cut him out of the profits even though he provided 100% of the start-up capital. The Winklevoss lawsuit pits two forces of equal arrogance against each other, but Eduardo's indignation during deposition meetings comes from a sense of personal harm.

Even so, none of these young men is any moral example. The Winklevoss twins come off as the sort of smug rich boys who will get cushy jobs in their father's law firm. When Mark launches Facebook, they pull strings to get an audience with the Harvard president to demand that the school shut down the site and expel Zuckerberg. When the president calls them out on their absurd sense of entitlement, the brothers looked shocked, as if anyone can bring a petty squabble to the head of the university. Saverin never shuts up about his own well-connected father, and his lawsuit for a portion of Facebook's profits seem less a matter of money than an attempt to win back his dad's approval. Saverin gets edged out of the picture by Napster founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), whose smooth-talking victim complex suggests the late stages of a cocaine-induced breakdown.

Then, there's Mark. Fincher always keeps Eisenberg separate from others, and the actor never looks comfortable when forced to deal with people. His site opens up socializing, to the point that anyone has access to everyone, and young men and women begin behaving irrationally over the transparency of their lives. The irony of his own ability to connect with anyone should be lost on no one.

In telling Mark's story, Fincher clearly draws from Orson Welles' great Citizen Kane, the story of a young media mogul who grows old and dies alone. Like Charles Foster Kane, Zuckerberg is indisputably a prodigy, a man of ambition and focus who builds upon the suggestions of his guides until he no longer has to stand on their shoulders. And like Kane, he cannot find true happiness in his work. Eisenberg occasionally breaks off all attention from the world to stare into space, and his utter lack of social skills hint that Mark may have Asperger's. But social discomfort does not fully explain the open arrogance in Mark's dark smirk. When a lawyer suggests that Mark's behavior toward the wronged parties stems from his resentment of never being invited to join one of the big-time Harvard clubs, Mark snidely replies that he currently has enough money to buy them and make them into game rooms.

The empire Mark builds doesn't have the grandeur of Kane's newspaper supremacy, but its influence runs far deeper. Groupies line up to sleep with the founder of Facebook, and we see how quickly Facebook becomes a part of people's lives. Within weeks, "Facebook me" has entered into Harvard's lexicon, and couples devolve into major, terrifying arguments over how often a page is updated to match a relationship status. Fincher seems to draw from his own Fight Club at times, portraying Facebook as something that sets off a cultural revolution that cannot be contained. Not even Project Mayhem is as widespread as the site where everyone -- including yours truly -- goes to post menial BS that can be taken for so much more. With businesses willing to terminate or not hire someone based on photos posted online, the issues of privacy that Zuckerberg casually steamrolls over to be popular carry a weight he does not or cannot contemplate.

The more social networking links people, the bigger the barriers, physical and mental, are formed in the real world. When Mark moves out to Palo Alto on Parker's advice, Eduardo heads to New York to work as a finance intern and seek advertisers from traditional routes. The 3,000 miles between them enhances the schism between them, with Saverin pursuing a business model that's proven but won't maximize profits for this kind of venture and Zuckerberg falling further and further into Parker's clutches. The two friends share an awkward exchange when Saverin finally comes out to California, and though the subject is not directly broached at the time, they both know that Eduardo is out, and the fleeting moment of friendship between them won't reverse what's coming. The irony of Mark's disconnect is compounded by the workers he hires when Facebook grows rapidly: anyone updating the site for better usability and interaction is described as being "wired in" and cannot be spoken to as if in stasis. The levels of impersonality between people mere feet away is bewildering even though we're living in this changed world now.

Fincher and Sorkin make tension out of the ostensibly banal subject of website programming by depicting how empty it all is. Mark, Saverin, the Winklevosses, not one of them has enough personality to hang a hat on. These are the people who created a way for all of us to fit our background, current statuses and interests onto a single page, as if Facebook was just a way for everyone to look as dull as them. The twins host raunchy parties while Mark decides to find an intern by holding an elaborate drinking game where the player who codes properly while hammered gets the job. These are just boys, yet they play with levels of money most of us cannot fathom. Couched in the vicious fights for intellectual supremacy is the suggestion that these are the sort of people who control all the money, spoiled kids and broadly unethical wunderkinds who receive respect for breaking numerous laws simply because they look cool in the process. When Saverin jealously prods Parker for losing to the courts on Napster, Parker still claims victory. "You wanna buy a Tower Records, Eduardo?" implying that he unleashed peer-to-peer file sharing to destroy the industry that would not work with him and recognize his talents.

Yellow-green dominates the color palette, as if someone finally got so sick with envy at the accomplishments of another that he finally vomited. The electronic/industrial score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross throbs and hums like a migraine headache, occasionally fading but never disappearing. Ominous without being ornate, the score captures the emotion of the film perfectly: cold but searching. It keeps looking for an outlet and finds none, always trapped by the insular attitudes of the characters, who only become lonelier as the film wears on. Its vaguely 8-bit sound deepens into more expressive tones, returning to motifs that suggest not just a thematic continuity but a personal stagnation on the part of young men who refuse to start acting like adults. Paranoia flecks their isolation, from Parker's obsessiveness over those who shut him down to the rumors that flame through instant Internet contact. It's almost funny how a student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, is seen as a deadlier social weapon than any of the national papers Kane's empire ran.

Much of the substance of David Fincher's films can be gleaned from his opening credits, something the great video essayist Matthew Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas are currently demonstrating with their pieces for the Museum of the Moving Image (part one found here). As ever, the atmosphere and character of The Social Network can be seen in its own opening. Rejected by Erica, Mark marches home as the camera glides over Harvard (or at least the shooting locations standing in for Harvard), showing all the interesting sights and people Mark could be interacting with instead of running home to blog. The score bristles with dark tones, and for all the camera's grace, you begin to fear that he might be planning something to hurt the girl. And, in a way, he does, insulting her online and subjecting her to verbal abuse from other misogynistic guys. It establishes Mark as a man who cannot let things go, and Erica manages to float around the back of his mind the entire film, as if he made Facebook solely to prove himself not an asshole rather than simply apologizing and acting more nicely.

Still, you never fully hate anyone in this movie, even if you want to give them all a good slap. Mark becomes the youngest billionaire in the world, but he has no one to enjoy it with, and his incessant invasions of privacy ensure that even the public that uses his site like a drug does not admire him. Like Facebook itself, The Social Network stays constant just long enough for you to get used to it before something changes, not in the narrative so much as the mood. Arrogance gives way to the insecurity motivating it, which in turn morphs into loneliness. When Mark sits by himself at the end, surfing his own website in that bizarrely fixated way of his, the chasm of darkness around him and the implication of his lawsuit with Eduardo make him resemble less Charles Kane than Michael Corleone. He's the most powerful man in the world -- just read any ranking of the most influential people -- and he has nothing to show for it and no amount of clicking 'refresh' will change that.

Second Thoughts: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

With the wide release of David Fincher's hotly anticipated The Social Network less than a week away, I decided to go back and watch some of the other films of one of my favorite modern directors. For reasons I cannot fully elucidate, I decided to revisit The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Now, my original review of the film is enthusiastic but, characteristic of my early reviews (especially the ones written for my school paper), the arguments are ill-formed because of the tight word limit and my own inexperience. Furthermore, soon after writing the review, my opinion on the film cooled considerably. While I still loved the aesthetic of the film, the howls of "Forrest Gump-ian tripe" started to find their mark, and when the experience wore off, so too did the zeal.

Thus, my decision to revisit the film came more as a curiosity than a burning desire to return to Fincher's three-hour opus, yet whatever the motivation, the result was worth it. Even when I embraced the film, I did not realize just how moving The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is, nor did I even grasp the extent of Fincher's visual style. His deep focus photography has always emphasized detail, but here he films events elliptically, deftly turning what is frankly another self-important script from Gump scribe Eric Roth into something poetic, the polar opposite of Zemeckis' travesty.

Button, like Gump, centers the action on a character who exists to be a gimmick more than a human being in his own right. Where Forrest was mentally challenged, Benjamin is born an old man and ages backward. Clearly a cipher, Ben walks through the post-World War I America without understanding the importance of the world around him. The same was true of Forrest, but the key difference is that Forrest Gump made up for the cluelessness of its character by bludgeoning the audience with reminders that everything the Baby Boomers touched turned to gold (except for that whole "everything after 1969" thing).

Fincher does not take that route. Now, Benjamin Button does take itself seriously, but it is not nearly as ponderous as some claim. Rather than focus on World War II, the depression, the birth of the '60s or any moment in the five decades or so that receive serious screentime in the film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is as elliptical and ephemeral as its reverse-aging protagonist. That the film should start with a flashback to a story wholly unrelated to the narrative, of a clockmaker who made a town square clock that ran backward in the anguished hope that it might bring back his son killed in the war, offers an immediate hint that Fincher is after something more than the trumpeting and bloviating of Gump. The shot of soldiers in the trenches of France being played backward so fallen boys rise again and those blown apart by mortar fire reconstitute into a fresh-faced, whole teenager is hauntingly poetic.

When the film finally moves to Benjamin's story, no single moment matches the power of this separate opening, but Fincher dissipates the style across the decades of Ben's life. The director stages Ben's birth as if opening an old horror picture, withholding the sight of a newborn baby as the horrified father looks down upon his child and immediately rushes out of the room with it. Before the man can drown the child in the river, a constable wanders by and, in a panic, the man dumps the child on the nearest doorstep and runs to console himself. The owners return and find the baby, at last revealing the horror: it looks like an old man.

Fitzgerald's short story, unconcerned with any remote medical plausibility, posited Benjamin as a man born not only aged like a man but with a wizened brain that retained less as his life continued. Fincher complicates matters: Benjamin is born with cataracts and extreme arthritis, but his brain is that of an infant's, incapable of speech or thought process. Later in life, he's intelligent, but he suffers from Alzheimer's making his brain match his youthful late-age appearance -- as someone dealing with an Alzheimer's grandfather, I can say all too painfully that the childish impudence of the old Ben is not a stretch.

The normal mental growth of Benjamin, when juxtaposed against the reversed aging process, allows for a nuanced form of acting, which Brad Pitt provides with surprising sincerity. Many would claim that Pitt's performance relied chiefly on the work of others who digitally inserted his face onto the bodies of various doubles meant to play Benjamin through his youthful frailty and the physical rejuvenation that comes with his old age, and I suspect even that this line of thinking might be responsible for Pitt's Oscar nomination. Yet one must watch him closely, as the film depends as much on the subtlety with which he plays his part as it does on the majesty of Fincher's visuals.

As Ben's body, withered and miniature, cannot match the youthful curiosity of his mind, Pitt's face displays a constant wonder at everything outside the nursing home where his adoptive mother, Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), works. His inactivity gives him the time to educate himself, but he's still a child, his enthused reaction at the arrival of a young girl, Daisy (Cate Blanchett, in her adult years), communicates just how lonely he felt previously. When his body strengthens enough, Benjamin gets work on a tugboat, and the banality of his occupation does not match the joyous zeal with which Ben takes to his odd jobs of washing bird shit off the deck and other menial tasks. Likewise, a boyish glee breaks through the excellent aging makeup when the tugboat captain takes him to a brothel or gives the man-boy his first taste of alcohol.

Pitt's performance roots the character in the prosaic despite his fantastical biology, and that push-pull between the two moods defines the film, often to its benefit, occasionally to its detriment. With his limitless digital canvas, Fincher creates a film that owes to deeply classical filmmaking, from a subtle use of character makeup à la Citizen Kane to the melodrama of its narrative. But he also creates a work that could not exist in classical filmmaking. With CGI, Fincher can emphasize the insignificance of the tugboat as it drags a behemoth liner, a boat so big that you don't even notice it at first because it cannot fit into the frame even in an extreme long shot. Never has digital been used in so subtle and graceful a manner.

That fluidity informs Fincher's approach to the material. In anyone else's hands, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button might well have been as odious as Forrest Gump. But Fincher shoots elliptically, traversing time in such an understated fashion that he breaks the film from its flawed foundation. This is a film that, for all its Old Hollywood melodrama and modern digital flash, that understands humanity. Those trying to unpack themes can be forgiven, since the film is constructed in such a way that it screams Big Idea, but its focus is more personal. Key to life is the way that nothing makes sense until it slips out of hand. The film's most beautiful shot -- an adult Daisy seducing Ben with a ballet in the fog -- screams with sensual enticement, but only when Benjamin hesitates and loses his chance to be with Daisy for the next decade does he (or the audience) fully appreciate the moment.

Some of the supporting actors understand this sense of ephemera, of the inevitability of loss and regret. The two most lauded performances in the film, those of Blanchett and Henson, are perhaps the least remarkable. Both are trapped in narrowly defined roles, Henson of the good-natured, spiritual black mother, Blanchett of the flighty young woman who loves our hero but looks for an excuse to get out and experience other pleasures before settling down. Jason Flemying portrays Benjamin's biological father, who reconnects with his son as a means of penitence, as a pitiable man who could not handle the strain of losing his wife in childbirth only to face the prospect of raising this genetic anomaly by himself. He withholds any big speeches of sorrow and regret, instead meeting Benjamin during his tugboat days and striking up a friendship before quietly leaving behind all his wealth to his son. Jared Harris has great fun as the tugboat captain, and he manages to temper his endearing vulgarity to prevent himself from turning into Lieutenant Dan. Best of all is Tilda Swinton, who plays the wife of an ambassador. When Benjamin meets her in a hotel, she seems the stereotypically uppercrust British woman, but Swinton immediately fills the character with warmth and sympathy, not waiting to spring it on us after being cold for a half-hour. She is the only character who recognizes how fleeting everything is, and her heartbroken look at the realization that her time with Benjamin will end as quickly as it began is as wrenching as the conclusion of Benjamin's story.

Let us be clear: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has serious issues, not least of which is the framing device set on the eve of Hurricane Katrina that forces Blanchett to make some awful acting choices and continuously interrupts the narrative for no discernible reason. If Fincher had developed the idea more, he could have tied New Orleans' fate to the the central idea of life's atmosphere of fleeting disquiet, but as it is, the framing device is just a distraction. The script really does retread Forrest Gump in numerous ways, and only the masterful hand of the director steers the story away from the rocks. But it is that hand that makes the film so rewarding, so tantalizing, so perfectly frustrating in the way it captures the frustration of life. Who else would insert the emotional moment of Benjamin helping Captain Mike shuffle off this mortal coil after the tugboat is attacked by a U-boat, and then interrupt it by showing a German consoling his own dying comrade on the broken hull of the sub? If Fincher cannot fully reconcile the grandeur of his visual élan with the simplicity (not simple-mindedness) of his storytelling, he comes closer than others could be expected to and makes art out of a gimmick. For all its issues, it is this film above all others that confirms the emotional motivation of Fincher's oeuvre and has me more convinced than ever that he could make a quasi-thriller about Facebook into a great film.

Se7en

David Fincher's Se7en remains in the public consciousness after a decade primarily for its climax -- both for its disturbing content and the endless parodies of Brad Pitt's anguished scream "What's in the baaaaahhhhx?! -- yet its influence on nearly all thrillers that would shoot for the adjective "dark" is nearly incalculable. Its grimy, slimy aesthetic informs countless psychological thrillers, and the extremity of the murders depicted set off a chain reaction that led to grisly crime on the ludicrous scale of Saw as well as the more scientific focus of C.S.I. and its spin-offs.

Upon revisiting Fincher's breakthrough, out now in a positively stunning Blu-Ray remaster, what stuck out at me was the surprising amount of emotion. The term "nihilistic" has been attached so often to the feature that even the new Blu-Ray describes it as such in its included booklet. Yet the film's downbeat, bleak ending does not translate to pure fatalism. Deep within the horrifying twists and turns of the film, Se7en ultimately focuses upon the central character, Detective Somerset (Morgan Freeman), and his arduous journey out of the very nihilism that both supporters and detractors see in the movie.

The first shot of the film, in fact, occurs away from the hell of Se7en's unnamed city, safe in Somerset's quiet home. Yet Fincher prepares us for the world outside the man's bedroom by watching the old detective ready himself for work. Freeman, an actor who always casts off a calming vibe, lightly smooths the wrinkles from his jacket. Then, he pockets a switchblade. Something outside clearly made this cop feel that a sidearm alone could not protect him, and when we see what it is, Somerset's nihilism seems almost comical in its insufficiency. If anything, the idea that he thinks a knife can hold back the darkness becomes a hopeful gesture.

After viewing an all-too-common "crime of passion" that leaves a husband dead -- "Just look at all that passion on the wall," he sighs -- Somerset heads out to a crime scene that will severely mess up his plans to retire at the end of the week. With his young, cocky replacement, Detective Mills (Brad Pitt), in tow, Somerset enters a fetid, roach-filled home where a mammoth of a man lies dead face-down in a bowl of spaghetti. Everyone jokes that the man ate himself to death, until they notice his hands and feet bound by wire and a bruise on his temple that suggests a gun pressed to his head. They were right: this guy did eat his fat ass to death, but it wasn't because of a lack of self-control.

Somerset knows this kind of crime is too meticulously planned and executed to be a random act, and he practically begs his captain (R. Lee Ermey) to re-assign him so that he doesn't leave in a week haunted by this killer. Sure enough, when a notorious criminal lawyer turns up dead the next day having been bled to death and left with the word "GREED" scrawled on the floor in his blood, it takes no time for Somerset to realize the pattern.

Each of the murders, based of course on the seven deadly sins, is intricate and, with the exception of the last two, gruesome. Yet Fincher displays a surprising amount of restraint in his view of these extreme crimes. His love of deep focus and his wry method of eliding around gratuitous shots allow him to show grisly scenes while still leaving things to the audience's imagination. Consider the manner with which he presents the Lust murder: Somerset and Mills track down a clue to an S&M parlor where they look at a photo of something the parlor owner designed for the killer, cut to an industrial club/brothel and a backroom where a man sits shivering and hyperventilating next to a bed with a dead prostitute we never quite see, then move to two interrogation rooms, one with the obstinate club owner and the other with the terrified patron. As the man explains having a gun put in his mouth as the killer ordered him, we finally see the photo, showing a knife mounted to a codpiece, and we understand in an instant what he did to that hooker without having to look at it.

That refusal to revel in the salaciousness of the material permits Fincher to devote his time to the characters. He never shatters Mills' confidence (not until the end, anyway) but he does dig deeper and suggest that the young man regrets his brash desire to come to the big city to solve more interesting cases, while his wife's (Gwyneth Paltrow's) obvious discontent drives a wedge between the loving couple that never becomes too stereotypical. The interplay between Mills and Somerset plays on the usual dynamic of the young cop and the old, wizened veteran, yet Fincher and writer Andrew Kevin Walker update it for the '90s: when Somerset figures out the pattern of the killings, he heads to the library to research any literary work he can think of that mentions the seven deadly sins. Mills, a member of the attention-deficit generation, has to buy the Cliff's Notes of those books because he can't stand trawling through Milton and Chaucer.

Even the killer, John Doe (Kevin Spacey), is richly defined despite only appearing in the final act. In his best performance, Spacey doesn't overplay his hand and embodies the banality of evil: there is nothing remarkable about John. He spent years slicing his fingers to destroy his prints, but no one would be able to identify him even if he left a print at the crime scene. So thoroughly boring is the man that he not only has to walk into a police precinct to get noticed but scream until people look. The eyes, however, give it away: in John Doe's eyes in the look of a man who cannot stomach the world around him, who's egotism found an outlet in horrific, fundamentalist Christianity. As he leads Mills and Somerset to his most disturbing setup, he spits venomous dismissal of his victims that betrays his self-absorption behind his religious facade.

But the heart of it all is Somerset. His despair is palpable, and unlike the usual retiring cop who looks back on his career with nostalgia and camaraderie, the detective behaves like the soldier in The Thin Red Line who learns he's being shipped home: rather than make a brave show of wanting to stay and help, he can barely contain his relief over his escape. Somerset sports a habit of ticking a metronome every night both to distract him from past horrors and to drown out the sound of street crime just outside. When Tracy, who doesn't know anyone else in the city, confides in him that she's expecting, he can only offer advice by way of relating his own experience with getting a young woman pregnant many years ago and talking her into an abortion to spare a child the nightmare of growing up in this hell.

Try as he might, however, he cannot leave his work behind them. It is Somerset who guesses the motivation for the killings, who does the thorough research and who even submits to being his replacement's inferior just to stay on and see the case through. A brief conversation with the captain uncovers the humanity in them both: the C.O.'s refusal to believe that Somerset can just quit after so many years on the force seems less a proud inability to see the dangers of the job rather than an insight into his own thought process. Implicit in his speech to Somerset is the notion that he, too, once thought of running away from this futile job, but he couldn't leave without feeling guilty about not helping, the same feeling that tugs at Somerset to finish the case and even stay with the police at the end.

Thus, Se7en is a film about humanity regained, not lost, and its grotesquerie comes to match the same level of exaggeration in numerous Christian allegories. The disillusioned priest in Shyamalan's Signs regains his faith after the terrifying ordeal of an alien invasion. Hell, the entire corpus of Flannery O'Connor reintroduces faith through downright catastrophic means. That religion should be the evil to motivate a character to rediscover his humanism is but the wryest and cleverest trick in a film that expresses a routine enthusiasm, never for the particulars of its crimes but in the ingenuity of its execution. This unexpectedly moral ending, which reveals the intelligence of the film, is the perfect book-end for the opening credits, which revel in the balls-to-the-wall, style-breaking aesthetic of the film. For a long time, that Brakhage-influenced opening represented the zenith of the picture, yet I didn't notice how smart the thing was until it was released at its most visually-appealing.

Fight Club

My decision this year to revisit some of the more notable films of 1989 had obvious personal connections ('89 being the year of my birth), but had I decided instead to pick another anniversary I could have chosen one of two particularly bountiful years for cinema. The first, 1939, is often heralded as the greatest year for the movies, period (as a side note, the highly talented and perceptive Tim Brayton over at Antagony & Ecstasy has being doing just that all year); the second, 1999, sent the 20th century out in style. I even considered running a '99 retrospective concurrently, though I suppose it's for the better than I decided against it as I cannot even regularly update the ones I have now -- I swear I'll be getting back to '89 and to John Carpenter's oeuvre soon. Furthermore, most of the finest films of 1999 are still fresh in my mind, save for some of the foreign films I still need to see, and while I certainly enjoy revisiting films from, well, it would be absurd for a 20-year-old to say "from my youth" but you understand, none of the films I've seen and enjoyed from 1999 offer any sort of challenge for me at the moment.

A lone exception is that controversial, hotly debated wrecking ball of a film: Fight Club. Upon its release, Fight Club found itself in the center of a frenzy, surrounded by fans who took to its pitch-black comedy and the finest example yet of David Fincher's relevancy and innovation in contemporary cinema as well as detractors who called it fascist, misogynistic and childish, and those were some of the kinder pans. Now, it's an indelible part of our pop culture, its twist ending beloved by those who worship such things -- as I scanned over some old reviews of the film's theatrical and subsequent DVD release I was surprised, and distressed, to see its name mentioned alongside The Sixth Sense on numerous occasions -- and that line, that line, so endlessly quoted and parodied that its mere utterance should, in reality, warrant a genuine beating. But what is it that makes Fight Club so simultaneously alluring and abhorrent? Are its fans mongoloid Hitler youths reveling in the fascist orgy that shall be our undoing, or are the haters simply projecting this image because they themselves cannot or will not read into the film any deeper than its surface level?

Upon revisiting the film, I know on which side of the fence I stand: Fight Club, sensory overload that it is, is one of the finest and most complex satires of the '90s. Of all the films concerning the alienation of Generation X, none so perfectly captures its existential listlessness. Told from the fractured perspective of its unnamed Narrator (whom we shall call Jack, after his twisted synecdochical statements such as "I am Jack raging bile duct"), Fight Club builds a mood of post-Reagan miasma around its protagonist, a suffocating poison cloud of Ellisian soulless consumerism.

Jack (Edward Norton) works for an automobile company ("A major one," he darkly tells someone after regaling her with horror stories), traveling across the country to assess catastrophic design failures and decide whether to order a recall for that particular model. Jack suffers from insomnia and, trapped in the bleary stage between awake and asleep, he absent-mindedly fills his condo with all the latest furniture and accessories from IKEA. So obsessed is he with the Scandinavian DIY-retailer that he pores over catalog entries like centerfolds.

The sick embodiment of Gen X, Jack is so desperate for something to latch onto, something that will allow him to drop the artifice of his corporate-crafted identity, that he finds himself gravitated to support groups for the disease-stricken. At a meeting for testicular cancer, Jack at last lets go, weeping into the enlarged bosom of a man who had both testicles removed. He becomes addicted to the sense of belonging, and the acceptance allows him to sleep at night. Until Marla shows up, that is. Another "tourist," she is a beautiful but morbid creature, as warped in her own way as Jack. Her presence destroys Jack's narcissistic and vampiric need to feed off these people, so they divide the various meetings as if haggling custody rights. Nevertheless, the damage is done, and Jack needs to find another way to cope with his hang-ups, and he finds it in Tyler Durden.


Tyler, the irrepressible id to Jack's neurotic superego, is free of society's consumer-based values system: he works a number of odd-jobs around town simply to wreak minor havoc, from splicing in frames of pornography into children's films to peeing in the soup he cooks at a restaurant. He lives in a dilapidated house that he casually allows to fall even further into disrepair; a Fincherian nightmare of the place, the walls do not leak so much as pour, and the running water looks a lovely shade of brown. In Tyler Jack finds an idol, someone who's broken free of the system that tortures him and has crafted an independent lifestyle ungoverned by the norms of society. The two create Fight Club, a place for other disaffected men to vent their frustrations with the emptiness of the world around them. Once a week they come and beat the stuffing out of each other, and on Monday they go back to their jobs as file clerks and waiters.

The very conceit of Fight Club is one of the most deeply satiric creations ever to grace contemporary literature/cinema: these men, so shiftless in their lives, are the dead-eyed wanderers of America's spiritual post-apocalypse. That the people who are so deadened by anomie that they beat each other to feel alive are yuppies only makes it funnier. The accusations of misogyny here seem meaningless, as Fight Club represents the bizarre need of some men, and men specifically, to experience pain to feel alive. That inherent need explains why the number of attendees appears to have compounded each time Fincher takes us back to a fight, and soon the yuppies prop up Durden as a hero, spurred on by his anti-materialistic screed: "You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis."

Under Tyler's tutelage, Fight Club morphs into Project Mayhem, directing that drive for self-harm outward into a mixture of masochistic fascism and social revolution. It starts with general vandalism: Tyler and Jack take bats to the sleek new VW Beetle -- the symbol of '60s youth repackaged by the sell-out baby boomers to foist upon the new youth both as the ultimate corruption of their values and their lingering, narcissistic infatuation with those abandoned values -- and the makeshift army loots a Blockbuster (prominently displaying a poster of Independence Day, no less, a cheeky reflection of the freedom these men feel).

But it soon escalates into threatening police commissioners and, ultimately, planning some mysterious bomb plot that might be what would have happened if Timothy McVeigh had led Jim Jones' cult: no other scene in the film is as funny and hopelessly pitch-black as the one where a squad comes back after a "mission" carrying with them a dead Bob (the large-breasted man from the testicular cancer group). A stunned Jack cannot believe what Tyler's escalation has led to, and he tries desperately to break the men of their insane conditioning. Tyler, like the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket, destroyed these men to rebuild them into a tool of destruction, and they no longer have names when they meet. So, when Jack screams that Bob was real, that his name was Robert Paulsen, these fascist idiots accept this as Jack, (co-?)founder of FC, elevating the dead to a position of honor, that in death they truly become worthy. Anyone who dismisses the film as the ramblings of fascist teenage morons -- as did Kenneth Turan -- must simply have left the theater before this scene, because it makes explicitly, hilariously clear Jack's horrified realization and disdain of the end sum of Fight Club.

Project Mayhem eventually becomes the ultimate attack on the society these men just cannot accept. Consider the brilliant extended metaphor of the soap that Tyler sells: the soap is made from liposuctioned fat, taken from people who got fat through consumerist gluttony then paid to have it removed because of society's perception of beauty. Tyler then sells it back to the people who, in a way, made it. Finally, the soap is used to make the bombs to bring down credit card headquarters, a symbol of the consumerist world that emasculates them. It is utterly insane, yet perversely ingenious.


Palahniuk's depiction of these men, perfectly refined for the screen by Fincher and writer Jim Uhls, works precisely because the satire of the men of Fight Club/Project Mayhem favors neither the anarchic revenge fantasy nor the sadomasochism of a bizarre subset of men that truly drives it. Fincher finds a perfect balance between the two, one that only fully reveals its brilliance on a second viewing because it's, dare I even say it, subtle. The yuppies fight to free themselves, if only for a few minutes of bloody pain, from their vacuous lives, yet they prove just as slavish in service to Tyler Durden as they do the corporations they so virulently hate. More so, even, because Fight Club offers them a psychosexual outlet: remember that Bob, who lost his testicles to cancer, takes to Fight Club with vigor. Through pummeling other men, he and the others find a solace that takes the place of sex.

Which brings us to the funniest aspect of the film's humor: the rampant, unyielding homoeroticism. Palahniuk, now openly gay, has long been the subject of debate for the perceived "macho" quality of his writing, but here all of the posturing and sweaty fisticuffs only feed an atmosphere of nascent homosexuality. Of course, now we all know the truth of Jack and Tyler Durden's relationship, but Fincher misdirects from it for most of the film by suggesting a borderline homosexual relationship between them: Jack sits in the bathroom while Tyler bathes, he appears to be as mad at Marla for sleeping with Tyler as he is with Tyler for sleeping with her. The first flashback places Jack in the support group, where men hug each and other and cry because they're no longer sexually active, and the members of Fight Club often clasp hands and embrace after a slugging match. Of course, the reveal of Tyler Durden as nothing more than Jack's id turns that particular relationship into an off-kilter demonstration of pure narcissism, a lingering shade of the consumer vampires that populated Bret Easton Ellis' work, but even in the end, as Jack looks forward to a relationship with Marla, Fincher has one last bit of fun by splicing in a few frames' worth of a shot of a man's penis, both a nod to Tyler's "editing skills" and a final reminder that what you just finished watching was gayer than gay pornography.


This week marked the ten-year anniversary of the film's release, marked by the release of a gorgeous Blu-Ray that brings out Fincher's jaw-dropping visual craft more than ever, and it's interesting to note how opinion has changed over the years. Roger Ebert initially questioned the clarity of the film's message and gave it two stars, but he has mentioned in passing how going through the film shot-for-shot at Boulder College with a room full of intelligent film buffs turned him around on the picture. In the current IMDb ranking of its 250 highest-rated films (not, of course, a concrete source of a film's quality but an interesting gauge of the "average Joe's" opinion), Fight Club comes in at an impressive #18. I cannot help but feel, however, that the overall shift of opinion in the film's favor is not necessarily positive, as I'm quite certain that a sizable portion of the people who voted Fight Club up the charts of IMDb merely think that it is cool and has a wicked ending -- by point of reference, The Usual Suspects, a film that lives and dies on its twist reveal, comes in at #21. In 2003, the magazine Men's Journal so thoroughly missed the point that it placed the film on a list of "The 50 Best Guy Movies Ever Made," and one of the features on the Blu-Ray consists of Mel Gibson bestowing the Guy Movie Hall of Fame honor to Fight Club at Spike TV’s 2009 Guys Choice Awards. It would seem that Fight Club has been fully assimilated into the materialist pop culture it so mercilessly mocks, "The first rule of Fight Club" being the "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" of the modern era in terms of joke-killing ubiquity.

I do not, however, believe that the perennial inability of some people to get this movie constitutes a failure on the filmmakers' part not to slam on the brakes to make its message (even more) inescapably clear. Fight Club is many things: a frenetic slice of pop-Nietzsche. An attack on consumerism and evil corporations, but specifically on the IKEAs, Apples, and Starbucks of the world, the companies that insidiously posit themselves as "one of us" and use youth's hipness against itself. A homoerotic revenge fantasy carried out by emotionally stunted morons who pin their problems, consciously or subconsciously, on their mothers and make a play at macho posturing to prove their manliness in a metrosexual world that frightens them. At its heart, however, Fight Club is a romantic comedy. Like all the other Generation X rom-coms, it's about a nerdy, neurotic loser who nervously tries to get with a beautiful, often slightly quirky, woman. Hell, the whole reason Tyler exists is because Jack envisions him as a reaction of his sexual terror over meeting and confronting Marla. Fight Club: Woody Allen meets MMA. That's why the ending is so happy: it's romance!