For a director who’s made movies about psychotic killers, David Fincher crafts some relatively bloodless affairs. This speaks to his obsession with psyche and behavior over guts and gore, and somehow this makes his films creepier. Cinema has no shortage of psychopathic portrayals and this breed below ought to give Hannibal Lecter a run for his money. Continue reading
Tag: Zodiac
The Detectives of David Fincher
In another life, David Fincher would make an excellent detective. It’s no coincidence that the protagonists in his films often brandish the fedora and trench-coat (some literally, others spiritually) or are prone to endless brooding as they piece together a complicated world. But it’s not the fact that they investigate that’s so compelling, it’s that they obsess. For a director himself who will shoot 100 takes of a scene, or refine the junk in a character’s apartment to an exact science, or pore over every line and molecule of the script; this storyteller-character pairing is as self-reflexive as it is madly engrossing.
This, of course, depends on how you like your heroes. Some like ‘em squeaky clean in every moral facet i.e. won’t take a nickel off the street, or aren’t above arresting every rule-breaking offender out there including jaywalkers. I like my detectives the way Fincher does, weathered and broken and a little fucked up. Continue reading