David Fincher Analysis

“Entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine, some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything’s okay. I don’t make those kinds of movies. That, to me, is a lie. Everything’s not okay.” - David Fincher. David Fincher is the director that I am choosing to homage for a number of reasons. I personally find his movies to be some of the deepest, most well made, and beautiful films in recent memory. However it is Fincher’s take on story telling and filmmaking in general that causes me to admire his films so much. This quote exemplifies that, and is something that I whole-heartedly agree with. I am and have always been extremely opinionated and open about my views on the world and I believe that artists have a responsibility to do what they can with their art to help improve the culture that they are helping to create. In this paper I will try to outline exactly how Fincher creates the masterpieces that he does and what I can take from that and apply to my films.

It can be argued that most of David Fincher’s films share stylistic similarities in narrative and story more than any other way. This is a very interesting claim considering that Fincher does not write his own screenplays, yet most of his movies deal with similar overall themes and characters. This can be best illustrated by looking at films from different points in Fincher’s career. Fight Club is a film that heavily criticizes materialism, capitalism, and even religion at some points. In fact, mostly everything that Tyler Durden says is largely anti-western culture in general. Until the very end of the movie, society is in some ways the largest antagonist in the story. Se7en also shares a similar distaste for society. In Se7en both Detectiv...

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...te the mood and feeling that he wants from the film. In The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo sound effects are used in a very subtle manner to motivate large pieces of the plot. For example, in the scene when Martin Vanger allows Mikael into his house and treats him to wine and dinner, a constant whistling of wind can be heard until Martin eventually gets up and closes the door, allowing Martin’s mistress to reveal that nobody knows that she is there, and thus giving Martin the ability to kill her. This sound effect returns later at a very pivotal point in the story when Mikael breaks into Martin’s house to find evidence, and is caught by Martin because Martin hears the whistling of the open door and goes to close it. It is this kind of attention to detail that causes Fincher’s films to be so articulately entertaining, yet also extremely deep and important to his time.