The thirteen chapters in this collection analyze David Fincher's development as a filmmaker, from television commercials and music videos to serving as front runner on the series Mindhunter. The contributors explore a variety of characteristics, including Fincher's attitudes toward his audiences, his attention to detail, his Gothic sense of evil, his modernization of film noir, and his reinvention of the serial killer. The diversity of approaches highlights the paradoxes of Fincher's films and style, accentuating the tensions between his innovative methods and storytelling and unpacking the perennial questions of love, life, and death that his films raise. Scholars of film, television, and media will find this book especially salient.
Francis Mickus is a doctoral candidate in history at the Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne University.
Introduction: David Fincher, the Master of Offset, Francis Mickus Section I: The Art of Making Movies Chapter 1: Film of Fury: David Fincher's Alien3 (1992) and the Scarring of a Franchise, Kyle Barrett Chapter 2: Fincherdgaf: David Fincher, Star Image, and Fan Appreciation, Kirsty Worrow Chapter 3: David Fincher as an Auteur: Pop Music Intertextuality and Film, Carlos Gerald Pranger and Cintia Gutierrez Reyes Chapter 4: Up Close and Personal: Details and Fragments in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Isabelle Labrouillere Section II: A Darkness More Than Night... Chapter 5: The Continuum of Evil in David Fincher's Exteriors and Interiors, Antonio Pettierre and Antonio Sanna Chapter 6: To Reign in Hell: David Fincher's Enclosed Worlds of Transgression, Sony Jalarajan Raj and Adith K. Suresh Chapter 7: Gothic Fincher: Alienation, Abjection, and the American Nightmare,Soumyarup Bhattacharjee Chapter 8: Spectacle, Noir, and the Obsession with the Horrific Other in David Fincher's Zodiac, Joshua Fagan Section III: The Meaning of Responsibility Chapter 9: 'Upset the Order': Disrupting Law in Music Videos, Alien3and The Game, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns Chapter 10: Who Watches the Watchmen: David Fincher's Serial Killer Narratives, Min-Chi Chen Chapter 11:'You're Not Even Trying': The Practice of Persuasion and Influence in Fincher's Filmography, Francis Mickus Chapter 12: Paying Attention: Care Ethics and the Cost of Chronic Illness in Panic Room,Julia Brown Chapter 13: The Guilty Game: The Peculiar Darkness of David Fincher's World, Roberto Donati
A Critical Companion to David Fincher captures all the ways in which Fincher's work is interesting and important. Among the book's many strengths, it shows us a variety of methodologies at their best, from art history through fan studies, production histories, genre analysis and up-close textual readings. Showcasing the innovative work of young scholars, this volume maps the full range of Fincher studies and moves the field forward in exciting ways. -- William Straw, James McGill Professor of Urban Media Studies, McGill University A Critical Companion to David Fincher, edited by Francis Mickus, offers a fascinating perspective on the work of one of the most emblematic filmmakers of our time. The multi-disciplinary approaches to the filmmaker's visual aesthetics, his cinematic sources of inspiration, his relationship to genre cinema and technology, his philosophical and moral stance on the representation of evil and violence... provide a comprehensive overview of how David Fincher's cinema questions the nature of cinema in its relationship to reality. -- Yann Calvet, Universite de Caen Normandie
