Boy Movies #16

Boy Movies Presents: Fincher February

You’re reading Boy Movies, a newsletter that for the month of February will focus entirely on the films of David Fincher. Subscribe and tell a friend as I embark on this project that absolutely no one asked me to embark on.

Fincher February: Week 1

Apologies for sounding like the guy who sat next to you in your Intro to Film Studies class, but David Fincher is the director who made me love movies. I don’t know if that’s an “uncool” thing to say, but I have never claimed to be cool or interesting or original. I saw The Social Network in 2010 when I was 15, about a week and some change before my dad died, and it permanently altered my brain chemistry. I’d never been so affected by a film that I felt compelled to look up the director’s name when I got home. I required no further convincing to decide that Fincher was my man for life.

This is all to say: Welcome to Fincher February! Every week for the rest of the month, I’ll be discussing entries in the David Fincher cinematic universe (the DFCU, if you will). I see Fincher as a premiere boy director, not just because of how men respond to him, but because of his sensibilities, style, and his place in culture. I will watch any behind the scenes video of him directing; the well-documented precision of his process seems intimidating and demanding and rigorous, but his collaborators insist it’s worth it. It’s fascinating that the guy who directed the Madonna “Vogue” video went on to direct Gone Girl. It’s fascinating that he was like, “You know what I’m going to do with this $25 million dollar check from Netflix? Produce my dead dad’s long lost screenplay¹.” I often wonder whether he’s still in touch with his old buddy Kevin Spacey. But most of all I just like the melodious alliteration of Fincher February.

In the short history of this newsletter, I’ve hosted a couple of mini “events” (sure) that required time, effort, and people-wrangling, but Fincher February marks the first real Boy Movies extravaganza. I can think of no one better to dedicate a month to than the man who, for better or worse, helped make me the annoying freak I am today. I’ll be welcoming guests over the next few weeks as we attempting to unpack an iconic boy director’s crossover appeal, but today I’m flying solo as I discuss his two big Brad Pitt-starring ‘90s hits: Fight Club and Se7en.

The first rule of Fight Club is have fun and be yourself

Fight Club was actually the first Fincher I ever saw, I just didn’t care that he directed it. I was a few years too young, having watched it for the first time in the late 2000s on VHS (!) in my childhood friend’s basement. I thought it was the greatest movie ever made, largely because up until then I had only seen like three movies ever and one of them was The Pacifier starring Vin Diesel. I thought it was, get this, very smart and, get this, very funny. I thought Brad Pitt and Edward Norton were both explosively hot in it. I thought the violence made it cool and I thought liking it made me cool. I’d never had a job, yet I was entranced by how miserable the Narrator (Norton) was at his: “This guy gets it,” eighth grade Allison thought. “I am a slave to consumerism. Work does suck the life out of you.” It took exactly one viewing of Fight Club for it to crystallize as a perfect work in my impressionable mind. I never had to revisit it. I knew I was right.

That’s the power Fincher has always had over me, whether I was aware of it or not. The great unifying through line among the DFCU is that no one ever belongs in the worlds he creates, which often look like our own but operate nothing like it. (In the DFCU, you can blow up buildings with zero casualties. In the DFCU, Daniel Craig can be a journalist, and a pouty-lipped Brad Pitt can be a cop. In the DFCU, Max Minghella is Indian.) My love affairs with Fight Club and The Social Network were cases of right place, right time, but pretending that I didn’t get any deeper meaning out of them would be reductive and unfair. I was in the middle of one of my many awkward adolescent stages when I was initially introduced to Fight Club, and I was unknowingly standing by as my dad lived out his last days on Earth when I first saw The Social Network. When I saw Gone Girl in college, I was deeply unhappy and financially unstable. To paraphrase Norton’s Narrator, I often meet Fincher’s films at very strange times in my life.

You were born knowing what Fight Club is about, but I’ll tell you anyway. Fight Club is based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel of the same name, following a detached insomniac who invents a sexy boyfriend for himself in order to give his monotonous life meaning. They start an underground ring of clubs where men show up to consensually fistfight each other, which somehow leads to a nationwide terrorist plot to blow up a bunch of credit card buildings? I’m going to be honest, it loses me at the end. Fight Club, as it turns out, is not a perfect movie, as I’d spent much of my life believing. The story begins to unravel at the end, its politics and messaging are all over the place, and — this is so obvious it’s almost not worth noting — its rancid fan base makes it nearly impossible to look at as anything more than a super famous incel dramedy. I don’t think it’s bad, but it’s also the worst kind of boy movie: the kind that makes you roll your eyes constantly.

Revisiting it, I spotted all the moments it thought it was soooo clever, and all the scenes that gave birth to armies of men who absolutely hate women. (Insane that this movie has the kind of fans it does when Pitt spends the movie dressed like that, by the way.) Even its status as an anti-capitalist work doesn’t fully hold water in 2023 — the Narrator and Tyler Durden (Pitt) are appalled by how gay it is to wear another man’s name on their underwear, but they’re not concerned with, I don’t know, the working conditions of the people who mass-produce the underwear they’re railing against. While the idea of men coming together to take out their rage by touching each other’s bodies rather than beating up women — in the world of Fight Club, exactly one woman exists, and her single personality trait is that she looks cool while smoking, and she keeps getting in the way of the Narrator’s relationship with his imaginary boyfriend — is beautiful and almost feminist of them (jk), their anger feels empty. I could never quite figure out what they were mad about, other than everything. It’s pure nihilism. But I’m not stupid: I understand that this is exactly why a certain class of men absolutely love this film, and I understand why I loved its confidently stylish messiness as a kid.

I saw Seven — I will not keep styling it as Se7en, sorry — for the first time recently for the purpose of this project and was truly gagged by every frame. It’s shocking that it came before Fight Club because of how much more modern it feels, following the odd couple pairing of two detectives (the rookie played by Pitt, the grizzled veteran by Morgan Freeman) as they try to track down a serial killer whose murders are inspired by the seven deadly sins. Its crime and thriller elements mean it has more in common with Zodiac and Mindhunter than it does with Fight Club, but both films have the quintessential Fincher quality of being about people coping with alienation. 

“This is a world that's fucked up and nothing works,” Fincher said of creating Seven’s dreary, hopeless atmosphere. The same description could be applied to Fight Club, which takes place mostly in a dilapidated house in an anonymous city. That final line from Somerset at the end of Seven would fit right in at the end of Fight Club, too (“Ernest Hemingway once wrote, ‘The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.’ I agree with the second part”). In the DFCU, everything is fucked up and nothing works and you have to do something about it, no matter the consequence. You might just die otherwise, by wound or by boredom.

It’s an idea that makes the most sense when you consider it in context with Fincher’s punishing directorial technique. There’s that story from the set of Seven, as told by Michael Alan Kahn, the assistant director: “I went up to Fincher and I said, ‘… Isn’t this amazing? Isn’t this wonderful? This is what you wanted.’ And he looked at me as though I were from outer space and said, ‘No, it’s awful. … Because now I have to get what’s in my head out of all you cretins.’” To an obsessive like Fincher, filmmaking is a practice that can never be as fun as it is pure, hard work. It’s a boy quality, obviously — if Greta Gerwig started saying things like that, she’d never make a movie again.

I liked Fight Club less as an adult but related to it more than I did when I was younger. In many ways, it’s just a movie about being in your thirties and feeling so lost that you’re willing to look for an escape wherever you can; without all the terrorist stuff, Fight Club is a feature-length version of those episodes of Girls that are centered around the boys. Seven details a series of horrific crimes, of course, but it allows itself to breathe in those little connections between its three lonely leads. Freeman’s Somerset is pulling back from work, or he’s trying to. Pitt’s Mills is trying to rise in the ranks, despite his youth and brashness. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Tracy is just trying to find someone to talk to. I guess you won’t be surprised to find out how much all of that spoke to me, too. This was, however unintentionally, a very strange time for a movie like Seven to come into my life. (I won’t go into detail, but IYKYK.)

I love David Fincher films. Even the ones I don’t love I still kind of love. To watch his movies is to be transported to meticulously crafted worlds where you’d never want to live but where everything is intentional and almost anything goes. I might not always belong in this world, but I wouldn’t belong in the worlds of the DFCU either. There’s something comforting, in a Fincher-esque sort of way, about that.

Also:

Literally that feeling when you end up watching Fight Club one day and seeing Tyler Durden. We’ve all been there.

• Thank you to Rose (who has her own super fun newsletter) for suggesting Fight Club literally forever ago VIA EMAIL!!! None of you other bitches ever email me. Rose, you rule.

• If you’re reading this in your inbox, peep the gorgeous bespoke banner by Sarah! Maybe, just maybe, you can expect to see special banners all month…

• I started rewatching Girls, if that wasn’t clear, and I just know Ray would’ve loved Boy Movies.

1. Sorry but “Mank” literally still sounds like a slur to me.