Notes on Evolution: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

David Liu | 1 January 2012

From Zodiac’s restless journalists and detectives to Seven’s ruthless killer, from Edward Norton’s white-collar waif in Fight Club to the troubled young entrepreneurs of The Social Network, the heroes and antiheroes of David Fincher’s films are forces of nature, obsessive and meticulous to a fault. Their hunger for progression and distaste for established norms reflect common psychological impulses connecting the director’s body of work.

It’s no stretch to say that Fincher revisits familiar territory with his latest The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.The film begins by giving us snapshots of the physically scarred, emotionally neutered Lisbeth Salander, played brilliantly by Rooney Mara. As her relationship with journalist Mikael Blomkvist develops, Salander evolves into a fascinating contradiction — alternating between cool detachment and feral intensity, she comes to embody both spectrums of the “Fincherian” archetype.

The more of Fincher’s films we experience (and experience again), the more they seem to share the same dialectical universe. Every line of dialogue, gesture and expression springs from an unconsummated desire for fulfillment, fragments of colossal puzzles that straddle the divide between revelation and oblivion.

Closing Shots: David Fincher

A collection of final shots from the works of David Fincher.

David Liu | 18 December 2011

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“To me this movie does to genre filmmaking what L’Avventura did to narrative cinema in the 1960s, in the sense that in L’Avventura, all of a sudden, the central character disappears, and you’re just left with abstract issues of what was really going on in life around that character.

Here you have the notion that everything is in place for a classic narrative — a serial killer, the cops, a smart guy from everyday life, the ciphers. Everything should fall in place and there should be a resolution, and here you’re only left with question mark after question mark, which ultimately is what real life is about, and it’s very rarely acknowledged by cinema.

What amazed me at the time and still does is the connection with Seven, because it’s like the anti-Seven. It’s this incredible exercise in dialectics. In American cinema, I don’t see an equivalent.”

—  Filmmaker Olivier Assayas on David Fincher’s Zodiac

The Social Network: Open Spaces

David Liu | 20 December 2010

In David Fincher’s The Social Network, familiar geographic landmarks contextualize the film’s narrative within the fabric of history and modernity.

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