Film Vs. Digital: How David Fincher Has Adapted To Survive In Hollywood

Fincher's Genius

1the social network blu ray

The King's Speech is a very good movie. When it came out in 2010, it meant a lot to a lot of people. It told a meaningful story in a meaningful way. But in spite of what Oscar said, The Social Network was the best movie of the year. It was a full-fledged turn-the-page extreme-makeover of Hollywood style. It was a revolution. But it was a quiet revolution and most people slept through the riots. The Social Network wasn't Fincher's first movie to be shot entirely with digital cameras; he made the leap to digital in 2007 with Zodiac and shot most of 2008's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button digitally. But The Social Network, featuring Jeff Cronenweth as director of photography, was something new. It wasn't just a "normal" movie shot with new technology. It incorporated its subject matter into its nature as a digital movie and produced a new modern style. The Social Network is literally about computers: the founding of Facebook, the invention of a technology that created a digital world that replaced face-to-face and ear-to-mouth interaction with interaction-through-separation. It's an emotionally distant movie, cold to the bone a The Social Network nd populated by people who are as isolated from each other as earth is from Jupiter. The audience is a safe distance away at all times, watching the backstabbing and career-sabotaging from a detached perspective. So it's suitable then that the movie be shot in that "cold and hard" digital style. The Social Network could not exist on film. It just couldn't. The warmth of the film grain, the luxuriousness and the richness of the textures and colors would change the way the movie feels and therefore what it means. You could have the exact same blocking, the exact same takes, the exact same editing and yet if it was shot on film, it would not be the same movie. As a few incredibly wise people have told me, you can't say the same thing with different words. For one of only a few times in my life, I left my showing of The Social Network knowing that I had just seen a vital movie, an honest-to-God masterpiece. But it wasn't until recently that I understood why it is, and how it revolutionized digital movie style. See, I had always found one thing about the movie infuriating: during the scene in which Mark (Jesse Eisenberg) pitches his idea for a social networking site to Eduardo (Andrew Garfield) outside the Jewish fraternity on Caribbean Night, the steam they are breathing in the cold was computer generated. And it was obvious. At the time, I thought it could be nothing but a shameful mark of laziness on the part of Fincher. I thought back to hearing Orson Welles talk about the making of his 1942 movie The Magnificent Ambersons and how they built an entire soundstage inside of a meat locker to simulate cold outdoor conditions on set. Now THAT is filmmaking. And I bet Orson was drunk the whole time, too. In The Social Network, we were surely seeing the worst of digital movie "magic" at work. Just a way to be lazy and save money at the sacrifice of good-looking effects. It didn't occur to me at the time that Fincher's reputation as a perfectionist who made his cast and crew work late nights shooting upwards of a hundred takes of the same shot to get the exact one he wanted precluded the possibility of directorial laziness and cheapness. Eventually, I came to understand the CGI breath, as insignificant as it seems, as an element of the movie's style. The movie, being digital, literally exists inside of a computer. The movie's subject matter was the creation of a digital world. It is perfectly coherent with these elements and the movie's digital style to accomplish basic special effects with computers. It's not laziness, it's selective inclusion of elements vital to the movie Fincher was making. The whole point here is not that digital photography and effects are only suitable for movies about computers or movies about soulless people doing soulless things. It's that acknowledging the movie's digital nature and suiting the photography to the subject matter was the first step in the legitimizing of digital technology as unique artistic means to achieving unique artistic ends, and not just a cheap and easy alternative to the film norm. Digital style was born within The Social Network.

The Social Network

Fincher again teamed up with Cronenweth for his next movie, 2011's truly great and underrated The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and advanced his new digital style further. Just like he did the year before, Fincher, understanding the unique nature of digital form, made a movie that couldn't exist any other way. He does this by crafting his crime thriller as an homage to past crime and noir genre traditions while also separating itself from the crowd as something modern and progressive. Essentially, the movie looks back and makes reference to the past as a way to cement itself in the present. The movie acknowledges its genre roots through its occasional direct references to past crime and noir works. At one point, the protagonist Mikael (Daniel Craig) finds a pile of old pulp magazines, the inspiration and basis of many film noir movies of the 40s and 50s. Lisbeth (Rooney Mara) addresses an envelope to Mikael with a single bold letter "M," invoking Fritz Lang. And just like in the classics, the plot is spurred into action by a central crime which eventually gets buried under more complex mysteries and personal drama. But at the same time as it lovingly recognizes these influential traditions, the movie moves on from them. Film noir's lone-wolf protagonist is no longer alone; he's been paired with a new-age partner who knows her way around a laptop. Violence is no longer exciting spectacle; in Dragon Tattoo, the violence is stomach-turning and plays on modern fears. Old photos are pored over for clues, just like in the classic mysteries, but no magnifying glasses here; this time the photos have been into a computer and digitally enhanced.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

And this is all depicted in Fincher's beautiful and stark and dark digital photography, far removed from the visual filmic style of the genre's past. Movie traditions are inherited from past generations, just like how the antagonist of Dragon Tattoo inherits his father's killing spree and carries it on himself. But Fincher understands that his industry and art has changed, and he adapts these traditions to suit it. Unfortunately, Fincher has vanished into the shadows for now. The unlikelihood of him working on the next Dragon Tattoo movie and the apparent falling through of his plans to make a new 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea movie makes it unclear when he will next surface (ocean exploration joke, get it?!). But other movies have broken ground in the new digital film industry in his absence. Last year, Ang Lee's Life of Pi sent a live human on an adventure through an unreality perfectly suited to digital photography. Effects that could have been done practically, like a bottle splashing into water, were animated with computers. Since we're so used to the look of film, a movie as artificial in appearance as Life of Pi seems particularly unreal, just what such a story calls for. A new movie style. This year, Ruben Fleischer's Gangster Squad utilized an artificial digital look for an otherwise traditional period movie for an anachronistic affect. The aesthetics of the movie, with its clean and sharp digitized look, digital slo-mo, application of CGI where practical effects would have served fine, and use of hip-hop (at least in the trailer), make it a movie that is distinctly of our time yet set in the past. A new movie style. Click "next" to continue.
 
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Brett loves great movies, the Green Bay Packers, textual analysis, formalism, film theory, Six Feet Under, blu-rays, the final shot from The Third Man, David Bowie, Belgian beers, scented candles, and Oxford commas.