An annotated walk through the films of David Fincher

October 2, 2025 by Christopher ZF 1 Comment

David Fincher’s new film, Gone Girl, opens this weekend. The film has received immense buzz in part because of the controversial nature of its source material, Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl, but also because of the nature of the director himself. Fincher has proven a difficult director to pin down, and his films have likewise been divisive. He works in the studio system with Hollywood stars, but in this era of earnestness and heroism, Fincher’s films challenge our notions of Typical Hollywood Movies. He is a gifted visual director whose films often leave audiences cold and discomfited. Gone Girl is likely to do both of these things.

Which makes this an apt time to consider the work of the director. To look back at his career and shape a notion of what kind of artist-and I am now convinced he is a truly brilliant artist, heir to the throne of Stanley Kubrick-he is. Below is a list of David Fincher’s 9 films, presented from worst to best, considered biographically and artistically.

The Trial By Fire

9. Alien³
1992, written by David Giler, Walter Hill, Larry Ferguson

By the time that David Fincher began his career in feature films, he was already a technically proficient if clinically detached director. For many, these traits have come to define his work: clinical, emotionally distant storytelling directed with a slick, if not beautiful sheen. The foundation of which is evident in his first film, Alien³.

It’s not hard to see why Fincher might have been interested in making an installment in the Alien series. Ridley Scott’s Alien is a clear influence on Fincher’s artistic choices-one that in tone and visual style can be felt in every Fincher film. And the thematic elements of Alien³-the mental effects of isolation and the inflection of domestic life with horror and violence-are a regular feature in Fincher’s career.

Still, Alien³ is not a good film. Fincher had a vision for his installment in the series, focusing on a near-middle-age woman trapped in space, pushing the alien itself into the background. But as a first-time director he was not allowed the freedom to bring it to light. Instead, the movie was plagued with script re-writes and constant studio interference. The end result is a mash-up of the occasional powerful image and inspired scene in the midst of a clear overall failure.

It didn’t take long after the film’s release for David Fincher himself to write-off the movie. In 1993, he’d give a candid interview (see below) about the terrible experience he had on the film, and 10 years later his feelings on the film had not changed: “I had to work on it for two years, got fired off it three times and I had to fight for every single thing. No one hated it more than me; to this day, no one hates it more than me.” Fincher learned what would become the most important lesson of his career on Alien³ in a “trial by fire,” he called it: That the studio does not know how to make a movie, nor do they care about making a quality film. Henceforth, Fincher would be in control of every aspect of the films he made. His reputation today lives up to this claim.

Alien³ was re-cut in 2003 for the release of the DVD collection of the Alien Quadrilogy. This Assembly Cut is a significant improvement (though the film remains quite a mess), and has claimed a cult status among many fans.

**Interesting Fincher Career Note: He told BBC’s Mark Burman in 1993 that the Ridley Scott’s Alien was first time he “was aware of being told things about people and story through the art direction rather than exposition.” It’s hard to imagine a more succinct expression of influence on the early films of David Fincher, which are easily recognizable as directorial expressions of tone, lighting, and art direction as a way to tell a story in lieu of exposition.

The out of Character Awards Show Fodder

8. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
2008, written by Eric Roth

The line on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is that it is Awards Season Bait. It’s a shiny 2 hour 45 minute film starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, written by Eric Roth, the Oscar-winning writer of Forrest Gump.

This line is correct. Benjamin Button may well be the most handsome film David Fincher has ever made. But what makes a great David Fincher Film is not that it is handsomely made (they all are) but that it it contains in its handsome facade an undercurrent of anxiety and fear and violence and satire and scathing social disorder. None of this is present in Benjamin Button. Benjamin Button is just a nice-looking, well-acted, awards season film. The Fincher precision is evident in the construction of this film, but that effort is lost on the result.

Given the bizarre premise of the film, an old man is born a baby and ages backwards through life (it’s based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald story of the same name), and given that it was being directed by an artist with such a singular and unique visual and storytelling style, many were taken back by just how familiar and traditional a film Benjamin Button turned out to be. It is meticulously crafted, stunning in its design and completely unoriginal.

In one regard this line of criticism fails. Button is wizardry in the realm of special effects. Fincher’s films pre-Button used CGI liberally but were never defined by CGI. But the very concept of this project requires CGI for almost every shot in which Brad Pitt is in frame. As a visual accomplishment, the aging of Pitt’s body is stunning, and likely a major contributor to the Button’s Oscar win for Best Art Direction. If anyone doubted Fincher’s ability to use art direction as a medium for story telling, Button lays those doubts to rest.

**Interesting Fincher Career Note: The start of Fincher’s career in the film industry was not in music videos but working for George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic. He fell into the role as a 20-year old kid who got the job of a lifetime, working as a cameraman for Return of the Jedi. He later did matte photography for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The NeverEnding Story. He knows a thing or two about visual effects.

Creative Exploration

7. Panic Room
2002, written by David Koepp

Panic Room is an experiment in craft. A mother and her daughter are trapped in their human-size safe, while three intruders attempt to enter. It’s a cat-and-mouse thriller of little consequence. Which isn’t to say that it is ineffective. Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart more than provide the emotional heft to hook audiences, and the criminals on the outside, particularly Jared Leto, make for an engaging tete-a-tete.

But the real purpose of Panic Room is in its composition. One occasionally hears that Fincher’s work is all style and no substance, and if that’s true it is never more true than in Panic Room. Here it seems Fincher is just having fun. Letting his technical virtuosity run free, Fincher’s cinematographic technique in the film is that of an omniscient camera, moving freely, unbound by characters, perspective, or physics.

The seamless marriage of physical camera-work with CGI is among Fincher’s favorite technical maneuvers, one that would become subtle yet defining in Benjamin Button. In one shot, Fincher’s camera starts in an upstairs bedroom and cranes down the stairs, through the railing, through the handle of a tea-kettle, into a key-hole that denies entry before retreating all the way back upstairs.

In another, the camera parks itself in the solid space between walls, as it watches two simultaneous activities in separate spaces.

Many of the visual and direction choices in Panic Room are reminiscent of those in Fincher’s previous film Fight Club, but here they are allowed the to take center stage, as the many layers of Fight Club are dropped for what is Fincher’s most simple plot. Which is fine since plots have never been the central driving force of a Fincher story anyway.

Still, by Panic Room, some of the persistent themes of Fincher’s films have started to draw themselves to the surface. One of which is that his characters are often plagued with psychological torments and are given to fear and compulsive obsessive behavior. To make the most of this Fincher often builds his films around psychological gamesmanship. The search for and revelation of information, whether the hidden nature of truth or the unraveling of personal history or planted riddles, were all seen prior to Panic Room, but here they take on a literal sense, embodied by human beings locked away in a safe.

**Meta Theology question inspired by Fincher: Can God make a safe so secure that God himself could not open it? As the compulsive experiment of an obsessive perfectionist, Fincher sets about to create an un-crackable safe, only to set about cracking it himself.

6. The Game
1997, written by John D. Brancato, Michael Ferris

I find it hard to avoid medical terms when discussing Fincher’s direction-clinical, surgical, antiseptic. These words are used almost always as pejoratives: they indicate an obsessive quality combined with a lack of care, a distancing from emotion, talent without heart. Over-produced and overwrought are words that accompany medical modifiers. And while sometimes this is true of artists, it sells short the skill that is required in being an obsessive technical storyteller. I do not believe that Fincher’s purpose has ever been to keep his audience from feeling. It is (Benjamin Button notwithstanding) to make his audiences feel something they’d rather avoid.

Audiences want to be won over, to be charmed, to find likable men and women and accompany them in stories that move from bad things to good things. These feelings are evoked in the traditional Hollywood narrative. The next five films on this list will eschew that narrative for something much more unsettling. The emotional experience that a great David Fincher film leaves audiences with is not reconciliation or love or heroism, but isolation, anxiety and discomfort.

Which brings us to The Game.

In The Game Fincher solidified the central setting for his films: deep inside the brains of the audience. If psychological gamesmanship is present in the stories he tells-it is the only subject of The Game-it is also the desired result for the audience. Unsettling audiences is a very different goal from winning them over. Fincher is not a director interested in winning over his viewers. If that was not proven in Seven, it would be in The Game.

The Game, in this movie, is a literal game being played with the mind of Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas). He is rich, his life is organized. For a birthday present, his brother (Sean Penn) signs him up for a program run by Consumer Recreation Services. Playing the game means that Van Orton’s life falls into chaos. Little things start to go wrong, then big things. Then his life completely collapses. Is this all part of the program or has his life really been led to disaster? Is the Game destroying to rebuild the mind of the subject or leading him to his own death?

“Smart” is a word that one often hears in conjunction with The Game. It is designed like a puzzle, a thriller to be experienced and pieced back together in the end. And like many such films, the ending of The Game is highly controversial. The end of The Game is a trap, one that viewers either love or hate. But however one feels about it, it is not a comfort to experience.

**Interesting Film-to-Career Extrapolation: When Van Orton signs up for the Game, he is told by the promotional material that it will “make his life fun again.” This is one of the best jokes (there aren’t a lot of jokes) in any David Fincher film, and one that must bring a smile to Fincher in the moment. Have your life dissected, dipped in chaos, led to the precipice of death and your sanity dangling by a thread. You know, for FUN!

5. Seven
1995, written by Andrew Kevin Walker

Seven was the second film directed by Fincher but in many ways it is the first time that audiences met the David Fincher who would become Hollywood’s Studio Auteur. The film established the visual palette that remains with him 20 years later. It also introduced many of the most significant thematic concerns of the stories he tells: misanthropy and isolation, psychological games, compulsiveness and obsession, the impulse for and seductive horrors of human violence, serial killers, and the search for absent information (to name a few). His settings are frequently influenced by the detective and noir stylings of the past, and his color palette and use of lighting and shadows matches that well. Both are present-if not too much so-in Seven.

Seven also revealed the clinical manner in which Fincher would direct his films, and the deliberate formal decision-making process that would define him going forward. His reputation as a master of technical achievement comes from this impulse: to obsessive over every frame, every take, until he saw what leaves audiences susceptible to unexpected trauma.

In Seven this plays out as a study in evil. Two detectives solving a puzzle perpetuated by a murderous unknown villain. The Los Angeles of Seven is one of constant rain. The detectives use flashlights in the daytime in crime scenes of such horror they can scarcely be believed. They read Dante and visit libraries as they are toyed with by a character who would be a monster in a genre film but here is just a man.

While Seven is an effective detective neo-noir thriller, it’s clear that the film was directed by an artist who was still finding his footing. Re-watching Seven today one finds a director relying on tone and feeling through visual stylization, rather than pulling deeper into those elements to draw out even more complexity than is allowed in his “evil is evil” conclusion. This year, in an interview with Playboy, Fincher said that were he to direct the film today he would “try to have a lot more fun.”

**Interesting Fincher Career Note: Seven marks two important firsts in Fincher’s career. It is the first serial-killer/detective movie that Fincher made, something that has become synonymous with the director (Fincher said that no one can write a script about a serial killer without it being sent to him for a read. “I don’t have a choice,” he said). Seven is also the first time the director worked with Brad Pitt. In the same interview, Fincher said he offers everything to Pitt, “not because I’m pathetic but because he’s good for so many things.”

The Top Tier

4.Social Network
2010, written by Aaron Sorkin

“You’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. And I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.”

This is what Rooney Mara says to Jesse Eisenberg in the opening scene of The Social Network. Mark Zuckerburg is dumped by his girlfriend, and to get back at her, he creates Facebook. The line is delivered in a rapid-fire scene, establishing what we knew going in to the film: Aaron Sorkin wrote this script.

One sticking point that sometimes arises in conversations about David Fincher is the fact that he is not a Writer-Director. He is “only” a director, be it one who obsessively controls every aspect of the film-making process. When we talk about the great auteurs of cinema, we often consider the men (they are usually men) who write their own films. Not only does Fincher not write his movies, but he does not have a “partner” with whom he works. Each Fincher film has been written by a different screenwriter.

What this criticism speaks to, in my mind, is the difficulty that comes with pinning down what it means to define a “David Fincher Movie”. When I asked a friend of mine what his favorite David Fincher film was, he said, “The Social Network. It’s the least Fincher-esque, but his best.” I think Fincher-esque is what I’ve been trying to pin down in this list, exploring the body of Fincher’s work and making thematic and artistic connections. But one thing that this project has made clear is that, by not writing, by working in adaptations and stories created by others, Fincher has made Fincher-esque very hard to pin down. This is never more clear than with The Social Network.

Aaron Sorkin has his own -esque to deal with. He writes a very certain type of dialogue, and when you ask anyone about Sorkin, it is the Sorkin-esque dialogue that comes to mind. No other Fincher film feels like The Social Network, because no other one was written by Aaron Sorkin. Is this a testament to David Fincher? Or a break from what qualities we might call Fincher-esque? Probably both.

There’s no murder, no mayhem or chaos of violence in The Social Network. Perhaps that’s what my friend meant about this film not being Fincher-esque. But the story is one of compulsion and obsession. Of the moral consequences of our decisions and the chaos that accompanies living our daily lives. That the central character is a billionaire 25-year-old who also is one of the world’s most famous people adds a taste of irony and humor-rare qualities in Fincher’s work. I read somewhere that Fincher described himself as “not an easy person to like,” and there’s an easy connection to make here with the movie version of Zuckerburg. Few people in The Social Network are easy to like, and even in this story of rich college kids and their grudges, Fincher complicates the notion of good guys and bad guys as he so easily can.

The Social Network builds from the CGI work Fincher used in Button. One of the most satisfying elements of The Social Network comes from watching Armie Hammer play both of the Winklevoss twins. The decision to cast one actor in both roles was not, strictly speaking, necessary, and it surely added difficulty to the shoot. But the rewards, for many probably unnoticed, are palpable.

I would be remiss not to mention a crucial addition to the Fincher team that began with The Social Network, and that is Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor coming on to score the film. Music has always been an integral piece of Fincher-the interactive nature of sound and score in his films is another quality that notes his capacity as a craftsman-but it took on new heights with Reznor and Ross. The two won an Oscar for their work here, and have worked on all of Fincher’s film since.

**Interesting Fincher Career Note: One point that Fincher considers when choosing scripts to direct is what they say about his brand. Or rather, how they cut against branding. He told FincherFanatic (pdf): “I work hard to fight against whatever my brand is. I would like my brand to stand for ‘works really hard’, ‘tries to make it as good as he possibly can’. If the brand is, ‘it’s gonna be dark and grainy,’ I have no interest in that. It’s just too reductive. It’s just too stupid.”

3. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
2011, written by Steven Zaillian

The Swedish title of Stieg Larson’s novel is not The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo but rather Men Who Hate Women. While the original title may have less romance, it is without question more appropriate. This is a story that is hard. It is about sexual violence, rape, revenge, and the search for both facts and truth (not the same, of course) in a decades old family tragedy. The very popular novels had previously been adapted into a trilogy of films in Sweden, and the appetite for an American remake of the story was low, if non-existent. And yet, in the oeuvre of David Fincher, it is his most electrifying film since Fight Club.

The film could hardly be more perfectly executed. There are only so many times that one can write about Fincher’s execution and technical prowess. But I can think of almost no film in recent years (perhaps The Master, but I found that less satisfying) which is more restrained in its individual component parts, but whose parts add up to so much more than they should. Dragon Tattoo is the third pairing of Fincher with cinematographer Jeff Cronenworth (who also shot Gone Girl) and the duo reach a new level here for Fincher’s work.

The editing, the sound-design, the score from Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor, it is all-I’m trying not to be hyperbolic-purposed, intentional, perfect. For those interested, I recommend critic Jim Emerson on the sound-editing and photography, hwo claims that “Fincher is one of the most precise filmmakers (some would call him obsessively finicky) since Kubrick.”

Kubrick comparisons abound in Fincher criticism, for very good reason.

Rather than search for superlatives on the direction of Dragon Tattoo, I’d rather like to stop and mention Rooney Mara. Rooney Mara’s performance as Lisbeth Salander is the best in any David Fincher film. This may be in part because Salander, a loner with psychological issues and a traumatic past, is suited well to the Fincher aesthetic. But it is also because Rooney Mara contains so much power in her body and language. She is photographed and presented in such a way as to demand the viewers eye whenever she is on-screen, and Mara rewards audiences by delivering a Brando-like performance, unflinchingly raw and commanding. It is my favorite performance of the decade, and one you should see.

The subject matter in this picture is the darkest since Seven, an investigation of evil as evil. And like Seven, it features two protagonists searching for the details of history in order to find a murderous, yet distinctly human, villain. Some found the film to be so emotionally disconnected as to be nearly impenetrable, but this reading misses the entire value of the project. It is, rather, a Kubrick-ian construction: looking at something un-explainable and preserving it intact while making it approachable without danger.

As a Hollywood Movie this is as brutal as it gets. Dragon Tattoo is like an ice-sculpture. Fragile, icy, and beautiful.

**Interesting Fincher Career Note: David Fincher’s reputation for shooting multiple takes is the stuff of Hollywood Legend. Again, in this way he is very like Stanley Kubrick: both maintain reputations for requiring dozens of retakes, demanding perfection from actors with a strategy that many find unworkable. Word is he shot an average of 50 takes per scene for Gone Girl. If anyone has room to complain, it is Rooney Mara and Jesse Eisenberg, who had to re-shoot their opening 8-page scene in Social Network “about 99 times.” Luckily Mara was not turned off by Fincher and returned as Lisbeth Salander.

2. Zodiac
2007, written by James Vanderbilt

David Fincher has never been shy in his interviews. He is a Hollywood director who works in the studio system, but he has found success enough that he only makes films he wants to make, and he maintains total control over the work he undertakes. In 2011, Fincher made a candid remark about how he considers his work.

Fincher divides his work between “movies” and “films”—by his definition, a movie is overtly commercial, engineered for the sole pleasure of the audience. A film is conceived for the public and filmmakers: It is more audacious, more daring. By his reckoning, Fight Club and, especially, Zodiac (neither of which were box office successes) are films.

This delineation is quite strict and I think undervalues the richness of some of Fincher’s work (in researching this piece it has become clear that no one is more critical of David Fincher’s work than he). But it’s worth noting that the two films he names as “films” are the two that top this countdown. Zodiac is a “serious movie” about “serious subject matter.” It is a long, slow, detailed procedural and murder mystery that has very little movement and yet grips audiences from the start.

What separates Zodiac from the other serial-killer and noir detective stories in Fincher’s catalog is that there is no dramatic conclusion or revelation. No John Doe from Seven appears to complicate the nature of humanity and evil. No twists, no psychological games unfold. The film maintains one of Fincher’s chief interests-the physical, obsessive search for facts and truth-and in the end, only the protagonists is rewarded for his efforts.

Zodiac has been called David Fincher’s “passion project” and watching it, one certainly gets the feeling that it is the film that he labored over, and obsessed over, more than any other. He painstakingly recreated each murder scene through the police reports and newspaper clippings from the time, and every detail in every frame speaks to the labor involved. This is fitting given that the subject of the film is itself obsession. An obsessive killer, and obsessed man dedicated to researching and solving the mystery of the Zodiac Killer. That obsession, of David Fincher the director and the Zodiac Killer and Jake Gyllenhaal’s character make Zodiac a truly unique and special film.

Even if making it was a bit of a nightmare . Talking about Zodiac in 2007, Jake Gyllenhaal mentioned the difficulty he had working with Fincher, especially regarding the number of takes the director required. Fincher told the NY Times that the reason he uses so many takes when filming his movies is to remove all earnestness from his actors’ performances. “I hate earnestness in performance,” he said. In the same interview, Robert Downey Jr. was asked about this process. He said, “I think I’m a perfect person to work for him, because I understand gulags.” Downey Jr. added, “Ultimately film-making is a director’s medium.”

**Interesting Fincher Career Note: In interview with Empire in 2008, Fincher listed his favorite movies. The list is long and filled with classics. Film, like all art, is a conversation between art objects. Fincher’s desire to avoid a brand is obvious not only in his own work, but those he considers his influences.

1. Fight Club
1999, written by Jim Uhls

Here is how Roger Ebert described Fight Club: “Cheerfully fascist…The sex movie Hollywood has been moving toward for years, in which eroticism between the sexes is replaced by all-guy locker-room fights.”

In the 15 years since its release, Fight Club has become all things to all people. It is a symbol of the corrupting power of Hollywood. It is a testament to the machismo and misogyny of modern male psyche. It is a scathing rebuke of capitalism. A black-comedy tearing down everything it pretends to be built on. A deeply philosophical Marxist story about the perils of consumerism. Arm-chair philosophizing full of freshman-level platitudes. Maschostic and sick. Powerful and empowering.

I would say, to these descriptions: You’re right. Part of what makes Fight Club Fincher’s best film is the complicated, layered nature of its construction.

And yet we try always to boil things down. So, here’s what I think Fight Club is: a fairy-tale romance about a man who is willing to destroy the world in the name of love. When I think of stories that are analogs to FIght Club I think of movies like Pan’s Labyrinth, or The Princess Bride, or the Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Adult fairy-tales, built on humor but designed to cut the legs out of the world’s they inhabit.

At the end of the day, when all the mayhem concludes, the fights are over and the social-commentary ends and the plot-twists are revealed, Fight Club is, miraculously, a Hollywood Love Story. Made by a Hollywood Director, with Hollywood Stars. It is (without question) the most romantic film Fincher has ever made.

But let’s walk through it a little, because a film this rich, and yet as easily discarded as Fight Club has been, deserves it.

Fight Club is a film about embracing masculinity, especially through violence.

It is also a scathing critique of the modern macho man,

Like Seven and The Game, it is a psychological thriller with a twist-ending.

But one that uses that structure to higher purpose.

It is a comedy, and it is a very funny one.

It pretends at philosophical depth,

And it mocks itself for doing so.

It also has actual emotional resonance,

prods viewers in ways that indict our pleasures,

And goes out of its way to make viewers uncomfortable

If Fincher is a film-maker who works hard to maintain a malleable identity, Fight Club is his crowning achievement. All of the thematic elements of the Fincher artistic vision are present in Fight Club, but so too is the heart and emotional interaction that so many audiences long for in his work. When Marla arrives in the brain of Jack as his spirit animal, we can not only feel the humor of her presence in the ice-cave (note: ice and snow are everywhere in Fincher), but also the emotional connectivity of the characters. Their bickering and fighting comes the closest Fincher ever has to a marriage, and that the two end the film hand in hand as the world around them literally collapses, we must stretch our ability to believe that the Kubrickian sculptor of Dragon Tattoo and The Game has been able to reach into the madness and at last find for his conclusion, love.

The Stake Podcast Episode 7: Where’s the Soul of David Fincher?

October 1, 2025 by thestakemag Leave a Comment

In advance of David Fincher’s Gone Girl, the Stake Podcast considers the career of David Fincher. Is he a great director? A hired gun? A technical wonder with little underneath? Which all precludes the real question of Whither David Fincher’s Soul?

After the break, the topic is SPOILERS. Have audiences become too obsessed with “what happens next”? Should we really put so much weight on unknown endings and plot twists?

Plus our best and worst of the week.

Listen to Episode 7 on Libsyn, or subscribe to The Stake Podcast on iTunes.

Follow The Stake on Twitter and Facebook

Save Me: My Magnolia Obsession

August 26, 2025 by Andrew DeYoung 1 Comment

You look like a perfect fit
for a girl in need of a tourniquet.
But can you save me?
—Aimee Mann, “Save Me”

Magnolia was my favorite movie of all time before I’d ever even seen it. I don’t know why.

I mean, I can tell you why I love the movie itself—I could write entire volumes about individual characters, favorite scenes, lines of dialogue and shots that still have the capacity to ruin me, fifteen years later. But what I can’t tell you is why, beforehand, I decided that a movie I’d never seen by a filmmaker whose name I didn’t yet know would be my thing, an inseparable part of my identity, the cryptic, incantatory title—“Magnolia”—a sort of talisman I’d use to define myself to the outside world for years to come.

I don’t know why there was so much at stake for me in that first viewing. There just was.

I knew next to nothing about Magnolia going into it, except what I’d been able to glean from the trailer. The trailer doesn’t do a very good job of sketching the film’s famously unwieldy plot—how could it? Instead, it merely feints at the dizzying interconnectedness of the narrative by summoning the characters one by one and having them speak into the camera—“My name is Stanley Spector,” “My name is Quiz Kid Donnie Smith,” “My name is Frank T.J. Mackey,” etc.—while Ricky Jay briefly sketches their relationships to one another in voiceover. The whole thing is set to one of the jauntier of the Aimee Mann songs on the soundtrack, and gives the false impression that the movie is some sort of star-studded dramedy. But then the tone abruptly shifts, the music changing to something with a bit more gravitas, suggesting that the whole mess might come together and culminate in some kind of epiphany, some moment of near-spiritual transcendence.

It wasn’t a very good trailer. But it gave me what I needed. I had an affinity, back then, for narratives of interweaving, for big stories made of small connections. My love for such stories was, at that point, mostly theoretical: I was a teenager, and I still hadn’t experienced much of what the world of film or literature had to offer. But I liked the idea of people trapped in their individual subjectivities, their petty dramas, unaware that they were caught up in something bigger, something of grander significance. To read or watch such a story, I thought, would be an almost religious experience—proof of some design in what so often seemed to be a fragmented world. And that, I thought, is what Magnolia would offer me: a religious experience, proof of some design in my own fragmentary, unsatisfying existence.

There was also the small matter of what was going on in my life at the time. The summer before my senior year of high school, I’d moved with my family from the small town where I’d grown up to another, larger town. What happened next I find difficult to describe, except to say that I simply checked out of life. In my hometown I’d had friends and was modestly popular at school in my own nerdish circles; but in the new place I for some reason decided to empty myself out, to make myself nothing, and to matter to no one—at least until the year was over and I could escape to college. At the same time as I was deleting myself from life, I was downloading myself into art, pouring books and movies into the place inside myself that I’d hollowed out, making a monk’s cell of stories and never coming out. And Magnolia was one of the first stops on this self-denying pilgrimage to the shrines of high art.

Here, then, was another reason why I might have latched on to Magnolia so feverishly: at the time, I was looking for something new to pour myself into, something new to be. I thought Magnolia might be that something, and it was. It became more than a movie to me—it became an identity, a way of being. Magnolia became a kind of cocoon: the outer shell I put on to shield myself from the world, the armor I wore into the next phase of my life.

Not that that first viewing went off completely without a hitch, mind you.

To begin with, I never saw Magnolia in the theater. There was no movie theater in my hometown, and the theaters in the middle-sized Midwestern cities nearby were not the kind that would show independent films, even for a weekend. Besides, I was 16 when Magnolia came out, and the ticket-takers where I grew up tended to be scrupulous about carding for R-rated movies. So I had to wait until 2000, when I was in the new place, to watch Magnolia—on rented VHS, in my darkened bedroom in the basement of my parents’ new house. My first viewing would not be a communal experience, but a private communion.

Also: Magnolia was not exactly what I’d so foolishly expected it would be. I’d hoped for a story of interconnections and intersections that built to some big and satisfying climax. That’s not what Magnolia was—though it seemed to be, for a while. The film’s justly famous prologue, for instance, quickly sketches three stories of coincidence: a robbery in which the names of the assailants match the town in which the crime took place; a scuba diver accidentally deposited in a tree by a pilot who assaulted him just days prior; and a failed suicide that becomes an accidental filicide. Paul Thomas Anderson pulls out his entire bag of cinematic tricks to convey the shock of these coincidences to the audience. The first segment visually evokes a silent film; the other two are a dazzling progression of whip-pans, jump cuts, and freeze frames. At one point, the Ricky Jay narrator is implied to pull out a piece of chalk and actually sketch on the screen, explaining the more complicated mechanics of one of the stories.

The effect of this prologue on me, that first time, would be hard to overstate. I’d never seen anything like this before. The prologue was dizzying, and exciting—and I settled in for the movie’s three-hour runtime confident that I was in good hands, that this tapestry of disparate lives would be woven together in some kind of decisive way.

But as the movie drew to a close, it gradually became apparent that no such culmination was on offer. There was no decisive climax, no epiphany. I’d expected to be blown away by Magnolia; instead, I was merely perplexed by it. I went to bed that night confused—but I didn’t write the movie off. It had lodged somewhere in my brain, like a piece of grit stuck in my eye that I wanted to blink away, but couldn’t. I lay in bed and didn’t sleep. I simply thought about the movie—turning it over and over again in my brain, trying to find some way into its mysteries.

Then, sometime during the night, I sat up. It must have been two or three in the morning, but I was wide awake. Somehow, the dangling threads of the film had come together in my mind in my state of half-sleep. I don’t know exactly what my epiphany was. I can no longer recall the nature of the sudden realization that made me get up in the wee hours of morning. What I do know is this: I rewound the tape and watched Magnolia—all three-plus hours of it—again. As the credits rolled, the light of dawn began to creep its fingers through my bedroom window.

I was hooked. Obsessed. Magnolia had me.

I couldn’t see it at the time, but there was an irony in my using Magnolia as a kind of armor, a mask I showed to the world in place of my actual self—because the film itself is, to some extent, a testament to the dangers of armoring oneself against the world in this way, of constructing masks to shield oneself from real human connection.

I’m thinking, for instance, of Frank T.J. Mackey, the motivational speaker and pickup artist who teaches other men how to manipulate women to attend to their every sexual need. He’s played by Tom Cruise, an inspired bit of casting on Anderson’s part, as every bit of the actor’s public persona becomes part of the armor that Mackey presents to the world: his physique, his sex appeal, his smarmy charisma, his almost comically inflated self-regard, his hair, his clothes. Mackey’s poisonous misogyny, his twisted view of sex and power, is a thin mask lying atop a sea of psychic torment; when the mask breaks down at his father’s deathbed, Frank is reduced to a helpless ball of rage and fear and naked vulnerability. “Don’t die, you fucking asshole!” he screams—like an angry, desperate child.

Or there’s Linda Partridge (Julianne Moore), whose self-hatred and self-flagellating devotion to her dying husband Earl have themselves become a kind of mask, an outer shell that shields her and protects her from true vulnerability, true love. Linda spends most of the film in near-hysteria, a jumble of nervous tics and repeated phrases that prevent those around her from truly seeing her. Even her big blockbuster emotional moment somewhere in the middle of the film—in which Linda shames a pharmacist for the suspicion with which he treats her when she goes to pick up morphine for her dying husband, anti-depressants for herself—is not an exposure but an evasion: in her righteous anger, she’s actually hiding the fact that the pharmacist’s concerns about her are correct. She’s really suicidal. But she leaves the pharmacy with her mask intact, her real self unexposed.

There’s also Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall), walking proof that the masks people create for themselves hide not just vulnerability, but monstrosity, too. Host to a long-running game show, Jimmy’s mask is his professional persona—jocular, respected, fatherly—but what lies beneath is much more sinister: narcissistic manipulation, high-functioning alcoholism, and sexual predation. Even his attempts to reach out to others are manipulative: a confession to his assistant Mary, with whom I suspect Jimmy once had an affair, that he’s dying of cancer, seems designed to wound her, to satisfy his own ego by leaving her bereft. Later, when Jimmy’s wife grills him about why their daughter Claudia won’t talk to him, he can only manage to half-confess to sexually abusing her years earlier. In this scene, the title of the game show he hosts, “What Do Kids Know?”, turns out to be bitterly ironic—Claudia, Jimmy’s daughter, seems to know exactly what’s going on, whereas he’s the one in denial. (“But I don’t know what I’ve done!” Jimmy pleads as his wife walks out on him.)

The characters in Magnolia are connected whether they know it or not—but they are also utterly alone, cut off from everyone and everything around them. And the film’s best moments come when people’s armor, their self-constructed masks, come down for long enough to make a real connection.

Take Jim (John C. Reilly) and Claudia (Melora Walters), for instance. The extent of Jimmy’s crimes against Claudia is never completely clear—but judging by her hysterical panic when he comes uninvited to her apartment one morning, what he did to her must have been pretty traumatic, a betrayal that tore her life in two. To move on and really live, she desperately needs to begin dealing with her father’s betrayal; that, and ditch the cocaine. But Jim, the cop who might be Claudia’s salvation, her best hope for a real human connection, needs to drop his mask too: his mask of self-righteousness, of false competence. Only through the humiliation of losing his gun can he find his way to his own kind of salvation: coming clean to Claudia about the loneliness, the fear, the shame and smallness that he feels every day in his job.

A great deal of this was lost on me at the time. I was seventeen. What the hell did I know about about pain, about trauma, about abuse, about vulnerability? As a viewer, I could appreciate and admire the raw, almost embarrassing nakedness of Jim and Claudia’s need for each other, could understand Quiz Kid Donny Smith’s desperate plea for connection (“My name is Quiz Kid Donny Smith and I have lots of love to give”) and Stanley Spector’s declaration of need to his subtly abusive father (“Dad, you need to be nicer to me”). But I couldn’t emulate any of it.

I couldn’t let my own mask slip.

All I could do, at the time, was focus on what seems in retrospect to be the least important thing: the fact that I loved Magnolia, and that my friends (my old friends, that is; in the new place I had no friends) didn’t.

We kept in touch, my friends and I, and I’d go back home to visit them occasionally—but things weren’t the same. A gulf had opened up between us. I still liked them, but our lives had become separate things: I couldn’t convey to them the stultifying loneliness that had become my reality, nor could I fully understand the thousand small daily dramas that their lives without me consisted of. But my friends were, nonetheless, on a journey similar to the one that I was on: discovering film as something more than entertainment. The years of 1999 and 2000 were important ones for the movie-watchers of my generation. It’s when we found out that movies could be art.

But the movies they loved were different than the ones I loved, and for some reason I came to think that this emblematized the distance that had grown between us, the ways that we’d grown different in just a short time: I loved Magnolia, while they gravitated more to other 1999 titles like American Beauty and Fight Club. I’d seen both and liked them well enough, but compared to Magnolia both films seemed too easy, too pleasant. American Beauty had its broad social critique and its obsession with bags floating in the wind; Fight Club had its armchair philosophizing and hamfisted message about a crisis of masculinity in the modern world; and both felt a little too on-the-nose for me, a little too obvious. Whereas Magnolia, I thought, was a film that rose to the level of art by virtue of its refusal to announce its intention to be art, a difficult, unwieldy work that didn’t attempt to beguile its audience or even seem to care that there was an audience there at all.

Writing all this down for the first time, I’m pained to think back and imagine what an asshole I was. But it’s all true; I really thought this stuff. This was the mask I wore—the mask that Magnolia had become for me. Looking back, I see in this period of my life the source of some qualities that would persist in my personality long after my obsession with Magnolia had waned: reflexive contrarianism, a carefully cultivated air of superiority, and an affinity for difficult works of art that didn’t connect me with the world, but (I thought) set me off from it.

This attitude would later lead me to other, perhaps better films. My affinity for stories of interconnection would eventually take me to Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy, and Robert Altman’s Nashville—all films I think I love more than Magnolia. I’d also soon sample the films of John Cassavetes and discover an even more uncompromising exploration of the human persona as an awkward contraption built of maddening verbal tics, of the face as a problematic site of emotional nakedness and emotional masking.

But all along, on some level, I’d be seeking what I sought first, at the age of seventeen, in Magnolia: a place to be alone, a dark monk’s cell of my own making.

I was a fool. Magnolia didn’t give a shit about me—and by my fifteenth or sixteenth viewing, I began to understand that the thing I’d chosen to serve as a placeholder for my identity wasn’t quite as unassailable as I’d thought. I couldn’t allow myself to see it at first, but Magnolia is deeply, irreparably flawed. Flawed in an interesting way, maybe—but still, flawed.

Of the film’s flaws, the most serious is probably its handling of the Marcy/Worm/Dixon storyline. Magnolia begins, after the prologue, with Jim, the cop, responding to a report of a disturbance. He comes into the apartment of a belligerent woman named Marcy, and soon discovers a dead man in her closet. We learn later that the man is the father of Marcy’s son, nicknamed Worm; there’s also a young rapper hanging around named Dixon, presumably Worm’s son and Marcy’s grandson. But who killed the man in the closet? Was it Marcy, or Worm?

We never learn what happened—a fact I scarcely noticed in my first dozen viewings, since there’s so much else going on in Magnolia. A while later, though, I read Paul Thomas Anderson’s shooting script and discovered two scenes that didn’t make the final cut: one in which Marcy confesses (perhaps falsely?) to the murder, and another in which Worm and Dixon encounter Stanley after he’s run away in shame from his humiliating failure at the game show.

None of this is in the movie, and actor Orlando Jones, who was cast as Worm and appears in the credits, never appears. His plotline remains a frustrating loose end: continuing to intersect in interesting ways with other characters’ stories, but never getting a satisfying conclusion itself. So that’s a flaw.

Also, maybe: the frogs?

The frogs. I’m honestly not sure, all these years later, which list to put them in: Magnolia’s strengths, or its weaknesses. Perhaps neither. Perhaps both.

A popular take on plot structure holds that, to dissect a narrative, you should take the story beats, write them down on a piece of paper, and then insert phrases between each indicating the chain of causation between one event and another. If you end up with words like “but” and “therefore” between each plot point, your story is good—but if the phrase that pops up between each story beat is “and then,” you’re fucked.

By this measure, Magnolia fails. Any plot summary of the film will always end with, “And then frogs fell from the sky, and then the movie ended.”

The problem is that the frogs simply don’t function dramatically. They don’t do anything in the story. Sure, one of them hits Quiz Kid Donnie Smith in the face, hurling him to the ground and messing up his teeth, which will probably require him to get the braces he decided he didn’t want after all. (Irony!) And yes, a frog prevents Jimmy Gator from killing himself, denying this predator even the solace of suicide in favor of a much more painful death.

But for the most part the frogs are purely symbolic. The question is: a symbol of what?

For a long time, I thought that the frogs had something to do with God. But I abandoned that reading a long time ago. It’s too simplistic.

Now, the best I can do is to say that the frogs are emblematic of some big Other against which all human lives must seem paltry—be it fate, or nature, or chance, or random misfortune. “This is a thing that happens,” Stanley says—and in a world where frogs fall from the sky, a world of cancer and pain and abuse and trauma, what else can we do with our numbered days but try our best to simply survive, and love, and forgive, if we can?

Italo Calvino says that a “classic” is a story that hasn’t finished saying what it has to say to its audience—and by that measure, Magnolia is a personal classic of mine, because it still hasn’t finished speaking to me. I rewatched it recently, for the first time in probably a decade, and found myself slipping easily into the old rhythms, responding once again to the film’s odd, off-kilter voice.

The prologue is still exhilarating. The kids—Claudia, and Stanley, and Donnie, oh Donnie—still break my heart. I still hate the parents, Jimmy and Stanley’s dad. Frank T.J. Mackey still provokes repulsion, though he’s funnier than I remembered. Jim Kurring I love, Phil Parma—played by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman—I love, I love, I love. Julianne Moore’s scene in the pharmacy still gets me, as does Jim and Claudia’s flirtation to the strains of Bizet, and their awkward first date and kiss. The music of Aimee Mann—“Wise Up” and “Save Me”—is, as always, beyond reproach. And the frogs still retain their power to perplex.

But most of all, I watch Magnolia and think about the misguided, obsessed teenager I once was. I think about masks, I think about armor. I think about something that a wise person once told me: that life is a long process of coming out of the closet, that everyone has a false identity they must shed, snake-like, before they can truly live—but that you never come out into the light of day, only into another closet. The self we become after we shed the mask is itself a mask that must one day be shed.

And so it goes, and so it goes, and the book says we may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.

And I wonder: which is the truer, better self, the teenager who foolishly looked to a movie to define him, or the person I am today? I watch Magnolia and see the shards of a mask I once wore: but what mask might I be wearing now? What false selves have I yet to discard in my journey to become a person?

It’s a depressing thought, this notion that there may be no true self, only the outer shell we’ve constructed to show to the world.

But surely, in the time it takes to shed one mask and put on another, there must be a moment. A brief, blessed moment, when the real person can be glimpsed, if only fleetingly. When she lifts her eyes and looks into the camera.

And smiles.

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What’s Chuck Palahniuk’s deal?

August 7, 2025 by Andrew DeYoung 1 Comment

Something strange happened last week on Chuck Palahniuk’s Tumblr. It’s unclear to me if the blog is run by fans of the Fight Club novelist, or by the novelist himself—but what is certain is that Palahniuk did at least stop by recently to answer some fan questions to promote the release of a new novel in October.

That’s when this strange exchange happened, in which Palahniuk appeared to argue that men are—brace yourself—an underrepresented and underserved demographic in the literary world. The post has since been deleted, but Internet, ever reliable, has kindly provided me with a screenshot.

As Flavorwire notes, there’s a lot that’s odd about this exchange, starting with the titles that Palahniuk cites to support his argument that the lit scene is dominated by women. I mean, The Color Purple and The Joy Luck Club? He couldn’t come up with any more recent examples? When’s the last time Palahniuk actually read a book by a woman?

Also, and perhaps most obviously, “the dearth of novels that explore male issues” is a phrase that’s laughable on its face. Palahniuk clarifies later that he’s talking about “books depicting social models for men”—which, I don’t know, giving him the benefit of the doubt or something, maybe he’s saying that the picture of masculinity we get in most contemporary lit is antisocial, or something? Which is defensible, I guess, given the prominence of the male antihero in Western lit—though I can think of half a dozen titles right off the top of my head that explore male relationships. I mean, the Bechdel test exists for a reason, right? There aren’t a whole lot of novels in which men don’t interact with other men.

Now, I’m not big on the “someone said something dumb on the Internet!” school of criticism, but when I read this from Palahniuk, it made sense to me. I’ve never been a big fan—I’ve read maybe two of the novels, and have of course seen David Fincher’s film adaptation of Fight Club. But I’ve always detected a whiff of something a little crypto-misogynist, crypto-fascist, crypto-whateverist about his stories. And so, when I read this post on Tumblr, my first thought was: “Oh, of course that’s what he thinks.”

Fight Club, for instance, begins as a lamentation of the death of hyper-violent masculinity in the modern world, before maybe kinda implying that it was a critique of that thing all along. (Except maybe not.) Meanwhile, looking though the books I’ve read, I come across this little gem in Choke:

I mean, I’m just tired of being wrong all the time just because I’m a guy. I mean how many times can everybody tell you that you’re the oppressive, prejudiced enemy before you give up and become the enemy.

I mean a male, chauvinist pig isn’t born, he’s made, and more and more of them are being made by women.

In the past, the author and his fans could defend this stuff with protests that whatever nastiness he served up in his books was offered in the spirit of critique. Now, I think we’ve got pretty good evidence to the contrary: that Palahniuk actually believes a lot of this stuff.

Given the depth of his fandom—especially how beloved Fight Club continues to be in some quarters—that’s a little disturbing.

Darkhorse Comics, Chuck Palahniuk releasing Fight Club 2

July 21, 2025 by Christopher ZF Leave a Comment

Chuck Palahniuk wrote his novel Fight Club in 1996. Three years later, David Fincher adapted the story to the big-screen. Next year, Tyler Durden will return in Fight Club 2, care of Dark Horse Comics. It will be written by Palahniuk and illustrated by Cameron Stewart.

According to the USA Today, Fight Club 2 will pick up 10 years after the end of the original. Project Mayhem will return, as well as Tyler Durden and a bit of origin-story on his creation. But the plot will focus on the unnamed protagonist’s marriage to Marla Singer, and their a 9-year old son, Junior.

Yes, married. Perhaps the IKEA nesting instinct has taken over?

Father’s are central to the story of the original, and the sequel will return to father’s and their grand failures:

The original book was “such a tirade against fathers — everything I had thought my father had not done combined with everything my peers were griping about their fathers,” says Palahniuk, 52. “Now to find myself at the age that my father was when I was trashing him made me want to revisit it from the father’s perspective and see if things were any better and why it repeats like that.”

This isn’t the first time Palahniuk has returned to characters of his past. That Marla and the man have gotten married and had a kid that they are free to ruin like their own parents did to them seems kind of, I don’t know, obvious. And comments like this from Stewart raise real concerns: “It’s as much a meta-fictional comment on the cultural response to Fight Club as it is a sequel.” I’m never crazy about being told a story is “meta-fictional commentary” as part of the press a year in advance of the story’s release.

But it’ll probably come together in the end because these are great fucking characters.

Given the beloved status of Fight Club among many of my generation (count me among those who had our mind’s blown by the film and am now a father myself), I predict there will be no shortage of anticipation for a continuation.

The 10-issue series will debut April 2015.