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ReFocus: The American Directors Series

ReFocus: The Films of David Fincher

Edited by Keith Clavin

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£95.00

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Published 31 January 2027

About this book

Demonstrates how film can function as a psychedelic medium that conceives the unconscious beyond the individual psyche as collective and cosmic

  • Gives an elaborate overview of Stanislav Grof’s levels of the unconscious based on the experiences from fifty years of research on therapeutic use of LSD and holotropic breathwork
  • Suggests in concrete ways how the unconscious and cinema are related in ways that go beyond the individual psyche as collective and cosmic
  • Presents a range of stories from films and from actual trip reports to give examples of non-ordinary perception

This book offers a comprehensive critical study of David Fincher as one of the defining cinematic auteurs of the digital age. Rather than treating his films as stylistically cold or merely technical exercises in control, the study argues that Fincher’s exacting compositions, obsessive attention to detail and embrace of digital technology operate as a deeply rhetorical mode of storytelling. Across his features, commercials and music videos, Fincher repeatedly stages worlds structured by systems: bureaucratic, technological, corporate and patriarchal. His characters struggle within these systems, seeking authorship, agency or escape. By reading his visual style alongside his recurring themes of surveillance, labor, masculinity and fractured authority, the book positions Fincher not simply as a master craftsman, but as a filmmaker whose aesthetic rigor reveals the anxieties of late-stage capitalism and digital modernity. Drawing on close textual analysis and production history, the book positions Fincher as a key figure in late-20th- and early-21st-century cinema, where authorship is inseparable from industrial constraint.

Reviews

David Fincher is perhaps the greatest American director of our times but he has not yet been the subject of a book that matches the quality and diversity of his work. With ReFocus: The Films of David Fincher, we now have that book. Highlighting the importance of Fincher's music videos, television and streaming shows, not to mention his films, this book sets a new standard for Fincher studies. As uncompromising as Se7ven, as tough as Fight Club, as mysterious as Zodiac and as compelling as The Killer, this collection is a must-read for anybody with an interest in twenty-first century Hollywood.
Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Film and Television Directorial Work by David Fincher

List of Figures

Introduction
Keith Clavin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Part I. Fincher and the Small Screen

1. “David Fincher’s Music Videos”
Mathias Bonde Korsgaard, Aarhus University

2. “Profiling Seriality: Mindhunter and the Televisual Auteur”
Gillian H. Harkins, University of Washington, Seattle

3. “Let Conscience Be Your Guide”: Ethics, Narrative, and Influence in “Bad Travelling”
Tom Ue, Cape Breton University

4. “Paranoia and the Television in the The Game and Zodiac”
Graig Uhlin, Oklahoma State University

Part II. The First Feature: Alien3

5. “Reframing the Abject in Alien3: Contaminated Spaces, Institutions and the Bodily Turn”
Fran Pheasant-Kelly, University of Wolverhampton

6. “Fincher Calling: The Existential Drama of Alien3”
Daniel Conway, Texas A&M University

Part III. Technology and Culture

7. “Control Freak: Dimensions of the Digital Auteur in Zodiac & Benjamin Button”
Zachary Sheldon & Max Romanowski, Baylor University

8. “Fincher’s Open House: Metacinema and the Image of the Director in Panic Room”
Mike Miley, Metairie Park Country Day School

9. “Investigating Objects and Cameras in The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, & Gone Girl”
Travis R. Merchant-Knudsen, North Carolina State University


10. “The Failures of Journalism and Media (Un)Certainty after 9/11 in Zodiac”
Nicholas Orlando, University of Florida

11. “Adopting the Father: Gothic Relations in Fight Club and Mank”
Keith Clavin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Part IV. Collaborator Interviews

12. Interview with Eric Weidt: Digital Colorist and Color Grader for Mindhunter
Interviewer: Carol Vernallis, Stanford University

13. Interview with Jason Hill: Composer for Mindhunter
Interviewers: Dale Chapman, Rhys Davies, Eric Lyon, Joanna Nadolny, Holly Rogers, Carol Vernallis

Index

About the author

Keith Clavin

Dr Keith Clavin is Lecturer in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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