David Fincher directing on the set of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"

I am fascinated by David Fincher. The former music video director who began his feature film career with the much maligned third chapter of the “Alien” franchise has somehow, over the last two decades , morphed into one of America’s most intriguing filmmakers. Gritty, intelligent fares like “Fight Club” and “Se7en” have inspired great fanfare, and the comparatively more shallow “Panic Room” and “the Game” display a masterful command of techniques that, despite the films’ generic demands, reveal the hand of a prodigious artist. It is with his last two films, however, that Fincher began to show the full extent of his talent. With “Zodiac” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button“, Fincher has, rather surprisingly, abandoned the more sensationalistic aspect of  his art (can’t be easy for a director with a background in music videos to do) and gone for a methodical approach that is rare in mainstream cinema. “Zodiac”, one of the great films of the 2000s and a remarkable time capsule of a by-gone era, alienated those expecting the typical  thrills of serial killer films (e.g. “Silence of the Lamb”, Fincher’s own “Se7en”) but fascinated others with its deliberate, time-conscious, and ultimately epic storytelling. Its cumulative effect was both mesmerizing and genuinely unsettling. ”The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, despite its fantastical conceit and magic realist overtone, transcended the emotional trappings of its premise and ended up enthralling precisely because of its detachment and refusal to engage in easy melodrama. (Think of the diminuendo of the death scenes.) It shows what a patient, confident artist could do with inherently sentimental story materials (the script is by Forrest Gump’s Eric Roth) and, more specifically, how death and mortality can be handled tastefully and beautifully in commercial films. It is a fascinating mixture of Fincher’s newfound analytic sensibility and the more melodramatic inclinations of studio filmmaking, a flawed film that also happens to be extraordinarily affecting by its end. Whatever tension there was in the work, Fincher has shown that he is not one to easily succumb to the temptation of sensationalism.

Where would Fincher go from here? As with “Zodiac”, his new film “The Social Network”, which focuses on the founding of Facebook and the messy rivalry and in-fighting that ensued, appears to be another ambitious attempt to capture the zeitgeist of an era- this time our own distraction-filled, frantic-yet-lonely digital era. As with “Benjamin Button”, it is penned by a successful and significantly more conventional sensibility  (the script is by “West Wing” and “A Few Good Man” mastermind Aaron Sorkin). Already, the tension that exists in the marriage of two contrasting sensibilities, the same tension that existed in “Benjamin Button”, is becoming apparent in the film’s haunting new trailer- it features an extraordinary choral version of Radiohead’s “Creep,” Fincher’s signature cool visuals, as well as a fair amount of Sorkin’s typically emphatic, sometimes heavy-handed dialogues (”Let’s sue him in federal court!”) that nonetheless compel because of the trailer’s expert handling of these competing and seemingly irreconcilable elements. It is a must-see, and certainly one of the more memorable trailers in recent months, its lonely beauty and magic on par with that of the trailer for “Where the Wild Things Are.” With this, I am now even more intrigued to see how Fincher’s unique talent will manifest itself in this new studio outing. which will open this year’s New York Film Festival before its nation-wide opening on October 1st.

The mesmerizing trailer for “Social Network”:

Do yourself a favor and check out the song featured in the trailer- Radiohead’s “Creep,” sung by the wonderful Belgian girls’ choir Scala and Kolacny Brothers. The haunting song beautifully captures the longing for acceptance and human connection; it might as well be the soundtrack of our digital age.  Warning: If you’re a creep like me, you may not be able to stop yourself from listening to it again, and again, and again…

And finally, a fitting quote from T.S. Eliot that should speak to those of us living frantically in the online/Facebook era. Something to meditate on:

“The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”- Opening Stanza of “The Rock” (not to be confused with Michael Bay’s masterpiece)

Hope you enjoyed those. Now go watch “Zodiac” if you haven’t seen it.

Eugene Suen is the Co-Director of City of the Angels Film Festival and the Reel Spirituality Institute of Moving Images at Fuller Theological Seminary. He is a new featured writer for Windrider Forum. Starting this week, he will be offering regular reviews, commentaries, interviews, and hopefully not too many stream-of-consciousness ramblings. He can be reached at eugene.suen@gmail.com and, yes, on Facebook.