michele schreiber
in the preceding quote david fincher ety arises when the forward momentum of in
suggests that the best films penetrate and novation is mixed with nostalgia for the certainty
sometimes arrest our senses to the degree that of the past. This complex dynamic is central
they leave a mark on our psyche that persists to conversations about the digital era and the
long after the film has ended. As we know, films degree to which its innovations are intertwined
themselves can also be scarred. Whether the with bodies: the bodies that labor to create this
scars are made deliberately or through the wear technology, those bodies being replaced by this
and tear caused by transport, repeated viewing, technology, and the new (non)body of the tech
or faulty machinery, a film print sustains marks nology that is being invented.
that suggest the extent of the geography it These concerns about the links between
has traversed. In both of these cases, we (and technology and embodiment, specifically male
Fincher) assume that the scar is evidence of embodiment, figure prominently in Fincher’s
the pricking of a fixed entity—whether human oeuvre. His preference for shooting on digital
or filmic. But how do we come to understand film and inserting CGI techniques into dramatic
this process differently when the very nature of live-action narratives is not simply part of his
knowing and feeling bodies is changing? With aesthetic signature but is inextricably inter
the turn from analog to digital film, and as our twined with his films’ contemplation of the
own bodies are becoming increasingly inter connections between corporeality and identity,
twined with technology, we must ask now more feeling and knowing, texture and surface—con
than ever, how do we “feel” and “know” when nections that come to a head in and through
scars have been inflicted? his male characters’ journeys of self-discovery.
Fincher’s comments are resonant when we The following analysis will map out how these
think about how changing conceptions of em intersecting issues flow in and out of Fincher’s
bodiment—particularly those that accompany work by tracing how his diegetic and extradi
rapid technological change—often coexist with a egetic preoccupation with corporeal and digital
longing for the security of known tactile surfaces materiality corresponds with many of the most
that can be marked and for bodies that can feel compelling ontological questions discussed
and register those marks. Indeed, a certain anxi in new media scholarship over the last fifteen
years and with the politics surrounding the
changing landscape of gender identity that has
michele schreiber is an associate professor of accompanied these technological transforma
film and media studies at Emory University. She is
tions. Although these concerns are present to
the author of American Postfeminist Cinema: Wom-
varying degrees in all of Fincher’s films, they
en, Romance and Contemporary Culture (Edinburgh
University Press, 2014) and numerous articles on are most pronounced in Fight Club (1999),
gender, genre, and contemporary filmmakers. She Zodiac (2007), and The Social Network (2011)—
is currently writing a book on David Fincher. culminating, I will argue, in the latter.