How David Finch­er put com­plex women in the frame

A for­mal­ist with a foren­sic eye for detail (and no patience for wad­ing through emo­tion­al sludge), David Finch­er holds his char­ac­ters at arm’s length – per­haps all the bet­ter to see them in their entire­ty. Most of these char­ac­ters are men; Finch­er is, after all, a man’s man with a par­tic­u­lar predilec­tion for sto­ries about fra­ter­ni­ty in cri­sis (The Game, Zodi­ac, The Social Net­work) and the crum­bling frame­work of mas­culin­i­ty in a late-cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety (Fight Club, The Social Net­work and – we think – Gone Girl). How­ev­er, that is not to say that Fincher’s women are shrink­ing violets.

There are excep­tions; Gwyneth Paltrow’s only notable scene as Tra­cy, wife of Brad Pitt’s detec­tive in Se7en, is noth­ing more than a shock in a box, while Chloë Sevigny’s role as Robert Graysmith’s shy, smart wife in Zodi­ac is so inci­den­tal to the plot that she might as well not exist. As for Alien 3’s fem­i­nist hero­ine Rip­ley – she isn’t exact­ly Fincher’s cre­ation. Yet, despite these mis­steps, many of the women in Fincher’s fil­mog­ra­phy stand out as being equal­ly as inter­est­ing, if per­haps not always as well-explored, as their male coun­ter­parts. From Jodie Foster’s fierce sin­gle moth­er in Pan­ic Room to the Machi­avel­lian women of the Finch­er-pro­duced House of Cards, tough, curi­ous, com­plex – and as psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly opaque as any of his mis­an­thropes – women fea­ture in almost all of his fea­tures. With his adap­tion of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl set to open the New York Film Fes­ti­val lat­er this month, Lit­tle White Lies looks back at some of Fincher’s most inter­est­ing, com­pli­cat­ed and sub­ver­sive female creations.

Deb­o­rah Kara Unger’s steely, straight-talk­ing wait­ress Chris­tine facil­i­tates Nico­las Van Orton’s (Michael Dou­glas) tum­ble down the rab­bit hole cre­at­ed by mys­te­ri­ous organ­i­sa­tion CRS. Sexy, resource­ful and seem­ing­ly fear­less, the earthy Chris­tine is worlds away from Dou­glas’ shiv­er­ing suit­ed and boot­ed Van Orton – and much more com­pli­cat­ed than the aver­age love inter­est. She main­tains the abil­i­ty to dis­guise her inten­tions through­out The Game; whether she’s sav­ing him from a snarling Alsa­t­ian as the pair prowl the emp­ty streets of San Francisco’s Chi­na­town or cajol­ing him into drug-induced stu­por, she retains agency. Yeah, there’s that bit at the end when Van Orton tries to score a date, but even then it’s Chris­tine who asks him if he’s like to join her for coffee.

Giv­en that ​“I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school” is Mar­la Singer’s most mem­o­rable line in Fight Club, it’s easy to think she’s a bohemi­an femme fatale, a token designed to tit­il­late in an oth­er­wise all-male cast. How­ev­er – as Edward Norton’s nar­ra­tor him­self states – ​“all of this has some­thing to do with a girl called Mar­la.” Whether you read her as a mir­ror of the narrator’s splin­ter­ing psy­chosis, or the human source of strength he needs to defeat his demons, Hele­na Bon­ham Carter’s Mar­la is as cen­tral to the plot as Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden.

Rooney Mara plays a small but sig­nif­i­cant role as Mark Zuckerberg’s (Jesse Eisen­berg) ex-girl­friend Eri­ca in The Social Net­work. Mara and Eisenberg’s ver­bal spar­ring is thrilling to watch, with Eri­ca deliv­er­ing Sorkin’s deli­cious zinger: ​“Dat­ing you is like dat­ing a Stair­mas­ter.” Zuckerberg’s breakup with Eri­ca is pre­sent­ed as the cat­a­lyst for the cre­ation of Face­book, but she tran­scends her func­tion as a plot device by ver­bal­ly cas­trat­ing him, pub­licly high­light­ing both his misog­y­ny and his immaturity.

The Girl With the Drag­on Tat­too – Lis­beth Salan­der (Rooney Mara)
Mara is some­how both strong and vul­ner­a­ble as Lis­beth Salan­der in The Girl With the Drag­on Tat­too. A bisex­u­al hack­er with a pen­chant for punk, Salan­der exists out­side the main­stream, it is Daniel Craig’s bum­bling bour­geois jour­nal­ist Blomkvist who is the foil in Fincher’s depic­tion of their rela­tion­ship. While some might argue he fetishis­es Salander’s graph­ic rape scene, lin­ger­ing provoca­tive­ly on Mara’s gamine body in a show­er scene that fol­lows her trau­ma, Fincher’s for­mal­ist approach to the mur­der mys­tery at the heart of the sto­ry keeps the film from being a revenge tale. Salan­der is an intense­ly high-func­tion­ing indi­vid­ual who sub­verts tra­di­tion­al gen­der roles, pur­su­ing Blomkvist sex­u­al­ly and res­cu­ing him from cer­tain death at the film’s climax.

With no pre­views of Gone Girl avail­able at the time of writ­ing, we can only spec­u­late about how Finch­er has chis­elled Pike’s regal car­riage into the shape of Gillian Flynn’s impos­si­bly icy vil­lain­ess. Depend­ing on how you read her, Amy can be seen as a man-hat­ing mas­ter manip­u­la­tor; a jeal­ous, high­ly strung shrew that deceives her hus­band to pun­ish him for his evo­lu­tion­ary short­com­ings, or a fas­tid­i­ous decon­struc­tion of the ​‘Cool Girl’ myth. To quote Fly­nn: ​“Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, bril­liant, fun­ny woman who adores foot­ball, pok­er, dirty jokes, and burp­ing, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves three­somes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and ham­burg­ers into her mouth like she’s host­ing the world’s biggest culi­nary gang bang while some­how main­tain­ing a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot.”

In Flynn’s nov­el, Amy writes, ​“I like strong women” is code for ​“I hate strong women.” While Fincher’s canon resists the ​‘I like strong women’ moniker, his com­plex, ful­ly-realised female char­ac­ters sug­gests otherwise.