Watch: David Fincher’s Inimitable Control of ‘The Game,’ ‘Fight Club,’ and ‘Panic Room’: A Video Essay

David Fincher’s work, if about nothing else, is about enclosure. This enclosure can take different forms, from the walls of a spaceship in ‘Alien 3‘ to the boundaries of friendship in ‘The Social Network’ to the psychological wall Lisbeth Salander places between herself and the world in ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.’ The films discussed in this, the third installment in the Raccord collective’s series on Fincher: address enclosure of a more direct kind: the confines of an office bulding in ‘The Game,’ the strictures of a clandestine secret society in ‘Fight Club,’ and the literal walls of a safe space in the process of being invaded in ‘Panic Room.’ The video takes us inside the eccentricities of Fincher’s technique: his penchant for multiple takes, his meticulous planning of characters’ movements and of the spaces they move through, and his miniaturist’s attentiveness to interior details–as well as, of course, his love of breaking the fourth wall, as he did in ‘Fight Club’ and again in Netflix’s ‘House of Cards.’ If the first two installments took us through the director’s artistic adolescence, this 30-minute installment of the series shows us how Fincher has flourished in his adulthood.