What more to say about David Fincher? The Internet, Slate included, has exhaustively praised the director’s style. There’s the taut, detailed approach; the striking color palette; the Hitchcockian flair for suspense. But it seems we overlooked the director’s most obvious obsession: the refrigerator.
It’s true—where Hitchcock put himself in his movies, Fincher instead puts a fridge. Dutch magazine De Filmkrant has a video essay showing how the appliance pops up in every Fincher film, an object through which characters convey their fears, interests, suspicions, and secrets. It’s not the most profound motif, of course, but it does stress the director’s visual efficiency, the way he uses everyday objects to further layer his storytelling.
