Photo: Steve Rogers Photography/Getty Images for SXSW
Before he released his recent Citizen Kane-adjacent feature Mank, David Fincher spent two seasons hunting the most diabolical minds going, directing two (and only two, sadly) seasons of his serial killer drama Mindhunterfor Netflix. But what, we’d like to know, about all those minds who kill in far more subtle ways than brutally slaughtering their fellow human beings, i.e., suggesting that there should be consequences when people do or say things that harm others? Worry not, Fincherinos: David Fincher’s got you covered, telling The Telegraph today that he’s thinking about doing a miniseries about the real monster in American society: Cancel culture.
This is per a longer interview Fincher gave to the U.K. paper, talking about everything from the frosty initial response to Fight Club back in the day, to his take on Joker (“I don’t think anyone would have looked at that material and thought, ‘Yeah, let’s take Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin and conflate them, then trap him in a betrayal of the mentally ill, and trot it out for a billion dollars’”), to the freedoms afforded by his partnership with Netflix. Which may or may not include the freedom to pursue this cancel culture miniseries, which, Fincher notes, “At its heart it’s about how we in modern society measure an apology. If you give a truly heartfelt apology and no one believes it, did you even apologize at all? It’s a troubling idea. But we live in troubling times.”
This loosely floated announcement has been greeted online with the worst excesses of internet witch-hunting, which, again, mostly conforms to a bunch of people rolling their eyes and going “Ugh, really, dude? This is how you want to spend your time?” (It’s also hard, given their long association, to not see a reference here to the last few years of Kevin Spacey’s life—although Spacey didn’t “give a truly heartfelt apology” so much as he seems to have retreated into bizarre House Of Cards cosplay.) Anyway, this is all just loose speculation at the moment, but cancellers be warned: David Fincher is ready and willing to come give your minds a hunt.
