The music video is primarily a medium of close-ups and wide tableau, with very little in between. In its traditional, performative form, framing is designed to either be tight enough to confirm lipsynch accuracy, or far away enough to properly present multiple bodies in slickly choreographed motion.

I am convinced that no director of music videos has worked the close/wide divide better than David Fincher. To be fair, I haven’t seen Zodiac, but I could take or leave his previous five feature films. In my mind, Fincher reached his creative and technical peak between 1989-1990, when he was directing music videos for Paula Abdul, George Michael, Billy Idol and, most impressively, Madonna. Is any image filmed in 1990 more iconic than this frame, from Fincher’s video for Madonna’s “Vogue”?

Fincher’s best video works actually function in part as tribute to the very concept of the close-up glamour shot, and he reached his absolute peak using Madonna as a more-than-willing sponge for the visual detritus of the studio era. Three of his Madonna videos (”Vogue”, “Express Yourself” and “Oh Father”, all of which made the Top 15 of Slant Magazine’s Top 100 Greatest Music Videos list) are so good that even now, 18 years on, watching them occasionally sparks a tear in my eye. A fourth Madonna/Fincher collaboration, “Bad Girl”, is incredibly silly, but still compulsively watchable. Even in Fincher’s lesser works, it’s the close-ups that punch me in the gut. In terms of his Madonna videos, Fincher’s close-ups are the most intimate images of the star that we’ve ever known.

Notes on Fincher’s signature close-ups after the jump.

As a music video director, Fincher had a number of signature close-ups:

*Kuleshov bait.

Short, seemingly inexplicable cuts to close-ups of things like teapots, leaky faucets, corporate logos, or in the case of the “Straight Up” video, to Arsenio Hall laughing (I don’t know if we can even attribute “offness” in Paula Abdul videos to Fincher—with her breathy voice and motorcycle jacket, her virtuosic tap dancing and seeming inability to control certain facial tics, Abdul’s star persona at the height of her career was such a muddle of contradictions that I’d need a whole other blog-a-thon to sort it out.) The images have no meaning on their own, but are imbued with mysterious significance by the cuts they’re sandwiched into.

My favorite instance of this is in “Freedom“, when Christy Turlington apparently sets fire to George Michael’s Faith-era leather jacket–with her eyes.

*The incorporation of bloopers or outtakes.
These are always close shots, so it’s possibly that they’re scripted spontaneity. See Madonna laughing while tugging on a blonde curl in “Vogue“; See Paula Abdul seeming to giggle and forget the words in “Straight Up”. The inclusion of these shots is odd, because Fincher’s best videos are otherwise set in a world that takes itself very seriously. Even the physical comedy in “Cradle of Love” plays like deadpan sexual neurosis (although, you have to laugh out loud at the notion that a woman’s sexual fury could send shards of plate flying off a Schnabel).

*Fetishistic Dutch angled close-ups, of the star’s face, either lip syncing or pointedly not.

These are the key building blocks of Fincher’s music video masterpieces, and his rare missteps during this time period (see: “Janie’s Got A Gun”) notably lack them. These shots are often lit and framed from above, in a manner that always seems to imitate, and at times exactly replicate, standard Hollywood publicity shots or film stills of the studio era. See almost every close up in “Freedom”, but especially a number of shots towards the end, of Linda Evangelista, bathed in the shadow of her sweater like a veiled Marlene Dietrich in The Scarlett Empress.

Visual references to Dietrich are sprinkled throughout most of the Madonna/Fincher videos. Madonna herself gets credit for this, but it’s perhaps worth noting that she didn’t completely make over her stage persona into the clearly Dietrich-inspired Dita figure until the Erotica album came out in 1992. Fincher came out of music video semi-retirement to make one clip for that album, “Bad Girl.” This oddly moralistic working girl noir co-starred Christopher Walken, as a dancing angel of death. Madonna dies in this video, and seems happy about it. Is it a coincidence that she was never really fun to watch after this?

Even when Fincher doesn’t have a gang of supermodels or a star like Madonna to put front and center, his videos demonstrate a powerful interest in iconic celebrity close-ups. Both of Fincher’s Billy Idol videos posit a connection between Idol and the forebear of his bleached-blonde spitcurl, Marilyn Monroe. A digitized Billy Idol actually shoves a Warholian Marilyn out of the frame in “Cradle of Love”; in the batshit insane, hallucinogenic orgy of Hollywood underworld clichés that is “L.A. Woman”, a splayed-out Idol dreams of a smiling Monroe, crucified to a utility pole.

Fincher also, of course, employs direct references to films. “Express Yourself” is clearly styled after Fritz Lang’s Metropolis; “Oh Father” steals images from Citizen Kane–although, overall, it has the feeling of an extraordinarily faced-paced Bergman film.

You’ve probably guessed as much by now, but as far as I’m concerned, both Fincher and Madonna hit the absolute apex of their careers with Vogue. It’s a truly radical work, literally dragging the totems of a gay club culture into the realm of classical Hollywood, suggesting that identity is fluid to the point where a queer Black kid from Harlem can morph into a blonde female superstar millionaire–and vice versa–through a common aping of Dietrich and Jean Harlow and Mae West. Most remarkably, through the apparatus of MTV, “Vogue” delivered that message to white suburban children with seductive nonchalance. Question its significance (and the motives of Madonna’s appropriation) if you must, but there’s nothing like this on television today. Almost twenty years on, with Madonna over a decade gone from her firmest grip on popular culture, Vogue plays like pure queer fantasia. It’s incredible to think that the same man made Fight Club—or is it?