Happy 30th birthday to David Fincher’s Seven (1995). Joining us to celebrate is special guest Adam Nayman, Toronto-based critic, lecturer, and author of, among other books, David Fincher: Mind Games (2021).

We get into: boy movies, the intersections of art and trash, Fincher as mad designer and marketing guru, Veronica can’t do math, canceling Det. Mills, how a spark of ambiguity can incite a book-length study, the undersung editing of Richard Francis-Bruce, the undersung producing prowess of Michael De Luca, what is and is not in the box, and more.

References: Tony Zhou on David Fincher (“And the Other Way is Wrong”), Richard Dyer’s BFI book for Seven, and of course, Adam’s terrific book on Fincher, Mind Games, from Little White Lies/Abrams Books.

The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman, and produced by Eli Sands. Our theme music is composed by Chad.

Find all 142 issues of Bright Wall/Dark Room at brightwalldarkroom.com, and please consider subscribing to the site, which directly helps support this show!

We welcome feedback, inquiries, and sponsorship opportunities at podcast@brightwalldarkroom.com.

Hello, champagne. This month we welcome back to the podcast Michael Koresky (listen here to his first visit, discussing A.I.: Artificial Intelligence). Michael is MoMI’s senior curator of film, Reverse Shot’s co-founder and editor, and the author of Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness, out now from Bloomsbury.

Michael joins us to talk about a film from that book, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), the ‘perfect murder’ cocktail thriller best known for its deceptive formal gambit (shot continuously with “no” cuts) and spectral queerness.

We get into: ways around the Production Code, that Technicolor sunset, Farley Granger’s offscreen persona, Hitchcock’s lost Holocaust doc, the film version of trompe l’oeil, teaching classical Hollywood in a contemporary classroom, the lesser-seen These Three (1936) and Crossfire (1947), and more.

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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman, produced by Eli Sands, and edited by Buczar. Our theme music is composed by Chad.

You can read all 141 issues of Bright Wall/Dark Room—including our current Jonathan Demme issue!—at brightwalldarkroom.com.

Feedback and/or sponsorship inquiries: podcast@brightwalldarkroom.com.

For a taste of summertime sadness, we look at a pick from curator Christos Nikou (Apples [2020] and Fingernails [2023]): Mike Mills’s semi-autobiographical bleak comedy Beginners (2010).

We get into the film’s tonality of “melancholic smile,” non-human actors, is this Mills’s All Fours?, Christopher Plummer’s silent expressivity (and “ascot game”), aging out of the gay bar, and nightclub as metaphor for life.

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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by⁠ Veronica Fitzpatrick⁠ and⁠ Chad Perman⁠, and produced by⁠ Eli Sands⁠. Our theme music is composed by Chad.

This episode is sponsored by Galerie, a new kind of film club. Discover more at ⁠Galerie.com⁠.