Reading Adam Nayman’s recent books Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks and David Fincher: Mind Games, you feel like you are coming into a discussion already underway—which, essentially, you are. This is just Nayman being realistic, because while it is far too late to “discover” David Fincher and Paul Thomas Anderson at this juncture, it is also too early for them to have secured their canonical niches. Although Anderson’s career now extends over 25 years since his debut, Hard Eight (1996), and Fincher’s since Alien³ (1992), they are still our contemporaries, and their reputations still in flux. While their achievement is now beyond reasonable dispute, the measure of how high that achievement reaches from here remains a question. Debates continue as they roll out new films, and as their earlier movies face reassessment as they recede into the past. How well will Boogie Nights (1997) fare after another decade, or Fight Club (1999)?
These books are the second and third that Nayman has published with Abrams, following his 2018 . As with the publisher’s expanded and redesigned version of Alain Silver and James Ursini’s in 2010, Nayman’s books are lengthy (closing in on 300 pages), oversized,
