David Fincher Start to Finish: Let’s Go For a Drive…With Our Clothes On

Every era has hitmakers who essentially disappear. Look at any given Top 10 list from a decade or two ago, and you’ll find yourself saying ‘who?’ or perhaps, if you’re lucky, recognizing a song or two from an artist you’d pretty much forgotten about. 

Christopher Cross had four Top 20 hits from his debut album, and another four Hot 100 hits from his second. His music got chosen for TV soundtracks in an era before needledrops were common. But almost all of that success was from 1980-84. “Arthur’s Theme” is probably his best known song, from the movie of the same name starring Dudley Moore, Liza Minelli and John Gielgud. The song, co-written with Burt Bacharach, Carole Bayer Sager and Peter Allen, lasted three weeks at the top of the Hot 100:

(Feel free to note how much attitudes toward drinking and driving have changed in the past four decades.)

His music does show up on things like SiriusXM’s  “Yacht Rock” channel, but it would be hard to claim that he had a major cultural impact, and by 1984 his star was starting to fall. Todd in the Shadows’ “Big Country” video has some nice background on how the more polished videos coming out of the UK, which had a slightly longer video history¹, tore into US pop markets. It didn’t help that Cross had a face more suited for radio <s>or modern country</s> than the glossy pop of the 80s; no one was going to mistake him for a lost member of Duran Duran.

But Christopher Cross liked Formula 1 and he had a new album to promote, and a single with a slightly harder sound². Jeff Ayeroff, then Creative Director at Warner Bros., had been so impressed by the “Shame” video that he called up-and-coming media company Propaganda looking for the director. “[Anne-Marie Mackay] said, ‘Ah, you’ve got to meet this kid. His name is David Fincher. He never went to film school, he’s a genius!’”³

“The first video I had him do was for Christopher Cross, ‘Charm the Snake.’ Christopher was a perfect example of ‘video killed the radio star’…he wasn’t very exciting visually. He liked driving Formula 1 race cars, though, so Fincher did a video that revolved around Christopher and race cars.”

“Charm the Snake” sure is a video that revolves around race cars. Christopher Cross, his made-for-radio face obscured by a racing helmet, races on a desert track while a pretty girl and a handful of other spectators look on. There isn’t really much plot. The visuals are pretty decent, there’s a nice sequence showing you what happens at a pit stop, and in a perhaps-desperate attempt to do something interesting, we see Cross, singing in the reflection of a car mirror. At the end, we do see a snake crawling out of the car. Yeah.

Sadly, the racing doesn’t have a ton of excitement to it; even the jockeying for position at the very end of the video is not particularly thrilling. Mostly it gives you an appreciation for the directors who can make racing in circles around a track look exciting.

This is also just not a very good song. There was (and is) a lot of criticism about how a video can make a good song look bad or a bad one look good, but at the end of the day, the songs that really break out with a great video have something going for them. This is the kind of song you’ll forget five minutes after listening to it, and you’ll be perfectly fine with that. (I do wonder if Cross would have done better if he’d gone in a more country-pop direction, but the 80s country-pop era was starting to fade, so it might have been too late. But seriously, someone cover “Never Be the Same” with some fiddles, it’ll probably be better than half the shit on the charts right now.)

Fortunately, Fincher’s next video was more his style.

“We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off” starts with a wink; Jermaine Stewart’s album rotating on a turntable, followed by a red countdown, dancers, and handclaps. Everyone’s dressed in evening wear, the lighting’s perfect, let’s fuckin’ go.

But let’s not go fucking. Come on baby, won’t you show some class? Why you wanna move so fast?

Jermaine Stewart wasn’t quite a one-hit wonder, but he was pretty close (“Say It Again” was his only other hit, and it was a modest one in the US). Despite it being kind of a goofy lyric, “We Don’t Have to…” is a fun song and the message certainly isn’t bad—that it’s okay to take it slow and just hang out early in a relationship. By this time, Rock Hudson had died of AIDS, the CDC had reported that new AIDS patients lived an average of fifteen months after diagnosis, and straight people were slowly figuring out that they could die of AIDS, too. Add to that the general fear of female sexuality that undergirds a good chunk of Western thought, and a guy asking his sweet lady to not jump into bed so fast was bound to resonate. (A few months later, Robert Palmer would be in similar territory with his cover of “I Didn’t Mean to Turn You On,” which went to #2 on the Hot 100.)

This isn’t the first sexy lady we’ve seen in a Fincher video, but this is the first video he’s really used a woman as an object, her stockinged legs and red lips representing temptation more than personality. She’s teasing and fun, and has a lot more personality than a lot of video vixens of her era (compare her with the almost expressionless models and dancers in those stylish Robert Palmer videos), but Fincher hasn’t figured out the balance between sexuality and agency that he’ll manage in some of his later videos. Still, she looks incredible. The whole video looks great.⁴

Stewart was a dancer on Soul Train and for Shalimar before he embarked on his music career.⁵ Fincher doesn’t use his talents to their full effect here, but we do get some good moves, and Stewart is smooth and comfortable in front of the camera. He’s got a lot of charisma, his hair is relaxed to within an inch of his life, and he gets some fun costume and hat changes. It’s mostly a performance video, but it’s got some spark. You’d definitely prefer to see more from this musician and director than those two guys who put together that Formula 1 video. Do you even remember how that song goes? I don’t.

Christopher Cross seems to have done all right past the post-fame bubble: he’s finishing up a tour with Toto and Men at Work at the time of publication. Stewart was in Deniece Williams’ “Never Say Never” video and had some respectable follow-up songs (I’m fond of “Say It Again”). He worked with Andy Summers, and was featured on the soundtracks for both Weekend at Bernie’s and She-Devil, but struggled to reach the heights he’d hit in the mid-80s. I’m not sure when he started getting sick. In one of those brutal ironies, the guy who had a hit with a song about delaying sex would die of AIDS-related liver cancer in 1997. He was 39, and his family wouldn’t pay for a headstone. A fan would eventually pay for one in 2014. I don’t have a glib wrapup for that. I’m just kind of tired and angry.

Next time: 1987 brings a lot of videos, and some more songs you might actually recognize.

1. Videos were a great way to get out of having to perform week after week on Top of the Pops. ↩︎
2. I do mean slightly. Like slightly-firmer-pillow kind of slightly. ↩︎
3. The quotes here, and some of the background, comes from I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution by Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks. I’ll be pulling from this book off and on for the rest of the series, it’s great. ↩︎
4. Okay yes this is also way more to my tastes than some douchebag driving a race car. (Cross actually seems like a fine person, and I do actually like “Arthur’s Theme” and “Never Be the Same”.) ↩︎
5. He also sang backup on “Miss Me Blind”! ↩︎