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Fincher’s film appears as a violent attack on a media system which raises accusations against a man whose wife tries to get him indicted for her murder, but the more general tenor of the film lies in an examination of our relation to images and the unstable meanings they are attributed in a hyper-media society. Through his staging of the illegibility of images, Fincher calls upon his spectators to take critical distance with representations. To that effect, he draws on a set of references which include both the filmic tradition and the status of images as “proofs” in the media and audiovisual discourses.