It is significant that David Fincher’s twelfth feature film, The murdererbegins with a sequence of credits, something that has not happened in his filmography since Millennium: The men who didn’t love women (2011). So is that long preface that aims to familiarize us with the motivations and strategies of the protagonist, but, furthermore, it is a declaration of principles worthy of a hermit or an anchorite, whose values are fiercely opposed to those promoted by the sphere public today. “Empathy is a weakness, don’t trust anyone,” the hitman played by Michael Fassbender repeats to himself over and over again.
With the complicity of screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, who had already collaborated on seven (1995) and, uncredited, in The Game (1997) and Fight club (1999), Fincher returns with The murderer to his origins as a director; to the thrillers nocturnal and misanthropic in which women were barely welcome while men were torn between two extremes: the fantasy of power and their practical impotence in times that had criminalized the classic masculinity embodied by the blue collar —the manual trade worker— in order to speculate, new masculinities through, with the economy and affections.
Seen in perspective, his dark debut feature, Alien 3 (1992), harbors several qualities of the later Fincher despite his turbulent production: from the conversion of the only female character, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), into an icon that does not inspire desire so much as awe, to the description of the inhabitants of the planet Fiorina 161 as criminals expelled from the system, cannon fodder destined to survive on their own in a Neverland transmuted into Hades.
Fincher sublimates the creative interference he suffers during Alien 3 in sevensummit of angst millenarian and hypermoral artifact of sordid imagery. The true protagonist of sevenFurthermore, the demiurge of his own film is the serial killer John Doe (Kevin Spacey), a nameless man who, armed with patience and manic attention to detail, defeats detective David Mills (Brad Pitt), a symbol of thoughtless ambition at the service of what is established. Through the portrait in off de Doe, Fincher and Walker certify the failure of the great city of the 20th century as a repository of modernity. John Doe is the ultimate manifestation of flâneurthe anonymous stroller of the streets into which the romantic explorer of nature ended up, although not in the sense of intoxication that Baudelaire gave to the term, but in that concretized by Edgar Allan Poe in his disturbing The man of the crowd (1840): the city as a mousetrap for individuals thrown, dynamics of progress through, into precariousness. Their dreams of greatness have no choice but to turn into class resentment.
The director continues his exploration of these themes in The Game, meta, Kafkaesque, night owl fiction about an unscrupulous banker, Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas), psychologically returned to childhood when his younger brother involves him in a strange game that once again casts the shadow of his father’s suicide over him. Nicholas is therefore another lost child, an orphan whose desire for material improvement hides a death drive, something he shares with another nameless man, The narrator (Edward Norton) from Fincher’s most popular film, Fight club. The Narrator will end up unfolding into a doppelganger, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt again), to overcome the dissatisfaction of not participating in the socioeconomic and cultural bubble of that West that follows the fall of the Berlin Wall: “Television made us believe that we would be rock stars, but not it will be like this. “We are the cursed children of history, rootless and aimless.”
Fight club It is above all a satire and the generational manifesto of a defeat, signed with that hallucinatory final shot that foreshadows the imminent 9/11 attacks. In a conformist sociopolitical climate, Fincher settles down with more conventional fictions, although his personality remains intact. In The panic room (2002), an exercise in paranoia after 9/11, the villains are, once again, humiliated and offended whom the survival spirit of the privileged classes condemns to failure. Zodiac (2007) is a review of seven based on real events, where the researchers’ fear of the abyss staring back at them leads to their irrelevance and the victory of evil. AND The curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) works as an antithesis to the optimistic Forrest Gump (1994), that is, as a dark fantasy that abstracts its protagonist from the flow of history.
Seen in perspective, his dark debut feature, ‘Alien 3’ (1992), harbors several qualities of the later Fincher despite his turbulent production.
It is fascinating how Fincher vampirizes Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, to make him into The social network (2010) another orphan, unable to deal with his maladjustment to the world except by resorting to black magic, the illusion of control; and how he propitiates in Millennium: The men who didn’t love women and Loss (2014) that male protagonists without attributes project their fantasy of seeing the world burn onto charismatic women, agents of the asocial.
At 60 years old, Fincher dares to personalize many of these questions in a game of mirrors. mank (2020), biopic by a screenwriter always in the shadow of others, Herman J. Mankiewicz, who serves to highlight a script by his own father, Jack Fincher, who died in 2003. In the director’s words, Jack was a victim during his childhood of “a abusive relationship with his father that alleviated a love for cinema that he has bequeathed to me.”
With The murderer, Fincher invokes the thematic abstraction of his beginnings and reiterates numerous authorial motifs, including his scathing critique of late capitalism and its corporate apostles. With two differences. On the one hand, the murderer does not display moral superiority, but rather an icy pragmatism, with which Fincher and Walker demonstrate that they have not lost their clinical eye when it comes to revealing the nature of the present beneath appearances. On the other hand, after lecturing us about his philosophy of life, the killer fails in his initial mission due to a rookie mistake, compared to the omnipotence of John Doe or Tyler Durden. This nod to the unpredictability of existence by a director who has shared with many of his characters the character of control freak It makes you think of maturity or resignation, depending on your tastes.
‘The murderer’. David Fincher. Released in theaters and available this Friday on Netflix..
You can follow BABELIA on Facebook and xor sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#Wounded #masculinity #class #resentment #David #Fincher #returns #great #themes #Killer