[COLUMN] With Mank and The Killer, David Fincher Finally Gives a Fuck | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Early in The Killer, the titular assassin (Michael Fassbender) articulates his methodology. “My process is purely logistical, narrowly focused by design,” he narrates. “I’m not here to take sides. It’s not my place to formulate any opinion. No one who can afford me needs to waste time winning me to some cause. I serve no God or country. I fly no flag. If I’m effective, it’s because of one simple fact: I. Don’t. Give. A. Fuck.”

It is a very disaffected and jaded worldview, reflecting the cynicism traditionally associated with Generation X. It feels appropriate that The Killer comes from David Fincher. Although Fincher was born in 1962, three years too early to fit neatly into the generational classification, he is one of the directors who most overtly embodies that vibe. As critic Adam Nayman puts it, Fincher is “a full-metal alchemist whose chill tone and mean streak captured the Gen X moment.”

Fincher was one of the defining filmmakers of the 1990s, and spoke to the apathy and disconnect of that particular moment. Like many of his generation, Fincher emerged from music videos and commercials. While Fincher himself disowns his feature debut, Alien³ remains one of the most bleakly nihilistic films ever released by a major studio. With movies like se7en and Fight Club, Fincher gave voice to a sense of millennial disaffection and anomie.

It is, of course, reductive to argue that Fincher’s filmography is entirely cynical. As horrific as se7en might be, it ends with Detective Somerset’s (Morgan Freeman) humanism affirmed, the veteran recommitted to the idea that the world – though it may not be a good place – is “worth fighting for.” The Game is ultimately about millionaire Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) working through the lingering trauma of his father’s suicide.

Indeed, Fincher’s films often seem like they are about characters trying very hard to be disaffected. In Fight Club, the narrator (Edward Norton) conjures Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) into being only after his routine is disrupted by Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), a woman about whom he has complicated feelings. In Gone Girl, as much as Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike) meticulously plans to trap her husband Nick (Ben Affleck), it ultimately seems like she just wants to be seen by him.

It's an attitude that finds expressions in the final moments of The Social Network, in which a young legal aide (Rashida Jones) tells Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), “You’re not an asshole, Mark. You’re just trying so hard to be.” This is a throughline across Fincher’s filmography, studies of characters who often make themselves monstrous rather than acknowledging that they’re human. It is certainly the journey of the anonymous hitman at the heart of The Killer.

At the same time, there is undoubtedly a lack of sentimentality in Fincher’s work. This is perhaps most obvious with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the closest thing to saccharine awards bait that Fincher has ever directed. The film consciously evokes Robert Zemeckis’ treacly Forrest Gump, even hiring screenwriter Eric Roth, but ultimately becomes a meditation on how everything gets washed away in the end, a metaphor literalized in the rising flood waters of Hurricane Katrina.

Fincher’s cynicism is self-reflexive. He seems particularly wary of mythologizing his work. One of the defining directors of his generation, with a distinctive style and outlook, Fincher is also unashamedly open to work for hire. He still directs commercials for brands like Gap or Calvin Klein. Although they never reached fruition, he has flirted with shamelessly commercial projects like the Spider-Man films, the sequel to World War Z and both The Force Awakens and The Rise of Skywalker.

Fincher is an auteur who doesn’t believe in auteur theory, confessing, “I feel like moviemaking owes a lot more to demolition derby than it does to neurosurgery.” He’s the rare modern brand-name director without any screenwriting credits, even though frequent collaborator Andrew Kevin Walker argues, “If David wanted to take the time, he could write his movies himself.” Asked directly about this, Fincher states, “I’m not a writer. I don’t take credit for things that I don’t do.”

Fincher talks about his work in self-effacing terms. He dismisses the idea of himself as a perfectionist as “a lot of bullshit.” According to Fincher, he tends to shoot a large number of takes because he’s looking for spontaneity and happy accidents. He sees the relationship between writer and director as collaborative, “a conductor and a composer set-up.” He argues “the screenwriter has given you the greatest gift, which is he’s given you something that inspires somebody to make the right mistake.”

To Fincher, “A director is like a quarterback. You get way too much credit when it works and way too much blame when it doesn't.” There is a sense in which Fincher’s tendency to downplay his own importance affords him some insulation from criticism. Over the past decade or so, Fincher has had to repeatedly confront the complicated legacy of Fight Club, a movie that has been embraced by a very vocal and very radical minority in decidedly uncomfortable ways.

To be fair, Fight Club is dripping with self-reflexive cynicism about its subjects. While its characters hold contempt for the vacuous world around them, the film reserves a great deal of venom for those men seduced by Tyler. At one point, the narrator dismisses one of Tyler’s followers as “a moron.” He reacts to another conspiracy theory by declaring bluntly “that's the stupidest thing [he’s] ever heard.” Still, there’s no denying the film’s visceral appeal and its resonance with a certain audience.

In his public statements, Fincher argues that such issues don’t affect him. “I’m not responsible for how people interpret things,” he argued when the subject came up. However, there are indications that he does think about it, despite his claims to the contrary. “My daughter had a friend named Max. She told me Fight Club is his favorite movie,” he told an audience at Comic Con in 2014. “I told her never to talk to Max again.” It’s obviously a humorous anecdote, but it hints at a broader awareness of Fight Club’s cultural context.

Then there’s Fincher’s relationship with Netflix. Fincher directed the first two episodes of House of Cards. He had been developing it at HBO, but it ended up at Netflix. While not the best thing that Fincher ever made, there is a credible argument House of Cards is the most consequential. As Variety put it, it “set the template for what was to follow.” It established Netflix as a power player and streaming as a new medium. Even visually, a lot of streaming still looks like a bad David Fincher impersonation.

Fincher’s relationship with Netflix has been good for both parties. He has talked about the freedom that they afford him. “Netflix has never quibbled with this type of choice,” he argued of his desire to render special effects in 4K. “They adopted an industry standard that made sense to filmmakers. Netflix has by far the best “quality control” in all of Hollywood.” He signed a four-year deal with Netflix in 2020. The studio bankrolled his passion project, Mank.

Fincher was an essential part of the emergence of Netflix, which had fairly dramatic consequences for the rest of Hollywood. Netflix pushed other studios into streaming, and the ensuing collapse of the market was so tied to the service that it was known as “the Great Netflix Correction.” The recent wave of strikes was referred to as “the Netflix strikes.” It’s too much to say Netflix couldn’t have done it without Fincher, but Fincher was a massive part of what Netflix accomplished.

Even outside of the entertainment industry, there was a broader reckoning with the legacy of the cynicism associated with Generation X and typified by artists like Fincher. In the wake of the election of Donald Trump, there was a push back against the idea of irony and detachment as virtues. Generation X icons like Elizabeth Wurtzel found themselves growing up and facing reality. This was a cultural conversation that played out in movies like Bill & Ted Face the Music.

This is a large part of Mank. Based on a screenplay credited to Fincher’s father, and Fincher’s first film in six years, Mank feels very different from the rest of Fincher’s filmography. Despite being set against the backdrop of the production of Citizen Kane, the movie is openly reflective in a way that Fincher’s movies rarely are. In some ways, it is a standard awards play, a movie about the magic of movies. However, it’s also a deeply cynical commentary on how movies get made.

“This is a business where the buyer gets nothing for his money but a memory,” Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) boasts. “What he bought still belongs to the man who sold it.” That dream came to fruition with streaming. It’s difficult to watch Mayer pressure talent to take pay cuts without thinking of the recent labor strikes. Mank’s (Gary Oldman) description of how Mayer runs MGM for “the money-boys back East” recalled the challenges facing Warner Bros. as an AT&T subsidiary at that moment.

Mank was criticized for somewhat villainizing Orson Welles (Tom Burke) in order to play up the importance of Mank, focusing on the screenwriter rather than the director of Citizen Kane. The movie certainly took its liberties with the facts, but it also feels like a fairy tale more than a biopic. Fincher uses Welles as a way to critique the idea of the auteur. Indeed, with his styled goatee, the version of Welles presented in Mank occasionally feels a stand-in for Fincher himself.

That would be hubristic from almost any other director. However, Fincher has been compared to Welles, most famously in reviews of The Social Network and most overtly by future director Todd McCarthy. While critics unironically described The Social Network as “Citizen Kane for the internet generation”, Fincher jokingly called it “the Citizen Kane of John Hughes movies.” Mank is skeptical of the all-powerful auteur, throwing its lot in with the work-for-hire screenwriter who has spent most his career indifferent to moviemaking.

Mank spent his career making cynical asides and wry jokes, pretending not to care about the work he did or the world he helped fashion. However, he has an abrupt moral awakening in the aftermath of an election swung by propaganda produced by the studio. He realizes that what he does matters. This is what drew Fincher to Mank. He recalled, “I was fascinated by the notion of a guy who is on record so many times decrying the shallowness and hopelessness of cinema finally saying, ‘Wait a minute. I want this one on my headstone.’”

This is also a major part of The Killer, a movie largely about the dehumanizing effects of working for large faceless entities in a world defined by those large faceless entities. Like the protagonist of Mank, the central character in The Killer is confronted with a similar epiphany that he is not as above it all as he might pretend to be, and that being ironic or cynical doesn’t allow him to escape the consequences of his actions.

It seems like David Fincher is asking the same question that the assassin finds himself contemplating during the movie: “How’s ‘I don’t give a fuck’ going?”