David Fincher, MANK, and the Games of Being Gauche (Patreon)

1. IN SEARCH OF AWE

If you were to ask a lot of young men who their favorite filmmakers are, you’d probably see David Fincher’s name come up quite up a bit. Back in the early days, it seemed that much of this admiration was due to the fact that Fincher’s impish sensibilities fell in line with their own temperament. Whether it was the gothic, gory stylizings of Se7en or the peevish, devil may care anarchy of Fight Club. But as he matured, Fincher’s work matured in a lot of ways with him. Heck, nowadays, it seems his “voice” has become synonymous with technical precision itself. I know we love to indulge in the ballyhooed discussion of the man’s “perfectionism” and multiple takes and whatnot, but for all the conjecture I feel like Fincher just keeps trying to tell us that it’s not much more than a workman-like dedication to craft (this profile from Jonah Weiner finally got out of the way and let him really speak for himself). It’s just hitting marks while getting performance and all boring stuff that others tend to let slide with a declaration of “good enough.” But for all his terse professions of the normalcy behind his approach, a deeper question remains.

Who the hell is this guy, really?

I don’t mean that, personally, of course. I mean that in the unfair-but-inescapable way we get to know a version of an artist through their artistry (and a huge part of why people connect to them). And with Fincher, that kind of insight has always remained a tad elusive. Sure, you could probably argue that being “detail orientated” speaks to some deeper element of personality. The reason Zodiac always been a personal favorite of mine is because it understands how to turn such fixations on detail and into a narrative on obsession itself. The film’s sprawling, information-centric search for the killer feels feels almost feels revelatory for it’s “anti-movie-ness,” utterly confident that it can draw your curiosity with clues and data alone. Granted, it’s not for everyone. And it certainly doesn’t bring us much closer to real open-hearted answers about artistic identity. But for those broader aims we have The Social Network, a near perfect and kinetic investigation of the zeitgeist that not only takes the piss out of the boy billionaire, it happens to nip and tuck much of Sorkin’s bravado in all the right ways.

But for all that film’s mastery, I weirdly feel like it’s Gone Girl that best brings out the filmmaker’s more puckish personality. Because that film has a hilarious distaste for almost everyone on screen, smearing and smudging their concerns with cackling glee, as it elevates just about every trashy moment in the movie. Still, there’s a core concern with the matter, but instead of me doing the explanation justice, it’s my industry friend who wrote one of the smartest and most insightful things I read on the film (and they dropped it in a casual email like it was nothing). I’ve quoted it before, and I will now quote it again at length:

“Another 3 Michelin Star meal from Fincher where the desert was the poorest course… Somehow I don't enjoy Fincher's eternal cynicism about everything because you can't slam everything and offer no alternative. If every facet of the human condition is to be picked apart and critiqued then really what's the point to anything?  OK, so adult society is based on a pyramid of sanctioned hypocrisies - fine. Where else do we find the soul then? David needs to man up and reveal himself if he ever wants to achieve true greatness as opposed to superior archness.

The stupidest appraisal people make of Stanley Kubrick is that he was cold and analytical. He was precise - at times - and nothing ever feels arbitrary in his films, but beyond the irony there's a real sadness and affection for the silly human race. Fincher feels like the sort of guy who would be absolutely capable of making a film as technically coruscating as Paths of Glory but would entirely forget to tack on the end scene of soldiers weeping sentimentally whilst listening to a folk song. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was Fincher's last stab at sentimentality and it didn't really work out for him. Everyone obsessed about how successfully he'd stuck a digital Brad Pitt head onto a baby but remained mostly unmoved by the narrative implication of what death brings to us all; the impossibility of love, the fleeting nature of beauty. He plays brilliantly to his known strengths as a filmmaker and as such is one of the few (the only?) auteurs flourishing within the studio system. But he seems torn between being a Spielbergian guardian of the zeitgeist, bringing the Midas touch to potboilers and being an impish Polanski-esque examiner of contemporary mores and morals.

What surprises me about the critical appraisal of Gone Grrrl is how everyone notices how tasty it looks and how naughty it is but there's not much discussion about how delicately balanced the narrative deployment is. The script, whilst utter fantasy garbage, is ground and polished to the Nth degree. Fincher has an absolute grasp on how to cup the audience's balls and lead them where he wants. There must be half a dozen inversions in our sympathies towards Rosamund Pike's character where we're alternatively asked to fear for her fate at the hands of muggers and weirdos, applaud her dismissal of a boorish cheating husband, cheer her guile and boo and hiss at her pantomime villainess.

That's ferocious skill. But ultimately I remain baffled. What's your point David?

What are you in awe of?

Quite honestly, I’ve been thinking about these words for the last six years. Not just in the sense that this is the kind of quality criticism and writing that puts me and so many others to damn shame. But specifically I’ve been thinking of the phrasing of those very last words: “what are you in awe of?” Because I’m not sure you can ever really know an artist, nor anyone, unless you know what they are in awe of. That is unless you understand what greater gods they see before them. For it is with awe that we understand how small or insignificant we are, thus rendering us humble and put on the same level with our fellow humans.

In the last six years, Fincher’s spent a lot of time in TV land and thus we haven’t gotten much of an answer. But here and now, there is Mank on Netflix. A film about the writing of Citizen Kane by Herman J Mankiewicz. And the screenplay was a passion project written by none other Jack Fincher AKA David’s father. Such notions invite the search for awe, no?

So I think it’s time for some three star dining.

2. THE SUBSTANCE OF STYLE

There’s an old Hollywood adage that is framed within a simple question: “When you watch a movie, when do you know you’re in good hands?”

The answer: “The credits.”

Yes, that means the opening ones. I know it’s sometimes interpreted as a joke about who's the director / doing what on the cast and crew side. but really it’s meant to show how the credits are your opening bellwether for whether or not the film is engaging in good aesthetic execution. It may seem silly to suddenly start judging a film on a matter of font choice, but it’s not *not* a valid thing to do either. Artfully designing your credits reveals a surprising amount about whether or not you understand things like negative space, mood setting, the rhythm of editing, and how to direct the viewer's eye. They’re honestly just signifiers of all the same kinds of things that often come up in the first few scenes of a movie. And I mention credits specifically because Fincher is as skilled a designer and tactician of credit as they come (even if the font is no longer in vogue, the Panic Room credits are a personal favorite and a direct homage to Hitchcock’s North by Northwest).

Similarly, we also hear things like Fincher is “good at cinematography,” but, like, okay, what does that really mean? Isn’t it subjective? Eye of the beholder and whatnot? In one way, sure. But if you also want to get academic about it and look at actual markers of what we use to talk about good aesthetics, you’ll find all the hallmarks of sound execution. For example, with Mank’s use of black and white and what you’ll notice is how he plays within the full range of the gray scales within a single shot. whether it’s a higher contrast of heavenly rays of sunshine in an image like this with this…

On the full swipe of light-to-dark gradient in a shot like this.

That means in both images you’ll see bright, shining whites, along with the dark, inky blacks, and most importantly, a whole spectrum of different grays throughout the shot. Why does this matter? Well, because in every visual study imaginable, we judge this as “pleasing to the eye.” That’s why. But it’s also incredibly difficult to pull off, requiring a heap of artful lighting and attention to production design to make it possible. And yet, Fincher rarely lets an opportunity to do this slip through the cracks. You’ll see the gray scale in the sky, the window-lit rooms, and even the innocuous innocuous shot of medicine chest. And if it were a color film? I know he'd be playing with the same ranges of contrast and be introducing color contrasts, too. The point is that with Fincher I know I’m always going to get something that looks the very best of professional photography. There are few filmmakers who better evoke the “Every frame a painting” mantra (which I know is meant to be a flowery phrase of spirit, but it also helplessly invites my nitpicking brain to point out sometimes you need frames to be decidedly not paintings to reflect motion properly — but that’s neither here nor there, nor fucking important).

Actually, I take that back. Because it IS  here and there. Because while Fincher is quite good at still photography, he’s ALSO good at understanding the effect of camera movement and cutting seamlessly between shots. While he spent a lot more of his earlier career pushing the camera around with glee, I’m struck by how much of his work now is ONLY motivated camera movement. That would be camera moves that only move along with the actors’ movement. Is it showy and attention grabbing? Nope. Does it get out of the way and render the cinema more invisible in order to best let the actors directly engage the audience? Damn right it does. Which means it’s the difference between someone letting the story be told and someone making the camera dance around like mad because they’re nervous they’re not directing enough. It’s no accident that shift in this technique tends to come with young filmmakers getting old, as they’re just learning to get out of their own way.

But for all the talk of camera movement, there is the more important issue: the way it cuts together. Because the hardest job in cinematography is not capturing a sweeping vista, nor executing an elegant pan across hundred of marching soldiers (besides, such shots often let their bombastic grandeur deafen the subtle problems of a shot). No, the hardest job is often a simple dinner table scene with multiple subjects. Why is this the case? Well, let’s put it like this. When you’re dealing with a lone twosome you get to deal with the beautiful, invisible delight of “shot /reverse shot” and your main concern is to never break the line of 180. The quick explanation of that term? You have to keep the camera placements on one side of them, because if you break the line, it makes your actor seem “flipped” and not in the right spot. Most audiences don’t care  about this because you almost never see it in a professional film. It’s the kind of mistake that more shows up in student work and it genuinely makes you go “wait, what the hell?” But executing it right means you don’t notice. You take your twosome and simply aim one camera at the person from the side, while you aim at the other person from the side in a similar shot and BOOM. You can cut back and forth between two people having a conversation and it feels damn seamless. It’s genuinely part of the magic of the movies.

But introduce a third person? Suddenly the conversation has to jockey back and forth to another person speaking and STILL direct the audience’s eye-line correctly within the scene and STILL not break the line of 180. I know it’s just one person, but you are literally doubling your complication of shooting. Add fourth? You’ve compounded your difficulty again to an exponential degree because now you need the range of being up close with them and being able to cut out without breaking 180. Add another? And another? It’s an exponential nightmare of timing, eye-lines, and geography. Again, to many people viewing at home? It’s the kind of invisible craft thing you’d never  think to notice. But without it, you’d literally have a confused viewer subtly wondering what the hell people are looking at and why the scene feels like a damn mess.

I mention this specifically because there is a cocktail lounge scene in Mank where Fincher effectively shoots people sitting at not one, not two, but three separate “tables,” which are all interacting with one singular giant conversation with what seems like a dozen speaking parts. And it not only never breaks the line, you never lose your place for a millisecond. It moves you in and out of its close-ups with surgical precision, always back to a shot that sets up the next shot without breaking and vice versa, all edited together like a tight drum that lets the performances sing. And it would be easy to chalk this up to his genius and regard it as the kind of non-euclidian math that makes your brain hurt, but the truth is it’s just hyper euclidian. It’s just doing the work (on second watch I started tracking the set ups and drawing the overhead diagram and yet, that fucker figured out a deployment that let him pop in and out of the tables perfectly). So yeah, freak out all you want because some director did a one shot with a steadicam and bunch of extras. This is nine billion times harder.  And in a more fair world, it would be honored as such. But the real obstacle to getting that understanding is that you don’t feel “the grandeur” from the shot. You just feel like it’s a tight conversation in a lounge. But again, all the greatest filmmaking is invisible.

This is not to say that Fincher principled style won’t allow the moments of unconventional flourish. For instance, in Mank, every scene is introduced with a literal screenwriting slug line as an on screen title card. But this is not only the one movie that maybe can get away with it, the decision genuinely helps the audience understand the time and place of the dense, ever-shifting narrative. Other stylistic details are more for fun, whether it’s the superimposition of film-like grain or the artificial “cigarette burns” to mark the end of reels (and whose use was famously pointed out to the masses in Fight Club). Yeah, yeah, this film was shot on digital, but it reflects the truth that is often shown in Steve Yedlin’s exhaustive detective work, which annihilates most assumptions about the nonsensical “film vs. digital” debate. At this point, they are basically just lighting styles and you can easily make one look like the other. Case in point? This whole damn movie. Because Mank is a feast of the senses, capturing the soft, airy lighting of yesteryear, along with the dark, sinking blacks of the best of noir. All of it, top to bottom reflects the historical importance of cinematic style. Which (finally) brings the 10,000 dollar question…

How much do these things really matter?

Because all the aesthetic precision in the world doesn’t amount to much if they 1) don’t help the story and 2) that story is compelling to the audience. But here, Fincher spends so much time blissfully getting out of his own way that he’s able to let the rat-a-tat of the dialogue just sing. Along with that, there are plenty of moments in the film t which show the flare for visual insightfulness. Like a simple shot of Mank walking along Hearst in his Dolly, which clearly emphasizes their power differentials. Meanwhile, the drunken gun scene in the studio evokes the subtle ways that Fincher can suddenly deploy tension and play with the terrifying ambiguity of malice within another character’s head (like the basement scene in Zodiac). Even when I was looking at the film’s propaganda newsreels, my mind immediately went “wait, those look too good to be believable.” But of course, turns out there was the story motivated reason for that craft because their director was wanting to make an impression of his skill by “getting in the chair.” It’s all peak craft, dammit. Which is to say it’s the kind of stuff I’d put in a textbook to help teach these filmmaking concepts to students.

But there’s a bigger matter of introspection here that also gets into one of the deeper ironies of craft. Because I think the craft of Mank is also an example of the very thing that all this overly fussy cinematography results in: a kind of distance with the audience. For all the scenes of bombast and kinetic soundtrack, the film never quite feels like it’s falling over itself, nor ever getting swept up in its own energy. This stands in contrast to how humanity works because, well, we’re human beings. We fall over ourselves. We get too loud. We make mistakes. We ruffle our hair and do things spontaneously and walk out of frame and sometimes see each other in soft focus. In essence, we are not only stubbornly defined by our flaws, we connect to each other through them. And Fincher’s filmmaking rarely shows such flaws off with understanding, let alone show the flaws at all.

So even when we’re supposed to be getting jazzed up or feeling the sumptuousness of romance, all constructed with aplomb, there’s utter carefulness that makes these moments sometimes feel like they’re just ships in a bottle. Thus rendering the viewer a kind of detached inertia. Or more tellingly, imbuing the viewer with a subtle feeling of distant somberness. In some ways, I feel like every single frame of 10% more depressing than Fincher realizes (or more interestingly, maybe he does). I even feel that Mank’s ubiquitous porcelain beauty enforces that same sentiment. Because when you put an entire film in carefully constructed gray scales, then everything becomes a mere part of an artful portrait. As they say, if everything’s gorgeous then nothing is. And so even as the film reaches its apex of aesthetic wonder, which I would say is the shot near the end of Davis by the the tree and the car with all the delicate blossoms floating by, I’m left with two distinct feelings: the appreciation of beauty… and emptiness of it, too.

The real question is whether that’s the exact point of the story.

3. THOSE WERE THE DAYS

It’s genuinely difficult for me to imagine someone watching this film without a fairly deep working knowledge of Hollywood history. I mean, I’m no expert, but I have a particular affinity for the MGM heyday with Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg, and pretty much all the amazing stories from this era that you’ll find if you listen to You Must Remember This (which you simply must, darling). Honestly, I’m into the time period enough that when certain characters pop up I’ll get an emotional titter much the way many others do when The Mandalorian references a Rebels character or something (I’m not joking, this is like a 1:1). It’s honestly at the point where I finished this film and one of my biggest thoughts was, “oh my gosh, they got Irving Thalberg right!” But I totally understand why such exclamations will mostly get greeted by crickets.

But this world is undeniably the setting of Mank. Because it’s the golden era of screenwriting, when everything they did was all a part of peak “craft” thinking. Meaning it was a time when the movie writer was not a gig artist, but a paid-by-week employee of the studio who got their hands on four, five, six or more movies a year. And these writers were often the most talented of their day, often lured from plays of Broadway to help the studios have a go at respectability (as Raymond Chandler said beautifully, to be a screenwriter is to “wear one’s second best suit”). And while it wasn’t the exact same as every studio, assembly line approaches to things like structure and dialogue were common. And as we see here, there was the writer’s room-esque collaboration on work at Paramount. Mank explains that they do it, “all at once, not relays, help spread the blame around.” This naturally brings us to his Mank’s merry band of writers, who we all meet through the eyes of a young Charlie Lederer. The scene throws a whooooole lot of names at you and I’m guessing a good degree of the audience won’t have a clue who they are, but how to put this…

There’s George Kauffman and yes he was the exact inspiration for Barton Fink. He also happened to be the playwright behind You Can’t Take it With You and wrote on dozens of films, including The Marx Brother’s A Night At the Opera. He is joined by fellow Marx alum Sidney SJ Perlman, writer on classics like Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, and later on Oscar winner for Around The World in 80 Days. It then throws to Charles MacArthur, esteemed figure of the famous Algonquin round table, writer on Billy The Kid, Freaks, Gunga Din, and Wurthering Heights (and yes, his family is related to the MacArthur Fellowship). If that weren’t enough, it then throws to the oft uncredited Ben Hecht and allow me to list the absurd resume that even I have trouble keeping track of: Scarface, Stagecoach, Gone With The Wind. The Shop Around The Corner. Lifeboat. Gilda. Design For Living,  Notorious. It’s A Wonderful World. Rope. Along with several late period Hemingway adaptations, and many of other films, including his collaboration on ones I’ve already mentioned with the other above. Oh, and that young man being introduced to the room? Charlie Lederer with the famous aunt? Yeah, he would go on to be a writer on classics like His Girl Friday, Gentleman Prefer Blondes, The Spirit of St Louis, The Front Page and Mutiny on the Bounty... If you didn’t know these names, you might not know that you were looking at one of the most talented collections of not just screenwriters, but general writing talent of all time. Hell, Ben Hecht alone is often regarded as the greatest screenwriter who ever lived. And that list I gave didn’t include Mank and his contributions to The Wizard of Oz and Citizen Kane, etc.

Now, another film might, you know, stop and convey the grandeur of all these people, but I have a feeling Fincher would find that gauche (to use one of Mank’s favorite words). So instead, it plays the entire thing for short hand irony where the biggest joke is that they very much also six idiots sitting around a table, betting on feather falls. Not only is it funny, it understands that their collective idiocy is an important part of that narrative… probably more important. And so we see these men enjoying time of absurdity before walking into a loose pitch meeting and trying to BS their way through a monster picture. They’ll even throw young Charlie to the wolves in a way that is both mean and funny.

The thing is the unrelenting density of all of this is that so much of it seems by design.

Where other films would be itching to showcase the Buster Keatons, Greta Garbos, and Clark Cables, this is a movie concerned with the “Manks" of the world. Which means it’s more interested in clashes with famous heads of production like Irving Thalberg than indulging in star adoration and cameos. Such sentiment becomes more evident in Mayer’s epic “Leo the lion” walk and talk, all before he goes into the shameful display of asking his workers for half their salary. These are the people that the movie it wants you to be up close and personal with. Meanwhile, it’s going to hang at a distance for any shots of Lionel Barrymore. And the Shirley Temple cameo? A mere pop over Louis’ shoulder. Again, anything closer or more pronounced that that would be too gauche for Fincher. And in it’s own way, it’s dastardly funny putting such things at a distance.

But I acknowledge it’s also still that: distant. A joke for those who speak MGM-ese and not the kind that sails cleanly unnoticed to others. This lands in what is perhaps an unfortunate not-so-sweet-spot, where it’s not exactly going to explain it to you, but it’s not gonna make something you can tune out either, nor be invited into. It’s a bit gatekeeper-y. And the film is honestly wall to wall with this kind of shit. And thus I imagine it’s easy for many viewers to feel lost in it (not even to mention the oblique way it comes at the narrative itself). But if you want to dig into every reference? It’s all there for the picking. A billion little fussy, hilarious, and amusing details right down to Lily Collin’s Audrey Hepburn like wisps of proper english accentage. This sort of history is our setting. And yet, it is not our focus…

Because at the center of all of it is W.R.

That would be William Randolph Hearst. The Rupert Murdoch of his era (hell, he’s probably worse, somehow). He’s the man who understandably hangs over the narrative because he’s our inspiration for Citizen Kane. And given what we come to see as his relative closeness to Mank, it becomes the film’s driving question: Why Hearst? Why target him? Why write a film that wants to take him down? What’s interesting about those questions is that Hearst’s character in the film is mostly dealt with tangentially, that is until it’s final pointed crescendo (which I’ll come back to). Interestingly enough, Mank is much more interested in the parts of the Hearst story that are less often told. And if there is any real credit to be given it’s the film’s re-writing of the popular narrative, it is the way it gives an earnest voice and focus to one Marion Davies.

The TLDR version of her history? William Randolph Hearst picked the much younger woman from the lineup of dancers at the theater, was smitten with her, bankrolled her, and pretty much moved heaven and earth to make her a movie star. And from silents through talkies, it more or less worked (which is to say her films worked on and off). But for anyone with such forces of immense power behind them, it is easy to become for that person to become an object of jealousy and scorn (and not unjustly so). But in Mank, we get to see her up close and with an empathetic eye. For she’s the woman who knows she lives in the fishbowl, who's likewise been poor and still speaks in Brooklynese in high society, and takes jokes about her Flatbush showing in stride (a pun on her old neighborhood). Sure, Marion woman who sometimes says the wrong thing in polite society (which is often the true thing), but rightfully muses, “why does anyone suddenly care what I have to say?” Thus putting an underline on the sycophantic system around her.

When imagining if she can play Marie Antoinnette, Mank tries to reframe the narrative. She is Dolcinea del Toboso from Man of La Mancha, because W.R. is the knight t who does not have a lady and “as he does not have one, he invents her, making her the very model of female perfection.” And by framing the story both through her and this specific reference, it’s not so much about W.R. or “Pops” as she calls him, but the inescapable sadness of his projection onto her. And more importantly, the effect of such projection onto her. For Marion is the person prodded by projection of endless form, and it finally gives voice to her interiority in a way I never imagined the film would tackle… But it’s also the exact kind of modern introspection that I can’t help but wish was found elsewhere.

Because the ongoing problems of “The Wife Narrative” also hang there, as they do so often. I feel like we’ve seen it trouble 20,000 times: the dutiful wife figures beside their fragile, broken husbands. Here, Mank is the drunk who refers to his wife “Poor Sarah” as she takes care of him, dresses his drunk ass, and raises their kids (who we never see), all while ribbing him and giving the pep talk equivalents of little pats on the head. Mank asks her again and again “why do you put up with me?” A question meant honestly, but often buttoned with hapless shrugging or, sometimes, prompt for cutesy flirtation. The problem is that, in the end, Sarah can only offer the answer that after everything they have been through she “wants to know how it turns out.” Which is an answer that, while unbelievably sad, also feels deeply unsatisfying and off the mark.

Especially when the answer is crushingly obvious. You're telling me the film can imagine the interiority of Davies and yet somehow can’t imagine the basic obstacles of women wanting to get divorced in 1940? Yes, she puts up with him because she lives in an institutional world that makes things the alternative basically impossible. So despite whatever goodness lies in the heart of their relationship, she puts up with him because she has to put up with him. Which is a level of somber tragedy the film can’t seem to reckon. If it cared about the answer, it would actually get into the headspace of her feelings. But it sidesteps it. And it honestly speaks to the kind of institutional problems that still hang over Hollywood erasure.

Keep in mind, the following features absolutely no slight here toward the wonderful performance of Tuppance Middleton, nor Amanda Seyfried who brings Davies to life with empathy, melancholy, and drunken pizzaz. No, the problem is much bigger, in that both actresses are in their 30s, playing characters who in real life are older than Mank’s 43. It’s a fact that goes up against the nexus of a brutal double standard in that Oldman is 62 and looks it. I’m sorry, he is literally way too old for this role and you feel it constantly. Yeah, but he’s good! Of course he’s good. No one doubts that Oldman is a talented actor who could find the essential truth of playing a hot dog. This is not the debate. It’s that his casting specifically creates loaded context on top of an already loaded context on top of another loaded context. And it feels worth mentioning in a film where Fincher got all the phenotypes of the roles absolutely pitch perfect, but not at these three critical intersections. Granted, I say that with the caveat that film casting is a largely corporate and industrial business, often beyond even the top’s control, but still I get to reflect on crappiness of it. And I also get to wish that these things were different (just as I get to wish that Phillip Seymour Hoffman was still with us because it seems yet another role he was made for). But wishing isn't really the point.

The point is that it’s fair to accept the way that these questions can hang over everything in the film’s discussion, to the very point that it has every right to BE the conversation. And should be. For all the notions of artists making “revolutionary work,” nothing will ever be revolutionary until one gives such things a voice (as part of that systemic discussion, here’s another pointed question: how many Fincher lovers do you think know who Ceán Chaffin is?). And criticism is part of an ongoing cultural conversation. And I’ll happily point you to the many critics and voices who are infinitely better at those exact discussions. What I can simply do along the way is at least try to use pieces like this to dig deep into the thing itself. To hopefully help unpack how all this fits (and doesn’t fit) within the architecture of what the work is trying to really, really, really trying to say. Because, for all my formal analysis? For all the deep revelings into history itself? A movie exists independently from such things.

It only ever comes down to one thing…

4. “IT’S THE STORY, STUPID”

If you’ve never heard that phrase, it is one of the many popular adages of writing that gets branded about ad nauseam during development. It’s achingly similar to “every movie only has one boss: the story!” And like any such adages, they can be utterly worthless if they’re tossed about meaninglessly instead of a manta that’s honored time and time again through the art of process. Because it’s what matters most. And once you glide past the artifice and history, Mank’s core story is at once achingly simple (guy wants to write Citizen Kane, we slowly find out why), but the larger sense of theme AKA “what it’s about” is honestly a bit more elusive.

Still, it bears mentioning there are certain positive qualities of the script that are quite clear, namely the most showy ones. After all, when most people hear the word “screenplay” they think it's just about writing dialogue and coming up with witty lines or something. But the funny thing about Mank is sort of honors that sentiment with joyful embrace. The film’s playful banter is unfurled constantly, as Mank (and the movie itself) drops killer line after line without so much pausing for a second.

Sometimes it’s lingual wit, “How silly of me! I thought I was rejecting a humiliating handout and all the time I was nixing a respectable bribe.”

Sometimes it’s quoting Pascal, “I would have written a shorter letter if only I had more time.”

Sometimes it’s referential to the setting’s social climate, “F. Scott Fitzgerald referred to you as a ruined man!”

Sometimes it’s casually delivering the devastating deadpan, “You look like you. Fine.”

Sometimes it’s incisively political adages, “In socialism everyone shares the wealth, in communism everyone shares the poverty.”

Sometimes it’s good old fashioned witty banter, “I might be fired!” / “I’ve never not been fired.”

Sometimes, it’s digging deep with some prescient advice on biopic-bound screenwriting: “you cannot capture an entire man’s life in two hours, all you can hope is to leave the impression of one”

Sometimes it’s acknowledging the “first half” artistry of screenwriting itself, “I built him a water tight narrative and a suggested destination. Where he takes it, that's his job.’

Sometimes it’s using the discussion of the Kane script itself to give the audience a roadmap to understanding the narrative of this film, too. For it's “a collection of fragments that leap around in time” all spiraling into the point of revelation. Meaning it’s a lesson both in how to watch and what to watch for.

And these are just the lines I thought to write down. It feels like twice a scene we are treated to the kind of line that makes for another delighted chuckle. But the obvious question, and the one I keep coming back to in this essay when it comes to going the step beyond craft is, “okay, so what?

What is the point of all these verbal insights? What does it add up to?

After all, the film isn’t trying to paint an especially pained portrait of Mank’s existence, nor his plight with alcoholism, which is actually treated like a temporary solution (perhaps pointedly so, given his eventual demise). Hell, it doesn’t ever seem that it’s trying to be all that introspective with Mank’s inner problems at all, save for little key moments that go a long way. For instance, there’s the moment he’s being flippant about Rita’s husband’s war efforts, but doing so right when Rita has found out his ship was lost at sea. Mank immediately laments his brashness and castigates himself by saying, “always the smartest guy in the room,” which is like #humblebrag. But in the next scene, Rita comes back to confront him only to find that Mank’s gotten into the pain killers (was it pain killers? I honestly never caught the proper noun, even after rewinding and trying to hear and I couldn’t find the answer online). Anyway, the point of this sequence is the way it gives insight into the fact that rather than address his failing and actually apologize to her, Mank takes the common alcoholic-brand solution of numbing his consciousness and spiraling inward to nix the pain.

In another way, this sequence also lends light to the existential problem of “being a good writer” and how that affects social graces. To wit, writing often demands you to (at least try to) be insightful, right? Often in the way where you have to be genuinely observant about the outside world? As for introspection, you’re hopefully a lot of that, too (and hopefully it’s the genuine kind that comes from therapy, which I wish I started earlier). But by its very nature, writing often demands so much outward projection that you inescapably get ahead of yourself and think you know far more than you do (like Mank thinking he’s a damn expert on air carriers or whatever). Keep in mind I’m not arguing that this is the cause of any boorish behavior like that, I’m saying it just tends to be an unfortunate byproduct of it that so many need to be aware of (especially us men, because toxic intersections and because duh).

There’s another wrinkle to this, too, in that the act of professional collaboration with other candid writers can help make you callous. An old acting teacher I had framed it as such: “ideas are babies. And rejecting someone’s idea is like taking that baby and smashing them into a radiator.” The problem is collaborating writers get used to that feeling and action because they have to do it so many times a damn day. Thus, the callousness gets callused. In some ways, this is a sad necessity. Because you need to take all that so-called magic of storytelling, the soulfulness, and the quest for human truth or whatever and engineer it all down into the nuts and bolts of simply doing THE WORK. Sure, this gaining of craft makes you a better writer, but it doesn’t behoove one’s social graces at all. Nor does it remind you that the most important part of empathy is not whether you see the situation clearly, but whether you stop to help the other person hold their space. And Mank seems deeply aware of all this, but again, it’s not exploring these concepts in an introspective sense.

Because that’s not what it seeks to unpack.

Instead, it’s exploring what happens when this kind of observant-but-not-introspective person is placed within exploitative systems of wealth, esteem, and power (and 1930’s Hollywood certainly qualifies as that). Upping the ante is the film’s backdrop of the 1934 election, complete with Upton Sinclair’s depression era groundswell of support. Which finally brings us to the subject of Mank's morality. Yes, through the film we get to know that he’s righteous and even seems that he’s also grown charitable, what with the way he sponsors an entire jewish village worth of exodus from Germany. For this, we’re told he’s “a good man and should be treated as such,” but Mank himself would also rather be caught dead than being seen as the face of good charity. No, not because he’s ascended to some higher, moral plane, but again, because he sees that kind of egotism as decidedly gauche. Or self-important in a kind of way he despises. It’s the actions of a man who could ooze pomposity in a verbal sparring match, but never be so serious as to let on that he actually cares.

The same exact sentiment extends to the way that Mank deals with money issues at the studio level. As others like his brother kvetch about it, Mank knows that what they get paid is ridiculous (especially when there’s “real people with real problems” and it's the damn depression). And yet to be in that system means Mank is also surrounded by powerful figures who, by their very nature, need more and thus can never amass enough wealth to feel like they’ve equaled their own personal equation. Meanwhile, Mank will let everything he has go in a flash because he finds such obsessions with wealth morally distasteful.

But this is not to say that Mank doesn’t trade in esteem or power. He clearly likes being right, just as he likes being toast of the town, even though he doesn’t enjoy talking about it  much. And so much of Mank’s gambling is actually part of the power game (like his hopeless bet on Sinclair). It’s not just that he wants to back up political convictions in the face of big industry to make a point, it’s that he wants to show the willingness to give up something they see as important. He is unafraid to have nothing, which is what they are clearly so terribly, terribly afraid of. And all these games of wealth, esteem, and power bring us right into the push-pull of the central issue of the film.

Because on paper and in principle, Mank is both unapologetically socialist and unapologetically anti-nazi. And he is both those things in a time where powerful people are busy either playing middle of the road, being in denial, or showing quiet agreement (sound familiar?). In essence, the film’s cocktail scene is a microcosm for every possible reaction to their current climate. But at one point later in the film, Mank is asked what would happen if he stopped playing coy, stood up and gave a shit. But what does that actually mean? Because in many ways, Mank stands up constantly throughout the film. Why, he stands up at practically every dinner party and tells a room full of powerful people the truth about their corrupted power and politics. The problem, as the film literally tells us, is that he is just the court jester. And when this is your role, you have all the attention, but none of the actual power.

Most of them don’t care about Mank’s nasty observations because his words are not actual threats to them. Even Hearst takes Mank’s final drunken rant in stride, as if his extended Man of La Mancha parable was a hapless farce. It doesn’t matter to them. If anything, having “the Manks of the world” around just allows them to cling to the illusion that they are well-rounded. That they can take a joke and play along with their faults. And if he really crosses a line beyond the line? Well, they can render the Manks of the world powerless in a second. Sometimes even with their own words (For example, Mayer’s greatest final insult is: “he likes the way you talk. Not the way you write. The way you talk”). And sometimes with ultimate banishment and leaving you washed up. For all Mank’s ability to thrive in their orbit, Hearst reveals through his own parable that in the end, Mank is just the organ grinder’s monkey. That would the little pet who assumes he’s leading the procession when really he is the one on the leash. And it is at this moment that the film’s structure of the spiraling shell hits it’s conclusive impetus: the realization you can’t be a threat in the cocktail lounge.

Which leads Mank to turn to the one place he can be a threat: the silver screen. Taking the dream factory and spinning the yarn that takes not just takes the piss out of Hearst, but takes all those powers of outward observance has and takes the man apart like an act of surgery. And yes, that’s the “why Hearst” of it all. And even though Hearst’s empire was waning even then, the victory of Mank’s take down is clear to us all these years later. For many people now mostly understand Hearst through the lens of Citizen Kane, perhaps more than any part of his own actual history. Mank “won” by crafting the narrative of his legacy. And now with this film about his plight? The only real, true goal seems to make that impetus behind that decision clear. Sure, Mank has this instincts to nip and tuck and fill in some important gaps on what happened in the story, but that’s still core of it.

But I acknowledge it might seem odd to frame this entire story as the dueling ego of two very flawed, but very different kinds of men. But sadly, that’s often that’s how games of power work. And for all it’s sociological exploration, it is the kind of narrative that only sees Upton Sinclair at a distance. No matter how radical, it’s not trying to radicalize you (again, it would consider that gauche). So it keeps the narrative locked within the structures of power, bringing us into the thicket of Mayer’s Sancho Panza figure and shrewd middle managers like Thalberg. To borrow another metaphor, it’s looking at all the games that are played in “the room where it happens,” especially the rooms that hold up Mr. Hearst.

Which makes it all the more odd to me that Mank’s final scenes suddenly switch gears to Mank’s conflict with Orson Welles over credit. Sure, the Hearst narrative explains why Mank wants that credit, but it can’t help but feel like this is some re-directed sniping. It’s just not the focus of the story they’ve been telling, is it? Nor does it really want to hang a hat on anything to directly connect the two, outside of the vague notion of ego. Ultimately, it’s just going out of its way to hammer home the point of what credit Mank really deserved out of this endeavor, compared to the boy genius of Welles. And as I’ve thought and thought and thought about this ending, it’s those last lines about accreditation and the magic of the movies and the weird meta point that’s being made.

One which might, ironically, come back to the heart of Fincher.

5. SAY AWE

“Who was that again?” / “Just a writer.”

Even to the audience, this sentiment feels familiar, no? Perhaps it is part of the conventional wisdom that screenwriting is a tough business. Because it is tough. And you’ve heard the reasons before. There’s only a handful of jobs. You can get fired at a moment’s notice. Interference runs rampant. There’s so many moving parts and business machinations beyond your control. You don’t even direct what you wrote. And on top of that, it’s incredibly difficult business to break into, often requiring years and years of working for others before you get the chance. And so, we have a whole world of people trying to write screenplays out there and the truth is that so many of those scripts will never, ever see the light of day. Some of it is the numbers game. Some of it is gatekeeper bullshit like institutional racism. But some of it also ties into something that doesn’t get talked about as much. And that is that is that screenwriting is an incredibly difficult job to “be good at.” Because writing a functional script is insanely hard for anyone, let alone those with years upon years of practice. And so, the idea that there are all these great unproduced scripts just lying around out there is a myth. Yes, they exist, but they are few and far between.

But it seems one such person is Jack Fincher.

We don’t know much in the way of biography, other than the fact that he was a former air force man, turned writer and essayist, who tried to turn screenwriter. We know this is his only movie credit. We know he wrote this movie long ago. And we know that he died in 2003. And we know that David Fincher has spent over twenty years trying to get this film made.

My question is why.

I understand the obvious reasons in terms of sentiment (which is something we will come back to). But beyond the personal meaning, there are deeper motivational themes at the heart of such an endeavor. I mean why tell this story? Why do it this way? In trying to answer, I think it would be reductive to say that Mank is trying to be a story about a writer, or writing itself. No, it’s much happier to make drive-by observations of the field, along with mere offerings of tonal feeling. To compare motives, someone like Aaron Sorkin probably thinks “being a writer” is some godly gift that must be bestowed to the people or some shit. But Mank more sees the way it as a curse. Like suddenly making you feel you are a part of the world’s cruelest joke.

The seeming problem is that the film side steps the big opportunity in that regard, because there’s so much it doesn’t capture about internal headspace of writing. Whether it’s the alternating back and forth of feeling like a hack or hypocrite (often deservedly) and the decidedly untriumphant feeling of “ok enough” (even when you’re told it’s good). Once again, it feels like a lack of critical introspection. But again, I don’t think it’s interested in all that outside of exploring Mank’s own capacity for self-destruction. Which means it’s probably not an accident that the things that hold Mank back from transcendence are the same things that hold back every story about “destructive male genius” and what we now understand in terms of the very toxicity of that idea. But Mank doesn’t seem to be running from it, either. There’s this kind of quiet, existential acceptance of everything. And in the end it shows how Mank, like so many writers, has a seemingly infinite tolerance for certain kinds of bullshit (read: mostly our own) and so little bullshit for certain others. Which is no surprise why his final act is a kind of internal purge of just about all of it, a literal vomiting onto the stage. But the most important moment comes just after. Right as he’s being escorted out by Hearst, Mank actually gives one, incredibly telling line…

“What I said was more in sorrow than in anger, really.”

I’ve been thinking about this line ever since I heard it.

Because suddenly I’m thinking about it as a lens with which to view not just this film, but every Fincher film we’ve ever seen before. Because you realize the way the cold, sullenness of sorrow hangs over so many of them, doesn’t it? Now, I’m not thinking so much about the murderous histrionics and twists and turns of Se7en and The Game, but the wallowing sense of doom that rests within every frame of each. And when I think of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I suddenly don’t see the misplaced attempts at whimsy and charm, but the melancholic tragedy of timing itself. When I think about the verbal and legal sparring of The Social Network, I’m reminded of the opening images of a boy, walking home in snow, who is taking his disappointment and opportunity for reflection and instead turning it into a colder, despondent kind of “logical” rage. Even within the juicy soap operatics of Gone Girl, there is this staid, yet pointed normalcy to so much of the photography that evokes the tragic trappings of an upper-class suburban relationship on any level. And now, for all the ways that Mank brought old Hollywood grandeur to life… so much of it can’t help but feel like a mausoleum… one that even evokes the last days of Xanadu. So, yeah. When you look at that career…

It feels like it was all said more in sorrow than in anger, really.

Using one line to extrapolate such a conclusion? Really? As Mank himself would likely imply, such things are gauche. But as he also put, I’m not trying to tell the story of a man, I’m trying to give the impression of one. So really I’m just trying to look at a popular artist through a certain lens. And it comes with the acknowledgement that sorrow is a complex feeling; one that often gets mixed in with feelings of not just anger, but nostalgia, yearning, and, if we’re lucky, moments of thankfulness, too. Because sorrow can humble us in an instant. So how is Fincher’s work thankful, exactly? Well, oddly enough, it ties directly into how Mank goes about the economics of his job and how Fincher goes about his.

Bringing it all back to opening point about Fincher’s blunt production mantras, you can view them through the lens of pragmatism and one particular quote from the aforementioned NYT interview, Fincher argues: “I don’t want to make excuses for my behavior. There are definitely times when I can be confrontational if I see someone slacking. People go through rough patches all the time. I do. So I try to be compassionate about it. But. It’s: Four. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars. A day. And we might not get a chance to come back and do it again.’ He moved to his fundamental point. ‘I tell actors all the time: I’m not going to cut around your hangover, I’m not going to cut around your dog dying [my editorial: okay THAT’s too far, dude], I’m not going to cut around the fact that you just fired your agent or your agent just fired you,’ he said. ‘Once you get here, the only thing I care about is, Did we tell the story?”

I think this quote clearly speaks to, well, a lot of things. Some of them are certainly rough around the edges, but some feature that incredible mindfulness of the economics of filmmaking. I mention this because there are people who treat the economics of movie-making like they don’t exist. Like it’s all just about playing with fun toys and cost overruns are meaningless because it’s all studio money, etc. Some of it is just understanding that hard lesson of ownership (to that point I once heard Soderbergh in an office remind people, “remember, it’s not our money”). But it’s also a reminder that that same money exists in a very real world and would feel different to so many other people. As he said, it’s 400,000 dollars a day. My mom was a school teacher and so that’s more than she’s ever had. More than most of us has ever had. But it’s not about frugality, this is where you crucially see Fincher’s approach as humility before a greater god than himself. And while I may not call it “awe” before that god, it is a respectable, hard won fear. And it helps reinforce the attraction to a project like Mank, which is all about the games of economics at the heart of studio creation. But this still doesn’t get us all the way to “awe” of it all.

For that, it takes the intersection of sorrow and grief.

A subject Fincher isn’t going to want to get into. Heck, even while discussing the subject of his father’s work on the screenplay, there’s a point in the same Times interview where Weiner tries to broach the subject and writes the following: “Invoking this seeming change, post-2003, in Fincher’s ‘emotional relationship to stories,’ I said, ‘This may be facile, but to what extent is it useful to think about your father’s death—’ ‘I think that would be facile,’ Fincher interjected. He conceded that Jack hadn’t much cared for films like Se7en (at first) and Fight Club (at all), but he emphasized that “I’m not doing this for anybody. I go where my curiosity takes me.”

This brings us to the crux of it all. In that setting, Fincher’s stopping of the interviewer’s projection is perhaps more than fair. Because its critics who always have to titter on the dangerous line of arm chair of playing psychologist when engaging in such art. So, yes, David, it would be facile to talk about. And I fully understand why you wouldn’t want to. But you also get to do it through the art itself. The thematic projection and psychology going on is not any different from what Mank’s character is doing with Hearst in Citizen Kane, nor what Fincher does with any of the real life characters up on screen, either. It’s the job to try and give insight. As much as we sometimes don’t want to talk about it in facile terms, we often reveal ourselves up on screen purely because we are trying to give some sense of how we see the world. And with Mank, a character who, despite being a writer and not a director, is blunt and scrupulous and insightful and prickly and cuttingly funny? I’m sorry but he seems not a horrible cypher for part of Fincher, himself (or maybe a part of his father’s influence). It’s an observation he would utterly bristle at and rightly so, but it’s also an inescapable part of his artistic personality, one that puts him in line with that same title character. I mean, look at our near-ending line...

“Mank, are you ever serious?” / “Only about something funny”

Which, if we take through another lens, leads me to the sudden realization that Fincher probably thinks all his movies are funny (which I think they are, too). Heck, you can take dripping sorrow of his entire oeuvre and realize it’s all part of that existential joke, something that could be downright Coen-esque with a little more re-framing. But the competing characterizations of his “sad and funny” work  therefore reflect two meaningful realities: 1) That maturity is simply holding two competing ideas in your head at once and being okay with it. And 2) that the subject still isn’t quite comfortable revealing itself in terms of a “singular emotion” or simplicity - which is why they are so much more comfortable revealing their intended seriousness within a joke. Which, in turn, brings us the actual ending line and its subtle reveal of sentiment.

“If you wrote it yourself, how come you share credit? / “That is the magic of the movies.”

It’s a joke that evokes a lifetime of understanding from a director who, like Scorsese, has always worked with different writers, some of whom were never credited. And while I can’t speak for the functionality of those particular relationships, Fincher’s always professed an incredible working respect for the craft of screenwriting (and trusting others to do a better job than him, instead of buying into the ego of his own full-blown auteurism). But most critically, that ending line also belies the reality of Mank’s own making. No, even if credited as such, Jack Fincher was not the only writer to get a hand on this particular movie. But that’s so completely okay. The point even. Because unlike the fight over Citizen Kane, it is instead displaying open-heartedly understanding the act of collaboration and openly giving credit to the one who most labored the most on it, that is the one who spent all those endless years in toil.

I think there’s something deeply meaningful about this unspoken reality. And as a critic, the truth is we get to be facile all we want (and boy are we good at it). Just as we actually get to be serious about serious matters of the emotional heart. Sometimes you just need to be a little, dare I say, gauche. So I’ll say the thing I think he’s too embarrassed to say…

In the end, Mank is a work of unbridled sentimentality.

This is evident in its very existence. He literally made a film his father wrote. It took him 25 years. And in the end, that script is probably the best thing in the movie. I think Fincher knows that more than anyone. And is proud of it. So for the first time in his career, he ushered in a personal story from deep within his life, and sought to bring it to life with verve.

After all these years, what was David Fincher in awe of?

In the end, it was a writer, long unthanked, one embodied by both his father and the spirit of the story that father wanted to tell. Fincher genuinely doesn’t think that anyone is “just a writer.” It’s something he sees with awe. And with Mank, I don’t even really have to justify all this, because the movie makes this plain. Yes, Fincher can find the observation to be facile, but it’s really not hard to see he’s just playing it close to the vest. Because that kind of sentiment? Coming from him? The sorrowful, cackling man with his fussy frames and finicky edits? The man who would rather be caught dead than being gauche?

Well, for once, I can think of nothing more kind.

<3HULK