A few quickie items before we scamper down the rabbit hole:
If you’re a book reviewer/blogger/TikToker, today is your lucky day: WHERE THE BONES LIE is up on NetGalley, where you can download it for your reviewing/blogging/TikToking pleasure.
In conjunction with the loveable scamps at Rock and Hard Place Press, I’m teaching an online class on action writing on October 12. You can find the sign-up at EventBrite; syllabus soon (seats limited)!
I realized I’ve been giving a lot of Substack space lately to assassins and lone wolves. That wasn’t intentional; such characters are an overwhelming presence in the movies and books I consume, which means they’re inevitably present in whatever my mind spits back, text-wise.
Many of those narratives hew to a template established decades ago, most notably in existential assassin movies such as “Le Samourai.” The killer is alone, isolated from the rest of society, utterly consumed by the minutiae of his work. When he botches a hit, his employer sends other assassins to annihilate him. The rest is a series of gunfights and stealthy maneuvers as he tries to extract himself from the consequences of his mistake, and…
Zzzzzzzz.
To borrow a phrase from Martin Amis, there have been precious few attempts to war against this cliché; perhaps the most notable is David Fincher’s “The Killer,” a movie I initially regarded as a disappointment when it came out late last year but keep returning to, like a murderer who keeps driving past a crime scene. I’m preoccupied by the idea that Fincher intended the movie as an outright comedy and failed, or else his sense of humor is too alien for most folks to grasp.
It's not like Fincher is incapable of comedic beats, despite his penchant for ultra-dark cinematography, twisted characters, and brutal endings. A murderer’s use of an ultra-sappy Enya song during a torture sequence in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” or Kevin Spacey’s bone-dry witticisms in “Seven,” are just two examples of him lightening the mood a tad.
“The Killer” likewise features some funny bits: the titular assassin’s use of sitcom characters’ names on his fake IDs, or how he turns to Amazon to instantly order a device that will allow him to bypass a building’s supposedly ironclad security. But those beats are easily lost in the relentless pace (the movie has a tight runtime of 118 minutes), noirish environment, and techno-dirge soundtrack (by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross), all of which combines to give the movie an ultra-serious gloss.
And yet… there’s an underlying weirdness here, a dissonance that would perhaps code as hilarious with a slightly different soundtrack or a more overt line delivery. The Killer (Michael Fassbender) speaks to the audience in voiceover, narrating each meticulous step of his kills — and yet he relies on the most banal cliches, and frequently forgets to follow his own advice. Every few scenes, he gets something catastrophically wrong, such as how long it takes a human being to bleed out with a nail in their chest, or the correct amount of drug needed to knock out a large dog.
Squint slightly, and you can see how a different production crew—Stanley Kubrick directing Peter Sellers in a black-and-white version filmed as a conscious Melville sendup, if we’re truly spitballing here—might have emphasized the comedy with bug-eyed reaction shots or some other tried-and-true prompt. But Fincher is too dedicated to suffocating everything beneath his style, and Fassbender remains carefully blank to the point where you begin to wonder about his character’s IQ.
By the end of the film, Fassbender’s assassin is less the epitome of the ice-cold killer than a weirdo you’d hire because nobody else was available; you might not even trust him to watch your cat for the weekend, lest he accidentally let the animal out and burn your house down by leaving the stove on. Maybe it works as a deconstruction of the hitman genre, and maybe Fincher spent the entire time in the editing suite laughing hysterically…it remains an intriguing oddity nonetheless.
Yes... he's a pretty inept assassin ... hired because nobody else was available, I like that!
Brilliant essay!