Crime stories
I’ve been rewatching David Fincher’s films recently and the effect is like browsing a book of beloved and half-remembered poems in the middle of the night, finding their real turns and slidings of phrase in fact live up to their insubstantial image. Like Michael Mann, his stylistic code has entered the substance of much Hollywood genre filmmaking - and particularly prestige TV - at the same time as his actual work has slid off on its own, rather strange, track. Each new crime show is incomplete without its compliment of Fincherian gestures - season 3 of True Detective is rife with harsh sodium lighting and medium-distance shots of travelling car lights - but somehow none are really like Fincher, not even those he’s produced himself. The golden age of crime films in the New Hollywood - the 70s of The French Connection, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Night Moves, Cockfighter, The Outfit or The Friends of Eddie Coyle - lent their subjects the glamour of an occluded or disappearing world, even as they railroad the audience through the sharp bends of narrative. Fincher’s work removes all of their lingering romanticism, while burdening its narratives with that displaced aesthetic power. By that very cynical vandalism he’s truer to the core of the crime film than the vaunted stylists who take it deadly seriously. His films since 2007’s Zodiac form something like the opposite figure to the “new middlebrow” I described in my last newsletter: they inhabit the solemnity of a culture that, as Nietzsche noted in The Genealogy of Morals, is dedicated to truth at the expense of life, but do so with a love of genre’s appearances that takes falsity as its own, very particular, kind of value. They even invert the favourite techniques of sobriety: the long takes of Panic Room glide between spaces through obvious CGI mattework, thumbing their nose at the unearned dignity of physical effort, connecting shots that might as well have been made on different days.
One way to put this is that Fincher does genre without the disavowal of pastiche or homage, unfolding and intensifying to breaking point its strengths and blindspots, but likewise without reverence. As Sean McTiernan has pointed out, Fincher’s films since Se7en have been adaptations of airport paperbacks whose plots he treats with crystalline precision while treating them with utter contempt. A revealing comparison would be between Zodiac or Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Drive, the film that did perhaps the most to set expectations for middlebrow genre film in the 2010s. (The “A24 aesthetic” is unthinkable without it.) Drive straightens out the narrative of its source material by James Sallis, making the mechanical progression of heists and getaways into a portrait of solitary professionalism. The neon and warm yellow cinematography forms an environment that reflects back, like Romantic nature, the inner life of the story’s characters, none of whom look remotely like career criminals, while the soundtrack is composed by artists used to doing earnest homages to the soundtracks of 80s thrillers - they evoke the originals at 2 or 3 degrees of remove, maintaining what the culture industry receives as their “glamour” while streamlining and rationalising their mess and imperfections. What the film imports from genre is its Iconic status, to use the most dreaded adjective in Ian Penman’s Devil’s Dictionary, its narrative logic become a throughline to connect refined memories of setpieces in other movies. (This is of course merely the tip of the iceberg of superhero movies since Jon Favreau’s Iron Man, in which the narrative language of adventure and spy films are translated into the withered syntax of Wheedonisms.) This isn’t even the now rather dated self-reflexivity of the high-pomo Hollywood films Fincher came up among. No actual acknowledgement of the sources - which might require some attention to the content of their narratives - is forthcoming even as they’re plundered. Narrative becomes primarily a vessel for vibes.
In Zodiac, narrative information - the torturous interconnection between events, small details that do and don’t turn out to be significant, or flip from one state to the other, the questions of who knows what that possess Jake Gyllenhaal’s character - become points of the utmost significance, even as they lose all meaning. The film drips in late 60s/early 70s period atmosphere, much of it achieved through CGI, but all of this is merely the backdrop to, and the instrument of, bungling and misapprehension. Quite literally: as Zara Dinnen has pointed out, the film pays obsessive attention to the old media through which narrative information is relayed - typewriters, faxes, newsprint presses. As Zara argues, through its digital recreation of an old media world, film remediates the postwar environment and its technologies through which the Zodiac story and its decoders passed. But more than that, in a sense it remediates the genre of the police procedural or conspiracy thriller itself. Fredric Jameson has argued that the breakup of the unity that the realist novel of the 19th century represented ended with the energies of narrative being redirected into the various genre fictions, realised as the byproducts thrown off by a process of rationalisation and destruction. The detective story, the police procedural, the gangster narrative all emphasised what narratologists call the récit, the temporal continuity of events that compose the story that a narrative presents; they depend on the base imperative of “what happens next”. In Zodiac, the content of what happens next is always too much and never enough: with each new letter and each new turn of Robert’s investigation, plot information is added at an absurd clip, but much of it contradicts the hypotheses that emerge, can’t be combined to any coherent picture. Likewise, Girl With the Dragon Tattoo presents a clear procedural process - Lisbeth literally laying out the coordinates of the historical killings on a map - but does so with stylistic excess: it bombards the viewer with roaring music and heavy, sudden contrasts of light and dark that don’t correlate at all to any dramatic need. Gone Girl, whose source material pivots on a series of clichéd but technically perfect twists, delivers its wrenching plot turns with grim precision but with no interest in the psychological material that motivate them. The only thing that isn’t flat is the externalised extremity of bloodletting; the sole moment of Iconic homage, the “cool girl” monologue, appears less as the mental ratiocination of a monstrous genius than the half-justified litany of a psychopath in love with her own voice. The dun lighting in so many of Fincher’s shots, which takes the green filter that’s now a cliché in action films and turns it into a richer, wider band of shades, seems to desaturate the world, depriving the horrors and fits of madness the films present of grandeur. The romanticism of crime becomes finally just the image of its obsolescence - consider Paul Avery, the dandy who got furthest with the Zodiac case before Graysmith gives up his life for it, unemployed and huffing oxygen on his dank houseboat. The interdependence between past and present that crime stories depend on - the irreversible action of murder sparking the hunt of the whodunnit - turns into the fate Nietzsche described in his parable of the eternal return: the choices and events the present offers are hopeless, secured by a past we have lived through countless times, but the dilemma of Fincher’s characters is that they must live as if they mattered.