‘Purely logistical, narrowly focussed by design’
I used to go to dance classes as a teenager and occasionally entered into local festivals competing against other dance schools. Sitting on plastic chairs, clutching polystyrene cups of tea in my costume and make-up, waiting nervously for my turn to go up on stage, I would watch the other dancers and learned something important about artistic expression. Namely; there is a difference between a skilled dancer and a talented one. The most technically skilled dancers with the highest jumps, the cleanest lines and the pointiest feet, were not always the most watchable. Sometimes they were even boring. And the more emotive performances were rarely close to any kind of technical perfection; they were often made all the more interesting due to moments of error; a missed count, a slight imbalance, a hair piece that comes loose. The dancers who placed the highest were often those who could combine technical prowess with some kind of flair, evidencing some kind of facility that could not be taught in the classroom, or perhaps even adequately expressed and praised by the judge. It is a rule I have found to be true in all kinds of creativity; I am the most moved by imperfection in art, by the raw humanity which faults hint at.
Yet imperfection is not something that David Fincher is known for. Famous in the business for his relentless repeated takes on set, Fincher is unflinching and meticulous in his pursuit of cinematic precision. And he often achieves it. Less cinéma vérité and more drill sergeant with a camera. The result of this is a signature, distinct, technically flawless style, something which few modern filmmakers can lay claim to. Even amongst the psychotic chaos of ‘Fight Club’ (1999), and the violent ballet of ‘Gone Girl’ (2014), Fincher’s filmmaking is always slick, clean and strictly realistic.
His latest offering is no different. Adapted from the French graphic novel series by Andrew Kevin Walker (the writer of Fincher’s breakthrough film ‘Seven’ (1995)), ‘The Killer’ takes us into the cold, joyless and repetitive lifestyle of our nameless protagonist; an American contract killer who is sent to Paris on a job which doesn’t quite go to plan. The film appears as the most generic and stereotypical story of Fincher’s career to date; a bog-standard, neo-noir, assassin thriller in the style of Jean-Pierre Melville’s ‘Le Samouraï’ (1967), or more recently, Nicolas Winding Refn’s ‘Drive’ (2011). It presents a recognisable, archetypal protagonist and genre, making it in some ways, the least Fincher-esque of Fincher’s films to date.
The opening scene tracks the tedium, mundanity and non-eventfulness of The Killer’s job. He waits and watches for days in an abandoned WeWork office space, sitting on a squeaky folding chair, and sleeping in one-hour intervals on a hard, stone desk. The Killer’s internal monologue speaks to us incessantly through voiceover, and telling us that to be successful in his line of work, one must learn to handle boredom. We see him globe-hopping between locations; replacing one airport lounge, rental car, and false identity for another. The Killer gets to travel the world but doesn’t see much of it. He is a man constantly in transit; untraceable, unrelenting, unfeeling. The Killer exploits the technological distraction of the general public in order to maintain his anonymity; with their heads down, scrolling through iPhones at coffee shops and train stations, everyone is oblivious to the armed murderer in their midst. To remain forgettable, he says very little to the people he encounters; a man of few words in a similar way to Ryan Gosling’s character in ‘Drive’. With name-drops for AirBnb and Amazon, as well as the prevalence of technological surveillance, the film oozes ultra-modernity, in contrast with the audio-visual nostalgia of Fincher’s previous film, ‘Mank’ (2021), shot in monochrome to replicate the style of the 1930s Hollywood era it dramatises.
Long-term fans of Fincher’s work may wonder why the idiosyncratic director was drawn to this more generic material. Did he find within the protagonist’s perfectionism and determination to succeed at any cost a match for his own painstaking methods as a filmmaker? Is his ability to handle the tedium of repeating shots on set that same capacity which The Killer has for enduring boredom? The Killer describes his work as “purely logistical, narrowly focussed by design”, a description which also applies to the slick, technical precision of Fincher’s filmmaking. Fincher can rarely be accused of providing style without substance, technique without flair, but he comes close to it here. He seems to have honed his own style to such a tee that it is almost too slick, too clean, without any grit or edge. With this film, Fincher has become the dancer who lands the impressive leap, but cannot move the audience to tears with their performance. In the achievement of near technical perfection and ultra-realism, does this film become hollow, empty, so perfectly crafted that it loses its bite, so good that it’s almost boring? Do we, like the protagonist, need to learn to tolerate boredom in order to enjoy this film?
‘Stick to the plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise.’
So as to fill this gap of boredom in the lead up to jobs, The Killer practises yoga, deep breathing, and has a speech of pithy mottos and maxims which he calmly relays to himself:
“Stick to the plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise. Trust no-one. Yield no advantage. Fight only the fight you’re paid to fight. Forbid empathy. Empathy is weakness. Weakness is vulnerability. Each and every step of the way, ask yourself: what’s in it for me? This is what it takes. What you must commit yourself to if you want to succeed. Simple.”
Out of context, The Killer’s philosophy could have been lifted verbatim from one of the many books, podcasts or YouTube videos pushed by the CEOs, self-proclaimed productivity gurus and ex-Buddhist monks who litter our online culture with their self-help, wellness and business advice. The killer espouses the same kinds of values, and uses the same kinds of practices promoted by these online figures to help others succeed in our world. Of course the irony is that our protagonist doesn’t utilise these concepts to make himself a better businessman, or a better person, but a better, more effective killer. Not quite what the Buddha intended.
The Killer’s adherence to the slogans and practices of contemporary wellness culture is not presented as an exaggeration or misapplication of them, but as the not-altogether-unrealistic potential outcome of the promotion of Stoic principles. It turns out the cold, impersonal and unfeeling instincts of The Killer are not all that far removed from the kind of discipline, minimised empathy and unflinching determination required to succeed in business. ‘This is what it takes if you want to succeed’ could easily be heard on a manosphere podcast espousing the virtues of 4am workouts and ice plunges. This sardonic twist on wellness and productivity culture suggests a kind of psychopathy which underlines these popular ideas, blurring the lines between Stoic detachment and cold-blooded murder in order to point fun at the wide-spread dissemination of these concepts in our society.
Yet the film is in no way promoting these values. The story more clearly stages the failure of this kind of self-discipline and the deranged impulses which underlie the desire for and the pursuit of perfectionism towards any end. These hollow truisms may make the killer feel safe, focussed, and successful, but they fail to produce the effects they are utilised for. Despite his rigorous routine and stringent philosophy, when it comes time to pull the trigger, the killer misses. His ideology collapses around him and is revealed as pure self-deception. So does all that yoga count for nothing?
After this initial failure, chaos ensues and The Killer begins to break his own rules. ‘Don’t improvise’, yet he abandons his mission to return to his girlfriend in the Dominican Republic, arriving too late to prevent her being brutally assaulted by assailants looking for him. ‘Fight only the fight you’re paid to fight’, except The Killer embarks on a rampage, flying around America to track down and kill everyone involved in this assault without being instructed, or paid, by anyone. ‘Forbid empathy’, yet he yields to Dolores’ desperate request for an inconspicuous death for the sake of her children’s wellbeing and inheritance. His heart rate monitor is left on the windscreen of his car, his heart pumping along at 120bpm, double the target heart rate he self-imposed for a kill, as he heads off to murder The Brute in Florida. Yet he keeps repeating the mantras to himself, clinging to their familiarity, even as their deficiency is exposed and their meaning becomes increasingly vacuous in light of his continuous slip ups.
Despite his internal robustness, we don’t meet a successful killer in the film. In fact, almost every murder goes wrong. The only kills which go smoothly are those of the two women in the film; the Professor’s assistant, Dolores, and fellow assassin The Expert. How proficient is our protagonist really, if he is only capable of cleanly assassinating an unarmed receptionist and a woman caught off guard in a restaurant? This protracted portrayal of failure may explain Fincher’s attraction to this material; the director somehow pointing fun at himself as well as the protagonist by enacting the repeated frustration of the impulse for perfectionism which has guided his career.
‘What’s in it for me?’
When The Killer comes face-to-face with The Expert, played with true flair by Tilda Swinton, she poses to him the question on the audience’s mind: “Why take this risk?” Why not, as his boss Hodges previously suggests to him, take his hard-earned money and disappear off to a different continent with one of his many fake identities? He knows the nature of the business: “You get a name, you get an address, it’s nothing personal”, so why is The Killer taking it so personally?
At this point in the film, one cannot escape the feeling that The Killer is on a mission not simply to avenge the assault on his girlfriend, but to avenge his own mistake; prove that he can kill under pressure and that his yoga moves, his heart rate rules, and his internal mantras are all, in fact, effective. It all feels like grandstanding; trying to prove himself capable at his job, to make up for that ‘unprecedented’ mistake at the beginning of the film. Trying to show himself, primarily, that he is the cool, calm and collected professional assassin that his internal monologue tries to reassure him that he is. Trying desperately to prevent that failed kill in Paris from being his anticlimactic swansong to an otherwise stellar career in slaughter. And is there a part of him that is wrapping up these loose ends just for fun? Because he has forgotten how to do anything else, how to be anything else? Because, as The Expert presumes, he cannot help himself?
If The Killer were to escape with his life, give up his job, then he would be, as he says at the end of the film, ‘one of the many’, someone who cashes in for an easy life, settles for feeling secure. He clung to his job, even when his luck was up, because he thought it made him special, someone on the other side of life, above others, like the CEOs and ex-navy seals who lecture us all about self-discipline and ‘staying hard’. To give in would be to accept he is just like everyone else; a reality which makes him flinch as he admits it:
“The need to feel secure. It’s a slippery slope. Fate is a placebo. The only life path, the one behind you. If, in the brief time we’re all given, you can’t accept this, well maybe you’re not one of the few. Maybe you’re just like me; one of the many.”
Is this film really about the lengths we will go to to feel special, to feel we are different from others? The bullshit, vacuous concepts we will chew up and spit out from billionaire CEOs, sociopathic figures whose lives we will never be able to emulate, and would not want to either. We who watch the film are not all that far removed from The Killer; all justifying our own inadequacies using deceptive, insufficient philosophies and wellness techniques we’ve learned from people who lead unrealistic and unrecognisable lives to ours. We are all unmemorable, just like The Killer. Trying to reach perfection, not realising that our humanity, our joy, lies in our error.
The Jaded Optimist 