Network Newsroom

Starting a series premiere of a political news drama with a monologue on the ills of America is brilliant – courageously, recklessly brilliant. It's politically incorrect. The kind of screed that would grind most shows to an entertainment halt. If this same monologue had occurred at the height of West Wing's popularity and had come from anyone other than a stock, political hack, the backlash would have been swift. Bill Maher's exit from network television following his crude comments about September 11 proved that certain corporations lack the conviction of their rights and prefer profit to scandal. The terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers exposed the fragile core of the American media. In the immediacy of the post-9/11 world, they abandoned nuance for jingoism and drawing reductive lines in the sand, civility pitted against nature, red in tooth in claw, us vs. them – a duality where Maher's dynamism was not welcome. Months later, Maher resurfaced with a new show on a new home, HBO, a network known for its progressive programming and at-times biting social commentary.

Therefore, it's fitting that Aaron Sorkin's new drama would also find a home on HBO. Newsroom is Sorkin's first foray into the sanctuary of cable television. The premiere espouses much of the trademark Sorkin charm – accidental hirings, awkward badinage, and savant-like idiots – but there's an aggressiveness that's downright un-Sorkin-like. Even at his worst, Jed Bartlet is an idealist reformer, but Jeff Daniels's Will McAvoy is a realist who needs reforming. The show hints that years ago, he and renegade producer Mackenzie MacHale were the Woodward and Bernstein of broadcast news, but much like the actual media, McAvoy's jounalistic zeal has deadened. He's now the Jay Leno or more aptly the Larry King of anchors who offends everyone by offending no one.

However, from the show's first scene, his patience with mediocrity has worn thin and McAvoy's ennui boils over into a rant for the ages declaring that America is no longer the greatest country in the world. Like Maher, we fear that McAvoy may be fired (even if temporarily, after all the show is called Newsroom). Smartly, however, the show avoids the easy melodrama of termination or rivals without having first earned it and instead positions the season's arc around a more imposing fate for a figure of McAvoy's stature: irrelevancy. Will his speech be his downfall or his first step on a path to redemption?


At his best, Sorkin's conflicts are internal rather than external, rooted in ignorance, apathy, and self-doubt. Governor Ritchie from West Wing is the purest example that Sorkin's antagonists are typically thin and underwritten. A stand-in for George W. Bush, Ritchie spouts half-chewed cliches about the virtues of small government and even smaller minds. But the greatest battle of that election season is not Bartlet against Ritchie but Bartlet against himself, Uncle Fluffy against the Nobel Laureate. “Will Bartlet let the pitch go by?” as Toby projects. The query is merely a symbolic continuation of season two and three's prime conflicts: Bartlet's struggle with living up to his expectations for himself.

Similarly, Sorkin's other protagonists at their lowest doubt everything – God, government, technology, the future, themselves – everything except their fellow man. Rather than themselves, their enduring optimism is rooted in each other. They are surrounded by lost passengers on the path of righteousness, but not lost causes. The masses are not the enemy; they are the downtrodden victims of misinformation that need to be persuaded more than defeated. Like a Greek chorus, Sorkin's proudest refrain has remained that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens, a few good men, can change the world. That is why the easy battle lines of the post-9/11 media are so disheartening to Sorkin's worldview: they forgo a faith in men and institutions for fear.

Newsroom is trying to restore that faith in the fourth estate. Sorkin attempts to do this by setting the show two years in the past on the day of the BP Gulf Coast oil spill. At first, because of its in media res opening, we're unsure of when we are. For a newsroom, the background is shockingly devoid of televisions turned to competing networks except for one solitary monitor tuned in to John McCain. A surprising image considering McCain's considerable lack of television presence since his defeat in 2008 that is typical of electoral losers. Later, a typed narration reveals the date, April 20, 2010.

A newsroom with no flatscreens though is hardly the only conscious choice to deprive the show of verisimilitude. The episode's resolution is propelled forward by an unemployed assistant's sources and a blogger's geological hunches. In typical Sorkin fashion, the producer in charge (the villain of this scene) is an obstructive, micromanaging dimwit who cuts off his nose to spite his face. He'd rather have the boring safety of no news than the risk of news that might piss people off, the kind of gutless paper-pusher that plagues the mainstream media. As the newsroom comes alive with investigative fervor, he smugly sneers, “I'm the only one not dramatically doing anything,” and sadly, he's right because he's the most realistic character in the scene and that's the biggest disappointment.

When the revelations about the Gulf Coast oil spill and BP's culpability come fast and furious within minutes of the report hitting the wire within the show, Sorkin discards reality for the cinematic power of reclaiming legitimacy. We are not seeing the way actual newsrooms reported in the immediate aftermath; we are seeing the way we and Sorkin wished actual newsrooms reported and reacted to the tragedy. The poignancy trumps the fiction. While it's a gamble to set a critique of the media, an industry obsessed with daily business, two years in the past, it allows Sorkin the freedom to rewrite history to improve the present without having to predict the future.

A History of Drivers

A ghost-like, hypnotic unreality permeates much of Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive. The film's LA is not in California but in a dream world where people are not individuals but archetypes, 5 minutes is not 5 minutes, and driving is not driving. The characters are quieter, often only speaking out of necessity for themselves and not the audience, as if words were an endangered species and not to be wasted. Time is slower but perception is more immediate. The world unfolds as a slower pace (often in slow motion) but with brighter hues and deeper shades to accentuate the frame. Several minutes pass by without significant passages of dialogue or even ambient noise. The pervasive solitude creates a sense of both patience and unease – the pace is methodical but guarantees periodic, sudden sometimes violent interruption. The existential appeal of such factors is often a highlight of European films moreso than American cinema. When Albert Brooks as a shadowy loan shark admits that he use to make action movies that “one critic called 'European'” but he thought they were “shit,” the filmmakers are acknowledging the uneasy (to some) marriage they have formed of muscle car heroics and French New Wave psychology.

From the film's first scene, one detects precise craftsmanship and visual storytelling. Opening on an intricately devised map with numerous routes and shortcuts sketched through streets and down alleys, we sense an attempt to bring order out of chaos. Gosling's first line (“There are 100,000 streets in this city”) echoes what the map and Michael Mann films have shown for over a decade – that LA is a journey rather than a destination. The city attracts outsiders and hardened criminals only because its sprawling, rootless condition allows the predators of the world to hide in plain sight. Because Gosling is driving a Chevy Impala, the most popular car in California, his boss Shannon tells him, “no one will be looking at you.” Even as the camera pans from the map to Gosling, we face his back and only see his face in the window's reflection. As if even that is too intimate, the camera quickly looks away and instead shows us his dimly lit, Spartan accommodations that he calls home.

Among many touches borrowed from Taxi Driver, the camera often moves and avoids direct emotional confrontation with the protagonist at his barest, most vulnerable moments. We see him mostly in reflections because, like a wraith, we're never sure if we're seeing the real him or just another shade. When out of the car, Refn uses long and wide shots to fill the frame and de-emphasize Driver's importance. However, when in the car, he is cast as a titan in low angle grandeur but half shrouded in the darkness of the night. Similar to Travis Bickle, he is a creature of the night that when shown in profile with alternating red and blue fields of light appears even less human and more threatening. He is simultaneously larger than life and less than life-like.

Like Jef Costello, Le Samourai, Gosling's Driver is a process more than a man. Trivialities such as entertainment, enjoyment, friends and decent lighting do not factor into his existence. As a stunt man, he casually signs his life away on a liability insurance form for the studio in a way that is not human. While others enjoy a party, he sits in the dark and pieces together a machine – another symbolic attempt to bring order to chaos. He seems most keen on adopting the persona of Hollywood star. He wears a jacket with a Scorpion on it and is never without a toothpick hanging from his lips like Sylvester Stallone in Cobra. Whether it's donning bare knuckle, leather gloves or the prosthetic face of a leading man, Driver loves pretending. He pretends to be a mechanic to his boss, he pretends to be a disinterested neighbor to the newly paroled ex-con, he pretends to be an LA Clippers fan, he pretends to be a stunt driver (“only part-time”) and he pretends to be normal to everyone. He is all of these things and he is none of them. There is a brilliant cut to a tracking shot that follows Gosling moments after the initial successful robbery where he is revealed to be a police officer, but only for a few seconds until we realize he is a thief pretending to be stunt man pretending to be a cop.

Early in the film, there is a scene with Benecio that indirectly highlights his character's ambiguity. They are both sitting on the couch with the same parallel look of child-like wonder while watching a cartoon. Gosling, continuing to emulate adolescent behavior in this scene, asks Benecio questions about good guys and bad guys in the show. He wonder if the shark in the cartoon can be trusted (“He's a shark.” “There's no good sharks?” “No.”) and Benecio answers, “I mean just look at him, does he look like a good guy to you?”

The same question could and should be asked of Driver by all of the other characters. Until this point in the film, we've only seen him as a criminal with fleeting dreams of domesticity. He does not smile nor engage in small talk. He only acts with purpose toward a designed end usually for profit. Down to the minute, he is a perfectionist that never appears out of his element or off plan. His every action is performed with the habitual rigidity of a mechanic – and a mechanic. While driving with finely-tuned mechanics, he never displays a hint of hesitation, an ounce of fear, or a glimpse of humanity. Like the shark in the cartoon, he is a predator.

But like the criminal antagonists of other notable LA crime dramas, Heat and Collateral, he is an honorable, if immoral, predator. He has principles and a code that he lives by even if we are never privy to it. Driver is like the cars that he works on (the Impala and the race car): he's just a ordinary, blank shell but one that has been modified internally to make it more powerful, more valuable and more unpredictable. He welds a balled up fist and a menacing, accusatory finger to Christina Hendricks more dangerously than his counterparts do shotguns and knives. Unlike even Tom Stall in A History of Violence, though his past was likely bloody and crime-filled, it never ventures into his present and the film's narrative (probably because he has killed everyone that would know).

After enjoying a few days and sharing a goodbye kiss with Irene amidst all the carnage, the film tries to project that he is a new man with a new lease on humanity. The final song announces over and over again that he's seemingly transformed from a monster into a “real human being” and a “real hero.” He has finally made order out of the chaos of his life. But at film's end, he's back on the road, behind the wheel, and under the glare of red and blue light, presumably on the way to another city to continue his journey as the man with no name and the man with no past. It's only fitting that when you're in the business of “driving,” “for the rest of your life, you're going to be looking over your shoulder.”

Slices of Cake: David Fincher, Auteurs and Genre Pictures

Is “genre picture” an insulting label? Is Hoop Dreams a lesser film if it's a “sports movie” or “basketball picture”? What about Casablanca as a “romance” or Die Hard as “action” or even worse The Exorcist as “horror”? Genres are useful categories for cataloging but can obscure the meaning and quality of individual examples. From science fiction to holiday, each collection comes prepackaged with a set of determinative values that prejudice audiences toward certain expectations.

While this seems natural even innocuous for purposes of clarity, it can hamper a filmmaker from experimenting or a film from finding an audience. Though both were “alien” movies and both were released in 1982, ET set box office records and John Carpenter's The Thing slipped through the cracks. Lost Boys (1987) from Joel Schumacher continues to enjoy “monster” movie cult classic status as a staple of late night cable programming but Kathryn Bigelow's more philosophical, less fantastic Near Dark from the same year has yet to truly experience a revival. After numerous failures at the “pirate caper,” a spin-off of the sword and sandal epics, such as Cuttthroat Island, Steven Spielberg's Hook, most studios were reluctant to greenlight a $100 million adventure film with no backstory other than a theme park ride. However, after the cultural smash that was Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, another wayfaring tale of the high seas hit theaters that same year, Master and Commander: Far Side of the World. Yet despite being nominated for 10 Academy Awards, starring Russell Crowe, and being based on a popular series of books by Patrick O'Brien, the film lost money because it wasn't POTC. Near Dark didn't star Kiefer Sutherland and the Coreys, Haim and Feldman. The Thing wasn't a family film about cute aliens akin to George Lucas's ewoks. The earlier success of the other films in the same genre cornered the market and shifted the audience's appetite away from other “genre pictures.”

In their television review of Primal Fear (1997), starring Ed Norton and Richard Gere, Siskel and Ebert touch on the slippery slope of genre pictures:

Ebert: This is the John Grisham genre and it's better than the John Grisham films. We know they are going to hype up the sensationalism, that they're going to have a red herring to throw us off track, that there's going to be a surprise at the end...
Siskel: Roger, this is standard stuff: “the lawyer who takes on the tough cases”
Ebert: There is a such thing as good genre stuff and bad genre stuff, and if you're a movie lover, you love genre stuff that's done well. This is done well.

I include the exchange not for a discussion of the film's merits, but for it's reasoned approach to how to assess a genre picture: if it's good, it's good regardless of the embedded cliches. Still, it's hard to avoid the Hollywood establishment's aversion to various genres especially at award time. No true science fiction, horror, or animated film has ever won the Best Picture. Silence of the Lambs is the closest example for “horror” but that label is just the kind of misleading, disingenuous gloss that is the problem.

Perhaps the assumption is that talented filmmakers, real auteurs don't traffic in genre fare. John Ford (Westerns), Alfred Hitchcock (Thrillers), and even Stanley Kubrick (war, science fiction, horror, caper) made careers exploring the limits of the genre picture. In fact, the auteur theory pioneered by Andre Bazin was crafted in response to the idea that genius could not exist or persist in formulaic films. Even, a modern master like David Fincher has tried his hand at expanding the possibilities of genres with science fiction (Alien3), procedural (Zodiac), serial killer (Seven), and B-horror (Panic Room).

Another reasonable critique could be that genre films are light – lacking of depth and substance. Fincher, on his commentary for Panic Room, addresses this very issue in what he calls “footnotes movies”:

"I don't know if this movie is specifically a footnote movie. I feel like all movies you kinda have to go in and understand this isn't the movie that will define you. People get too caught up in the legacy they are leaving. I sort of like thrillers. I like this movie because it's not really about crime or any kind of sociology. It's just a lurid thriller. It's a Friday night movie. It's not supposed to be that important. And I think a lot of people get questions when you release a movie like, 'What were you trying to say?' It's like, 'I don't know. I was trying to say two chicks got caught in a closet and three guys try to get in and they burn the place down.' I guess the footnote movie aspect is that it's not supposed to be taken that seriously. Hitchcock once said, 'I'm not making slices of life; I'm making slices of cake' and I think that it's important that-- ya know, we're not curing cancer. We're just making a movie with actors pretending to be burglars.”

Fincher simultaneously embraces the genre of thrillers but rejects putting that label or its implications under interpretive scrutiny, essentially negating the first half of his statement with the dismissal of the second half. If we are fans of thrillers or any genre and we continually find ourselves drawn to that formula, that should tell us something about either ourselves or the films, but Fincher understandably was reluctant to take on the onus of genre explication. After all, he effectively birthed and destroyed the serial killer genre in one fell swoop with 1995's Seven. While Silence of the Lambs was a noteworthy and exemplary entry, Seven was the popularizer that meta-spawned numerous copycats including Kiss the Girls, The Bone Collector, Along Came a Spider and many others. He must have become so bored with the paltry imitators that he decided to reinvigorate and redefine the genre again with 2007's Zodiac. By mixing the serial killer picture with the procedural style of Law and Order and CSI, Fincher was able to give the genre a new lease on life.

In 2011, Fincher has dipped into tried territory for himself again by making another serial killer movie with Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Is it fair to call this film a “serial killer” movie though? Or even a thriller? Anytime Fincher knowingly takes on the confines of formula, there is a chance that he, as a clever and active filmmaker, will search for empty parts of the film to play. Typically, Fincher's sandbox is the credits. In Panic Room, he pioneered the pop-up characters framed against the city's real geography that has since been used in many commercials and other films. In Seven, there is a cryptic, askew montage of John Doe's hands cutting off his fingertips and plunging into the depths of thousands of journals with off-center, stained text. Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is another inspired choice – more closely resembling a Nine Inch Nails music video than a credit sequence, Fincher opts for an interpretative, ouroboros-esque animation story that brings to life the titled dragon tattoo.

Is it only in the “genre pictures” where Fincher's imagination runs wild with the credits? Fight Club is too hard to pin down under a single category and contains perhaps the most inventive opening with three minutes of Dust Brothers chaos as the camera winds, circles, and finally backs away to reveal the miniscule details of a handgun. Zodiac, on the other hand, is unusual. Other than the muted inclusion of the collapsed Oakland Bay Bridge and the Hyatt-Regency construction on the initial push in, Fincher's visual flair is mostly absent from the credits, but the title credit is telling in it's simplicity.

The text is all lowercase in a conventional font. It's an off-center double shot but it's the two people that speak to it's signifcance. Robert Graysmith, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, is dropping off his son at school with a basic set of instructions that could serve as a survival guide in case he never sees him again: “Learn a lot.” The statement plays half humorously because we have already seen father and son wearing similar clothing and brushing their teeth in the same way at the same time that they could pass for dwarfed twins rather than pater familias and eldest son.

In another way though, the image resonates because of it's insight into the film and Fincher's entire ouevre. As much as anything else, Zodiac is a film about obsession and how it destroys lives and families. Graysmith's drive to find the Zodiac perpetuates his divorce from his wife and separation from the son he instructs in the image. The irony is that in his own quest to “learn a lot” Graysmith sabotages his own closest relationships. Paul Avery's addiction to finding out the killer's true identity is only matched and indeed overrun by his addictions to drugs and alcohol that claim his career, health, and eventually life. Dave Toschi manages to escape just in time to save his marriage though we see Graysmith able to pull him back in through his blind commitment to the chase.

Zodiac is hardly the only Fincher film to display these themes. In Seven, both Somerset and eventually Mills ruin their own lives in pursuit of John Doe. Even Girl with the Dragon Tattoo teaches the virtue of love and family and the perils of forgetting it. Blomkvist lost his family through a divorce caused by adultery, but the implicit acknowledgment is that the cheating is due to his ties to the newspaper and his relentless conviction to outting Wennerstrom. Similarly, Henrik Vanger proudly lists off the accomplishments of his business that include “building” Sweden through its railroads and lumber, but he neglects to make the associations between his own family's collapse and their tireless bickering over the “family business.” Lisbeth is an intriguing character, because while she has own own obsessions and addictions to battle, her current predicament is clearly not of her own choosing or doing. Rather, while the film provides no explanation as to how she became the ward of the state, one can easily parallel her with Harriet and Pernilla as gifted, but neglected daughters and due to their parent's obsessions find their own releases in religion, escape, and (psychological, financial, and geographic) freedom.

Lisbeth and Harriet also bring to bear another Fincher staple: ordinary, possibly child geniuses. Almost every character that speaks of Harriet immediately adds that she was “very bright” and soon to take over the business from Henrik himself. Lisbeth, despite the chaos of her live and depravity of some of her benefactors, is the film's best detective and manages to solve a case that stumped the local police for 40 years. To a lesser extent, Mikael is also indicative of Fincher's interest in common brilliance. Like Graysmith of Zodiac, Mikael is a journalist who engages in investigations for fun and for hire and he's adept at both. Like Toschi though, Mikael is a decent man who wants to reclaim his family or at least his relationship with his daughter. Unlike Graysmith and unlike Henrik, he has learned the most important lesson of the case and this is primarily why Lisbeth trusts him while she trusts no one else. She has done the background on him and realizes “he's clean” meaning “he is who he says he is.” It is his integrity that draws Lisbeth to him, not his genius, though she admires that as well. When she asks him to borrow $50,000, he says yes almost without hesitation. Still, though, for a woman that seems perpetually bored by her latest acquisitions whether they be partners, tattoos, piercings, or electronics, she stays interested in Mikael because of his complexity, even if his forthrightness attracted her initially. She, like him, is a savant, but while he wants a return to homeostasis, she yearns for the next challenging distraction to depress the pain.

Still though, for Fincher, there is an undeniable attraction toward these sorts of tortured artists and their method to madness. Some of the more unique scenes in his filmography involve a process of discovery, a teasing out of order amidst the chaos of uncertainty. Roger Ebert recalls a similar sensation in perhaps the most famous example of such a scene in Antonioni's Blow Up:

“Whether there was a murder isn't the point. The film is about a character mired in ennui and distaste, who is roused by his photographs into something approaching passion. As Thomas moves between his darkroom and the blowups, we recognize the bliss of an artist lost in what behaviorists call the Process; he is not thinking now about money, ambition or his own nasty personality defects, but is lost in his craft. His mind, hands and imagination work in rhythmic sync. He is happy.”

Working from the same cloth, Fincher includes variations of this trope throughout his career. To the tune of Bach's “Air on a G String,” Somerset in Seven pieces together the breadcrumbs left by John Doe in the downtown library. Through one drunken night of vegging and technological alchemy, Zuckerberg in The Social Network creates the monster that would go on to become Facebook. Mikael methodically reanimates a 1960s parade with the help of a computer program and some classical music. Graysmith and Toschi pour over the painstaking details of the Zodiac case in a diner using silverware and saltshakers as stand-ins for landmarks and corpses. He has an entire film dedicated to puzzles and mind games with 1997's The Game and one ups himself again with the psychological, nihilistic morality tale, Fight Club.

In a sense then, Girl with a Dragon Tattoo confirms Bazin's argument about auteurs, namely that even their “footnote” films in lesser “genres” display tenets of their underlying philosophy toward life and filmmaking. There are undoubtedly “serial killer” elements to Fincher's latest offering but he makes effort to minimize their deadening impact. He splits the first half of the film between the murder mystery akin to Gosford Park and Lisbeth's dark, twisted journey toward the case. As soon the film begins to drag on either account, Fincher cuts to the more interesting narrative thread for some needed vitality in the form of detective scenes mentioned above or a particularly gruesome rape scene. It is as if Fincher is somewhat bored with the source material and entertains himself by playing with convention. He turns the credits into an avant garde animation short, he teases a horror movie jump scare at the climax only to have Martin already outside in his car pulling away, and just as Lisbeth seems intent to blow him away Dirty Harry-style, the car explodes to mock such a trivial confrontation in the same way that Toschi leaves the theater in Zodiac to express his impatience with Hollywood's formula, genre conventions. While Fincher invokes Hitchcock to praise genre pictures and dismiss the necessity of making each film “high art” important to a filmmaker's legacy, Fincher himself would probably agree that even in making slices of cake it's hard to hide who we are.