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.
No comments:
Post a Comment