The unhappiest auteur in Hollywood?
David Fincher is a director for adult audiences in an industry focused on cartoons and comics
For nearly three decades, David Fincher has been making gorgeous bummer movies that — in defiance of Hollywood’s first principle — insist that happy endings are a lie. Filled with virtuosic images of terrible deeds and violence, his movies entertain almost begrudgingly. Even when good somewhat triumphs, the victories come at a brutal cost. No one, Fincher warns, is going to save us. You will hurt and you will die, and sometimes your pretty wife’s severed head will end up in a box.
Long a specialized taste, Fincher in recent years started to feel like an endangered species: a commercial director who makes studio movies for adult audiences, in an industry in thrall to cartoons and comic books.
His latest, “Mank,” a drama about the film industry, was made for Netflix, though. It’s an outlier in his filmography. Its violence is emotional and psychological, and there’s only one corpse, even if its self- destructive protagonist, Herman Mankiewicz ( Gary Oldman), can look alarmingly cadaverous.
Set in Hollywood’s golden age, it revisits his tenure in one of the most reliably bitter and underappreciated Hollywood tribes, a. k. a. screenwriters.
Part of the movie takes place in the early 1930s, when Herman was at Paramount and Metro- Goldwyn- Mayer; the other section focuses on when he was holed up in 1940 writing “Citizen Kane” for Orson Welles, its star, producer, director and joint writer. Like that film, “Mank”— written by Fincher’s father, Jack Fincher — kinks time, using the past to reflect on the present.
Its flashbacks largely involve Herman’s boozy, yakky days and nights at Hearst Castle in the company of its crypt keeper, newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, and his lover, actress Marion Davies. There amid the waxworks, Herman plays the court jester, as a few intimates unkindly note.
Hollywood loves gently self- flagellating stories about its horrible, wonderful doings; there’s a reason it keeps remaking “A Star Is Born.” The lash stings harder and more unforgivingly in “Mank” than it does in most of these reflexive entertainments, although Fincher’s movie also sentimentalizes the industry, most obviously in its softfocus view of both Herman and Marion ( Amanda Seyfried), a poor little rich dame.
In narrative terms, Marion is Herman’s doppelgänger: a self- immolating avatar of decency that’s otherwise missing in their crowd. Their real tragedy, at least here, is that they’re in the movie business and, as punishment, each must endure the unhappy patronage of a great man: Marion under Hearst and Herman with Orson.
The two narrative lines in “Mank” never make coherent, interesting sense, no matter how Fincher jams them together. The big news during Herman’s MGM years is the industry’s ( and Hearst’s) propagandistic drive to torpedo writer Upton Sinclair’s 1934 run for governor of California.
The real Herman Mankiewicz doesn’t seem to have had much of anything to do with this chapter in American cinema, but Hollywood has rarely let fact get in the way of a juicy story and “Mank” fully commits to its chronicle of events.
But it doesn’t just stop there: It tethers Mankiewicz’s nonexistent role in this disinformation campaign to his role in
“Citizen Kane,” a fascinatingly self- serving flex.
Fincher was 27 when he was hired for “Alien 3,” his first feature. Welles was 25 when he began filming “Citizen Kane,” the most famous directorial debut in cinema history. There’s little to connect the men other than cinema. Welles had a background in radio and theatre; Fincher had worked in post- production before he started directing commercials and music videos. The Hollywood each man worked in was also different, although by the time Fincher made his first film for Twentieth Century Fox, the industry had weathered multiple existential threats beyond the coming of sound, including the end of the old studio system and the introduction of television and, later, home video.
“Alien 3” bombed and, for Fincher, remains a wound that has never healed. His resurrection came a few years later with “Seven” ( 1995), a brutal thriller that turned him into Hollywood’s Mr. Buzzkill and put him on the path toward fan devotion bordering on the cultlike. Its Grand Guignol flourishes were attentiongrabbing, yes, but what knocked some of us out was Fincher’s visual style, with its crepuscular lighting, immaculate staging and tableaus. Striking, too, was the visceral, claustrophobic feeling of inescapable doom. It was as if Fincher were trying to seal his audience up in a very lovely, very cold tomb. It was an easier movie to admire than love, but I was hooked.
Most of Fincher’s protagonists are nice- looking, somewhat boyish, WASP- y white male professionals, kind of like him. Even when they don’t die, they suffer. Notably, whatever their differences, they engage in an epistemological search that grows progressively obsessive and at times violent. These are characters who want to know, who need to know even when the answers remain elusive: Where is my wife? Who is the murderer? Who am I? Their search for answers is difficult and creates or exacerbates a crisis in their sense of self. In “Alien 3,” the hero, Ripley, realizes that she will give birth to a monster. In “Fight Club” ( 1999), the hero’s split personalities beat each other up. Always there is a struggle for control, over oneself and over others.
In 1995, a few weeks after “Seven” opened, I interviewed Fincher at Propaganda Films, the production company he’d helped found. He was funny and chatty and spoke fluidly about movie history and the technological shifts affecting the art and industry.
“If you can dream it,” he said of digital, “you can see it.”
He talked about the silent era, John Huston and Billy Wilder.
“And then you have Welles walking into the thing going, OK, let’s turn the whole ( expletive) thing on its ear,” he said. “We know it can talk; can it move, can it be opera?”
Welles was already a touchstone for Fincher, whose 1989 music video for Madonna, “Oh Father,” alludes to “Citizen Kane” with snowy flashbacks. Fincher also mentioned Mankiewicz in passing.
He talked about “being crucified” for “Alien 3” and how he’d known that his next movie would need to use genre to get people in the seats and deal with some of what interested him, namely “a certain fascination with violence.” He was, he said, someone who slowed down on the freeway to look at accidents. “When I was a kid, literally from the time I was about five years old until I was about 10 years old,” he said, “I could not go to sleep, I would have nightmares.” Years later, when he made “Zodiac” ( 2007), he told interviewers about growing up in Marin County, where the killer had threatened to shoot school kids. It was easy to wonder if this was why the young Fincher couldn’t sleep.
Two years after “Seven” blew up the box office, the trades started running items about “Mank,” which Fincher was interested in directing with Kevin Spacey in the title role.
Fincher said “Mank” would be “a black- and- white period piece about the creation of one of the greatest screenplays ever written” and “the man who did it in almost total anonymity.” Instead, he triumphed with “The Social Network” ( 2010) and baffled with “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” ( 2011). By the time he managed to direct “Mank,” it was for Netflix, and Murdoch had sold the Fox studio to Disney, which killed it. He hadn’t made a movie since “Gone Girl,” a pulpy hit, six years earlier.
Fincher has directed only 11 feature movies; since “Gone Girl,” he has been busy making television. These include the Netflix shows “House of Cards,” about Washington power players, and “Mindhunter,” about criminal profilers. Each is of a thematic and visual piece with Fincher’s work, but neither feels worthy of his talent. Maybe he doesn’t care. He made what he wanted and, perhaps more important, the way that he wanted. He might care more if he wrote his movies, but like most old- studio directors, he doesn’t. Mostly, I think, he just wants to work.
“Netflix has been incredibly respectful,” he told the DGA Quarterly in 2013. I wonder if he feels that respect when you hit pause, as I did during “Mank,” and a Netflix pop- up asks if you’re enjoying the program.
There are all sorts of ways to look at “Mank” — as a vindication of Mankiewicz, as an assault on Welles. It’s both, it’s neither. In truth, the two characters are fundamentally in service to a movie that, in its broadest strokes, enshrines its own loathing of the industry, partly through its strained relationship to the truth.
It was Herman Mankiewicz’s filmmaker brother, Joe (“All About Eve”), who did his bit to help sink Upton Sinclair’s campaign. By bending the facts, though, “Mank” does give Herman Mankiewicz an ostensibly righteous excuse for putting what he’d picked up at Hearst Castle into “Citizen Kane.” In “Mank,” he sells out a friend to stick it to the industry.
I can’t shake how eulogistic “Mank” feels. Maybe it would have felt different on the big screen, but because of the pandemic I watched it on my television. As I did, I kept flashing on “Sunset Boulevard,” Billy Wilder’s grim 1950 satire about another studio writer adrift in the waxworks. During that film, a forgotten silent- screen star famously says that the pictures have gotten small, a nod both to TV’s threat and Hollywood itself.
I wondered if “Mank” was Fincher’s own elegy for an industry that increasingly has no interest in making movies like his and is, perhaps relatedly, facing another existential threat in streaming.
Not long after, I read that he’d signed an exclusive deal with Netflix. The pictures would remain small, but at least he would remain in control.