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Brett's Notes for The Killer
🕑 Added 2024-09-18 03:08:18 +0000 UTCThe Killer (2023)
Background
Based on a graphic novel by French writer Alexis Nolent, whose second IMDb credit is for a video game, XIII (2003), the synopsis of which reads:
A man is rescued by a lifeguard on Brighton Beach. He has suffered a head wound and has no memory of who he is. His only clues to his identity are a tattoo of a roman numeral, XIII and a key to a bank deposit box.
French co-producer Raphael Benoliel has a number of sus credits, including the Monarch film Trance, starring James McAvoy as a guy put under hypnotic mind control to steal a painting, directed by sus lord Danny Boyle. The other producers are Fincher regulars except sus-bomb Alexandra Milchan, daughter of Mossad agent and Hollywood super-producer Arnon Milchan.
IMDb: This is the second feature film in a 4-year exclusive deal between David Fincher and Netflix with their first film being Mank (2020).
Fincher and Andrew Kevin Walker teamed up again for a new, more meta-take on the old theme of the psychotic killer who would be god (an iteration of the dark self archetype beloved by Hollywood). (Only their second official collaboration, but Walker did uncredited work on The Game and Fight Club and possibly another Fincher project.)
Inspiration
Le Samourai (1967), directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, is an acknowledged influence: methodical, semi-spiritualized killer who takes on but is ultimately subject to (and killed by) the higher ups that run the criminal underworld. See also Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai (1999), itself spawned by Le Samourai (it even opens with birds in a cage, a direct homage to Melville’s film), among other influences. Consider also Mann’s Thief. All of the above involve the dynamic of a controlled operative attempting to defy his masters. Only in the case of Mann’s protagonist, played by James Caan (who is a crack thief and not an assassin), is he successful—and that is a revenge fantasy (of epic proportions).
Theme:
Celebration of the transmoral and hence liberated and godlike psychopathic killer (dark self) who, as he learns in the course of the narrative, is really a slave (though still better off than you because higher up the food chain, which can be rough but he’s still better off than you).
The Film
The opening credits is a reworking of the Se7en formula (already revisited in other Fincher films), showing the killer’s methods, all the different ways he kills/has killed.
And Fincher is all about method: the method is the substance for Fincher, a technician, a killer: “My process is purely logistical, narrowly focused by design.” Fincher obviously identifies with the killer here, as he does in Se7en, where the John Doe character is the master manipulator leading the detectives and by extension the audience through the maze of his madness, toward personal destruction (for the more callow character played by Pitt). Consider Nolan’s even more ominous framing of himself as a cinematic killer…all of this goes back to Hitchcock, of course, and the Revelation of the Method on filmmaker-as-killer/traumatizer is Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960).
In The Killer, method and message are intertwined, which is both a window into Fincher’s own understanding of cinema as well as a vehicle for delivering messages with artistic impunity (since one can deny any message, claiming it’s all an exercise in method): “I’m not here to take sides. It’s not my place to formulate any opinion. No one who can afford me needs to waste time winning me to some cause. I serve no God or country. I fly no flag.” And then he reminds us that it’s the liberatory nihilism that makes him great: “If I’m effective, it’s because of one simple fact. I… don’t… give… a… fuck.”
Narrative is reduced mostly to method in the film. Is this “the ultimate Fincher film” so far?
The first 15 or 20 minutes of the film is the killer’s internal monologue accompanying deliberately boring scenes of him preparing for a hit.
All the lines about how tedious it all is of course are meant to refer equally to filmmaking, which is also about killing, killing the soul of the viewer—and doing it as a contract, the errand boy for invisible powers. The deep politics themes, vis-à-vis contract killing (and by extension, but even more occluded, Hollywood filmmaking), will figure into the plot as we approach the final act. But note that already he refers to “staged accidents” and “gradual poisonings,” as well as “the military industrial complex” (and its “lie” that sleep deprivation is not torture).
But the internal monologue is of perhaps the greatest interest for us. It’s a tour de force of cultural and occasionally cosmic nihilism—the most clearly Fincherian themes one can identify through almost everything he’s directed—that simultaneously tips the hand as to the occult underpinnings and cryptocratic ideologies that promote that nihilism, both culturally and in its demoralized and finally helpless servants like Fincher/the killer.
Early on, the Killer quotes Crowley—“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”—then plays coy with the audience about who said it, winking at insiders and conspiracy theorists and would-be initiates that, yeah, Crowleyism is indeed the secret religion of Hollywood and of the last century in elite circles.
Poisonous expressions of nihilism and misanthropy pepper the long monologue, but the message is that nihilism (philosophical, cosmic, and otherwise) is good because it gives one “freedom”—"Most people refuse to believe that the great beyond is no more than a cold, infinite void, but I accept it, along with the freedom that comes from acknowledging that truth”—which is freedom from moral restraints.
Note that, as he’s testing a scope, he puts a bead on a child and then flashes a dark smile, which I think is hinting at both the anti-natalism inherent in his worldview as well as the possible dark excesses of Crowleyanism.
The Killer indicates that this knowledge/way of life place him above the common man and his petty morality and into the elite class:
From the beginning of history, the few have always exploited the many. This is the cornerstone of civilization. The blood in the mortar that binds all bricks. … Whatever it takes, make sure you’re one of the few, not one of the many.
In the end, he will reconsider these formulas somewhat, but only to demote himself, not “the few” (see below). The “mortar that binds all bricks” is also a probable Freemasonic reference.
But, again, this is already in tension with his self-recognized status as a humble technician (though the humility is false, both for the character and for Fincher, who thinks he’s a master manipulator above and beyond an auteur): “I am not exceptional; I am just a part” (cf. Fight Club).
Drawing inspiration from Le Samourai, the “spiritualization,” if not deification, of the psychopathic killer (the dark self archetype) is indicated by his yoga pose. Note too that the monologue reads often as a spiritual tract, written by some Eastern master for his disciple (which makes me think that maybe Fincher took some specific inspiration from Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai).
There are even subtle hints (to be taken in the context of the killer’s invocation of Crowley) that he is a type of anti-Christ, as in the line, “W-W-J-W-B-D. What would John Wilkes Booth do?”—an inverted allusion to “What would Jesus do?” Booth was the assassin of Lincoln, a type of Christ in American political culture, along with JFK…and the Killer/Fincher is associating himself directly with the murderer of the type of Christ, the enemy of Christ, and also perhaps with the elite class, at or very near the top of which is the anti-Christian House of Rothschild.
Relatedly, the Killer is an internationalist, as he makes clear in his opening lines about how Paris wakes up differently from so many other cities around the world. He is aligned with an international elite, the intel-backed globalists who control finance, tech, and the entertainment industry and sit atop the clandestine world that includes the criminal underworld in which The Killer operates. They surely see more than the non-internationalist “many.”
Accompanying all the boringness and talk of boredom is a repeated emphasis, during the monologue, on the killer’s ordinariness. This, again, is Fincher talking about himself: the filmmaker is a problem-solver, a technician, in his falsely humble view, not an auteur. But Fincher and Nolan and their ilk think they are more than auteurs: they are master manipulators wielding the method. At the same time, there’s a real tension between this emphasis on ordinariness and the claim to be one of the elites. This contradiction will resolve itself at the end.
He references the “Green river killer,” Gary Ridgway, making the connection-we-already-knew between the serial killer and the hitman (and the spree killer, school shooter, etc.); but he brings up Ridgway to make the point that killers don’t have to be geniuses (he tells us repeatedly that he’s no genius, as Fincher does in interviews), which gives the lie to phony FBI profile he helped popularize with Mindhunter (although, as we noted in our analysis of that show, he frequently reveals inconsistencies and weaknesses in the profile which needed to be constantly explained/shored up).
The intelligence angle is hinted at in this movie as well, when the Killer is stalking Claiborne at the fitness club and says of one of his security detail, “I don’t think this guy’s Mossad.” Consider Albertini’s revelation that many Hollywood celebs are guarded by Mossad under the guise of private security, and this includes Johnny Depp, who’s “surrounded by Mossad.”
The Expert’s (Tilda Swinton) “bear story” to the killer is meant as a patronizing warning from up the deep state food chain. You think you’ve come to kill the bear for what he’s done to you, but you are overawed by the bear and are really here for something else. The bear “sodomizes” the would-be hunter (who can choose either that or death after he fails to kill the bear) as an “indignity”—very provocative language hinting at the use of sexual humiliation by the superclass as a method of class discipline and control. The killer is being told in no uncertain terms that he’s a programmed slave of those above him…and it goes still higher.
In the end, the killer sees himself as now “living amongst the normies,” “one of the many,” as he now appreciates that he’s a disposable functionary who doesn’t really know everything that’s going on and won’t see it coming, like the normies. On the other hand, it’s implicit that, even though he’s suffered the things he has at the hands of the clandestine world, he’s still fortunate to be in the position that he is, a hired gun for the deep state, who gets to retire with a hot chick on an island estate (“made in the shade,” as they used to say).
Note that he kills the other functionaries, not the client.
This applies to Fincher in more ways than we know, but I’d like to make the general observation here that, historically in the West, the entertainment industry has represented a low-status class nonetheless closely bound to the aristocracy and monarchies. Ever thus: the entertainment industry do the bidding of their masters (now psychological warfare, not merely personal entertainment and comic edification), waging war against the great majority of society in the middle classes at the behest of the superclass.
We never learn (because he never asks) why Claiborne wanted the French guy dead. The Songwriter’s line from Under the Silver Lake comes to mind: “Your art, your texts, your culture: they are casings of other people's ambitions, ambitions that are bigger
than you will ever understand.” The killer already knew that and isn’t trying to understand: he’s only trying to get “justice,” within the degraded framework of pseudo-morality and pseudo-justice bequeathed to him by the clandestine world, and a restoration of order as he understands it. It’s a sad statement about a lot of things, including Fincher’s spiritual ambitions and how that limits him as an artist and filmmaker. He’s a spiritual cripple, secretly sucking up Hollywood woo woo (e.g., going to psychics) and the omnipresent Thelemite influence (witness the direct reference at the outset of this film), and dribbling it out on cue as the Method is increasingly Revealed.
Baliquinox, the fictional Chicago fitness club where the killer stalks Claybourne, uses a Buddha as its logo, gesturing toward the neoliberal fusion of fitness and spirituality that thrives among the post-Christian superclass.
The Method
IMDb Trivia:
Similar to Baby Driver, in the opening chapter when The Killer is listening to music with one earbud in, if you're watching the film with headphones on the music only plays on that side when the film shows POV shots.
Using sound techniques to put the audience deeper in the perspective of the Killer.
Etc.
Product placement—
Why do Amazon, Starbucks, and other mega-corporations allow their logos to be associated with murderous, psychopathic criminality? And why does no one question this?
The conceit of having the killer constantly listening to The Smiths is both pretentious and a blatantly obvious “Tarantinoesque” use of music as a dissociative counterpoint to violence (cf. the use of Enya by the serial killer, played by Stellan Skarsgard, in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). In fact, if Fincher did this in the 90s, he would be laughed at for such a limp and unoriginal conceit [is it in the graphic novel?].
The fight scene in the dark, between the killer and “the brute,” is unintentionally comic and pointlessly protracted. It’s in the dark so they can use more CG, which looks terrible. Cf. that fight scene to, say, the John Doe chase scene/shootout in Se7en and you get a sense of how far aesthetic crime cinema has fallen.
From IMDb Trivia:
A list of all 9 aliases used by The Killer:
Felix Unger - The Odd Couple (1970)
Archibald Bunker - All in the Family (1971)
Oscar Madison - The Odd Couple (1970)
Howard Cunningham - Happy Days (1974)
Reuben Kincaid - The Partridge Family (1970)
Lou Grant - Lou Grant (1977)
Sam Malone - Cheers (1982)
George Jefferson - The Jeffersons (1975)
Robert Hartley - The Bob Newhart Show (1972)
What’s with all the eating?
The Killer was a former law student who turned to the other side of the law: Fincher as a slacker with a black heart.
Body count is 6, all victims of the protagonist. Any numerological significance? (6 chapters too, right?)
