The Killer - One of the Many "Literally Me" Characters

 

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

"A hundred and forty million human beings are born every year, give or take. Worldwide population is approximately 7.8 billion. Every second, 1.8 people die. While 4.2 are born into that very, same, second. Nothing I've ever done will make any dent in these metrics."

David Fincher's The Killer is absolutely loaded with gems like this. The unnamed killer (Michael Fassbender) rationalizes the immorality of what he does by explaining to himself that none of what he does matters. Justice isn't real. Morality isn't real. These concepts only exist to comfort those who are unwilling to stare into the abyss like he does. He's content with staring humanity in the eye and seeing nothing worth defending. At least, that's what he tells himself throughout runtime before accepting his philosophical role in the world in the film's final minute. 

Fincher's film feels like an idiosyncratic black comedy that pokes fun not only at this type of character in other films, but his own creative processes as one of the world's most renowned and admired filmmakers (I'm particularly fond of Se7en). As a film, it's exciting to see Fincher dedicate his unique talents to something like this. The fight scene in the middle is particularly nasty and exciting, and Fincher brings a handful of creative decisions that make the scene intense and visceral. I especially loved how the camera lightly shakes on every impact. It really added a layer of impact and weight that many fight scenes these days lack. 

Fincher isn't critiquing these characters or arguing that they shouldn't exist in film, as one can argue that some of the best films ever made are centered around fundamentally lonely men, but his thesis is finally arrived at in the film's closing line where The Killer admits that he is one of the many. Throughout his entire journey, The Killer talks about being one of the few versus one of the many, seemingly believing he is one of the former before accepting he is one of the latter. In a sense, this, and other movies like it, is about understanding your role in a world overrun by late-stage capitalism. In a place where net worth counts for more than virtue, you are your job, and little else. 

It's hard to explain exactly how Fassbender and Fincher manage to make this character strangely charismatic. It goes without saying that our unnamed protagonist is a terrible person. He kills multiple innocent people throughout the movie and doesn't seem to feel any remorse over it whatsoever. He views empathy as a weakness and tries as hard as possible to forbid it whenever he is capable. He is objectively despicable, and yet, for some reason, I found it extremely difficult to not root for him as the movie progressed. The narration takes us so far into his mindset and nihilistic worldview, and presents it so logically that it is difficult to disagree with it. The quote I used to start this off is objectively true, even if he is using it to justify his profession of killing people for money. Whether or not the people "deserve" to die or not is irrelevant both to The Killer and in the grand scheme of the human experience according to his worldview. I think it is this cold, ruthless logic that makes it hard to despise The Killer despite his obvious moral shortcomings. The aesthetic of the film captures the sort of sleek coldness that inherits The Killer's mind. Shots are gorgeously lit, but there is no warmth to any of the images that populate the film. 

Characters like the titular killer have existed for decades now. Characters like Jef Costello of Le Samourai, Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver, Patrick Bateman of American Psycho, the driver of Drive and many others have become synonymous with men who find the inherent loneliness these characters define their lives by relatable or comforting despite the cold aesthetic. The film surrounding Travis Bickle's fatalistic definitions of masculinity is nasty and grimy. There are no heroes in any of their worlds except the one that exists in their own minds. Between these characters, their mentality generally fluctuates between "the world is ruined and only I can save it" or "it doesn't matter". The killer is almost a borderline parody of this sort of character, but with one exception. All of these aforementioned characters feel like they are exceptional but don't realize that they are not. The Killer, in its closing line, finally pokes through at just how flawed his mindset is. 

 

Taxi Driver (Movie Review)

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

To quote Roger Ebert when he discusses Taxi Driver, the scene where Robert De Niro kinda sorta almost breaks the fourth wall by repeatedly asking "you talking to me" might be the most widely quoted line from the film, but it's what he says after that is far more important to understanding Travis Bickle and his seemingly fragmented journey.

"I'm the only one here."

The first viewing of this movie can certainly be challenging. Travis isn't as outwardly unlikable as, say, Rupert Pupkin of The King of Comedy, but he is certainly not someone you would want to find yourself hanging out with under almost any circumstances. He is alone even in a crowd, and the camera often reminds us of this when it shows his coworkers in one frame before cutting to him in isolation, even though he is only sitting a few feet from them at the same table. 

However, this awkwardness is not what makes the movie somewhat inaccessible on a first viewing for a lot of people. Many movies center themselves on awkward people, but it's the plot that Travis more or less wanders through. There isn't a singular thread that runs throughout other than Travis's fantasies of becoming a vigilante. It's a perverted, nihilistic expression of masculinity that culminates in an orgasmic display of violence in the film's closing minutes. It's impossible to predict that that sequence, or the story of rescuing the child prostitute from her nasty pimps in the first place, would be where the film ends up after the first handful of scenes that introduce us to God's lonely man. 

In an interview, Paul Schrader was quoted as saying it took him just over two weeks to write the finished screenplay, and that the taxi that Travis works in is a "symbol of urban loneliness, a metal coffin". Extenuating this notion further, you are, in fact, your job. We are told that Travis is a discharged marine from the Vietnam war, but we never hear anything about his time there other than being shown what looks like burns on his back. Instead, he is now a taxi driver and nothing else. In the modern world, you are your job, whether you want to be or not. If you were to die right now, the only thing they would describe you as in the media is what you do for a living (which I've always felt is a disgusting expression, but that is a whole other conversation). Your value is your output; such is the way of the modern industrialized world. 

I've been following Schrader's career for years now, and I love how he has carved out this niche for himself. Time and time again we see him revisiting these themes of masculinity and existentialism playing out on different scales. A jaded man's inability to reconcile with his past moral failures such as The Card Counter, or a man who's will to power overtook his physical form such as Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters; these are ideas Schrader has been fascinated with throughout all of his works. This film was the introduction, and I don't know if we'll ever get the conclusion. And to be honest, I don't want one. On a totally biased and self-serving note, these sorts of movies are thoroughly engaging, so I don't want them to ever stop being made. Travis lacks empathy and is most likely a psychopath, but Schrader still provides empathy within his screenplay.

The ending of the film is a tricky one, and I don't mean the shootout, but rather what follows after that. Scorsese and Schrader seem to be on the side of that what we see there is real, and that Travis survived the shootout, but this reading just doesn't make any sense to me. First and foremost, a person would not survive the injuries he sustains throughout the rampage. He is shot in the neck and in the arm and isn't tended to for quite some time and would, therefore, bleed out by the time the police showed up to the scene. Secondly, it's important to not let our disgust for the pimps cloud our judgment and cause us to misunderstand what Travis is doing. No matter what your feelings are towards these people, this is still premeditated first degree murder against three people. I'm not saying I feel any sympathy for them, but it's important for us to recognize that vigilante justice is not real justice. Travis would not just be let free by the police, and I honestly don't believe that he would be celebrated as a hero by the media. He planned out the attack and was not acting in self-defense in the situation at all, so he would unquestionably spend the rest of his life in prison for what he did. Betsy responding to him in the manner that she does is exactly what he wanted. He wanted to be a hero for the girl so she could see that she needed him, but this is little else than a dying man's fantasy.

So what does it mean? My interpretation is that he does, in fact, die while imitating suicide in front of the cop. As the camera cuts to the long panning overhead shot, we see the full carnage of the bad ideas in one narcissistic, deeply lonely man. He didn't have many opinions about anything, but we do know that he harbored a fantasy that involves a rain washing away all the "scum" off the streets, as he puts it. When he meets the man in his taxi ironically played by Scorsese himself, the man starts talking about using a gun to deal with his wife's infidelity with a black man. This only escalates his misogynistic and racist worldview and introduces the idea of using violence himself to resolve what he perceives as his problems. And as such is the case with conspiratorial thinking, because Travis has no friends to bounce his ideas off of, and therefore no one to challenge his worldview, his beliefs only become more and more extreme as his descent in nihilistic vigilantism furthers. He wants to be a hero. He wants to be the one who rescues society, but when he realizes he can't do that, he wants to rescue the girl. This reaches its climax after he executes the remaining pimp, where he immediately attempts to commit suicide in front of Iris (Jodie Foster). He doesn't value his own life or anyone else's, but he does value his own perverted expression of masculinity. Travis Bickle is little more than God's lonely man.

The Zone of Interest (Movie Review)

 

⭐1/2

Everybody understands that World War II is the singular most multi-faceted, deeply complicated and immeasurably costly conflict in all of human history. In fact, one can reasonably divide history into two halves: pre-WWII and post-WWII, as nearly everything we deal with today on a socioeconomic and diplomatic level are connected to that conflict. And as such, it is no surprise that there would be a plethora of films about this, covering a wide range of perspectives.

Countless movies and series have been made about the American perspective of the war, but it should not be overlooked the other extremely well crafted movies about this that don't get talked about enough. For example, Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall (2004) provided an unprecedentedly intimate fly-on-the-wall perspective of Hiter's bunker during his final days. Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwojima (2006) showed the horrors through the eyes of the Japanese, an especially untold story. Elem Klimov made the unrelentingly harrowing Come and See, which told the story of a Russian child. My favorite of them all might just be the criminally underappreciated Land of Mine (2015), which is a side of WWII that very few people are aware of: that being how the Danish government forced German POWs (many of which were children) to excavate and disarm millions of landmines along the western coast of Denmark with their bare hands. 

These movies are traumatizing, but necessary, and they force us to analyze how WWII deeply affected people of all cultures and countries, both tangible and intangible. The danger of this, however is the redundancy of communicating something we all already know. The only thing The Zone of Interest is interested in is the banality of evil. It's a film about the day-to-day life of even the most heinous people in history, as our protagonist is the main commanding officer of Auschwitz. I'm all for exploring World War II from relatively untold sides like this, but what does this bring to the table that hasn't been extensively covered in other World War II movies and even the most watered down history classes in your average public school? Nothing.

I also understand and acknowledge that a movie like this shouldn't necessarily be "entertaining" per se, but did writer-director Jonathan Glazer really have to go out of his way to make this so searingly unexciting? There was never a moment in this that really gripped me in the way that other reviewers seem to be saying it did for them. This never justifies its own existence or explains why it is telling us this story. Why should we even care about the daily life of someone like Rudolf Höss? Glazer never answers this question, and while his talents as a filmmaker are undeniable, as this does have some arresting visuals here and there as well as a score that I could see myself listening to on its own, there's just absolutely NOTHING here, and I didn't learn anything I didn't already know as well.

The only reason I see this movie existing is to be Oscar bait, and unfortunately, it has worked. As of writing this, The Zone of Interest has been nominated for Best Picture. This is some seriously trite stuff, and as I said it is excruciatingly boring. Can we please stop making movies about WWII if you are going to offer nothing beyond the reductive "war is hell" or "the banality of evil"; motifs that are so unoriginal and bland at this point? If you have nothing to say, then shut up.