aserdcerebral

It's confounding to observe the pure compositional and editorial precision David Fincher dedicates to the realization of a screenplay that's.... just okay.

This excellently executed feat of sensory engineering is the equivalent of watching Rembrandt refine to perfection a random screenshot of a night-shot, noise-washed tiktok; it'd be a perfecting painting of, what-exactly.

The actors, and even background extras inhabit their roles beyond question.

There's a feeling I often--or rather rarely--refer to as true suspense; you're watching a heartstopping sequence from an episode of Planet Earth; a pride of lions stalks dappled through the shadows of a grassland, a menu of buffalo marches unwitting across the horizon. When the scene cuts to the inevitable closeup of a lion's salivating visage; you're not adjudging the emotional efficiency of a performance, you know it's death on the other side of that camera.

Few actors ever manage this level of truth. To truly become and strike the audience at the brainstem.

So comes a scene in The Killer. A character assured of his survival, attempts to negotiate his way out of certain demise; logos, defining the illogicality in killing him, is his choice of rhetoric.

As he fashions himself an armor of well-worded reasoning, Fincher cuts to a medium shot of Fassbender as the Killer. Facial muscles frozen and eyes unblinking, the vaguest ripple of emotion buried several thousand feet deep. Watching that brief drama unfold evokes the dread of looking on tied up while a stick of dynamite swallows the final spark on long string of fired up suspense.

But, to what end. The Killer is so emotionally barren that during a late fight sequence, and this is coming from a guy that rooted for the Pharoah in Moses, a happier ending seemed to be the Killer getting a little killing of himself done. Why? His antagonist was more alive than him to begin with; death for the Killer seemed less like the extinguishing of an entire existence, and more like turning off the shallow buzzing of a dim radio to trade static for silence.

His nihilistic voice-over reads like the dull ramblings of a clever 12-year-old edge-lord that just closed his first episode of The Sopranos, saw Fight Club and learned how to pronounce Nietzsche. Weak.

The Killer was the first and ultimately only graphic novel I ever read in its entirety, upon hearing of Fincher's planned adaptation. The appeal was immediately apparent. The spatial flow between panels felt captured from a 3D vision of the scenes, as opposed to the generic two-dimensional flat graphical progression of lesser comics. The only comparable outings, whose completion I might find one day, are Watchmen and All-Star Superman, both grander in reputation than the Killer. Fincher took it, made it his own, in the process erasing the magic that must've drawn him to it in the first place.

The original comic is composed of 10 chapters, each phasing swiftly between locations, plots, dramas, characters and action set-pieces.

Locations in particular, felt alive and burning. Action scenes leaped off the page like motion operas.

Fincher picked it apart and assembled material insufficient for a chapter, and diluted it to a 2 hour runtime, making the rest up in filmmaking. Locations are presented as nearly-generic Movie Spaces framed perfectly, like insta-ready portraits of an everyman. This is the same master filmmaker that made a police precinct feel like a cosmic moral interface plucked out of Dante during a crucial scene in Se7en. His Paper Street house (Fight Club) is arguably the most memorable modern interior in all visual media.

That warehouse, somewhere, in which the Narrator finds the husk of a burnt-out vehicle, bears infinitely more personality than anything seen here.

Here, he blunders into banality.

Action scenes become utilitarian suspense exercises - the boundlessly operatic simplified to dread-then-dead instances of buildups to brutal resolution.

"Look how flawlessly I can stitch any 2 shots together through composition and movement," he seems to say with each cut.

Nonetheless, The Killer is undeniably the second-best made film of 2023, behind Nolan's Oppenheimer.

If only there was a film to make.

(Across the Spider-Verse perches distant above the rest its own monoitemic category as a multiformat experience. To define it as a movie would be to understate what it is.)

Recently, a question weighed existential on me; what makes a story substantial enough for David Fincher to make it into a movie?

Apparently, today, a beginning, middle and ending.

The new David Fincher masterpiece, isn't.

It's just, a piece.

If you look under the hood of most acting performances, in spite of how emotionally well-rendered they may be, they are ultimately a single-point expression of a broader sense of humanity with very few specifying factors. A great example of this phenomenon is the TV show Severance, superior to The White Lotus in every aspect of filmmaking, save the acting.

The performances in Severance, or The Morning Show, or Watchmen, are of types of human beings: a four-word summative description of the characters can be generated which then applies to every single scene they shall be a part of. The specifics of their behavior can be predicted because of an emotional simplicity and a narrowness in behavioral variation. Even when they change over time, it's only the externalities prescribed by the world around them that define these changes.

For example, Adam Scott's character in Severance is never not a solemn wallflower, John Turturro's character is never not a purehearted nerd; it's not a deficiency in writing or acting, but a failure in merging both into a cohesive whole. The depth these characters posses is not in layers of emotion, but in multiplicity of screenplay adjectives; it's not that actable.

None of these issues plague the characters of The White Lotus, who always feel at least four separate ways about any of the situations they find themselves in; the character work was focused inside-out. The actors perform the behavior of their characters based on an intimate and unambiguous knowledge of their complexly layered emotion, and not simple cues of what they need to "look" like externally.

The writing itself in terms of scene construction and dialog is above functional. It keeps you unwaveringly engaged.

The cinematography is "good" if you're not very visually conscious, but I found the compositions to be lacking. Images are pretty sunsets and orange-hued firelights, but there's not a specific sense of order of elements in relation to camera.

A remarkable aspect of the technical filmmaking is the editing of the final episode, which uses interruption of narrative momentum and rhythmic matches in behavior (head down to head up etc) to seamlessly weave and tighten the knots of suspense to a morbidly sharp climax.

The second season ranks even superior. The behavioral rendering and characterization is deep enough to warrant exploration by shoddily-constructed submarine. Loved the central couples.

Soundtrack is unique and immersive.

Speaking of immersion, the underwater shots of both seasons feel not like cinematographic showboating, but interments into the private psychic coffins these characters walk socially entombed within.

Show would be a perfect 10 - weren't the characters so vapid; as people, not as characters.

As that they're incomparably infinite.

8/10.

That's what the show is.

Now with the title alone, I have already communicated everything I have to say about how I feel about the emotional nature of show.

Still, I must add more lines to avoid seeming complacent in my self-perceived capacity to narrow down complex concepts into simple expressions.

But really, all I'm going to do is obfuscate my true position further and further in a quest for externalized clarity.

There are two major subsets of readers to this review; those who did extrapolate everything from the title; those that didn't, and stand to know even less of what I have to say about the show by reading more of it; and the sliver of intersection.

The Rehearsal unfolds in a similar fashion, wherein overintellectualizing commonplace experiences results in an infinite emotional loop deeper and tighter into oneself with the laps growing paradoxically longer: trying to revise the future before it happens, and trying to correct an immutable past that's already been set in permanence.

When it comes down to it, we can only assume potential outcomes of events provided they occur with significant structural similarity to our reference data, and we can only very vaguely estimate the emotions of others based on our own deeply personal distorted perception of how they have previously elected or been compelled to express them; While we can improve efficiency in the context of events, by expanding the reference datasets and accounting for the weighted impact of more variables, to approach humans the same way would only lead to corruption of the initial results; most people can't predict their own emotions within the real-time throes of future events, as they are a composite reaction to the present situation and an externally inaccessible section of their subjective perception of previous experiences that unfolded similarly or triggered identical internal states; as the congruent emotional memory, sometimes decades-old, is superimposed over the present, the invisible internal conflict becomes to relive, or relieve oneself of it.

There's always more past than we can account for or readily observe. Pasts lived and vivid, pasts learned and vicarious, and pasts only dreamed.

As Nathan further deconstructs the unknowable interiorities of the people he encounters using externally observed data as a reference; recent-past behavior in elaborately staged replications of realities as a predictor of future behavior, he more and more corrupts his own sophisticated behavioral experiment with an ever-narrowing perspective; the more he sees of the endless irrationality in these humans, the further he attempts to expand the ruleset of the rational system he applies to account for all the emotional possibilities they might present with.

As the show progresses, Nathan seems to realize he's contending not with the dark vagaries of unpredictable, inexplicably self-inconsistent human beings swirling around him, but with his own inability to accept that there's no internal consistency within humans as a logical framework: not within the one, even less within the many.

That the external world is an everfluxing chaos than shall never align with the rigid grid of his inner world.

And maybe he can accept that.

But probably not.

Therein lies the grand tragedy.

A masterpiece of one man's human condition.

Hell. That might've been a better title. More broadly-appealing. But I can't go for broad appeal. I did that with my Jibaro review, edited it for digestibility and people hated it because it made just enough sense to not make sense to them. An intellectual uncanny valley.

I'll leave this as is.