The Killer and Life Today

I don’t want to write about movies too much, but I am going to again here. (I have posts/articles on non-movie things planned to come out soon). I feel like I have been writing a lot about movies (I have enough pieces for a book now, which I might do). Anyway, here is one more.

I saw the new film by director David Fincher recently. It’s called The Killer, starring Michael Fassbender. Fincher has always been one of my favorite filmmakers (though his recent output hasn’t been as good as his stuff from the 90s, like Fight Club and Se7en).

The Killer is true to its title: it’s just about a killer/assassin, following him on his treks around the world killing various people. There isn’t too much of a plot, which is fine by me (I think plot is an overrated part of film). Fassbender’s performance as the killer is pretty good (I’ve always thought he was a good actor, but hasn’t had too many great roles—this seems like a common problem for actors now).

But the reason I wanted to write a little bit about it is because it depicts what life is like today, right now (in the 2010s/2020s), in a way that is surprisingly rare. This is something I’ve often thought about: how contemporary life (roughly the last 15 years or so) isn’t depicted in films that much. In previous decades, films depicted what life was like during the time they were being made. In the 1970s, the golden age of cinema, so many movies were made showing what life was like in that time—and that’s what makes them so eternally interesting, you can see and feel what life was like then. This was true in the 80s and 90s too. But in the late 2000s that started to change. Our best filmmakers, like Scorsese and Tarantino, started making more historical movies. (Tarantino hasn’t made a movie set in the present since 1997’s Jackie Brown, which in my opinion is his best movie).

There are some movies made now that are set in the present, of course—but mostly superhero movies, or movies that aren’t really trying to show anything about what life is like now. Why is that? The obvious answer is that technology (specifically smartphones) has changed life so much—there’s nothing to really depict anymore, life isn’t like anything now, life is just people staring at their fucking phones, what’s the fun in that? This is part of the answer, sure. It’s also that modern life moves too fast—nobody stays in one place, everyone’s on the go (but they’re on the go in boring ways, not to do anything interesting, but just kind of frenzied, like headless chickens). There’s little context to life anymore, nobody really knows why they’re doing what they’re doing—all of it is too weird to show on film in a serious way. I think we’re just going to keep seeing more historical films (like Scorsese’s latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon, which is set 100 years ago, in the 1920s).

But, back to The Killer: this movie is very much set today. It doesn’t give you an exact year, but it could be 2023, or 2013. Probably not any earlier than that (the usage of iPhones and Amazon feels more developed than it was in like 2009). It’s the movie that most feels like it captures our current time, more than any other that comes to mind.

Most of the movie consists of Fassbender renting cars, renting hotel rooms/AirBnBs, going to airports, going in and out of office buildings, storage facilities, etc. He barely exists as a person or character—he exists only as he moves around, inhabiting the present. He lives entirely in the moment. He has nothing but the moment, and he navigates his life hour by hour. He always moves with maximum efficiency—no movement is wasted, every turn is crisp and calculated. And Fincher’s camera captures his sharp movements in a way that you can feel—even the smallest things, like moving in and out of a doorway, have this visceral, cinematic feel. That’s his life—these small moments moving around, little clicks of doors, those are the only signposts that register the passage of time. His existence is perfectly smooth, one fake identity flowing into the next, one locale fading into the next—those little crisp movements in doorways, or with clerks at counters, are the only things in his life that aren’t just pure motion.

There’s a dramatic scene that revolves around an office door opening and closing—Fassbender has to time it so that he knows exactly how long the door takes to close, so he can put his foot in there to keep it open and sneak in (to kill the people inside). It’s just him and this inanimate object, the door, in a kind of weird dance. His world is so inhuman, and not just because he is a psychotic serial killer (although that’s part of it too!)—he only engages with inanimate objects, he is surrounded by tools of his trade (guns, fake IDs, many passports, extra license plates, and on and on). He is attached to nothing, and constantly just rents cars, hotel rooms, everything is short-term and low commitment. He never stays in one place for very long, he’s always on the move.

In all of this, you can feel what life is like in the 2010s/2020s (I see the two decades as basically the same thing). In order to survive, he has to constantly be on the move, he has to be ruthless, calculating, cold, with no connections to anything. And this I think is how neoliberal capitalism wants us—the perfect neoliberal subject is like a shark, which dies if it stops moving. The only constant in his life is leaving places: the sounds and sensations of leaving places, doors clicking, planes taking off, getting keys from rental cars dropped in his palm—these are the only connections he has.

There’s a refrain in the movie that he says after he has an especially brutal encounter: “this is what it takes to succeed.” Meaning you have to be more brutal than your opponent if you want to succeed. But what is success for him? It’s just survival. And this it seems to me is very distinctly 2010s/2020s—success and survival have become the same thing. If you are surviving at all, you have succeeded, because the world has become this sharp merciless weapon that tries to kill you at every point.

Yet there is a peacefulness to Fassbender’s character, despite his lack of identity, his gruesome violence, his constant movement and unsettledness. He finds moments of comfort relaxing in airports, on planes, on park benches, even waiting in the moments before he assassinates a high value target. He is constantly on the move, constantly anonymous, always in danger—and yet he is at home in that world.

He is the perfect neoliberal subject because he is always on the move, has no connections to anything, and because he doesn’t experience this in a negative way at all—it never occurs to him to want things to be different. He accepts his transient, contingent, anonymous existence—and that makes him succeed/survive. And of course he’s a psychotic serial killer—that’s the only kind of person that would feel comfortable in the world as it is now.