Issue 13: David Fincher and Virtue Ethics
Let's talk about David Fincher's Gone Girl. I don't know how this came to mind exactly; it just floated onto the tracks of my train of thought while reading about the Aristotelean ethics of friendship and marriage over Thai food (as Tim does).
But first let me take two steps back. Lately I've been listening to a lot of interviews with film writers, directors, and curators. I'm interested in hearing how people who spend a lot of time thinking about film got to the place they currently inhabit intellectually, emotionally, and ideologically. That last adverb has proven an annoying one to navigate, as ideological divides come up time and again in discussions of what constitutes good film criticism—for that matter, what constitutes a good film.
So far, the jury is split. Victor Morton, the self-professed Right Wing Film Critic, always considers a film's politics and judges it based on whether and how well it give an entry point to audiences of opposing views. Kent Jones renounces any kind of critical-theory approach to watching movies in favor of observational movie watching (i.e., engaging with the film that is actually on the screen, not filtering reality through Marxist/feminist/post-structuralist lenses). Miriam Bale, meanwhile, is loathe to applaud films that stand athwart her feminism—not an ideology, she explains, but a way of understanding women and men in relation to one another that's been with her from birth. Things get tricky quickly, as you can see.
If you subscribe to this newsletter, you probably know already that I work at a magazine with the word "conservative" attached to it. In the course of reading film criticism that has been published under our name and under the bylines of some of our friend publications, I've been trying to figure out why it is that, by and large, conservative-leaning writers and moviegoers just don't know how to talk about film.
This is not to say that they don't know how to write about film: au contraire! I've seen a lot of great writing on film in these parts, but there's frequently something about it that strikes me as…missing the point. Which brings us, now, back to Gone Girl.
Seeing Gone Girl on opening day (as Tim also does) unearthed a jumble of feelings I had had about the book when I was reading it earlier that year. Gillian Flynn's story seems to be predicated upon a certain set of assumptions about the way people, or at least Americans, approach marriage. Her view of marriage acknowledges the element of mystery inherent in The Other and twists that aspect of human relationship into a perverse and prickly potboiler. The fun of Gone Girl comes from the utter unbelievability of Amy's character, especially as she frolics about in the context of the tried-and-true murder mystery-slash-domestic abuse drama-slash-average Joe framed for someone else's crime story. It should just be all fun and games, yet the structure of the story conveys what feels like Flynn's firm conviction that she is writing the Next Great American Critique of Marriage.
As the success of both novel and film would indicate, many people were sufficiently struck by Flynn's ideas and the way David Fincher translated them into a film. I suspect that a lot of conservative-leaning and Christian critics weren't among them. I wasn't, initially: the supposedly "ideal American marriage" that Fincher and Flynn construct (to later deconstruct, in the course of the story's many twists and turns) bears little to no resemblance to the deeply-rooted and deeply-committed marriages I grew up surrounded by in churches and in tightly-knit cultural communities. It's almost as if, in some Alasdair MacIntyrian sense, marriage in Gone Girl is played like a game of checkers while marriage in my world is played like a game of chess.
Thus Gone Girl is a bad film if you are of the persuasion that movies predicated upon morally vapid or intellectually incoherent premises are worthless. The problem with such an evaluation is that Gone Girl isn't a bad film; it isn't a perfect film, and it may not even be a great film, but it is in certain respects a very well-made film. It doesn't matter if Fincher's moral universe at all resembles the actual universe because Fincher understands what so many conservative film critics don't: a movie is more than just its ideas. A movie is its actors, its editing, its cinematography, its sound design and score its screenplay, yes— but ultimately it is the way all these disparate parts interact to create the illusion of reality.
Or unreality: Fincher is so widely hailed as a director because his obsessive control over every aspect of his movies' design results in worlds that are both fully lived-in and coherent to their own inner logic. Gone Girl very effectively creates a world that at first blush looks like our own (speaking strictly of aesthetics, here: through an ingenious blend of set design and CGI, the suburban hellscape of the film's Missourian setting uncannily approximates the real thing), but which, under layers of amoral and virtueless design, ends up looking nothing like ours—or at least the one that people of a certain moral or ethical bent find themselves inhabiting.
These very critics ignore the brilliance of Fincher's filmmaking at their own peril. As the aforementioned Victor Morton said of the lack of any good conservative films to balance the prevailing ideologies and mindsets at the movies, "You don't make a work of art based on hating the other works of art out there."
As recently as last month, we caught a glimpse of what a conservative vision of good filmmaking may look like in Whit Stillman's Love & Friendship. Stillman isn't animated by any desire to combat societal vogues—even though his films do unabashedly present viewpoints that fly in the face of popular opinion on topics like relationships and education. Rather, he's operating here under the desire to make a worthy adaptation of a Jane Austen novella, a desire itself motivated by his unyielding love for Austen's prose. Stillman isn't as accomplished a director as Fincher, but he knows how to play the game in such a way that even those on the left of him politically can find much to gush about (or ponder amusedly, if quizzically) in his movies. A young generation of like-minded artists would do well to follow Stillman's passion-based approach to filmmaking, rather than one based on that least artistic of impulses: “I'll show you how it's really done!”
Agree? Disagree? Write me with your thoughts anytime! The conversation need not end here.
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