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‘Mank’ & David Fincher: From the Quest for Truth to a Deeper Humanity
A perspective on the latest film in the director’s filmography.
Warning: This article spoils the ending of Mank.
There’s little doubt that David Fincher and many of the characters he’s interested in — detectives, investigative journalists, screenwriters — are concerned with the search for truth. A point repeatedly raised is how attainable truth really is. What if, asks Zodiac (2007), at the end of years of research, the truth remains, and will always remain, out of reach? What if, in The Social Network (2010), we approach the truth of the main character’s motivations by way of a variety of angles, depositions, and second-hand accounts, but leave significant gaps in that truth that linger beyond the final frame? What would be the effect on audiences? The concern with truth and with the lack of it runs through so much of the director’s work.
From that concern with attainability of truth, the negative inference that might follow when watching these films is that we can’t hope to know a great deal about anything or anyone. In highlighting people who are grasping in the dark and who, as a result, see their obsessive or destructive sides come out, Fincher’s films can be troubling. But they’re also too rich to stay at that.
What I propose in this piece is a different angle through which we can approach the question of truth — one I find more interesting, that emerges with just as much clarity from Fincher’s work, and that can give rise to a more positive perspective on these issues. It’s not a question of finding easy uplift, but the wrestled and difficult kind of move towards positive meaning that I think these works warrant.
For this purpose, Mank (2020) is the most fitting place to start. In part, it’s a playful look at Hollywood, movies, and how everyone involved is trying to make something that “will play”. It’s also, in part, a film concerned with authorship and agency that extends beyond the realm of filmmaking. (The question is who is simply playing a role in someone else’s story, and who is pulling the strings?) But perhaps most interestingly, Mank uses the idea of “a movie” to more generally refer to “an angle on truth” presented to audiences.
The protagonist is screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman). Eccentric, world-weary and assiduous (“If only I’d had more time, I would have written a shorter letter,” he quotes Pascal), he fits right into the Fincher filmography. The year is 1940 and Mank’s given an assignment: to get a screenplay about newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst off the ground and ready for Orson Welles, a successful young talent from radio, who would go on to direct what’s commonly regarded as the greatest film ever made: Citizen Kane (1941). The two men would then fight for credit.
Mank personally knew Hearst. And so, as he’s writing, Fincher’s film flashes back to the 1930s to explore all of his experiences that would later inform his script. Those flashbacks also feature a 1934 gubernatorial election disputed by the left and right of California which starts to ethically weigh on the protagonist the longer it goes on. For Mank, getting to the truth of his characters in order to make a believable work that plays well seems to be an important part of the way he works. He’s visibly repelled by things like the off-handed ease with which his boss, head of MGM Studios Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard), can enter a room full of Depression-era workers and leave after five minutes having successfully convinced them to accept a 50% cut of their salaries by way of a cheap and manipulative appeal to their emotions, asking “the MGM family” to stick together through the tough times.
It’s like a mini-movie in itself, in which every note is false, but it plays to an unsuspecting and applauding audience. “Not even the most disgraceful thing I’ve ever seen,” Mank quips to his brother. As seen over and over again, humour helps him get past these little troubling moments and carry on with his days. But when he sees the same type of conning of people happen on a large-scale political level, with his studio and Hearst both heavily involved, with real lives at stake, he starts to be seriously troubled.
Moving back to our question about truth for a moment, the fact that these types of deceptions in Mank are not acceptable forms of truth should not lead us to think that there is one at the other end of the spectrum that is absolutely pure. As demonstrated throughout Fincher’s work, if one’s goal is to find an entirely uncoloured objectivity, the only conclusion one can hope to reach is that it’s unattainable, that “the more you look, the less you see” — or in some cases, as in Se7en (1995), that the approach can only end in wreckage.
So where does that leave the truth seeker? Based on Fincher’s filmography, the first step towards a positive account of truth is the recognition that it’s inseparable from a certain degree of human intent, emotion, and cognition.
“As long as people have tried to articulate their belief systems,” says Fincher, “they have endeavored to spin things in a way that helps people understand their points of view. That’s not necessarily wrong.” The same thing that happens when a person is communicating their beliefs also necessarily happens when someone is in the business of gathering fragments of facts and presenting a news story that puts them together. “People want to get their news as unbiased as one can,” says Fincher. “But as soon as you spend tens of thousands of dollars to go out and collect this, there’s a perspective on it.” And the point doesn’t only apply to communicating beliefs or gathering news. It’s difficult to escape the fact that as soon as you assemble distinct data fragments into any meaningful entity, you elect to do it in a certain way and not in another, you see the meaning in it in this manner and not in that one.
And so, truth is always truth through the lens of the observer, the assembler, the gatherer. This can be the starting point to see Fincher’s truth seekers slightly differently, less as obsessive types who are after the crushing unknowable and more as owners of a respectable, serious but ultimately personal lens — one that in fact contributes to an appreciation of flawed humanity that can be profoundly beautiful. It’s a notion that merits to be explored a little further because Mank, while possibly not the director’s best film, is the one that conveys this sense better than any other. But the movie also comes loaded with an important challenge to this notion and it’s best to first get it out of the way…
If the notion of the personal lens and the personal act of assembling facts can excuse or can even provide a bit of justification for the political ugliness that the film recounts within 1934 California and Hollywood, then it is anything but profound and anything but beautiful. As shown in Mank, what were no doubt the views of some in California at that time are assembled in a penned Hollywood script (“forced together and padded with a good dose of invention” is a better way to describe it), given to actors, passed off as actual interview reels with random people on the street, and shown in theaters, their effect calculated in every way to influence their voting audiences.
Truth may always be truth through a lens, but we clearly feel differently about a serious inquiry into something and what we commonly call fake news, and with reason. It’s not that fake news won’t draw from fragments of real data. Both the inquiry for truth and the fake news do. It’s rather that one is done with effort, an openness for discovery and a respect for its audience, and the other with a lazy (or at worst malicious) fallback to an already fully determined narrative, and then it’s just a matter of fitting some pieces of data into what is already fixed. We all know and recognise the all-too-easy way in which someone will wait for anything vaguely resembling a fact that fits, and the words that were always ready at the tip of the tongue slide out: “See? That’s what I’m saying.” It’s callous, it isn’t believable, and eventually, if not immediately, it shows. “I don’t think anyone is hoping to be pandered to,” says Fincher.
Conversely, we can often clearly recognise the honest disposition of an inquisitive person who is serious about it and puts in the work and has an openness for going where the trails go. What’s produced in the latter case still reveals something about the assembler and his lens, but it’s as true as anything can be. It’s believable. It is, in all the important senses of the word, truth.
Nobody can accuse Fincher of having the former callousness or lazy neglect. Besides the reported and much-talked-about perfectionism of his filmmaking process, what can be felt in all of his films is his storytelling approach. He starts by detailing certain aspects of something or someone — a character of some complexity, most often, or in some cases a police case, but one that’s usually more interested in ultimately going back to the person at its source. From the beginning, the portrait is very precise, and after some time, very rich, but in an unassuming way and without anything that sounds like an announcement. Throughout, there is a knowing sense that the act of detailing, the inquiry could always go further, that it is a lens on truth. One never feels that Fincher ever pretends otherwise.
But that is also where the beauty of an honest approach to truth starts to emerge: in the knowing acknowledgement that a lens doesn’t have the final word, that a portrait always leaves to its subject space to have human mysteries of their own. It’s a sense that runs through Citizen Kane. It also runs through a lot of Fincher’s best work.
In Mank’s final third, there are some superb moments such as when Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried) tries to dissuade Mank from getting his film about her and Hearst made and she says of Hearst, “there are things between us that no one could possibly…” These moments have such a depth of emotion because, even that late in the narrative, they hint at hidden worlds that still exist that we haven’t even peeked at. Mank knows these characters so well and at the same time he doesn’t know them at all.
Maybe the beauty is not always felt by the tortured souls like William Sommerset (Se7en), Herman J. Mankiewicz (Mank), Robert Greysmith or David Toschi (Zodiac) — or indeed maybe David Fincher — who are in the business of painstakingly painting that truth, or painstakingly looking for it. But the beauty is also that it’s their lens, their take, and it says something about them. It’s the reason Mank fights for his writing credit.
“You cannot capture a man’s entire life in two hours,” he says. Instead of settling for a simplification that would sum them up, Mank, and Fincher, opt to render facets of their characters with enough precision and truth to suggest their depth. It’s this respect for their depth that distinguishes Fincher’s handling of characters — at least of most characters who are his films’ focus at all (Welles isn’t in this one). There is a lot of caring about how these lives will turn out but without attempting to mold them into common roles of society or giving them easy contours. And the characters have the same attitude about each other — something approaching real love in some cases. It’s real because it’s not oppressively molding or needy, and because it’s imperfect.
Why does Mank’s wife Sara (Tuppence Middleton), as exasperated as she is by much of his character, continue to care for him with a gentle affection? Why does Marion, who married Hearst for the social security that he provides, come to really love him after years, and goes out of her way to prevent him hurt, well beyond the point when she stopped needing him? The answer could well be something similar to the way a viewer might feel about Fincher’s difficult characters: that along with proximity to the truth of a person comes a suggestion of further depth, that a person never turns out to be just this or just that, and that “a wealthy man who marries a woman of much younger years” turns out not to be such a good summation of the individual.
Even Mank’s attitude towards Hearst and his eventual portrait of him in Citizen Kane is not one of “the enemy”. Hearst is the enemy and he is more. He is the wealthy man who married a woman of much younger years and he is more. Mank adds to this portrait the story of a lonely boy not saved from heading down a path of destruction of himself and of others, a layer that has more sorrow to it than anger. He relates the way Hearst crushed the idealism of his political opposition: “Our Quixote looks into the mirror of his youth and decides to break this glass, a maddening reminder of who he once was. Assisted by his faithful Sancho and armed with all the black magic at his command, he does just this, destroying, in the process, not one man… but two.” There is real sorrow mixed in with Mank’s anger as he tells these last words of the tale.
He goes on to produce his best piece of work by writing human truth. Incomplete, imperfect, but created by considerable observation, driven by a fair bit of pain, believable and true, it’s one that is sure to play.
Reference for the quotes by David Fincher.
I'll be following up this piece with one on Zodiac, which I consider to be the best work in Fincher’s filmography. If you're interested, follow my Medium or Twitter page for updates.If you wish to leave any thoughts in the comments, I'll be happy to engage with them!
