MANK BY MAK
"Traveling back in time to tell my younger self that the dude who made the Quake 3 soundtrack is into Big Band Music now."
Mank (2020)
Directed by David Fincher
Written by Jack Fincher and Eric Roth (uncredited)
Shot for Television
Big Band Music provided by The Nine Itch Nails
Starring Gary Oldman, Charles Dance, Amanda Seyfried, Bill Nye, Lily Collins, Arli$$ Howard, Tuppence Middleton, and the guy from TheSouvenir doing maybe the worst Orson Welles you’ll hear. Which feels like an attack on me.
A couple of weeks ago I saw Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner. Not out of a necessity beyond what else I could put on hold at the library as I ignore a commitment to box sets I have piled up and always deliberating. Not what amounted to a real obligation as I honour the result of a coin toss between that or Philadelphia*. The forcible chance taken when watching at home with vast resources where I still have to find a way to cheat a little with something outside of what I’m already paying for and not really using. Nothing to chronicle even when this is the relay of experience you hear from other people on podcasts but even when I can’t remember the exact night I’m still catching hold of an alibi of having seen a movie about J.M.W. Turner. A recreation of events not through the organization of what’s in structure and genre—so you can make an easy judgement as to why you’re disappointed by it because it designs a route with a dead end—but by the behaviours and motor of an artist in time. Having researched to authenticate a rendering of the past but knowing the limits of any insight achieved just comes from an observation and what has to be imagined as material. Showing off routine without splendour. Only following a pattern because an action is done twice in wandering. Living with a comparison of being symbolically viable if art is only thought of as reward without the awareness of the labour or meaning—as decoration or entertainment—while being socially incomprehensible. Able to leer at a process with a sublimity towards what can be done with photography and manufactured beautiful while accepting these enhancements occurred because of a deficiency in how a specific discipline went with a person and now seems more majestic and alien in re-enactment. What actually weights and lifts in history.
Which isn’t what I really can say about Mank. Going into it under the same conditions and feeling it as a conversational obligation not only to a bogus but attractive theory but to the grander blandness done by Netflix (and everyone else is just as guilty) to make cinematic history into a kind of condo development. Two months after a plastered yellow and pink remake of Rebecca (also made by a former bad boy) and a girl boss rehabilitation of Nurse Ratched where every set is lit and centred like a living room (for television and the fans?), Mank is just as garish as a facsimile of enough-style. Black and white digital cinematography spackling a world in compound as lighter shadows absorb depth. Ok with the finality of all these images ending up under glass of smudged or dusted across laptop monitors and have the same barely requirable attention as heating up chicken wings in an oven. Concerned more as a utility with rent acting like a convenience as it becomes the excuse of leaving something on and making claim to a context it never provided. Old Hollywood just seen as a vacuum cleaner with a bag and filter and in that door-to-door pitch easing audience in with the prospect of accepting content without an emotional discipline as the preferred method to consume even if the science comes down to a bucket and fan. What becomes applicational and never meant to leave the dwelled space and to work barely or without notice.
David Fincher already having a certain problem with intention (not my problem) but now convincingly acting without glamour in a marketable sincere act of rewriting his deceased father’s script. If ironic—making this notion of authorship actually interesting—equating screenwriting without production as nothing but a collection of drunk memories. Made to lack the impulse control sober engineering has to captain. Editing not just clumsy but lecturely tedious for those ends as form doesn’t optically flow but sprawl with needless detail. Still imagining a movie roughly in the same way Citizen Kane here is both in progress and readymade or guaranteed a reputation even without a go ahead. But if sincere just snotty workmanship from a billed perfectionist and slightly better than contemporary offerings but lamer than what could be seen on a semi-snow day in high school. Films also dropped off but rolled in on a wheeled cabinet with a TV on top. Also not thought of as being seen in a theatre and were at once modest now in remembrance more masterly and adored. Mank wanting to be parsed and segmented in those 70 minutes of a school period but unlike School Ties, Swing Kids, Gattaca, October Sky, Some Kind of Wonderful, Crossroads (the Robert Johnson movie), A Civil Action, Amadeus, Simon Birch, and Quigley Down Under is a torturous break for overstressed kids who would probably want to catch up on homework or put their head down.
The artist only mattering in legacy if seen with dollar sign eyes and only understood if they comply with a favoured monitory result**. Anything else smoothed out in a shine-o-ball-o as the film celebrates the greatest alcoholic of all time and what he managed to do in constant incapacitation. Typically Hollywood as symbol and factory in how it ignores concern or enables as long as a task materializes. Able to maybe sympathize if anything of privacy was honestly painful but always annoyingly on. A wife meant to smile at ill-timed zingers as she has to dress her rapidly sagging thirty-year-old husband and convinced out of bad feelings as she returns to being collapsible. A refugee maid in debt to nurse a habit slowly killing the man she owes her life because it nurtures the process. Irritating British people (all butlers) encouraging a barely conscious writer about the already tailored film they read imbuing its themes back without the need to be awed in image. The frailty of a nauseating figure unblemished when given that connotation to what they must be because of what they wrote too well. Perhaps done on purpose and not nudging to be all of a sudden subtle but never considering accidents in this occupation as the only morality needed is credit deserving some recognition. Created to be unlike Kane with a denial too courageous and unfeasible as the arbitrary object wanted here becomes a statue the size of a shampoo bottle earned and also made up of too much significance as a determining icon of what’s always more chaotic and settling.
Chalk it up to a strike out (and I still am) but there is a faint notion of focus in what you could see in this that I don’t think a Netflix audience really believes in enough to revisit (and I’m not going to). Observing in profile from across a street at Upton Sinclair (Bill Nye casting making an old timey impression more believable) and how easily he’s crushed. The sternest imaging of that struggle without the conspiracy suspending this narrative of Los Angeles and California as it is all plainly concocted by the bosses at boring parties. What has to mute in the infrastructure of what still is the industry. Not so much a parallel but a practice and not helped with the exclusivity of a streaming service. All of that having to be quieter as a company flattens a real confrontation to the point of worshipping writing in a poorly written screenplay and mimicking the burns in frames in a camera without reels. Still corporatizing a past with what can be made into content as artists in death can be animated economically through the legacy they’ll never have to see even when—as these kind of movies make clear—they’ll become mascots to what is made of the future as that no longer has scope for shorter attention spans. How even in this observed plight of the Citizen Kane co-writer, David Fincher—as the director who is honouring or fixing a document passed on to him to make real and still working with whatever feeling towards the structures that be and have always been—has to take credit for.
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Dead The Long Year 2020: The Best of
The endnotes
*Which I can also use as the example and like Mr. Turner also has an embarrassing in-context reaction nestled with the prestige. Demme able in craft to design the ached largeness of a Capra or Lang-esque court room drama influenced by a certain perception or plead to make an argument physicalize through the art and what summarizes a more important social idea as the whole of something smaller.
**This movie might not even know Kane was a bomb it might only know that it’s great.