Exactly what kind of hipster is David Fincher? His access to the zeitgeist through music videos, TV commercials, and movies has made him a favorite director for the kool kids. His Madison Avenue instincts override artistry; he merely pitched yet another serial-killer project to Netflix: his latest film, The Killer. It is a sequel, of sorts, to the 1992 serial-killer film Se7en and the 2011 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, reversing their vengeance perspectives. In sync with Millennial angst, The Killer’s protagonist — a professional assassin played by Michael Fassbender — personifies the dystopian mood. Self-interest makes him the hero. Plus, he has exquisite musical taste: He dispatches his human targets while listening to songs by the 1980s pop group The Smiths.
This predilection is a distinctive marker. The Smiths were never embraced by American tastemakers (reviewers resorted to snide put-downs), so the band developed a silent-majority coterie — a Make Music Great Again following. The Smiths signify the killer’s depraved idiosyncrasy — his untrustworthy individuality evokes the elite sadists in Fincher’s Fight Club. This combination of elitism and sadism is distinct to Fincher, as is his puke-and-urine color scheme. He follows the assassin through his debauched world; each assignment resembles a TV-series procedural, the preferred narrative for moral detachment. The soundtrack’s Smiths songs become ironic rather than expressive because the killer shows no real affinity for them. It’s Fincher’s attempt to destroy everything The Smiths stood for — the ultimate hipster-fascist statement.
The Killer gets its anomic air from a series of graphic novels by Alexis Nolent (also nodding to the chic French art movie Le Samouraï, by Jean-Pierre Melville). Still, it’s unmistakably the same quasi-noirish hellscape as in Gone Girl, The Social Network, and Panic Room. Fassbender plays the hit man like a runway model — photogenic but blank, an automaton’s version of Kevin Spacey’s hammy villain in Se7en. His worldview (evident in how he takes pride in cold professionalism or speaks of “Annie Oakley jobs”) distorts a detective’s moral code. Each nameless character in each generic chapter, whether Sophie Charlotte as his pouty sex interest or Tilda Swinton as his eccentric rival, deserves annihilation. Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker’s sophomoric idea of profundity is the philosophical cliché “Most people refuse to believe that the great beyond is anything more than a cold, infinite void.” A lack of compassion suffuses Fincher’s dank slickness, a test-marketed style of affectless alienation. His focus on killing but not its moral ramifications — what distinguishes Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, and De Palma — is the most debased form of Mad Ave. cynicism.
The music for such an exercise should be the corrosive, grind-house nihilism of Nine Inch Nails, headed by Fincher’s favorite composer, Trent Reznor. But Fincher’s antipathetic TV-commercial motifs are not well served by The Smiths catalogue — the most droll, unabashed petition for empathy of the past half century.
From the first moment Fassbender takes aim, with his earbuds emitting “Well I Wonder,” Fincher proves as insensitive a DJ as he is a storyteller. The irony is not just obtuse, it’s an affront to our sensitivities. I haven’t forgiven the bowdlerization of Donovan’s wondrous “Hurdy Gurdy Man” in Zodiac. But targeting The Smiths — and the sensibility that music represents — is sociopathic. (If he had any respect, or an ounce of wit, he’d settle for “Meat Is Murder.”)
“I Know It’s Over” cannot ever be “mood music” — its imprint in pop history etches the personal agony that Morrissey dared show to the world via The Smiths. That triumphant not-aloneness is also what made the guitar-quivering “How Soon Is Now?” seismic. Called the “alternative-rock ‘Stairway to Heaven’” for its majesty and universality, it has an ineluctable appeal that defied the insensitivity dominant in Eighties rock criticism (despite that era’s amazing cultural ferment and eccentric geniuses Michael Jackson, Prince, The Smiths, Kate Bush, etc.). “How Soon Is Now?” longs for happiness and demands an end to smugness. Fincher squanders it as music to kill by, returning smugness.
It’s impossible to hear “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” and think bad thoughts, but Fincher spreads ugliness throughout the culture. Variety’s review asked, “Doesn’t he ever listen to music that’s not The Smiths?” Another ignorant review complained about “droning vocals and . . . romantic anti-romanticism.” The only anti-romanticism is Fincher’s indifference to the special pleading in “Hand in Glove” and “This Charming Man” — songs that challenged status quo pop. Being unresponsive to the brilliance and gaiety of “Bigmouth Strikes Again,” “Unhappy Birthday,” and “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” seems especially witless. And the misuse of “Girlfriend in a Coma” and “Shoplifters of the World, Unite” — each a radical concept of grief and revolution — makes Fincher an unfit communicator. Because of Fincher’s humorlessness — remember Brad Pitt whining “What’s in the box?” in Se7en? — nothing here can be taken seriously except the assault on pop-music culture.
The Killer is calculated for quiet barbarism threatening to normalize inhumanity. Fincher’s rejection of The Smiths aims to destroy the band’s great contributions to civilization. This anti-art horror film appeals to the hipster appetite for self-destruction.