Fincher: The Game (1997)

One of the most original thrillers of the 90s, The Game is about a wealthy, reclusive investment banker, Nicholas van Orton (Michael Douglas), who’s given an unusual present by his wayward brother, Connie (Sean Penn), for his 48th birthday. It’s a voucher for a game, and although Nicholas has to go through a whole variety of tests before he can enter, he’s never told what the game is – finding out the object of the game is the game, and differs from client to client. In other words, it’s a game that creates its own space each time it’s played, and as it progresses, it forces Nicholas into two quite distinct types of space. On the one hand, there’s the wooden, ochre interiors of his mansion and country club – deep recesses of oaky space, so old you can almost see the growth rings. On the other hand, there’s a series of cold, palatial, technocratic spaces, prophecies of the millennial financial district, where offices, floors and buildings are provisional, expendable and replaceable, changing at the blink of the eye. Alternating between these two spaces recalls the odd combination of noir and soleil that drove Se7en, but it also exudes the cold warmth that will crystallise into the peculiar properties of cyberspace later in Fincher’s career. In other words, The Game takes place at a fascinating juncture between the languages of noir and cyberspace, as Nicholas starts to glimpse a vast, virtual architecture, a second city that’s only commensurate to his paranoid imagination, his suspicion that every single person around him is acting. And that means that the film revives the vast, absolute loneliness of classical noir, even or especially as the game becomes less plausible, since it’s only then that we fully enter the space of the game, become part of a world that’s both separate from and somehow continguous with our own. It makes sense, then, that it’s set in San Francisco, a city so vertiginous that it seems to defy typical of notions of what space is – Fincher opens up vertical space at critical moments, while the film opens and closes with plummets that recall the avant-gamespace of Vertigo. It also makes sense that Douglas is cast as Nicholas, since part of the point of the film is that the corporate sensorium often evolves to fit new media and technology faster than the general population. As the face of that sensorium, there’s always been something avant-garde and revelatory about Douglas’ presence, and Fincher crystallises him into something like an avatar, at least while he’s in the game; watching and identifying with him is like navigating a sandbox city ten years before its time.