Writer's Block Magazine

Art is said to be an expression of the inexpressible. It is about the things all other human expression cannot be about. But more often than not, what art really is about is making art. While an artist is creating, he might ponder politics, life, or love – but what he most certainly thinks about is art. On its surface level, but perhaps also on its deepest level, art is about its own creation. Paintings are about painting, about the looking and the shaping. Books are about writing, the inventing and remembering. Photography is about photographing, staging and spontaneity. Films are about film-making, movement and community. This connection can be direct, like paintings of painters, books about writers. Velázquez looking the viewer in the eye from behind his subjects in Las Meninas. All those miserably depressed writers that permeate pages from The Bell Jar to The Fault in our Stars. A more interesting form of artistic self-examination is the indirect one. Country songs about train-hopping hobos that are really about the desperation of being perpetually on tour. War-photography of men shooting rifles, being shot themselves by a Rolleiflex Twin-Lens Reflex Camera.

Genre about Genre

This trend has previously been noted in two filmic and literary genres; the detective and the heist film. All detective stories are essentially about writing detective stories. While the role of the reader mirrors the detective, both are examining clues, seeking the killer; the mirroring between writer and sleuth might be even more striking. Both are frantically seeking a satisfying ending to the story. If the detective does not find his man, the writer does not discover a genre-appropriate finish to their novel. Heist-films are about filmmaking. In both, a team of experts in their respective fields must form. The actor and the con-man. The director and the planner. The costume designer and the disguise master. The special effects supervisor and the explosives-expert. This team must then come together in a writer’s room or large, nondescript warehouse and construct a master-plan. The heist is the filming. The score is the box-office returns.

Psychopaths About Directors

Another of these odd little linkages is that between the serial killer and the director. The rise of serial-killer media has been steady and unstoppable. It can be attributed to the increasing cultural true-crime-fascination or the shift from whodunnit to whydunit within the crime-genre. I think it is because directors feel a sort of kinship with these monsters. Being a director contains a strange dichotomy of roles. Creative and control-freak. Improviser and organizer. It calls for ritualistic idealists and in-the-mud-realists. Free expression and total power. These unique tensions are present in both movie-directors and serial-killers. William Friedkin, director of films such The Exorcist and The French Connection, utterly foundational to modern American cinema, said “If I wasn’t a film director I might have become a serial killer.” Dominic Sena, director of B-movie action classics like Swordfish and Gone in Sixty Seconds gave Brad Pitt the note “you know when a serial killer has a victim around the throat and chokes him till they pass out and then revives him so that he can do it again? Do that.” The killer as stand-in for the director themself. Viewing serial-killer media in this light opens most of these films up to swaths of new interpretations. What does Psycho say about Hitchcock? What does Natural Born Killers say about Oliver Stone?

Two examples I’ll highlight are David Fincher’s The Killer and Lars von Trier’s The House that Jack Built.

The Killer About Fincher

Fincher, a veritable guru of serial killer media with classics like Se7en, Zodiac, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo already under his belt, is most introspective in his 2023 hitman-thriller The Killer. Ice-eyed Micheal Fassbender works down a list of victims with dispassion and exactitude. It is almost painfully obvious Fassbender’s nameless hitman is a metaphor for Fincher: through an endless internal monologue we learn about the killer and all the ways he is similar to his creator. The killer is nihilistic, like Fincher’s films. The killer values perfection above all else. Fincher is known for doing takes until they are exactly what he wants them to be, using special-effects not for explosions or alien-invasions, but for background details, so that everything looks just how he wishes. The killer is a precise weapon, still and steady. Fincher’s camerawork is famously almost entirely without shake, moving straight-lined when moving at all. The killer is impersonal and unemotional. Fincher’s films are plot-focused, not people-focused, using cool colors and almost never showing close-ups. Every little element of the killer’s personality can in some way be linked to Fincher and his filmmaking. Including the one character-trait the killer is not aware of: he is really not as smart as he thinks he is. Almost everything he does goes wrong in some way. While his monologues sling slick one-liners and his slight chin-tilt shows a cool detachment, he stumbles into traps, misses sniper-shots, and his loved ones get hurt. Through this film Fincher seems to be winking at the audience. He knows his filmmaking is strange. He knows his little quirks are just that, quirks. He knows he sometimes fails in his artistic pursuits, as well as his personal ones, because of his obsessions. However, the film is also a victory lap of sorts. The killer ultimately succeeds completely, killing everyone who needs killing, escaping all hunting him, retiring to a nice beach-front mansion with his one true love. Fincher, in his most Fincher-esque, cold, nihilistic, still, obsessive film yet, rakes in a heap of Netflix-money and has added another masterpiece to his oeuvre. Both miraculously succeed despite their failures. Like the killer, it is questionable if Fincher has really learned anything from his shortcomings. The universe has stumbled into proving his obsession warranted.

Jack About Chuck Lorre

Von Triers’ The House That Jack Built is an unpleasant film and I cannot consciously recommend it to anyone. Von Trier’s filmmaking, which can range from voyeuristic to downright unwatchable, has something psychotic within it by nature, and he mercilessly leans into this in The House. That being said, it contains a wonderful critique of directors through the medium of serial killers. The movie follows Jack as he recounts the various murders that shaped him as an artist. Every kill sharpens his craft and artistic senses as he works towards what he regards as his masterpiece: a house made out of human bodies. It is remarkably easy to link Jack to directors. Every murder-story is one of his movies, all of which lead to his magnum opus. The title of the movie itself is the title of his final work. While Lars von Trier does not seem to equate Jack with himself, it is clear Jack represents directors. Deep into the movie Bruno Ganz’ character, the devil, notes something about all these stories Jack has been telling to him and the audience: the women Jack kills are all “seriously unintelligent.” Jack is fabricating these stories, heightening them to feel superior to women. “It turns you on, doesn’t it, Jack?” the Devil asks. Von Trier cleverly uses the serial killer to expose a tendency of male directors. To some, when one has all the power over a narrative, it becomes tempting to use it as an expression of superiority. Like Jack, some directors cannot help but use their authority to create stories where they are the infallible sex-god-protagonists and women are reduced to dumb blondes drooling at their feet. Von Trier is a lot of things but he’s not Jack. I think Jack is a metaphor for Chuck Lorre, and those like him. Chuck Lorre’s sitcom Two and a Half Men is about Charlie Harper, “a hedonistic, successful commercial jingles composer” who seduces an endless cascade of unintelligent women. Chuck Lorre was a commercial jingles composer before creating the show. The show is an attempt to make himself seem like the coolest person alive, charming, careless, so much smarter than women. “It turns you on, doesn’t it, Jack?” Von Trier asks.

Serial killer media is one of many art-forms that is essentially about making art. And like all other art, it does not let this stop it from saying more. Fincher examines himself, his own flaws and successes, and the costs and boons accrued through obsession. Von Trier attacks egotistic directors and their warped, sexist storytelling. Killers are made reflections of the worst tendencies of creativity. Killing is made to be about the creation of art. And isn’t killing about the unexpressed, about the things that all other human expression cannot be about?

Written by Arthur Mulder