The Game

From time to time I like to revisit movies from around Culture Ground Zero. Since Western pop culture is now fully in the grip of a fanatical cult bent on memory holing the past, it’s beneficial to look back on what we’ve lost.

One of the most tragic casualties of Hollywood’s total metamorphosis into a cape flick agitprop factory is the middle market drama. It’s hard to imagine here in Clown World, but low-key mysteries and psychological thrillers used to give a good showing at the box office. Hollywood doesn’t deserve all the blame for this genre’s disappearance. After all, cerebral films have a built-in barrier to entry.

A quintessential example of the lost sophisticated thriller genre is David Fincher’s The Game. It’s also one of those films that bears the dubious distinction of having been disowned by its director, yet has achieved sleeper hit status. Fincher’s dissatisfaction with this film is a shame on the level of David Lynch’s disavowal of Dune. Both movies are prime examples of works by stylistic masters who use their respective styles to convey volumes of complex meaning at a glance.

Despite Fincher’s disappointment with the final product, The Game eventually achieved high-midlist success in its original run. It failed to earn out domestically but went on to gross double its budget thanks to the foreign market–a clear reminder that despite its quality, this film came out of Ground Zero.

The Game is pushing a quarter-century old, so this review won’t shy away from spoilers.

As his forty-eighth birthday approaches, investment banker Nick Van Orton grows even pricklier and more withdrawn than normal. He gives short shrift to attempts by his business associates, his ex-wife, and even his brother, to reach out.

Nick’s luxurious, disconnected life takes a turn when his ex-junkie brother presents him with a gift card from a shadowy company called Consumer Recreation Services. After dragging his feet, Nick overhears two members of his country club gushing about CRS and visits the company’s offices to find out what exactly they do.

A distracted corporate functionary explains that CRS treats its customers to a game. Unlike Monopoly, Donkey Kong, or racquetball, the game is custom-tailored to each participant. Out of morbid curiosity, Nick agrees to try the game and is subjected to a battery of psychological and physical tests.

Strange events soon disrupt Nick’s carefully ordered life. His brother disappears. Papers needed to close an important deal go missing. His house is subjected to repeated bizarre vandalism, such as every room getting tagged with UV graffiti and a wooden clown being left in the same position his father was found dead in.

The plot point this event alludes to–Nick’s father’s sudden suicide, also at age forty-eight–is a key theme that unlocks the story. Fincher drives this point home by having Nick find a key in the clown’s mouth.

A major strength of The Game is that its deft twists and turns effectively keep the audience guessing about the true nature of the game, and The Game. As practical jokes turn to intimidation, burglary, and even murder, questions arise and linger. Is the game an initially harmless LARP gone wrong? A sadistic social experiment? A complicated revenge plot hatched by Nick’s enemies? An elaborate con job? Fincher leaves all of these possibilities and more in play until the movie’s last minutes, a virtuoso directing performance.

Besides being one of Fincher’s most accomplished films, The Game shares similar, though subtler, prescience with the previous year’s Escape from LA by John Carpenter. In retrospect, Fincher’s film chillingly predicts the more recent claims of gang-stalking. Viewed as a type of live-action role-playing, the game conditions us to view everyone except the protagonist as a potential NPC.

At the end of the day, The Game is perhaps best summed up as  secular take on A Christmas Carol. Remove the mystical and religious elements from Dickens’ tale, transplant it to the low 90s, and you’d come up with similar results. Instead of piety, Nick’s ordeal reawakens his sense of fraternity.

Another significant departure from Dickens on The Game‘s part is not treating greed as the protagonist’s besetting vice. When at one point he loses $600 million, he’s less concerned about the theft’s personal impact on him than his clients’ payrolls and pension plans. And while at one point he forces a publishing company CEO–who’s also an old family friend–to step down because he’s losing money, that character later confirms that Nick made the right call for the business and for him.

Check out The Game if you’re in the mood for a sharp psychological thriller with a soft, but not degenerate, moral center.

And for a thriller that expressly contrasts weak secular versus strong Christian morals, read Combat Frame XSeed.