THE GAME (1997)

This David Fincher film features actors Sean Penn and Michael Douglas..

Welcome to my blog post for David Fincher's "The Game "

There are places to explore and think about in particular to “The Game” that have literary reference. The site about novelist John Fowles almost makes the accusation that a lot of “The Game” was somehow plagiarized by his novel “The Magus”. The main character is Nicholas Urfe and in the movie Nicholas Van Orten played by Michael Douglas. Both lead characters are handsome, jaded, and rather miserable though they differ in age. There is a young character in “The Magus” whereas Michael Douglas’s character is more middle aged.

The people in these plots are people that are thrown into games where rules do not matter. One cannot trust what is before them. The novel was originally titled “The God Game”. Another similarity is that in the novel, the character who initiates the game in the movie is Nicholas Van Orten’s brother, Conrad played by Sean Penn. There are many coincidences to think about and consider. Classical literary allusions for this work include “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” which is referenced explicitly as well as Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” Kafka’s “The Trial” and Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”.

Fincher said himself in interviews that part of the inspiration behind “A Christmas Carol” which was a morality play we all know quite well has become present during the holiday season. “The Wizard of Oz” does an admirable job of showing its connection to “The Game”. Dorothy wants to leave her humdrum life in Kansas and travel to some place different, visually exploited by the color and transformation when she reaches Oz and she has to face all of these interesting trials eventually to return to the life she oddly wanted to depart. “The Game” functions in quite the same way. At one point, there is a sense in the film that Van Orten wants to see who is behind the curtain, who is the wizard, who is a huxter and con artist .

He has created this scheme of allusions in “The Wizard of Oz” and is certainly not what he appears to be. This film is positioned as one that plays a lot of games with us. This is about capitalism to a certain degree. Michael Douglas is a bit of a cloistered, wealthy, middle aged figure as he says in the film that he moves money from one place to the next. It is told in San Francisco and you get visual descriptions of his isolation, aloofness and in a way that he is completely alienated from family and the world around him which is part of the draw of the book. He needs some kind of change.

The real trust in Fincher’s tale is that it's the level of deprivation and punishment which is not too far from what was witnessed in the “Seven” film. There is a sense of the sadism and the punishment the character must go through in order to purge his old self and see the world anew. In regards to “A Christmas Carol”, we can almost see Van Orten’s progress in the film similar to Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge is a miser. We know his character and there is a kind of quasi religious sensibility to that. He has to be revisited by the ghost of Christmas past, present and future in order to see the lacking, the mistakes he has made in his life, see the ways he has failed and that he has to change his ways in order to become a good Christian, more giving individual and that he must amend his ways.

There is an updated postmodern sensibility in the game cartoon of the synopsis for “The Trial” by Kafka which is a fascinating work of Kay who is the central character of the book is accused of a crime and faces the absurdity of almost a year of trying to figure out a bureaucratic system of not being able to get to an understanding of the truth and in a way is completely alienated from the world lives in where he cannot ascertain what is true and what is false particularly through a type of criminal system that makes no sense whatsoever to an extent. It is paradoxical, leads him in circles and ultimately Kafka-esque which leads one to believe that modern life/ modern systems are basically absurd. Kay winds up being taken away by officials a year later and killed in a quarry. It is filled with weird allegorical senses of just what is at stake in a modern sensibility. There is a sense of dreadful boredom and inability to get to the truth to understand purpose in life and feeling caught in a system that really makes no sense that cannot get anywhere. One is caught in a labyrinth of bureaucratic idiocy.

The question that lurks and perplexes people is what the message is here in “The Game” and whether or not this is an indictment of some bit of our culture. At one point, it is said that this is a movie about movies which is in a way fascinating about how much of this is about metacognition and weird allusions about what is and what is not real life. The plot is set in motion when Nicholas Van Orten gets a gift from his brother, Conrad at a very exclusive club from a company called CRS which provides “Whatever is lacking” in Conrad’s words. Van Orten is rich, extremely wealthy but a tremendously cold, isolated man. You do not feel for him. To a general extent, you do not connect with him which is odd considering the choice of Michael Douglas. “Greed is good” is what gets tacked on to his character and Fincher’s tale has an odd, strange pathway to it. There is an interesting aspect as far as thinking about a plot is to consider what “The Game” actually signifies and how much of this is seen as a real life version of the fears of the Matrix which would be made around the period of 1999.

Oftentimes, people have seen a direct parallel in a different way to “The Truman Show” which was also made around the same time period. How to ascertain when the game ends and when it does not as well as what is or is not part of the game and what the final message is. There are problems presented and difficulties encapsulated in the text of the film. There is a lot of the sense of the pulling down of this character. David Fincher said often times he distrusts experts as part of his control freak sense as a director but there is clearly a sense in this film of a character getting punished, getting his comeuppance in a different way than Scrooge who simply has to go through and look at his life, the decisions he has made and perhaps those he has let down or done wrong and harm to. There is a weird line about the surveillance regarding the blurring lines between reality.

This film made in 1997 blurs lines between how much the big brother is manipulating us and how the muck of one's reality is just that or just the essence of a game of some kind of labyrinth you are desperately trying to get out of and as an audience trying to figure out what the ultimate verdict is. This plays off of “The Wizard of Oz” “The Trial” “Alice in Wonderland” and what happens to the character as they go through their trials and tribulations about their life. We know well that Dorothy wants to return to Kansas, click her heels and go back home while Scrooge is going to be a good man , mend his miserly ways and be a better person. There is much to be said about “The Trial” in the sense that it is meaningless and leads to nowhere. We ask ourselves in the end of “The Game” what happened to Nicholas Van Orten and what the purpose was of all these tests and games he must endure. The ending is problematic.

Meghan L. Grady