Issue #315: Kind of Blue
Car trouble deferred my big plans for this week’s newsletter, so let’s have some fun instead. Take a look at this:
This is the Krink K-55 Fluorescent Blue paint marker. Here it is up close:
I find this color very appealing. I got this Krink marker back in 2022. I like how the color appears on the label and before it gets applied to a surface, which I think is quite close to Pantone C 306:
The hex code is 00B5E2. But it looks darker when I apply it. I tried to paint a pair of shoes a few years back:
That darker blue color, while still very pleasant, is a bit different. It looks more like the blue on the front midsole of the Action Bronson New Balance 990s:
I feel like I have a few things that are reasonably close to the blue I am looking for. These Camper shoes I bought two years ago:
Also, not something I actually own, but I love this blue shade in the Vibram Wrap Tech sole:
I can’t exactly write in a notebook with that huge Krink pen, plus the ink doesn’t exactly come out the color I want anyway, so I’ve been looking for a pen that’s a good match. The closest I have found so far is the Pentel Matte Hop light blue gel pen:
Maybe nothing can truly look quite as striking as that saturated, bright blue radiating from the marker tip. But my quest to find objects (mostly sneakers) and writing implements that are of this color will continue.
“Measure twice, cut once”: The Brutal Precision of David Fincher’s The Killer
People look at me a little funny when I tell them The Killer was my favorite film from the United States last year. They look at me even funnier when I tell them it’s a top twenty film of all time, perhaps Fincher’s second greatest film after Seven (1995). It is a simple film. It transcends because of the most fundamental aspects of filmmaking: performance, cinematography, direction. Without Fassbender and Fincher’s unbelievable eye, the film is nothing. But the absolute nuclear fission of the duo gives everything. As the titular unnamed Killer, Fassbender demolishes a litany of lines that could have made a one man show. His delivery is spectacular, intercut with various songs by The Smiths. Not for nothing, Fincher is also a music video director. But for all the attention paid to sound, The Killer looks good enough that it plays just as well on mute.
Fincher’s latest is condensed, tight, focused, and without excess. It is an existentialist text that follows The Killer on an odyssey as he learns his place in the world. The film, I think, draws most from The Game (1997) and Fight Club (1999), critiquing modern life and telling a moral fable. The Killer, like Fight Club’s unnamed Narrator (Edward Norton), wants the audience to believe he has it all figured out. Fassbender’s narration, an inner monologue (again, akin to the running voice over in Fight Club), might double as self-help. Giving the kind of advice that might be skewered by the If Books Could Kill podcast, what’s not immediately clear is if The Killer is getting high on his own supply of aphorisms.
The character obsesses over discipline, precision, and planning. “Redundancies, redundancies, and redundancies,” he recounts as the largest share of preparation required to carry out an assassination. His moral calculous is simple: people die every day. Why not make some money on it? The character has no background and very little context to understand how he has arrived in the situation of the film. Clearly, he is a successful assassin, one qualified to narrate the contract killing equivalent of Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act (2023). But more than that, he is a figure for the disaffected silent population — whether it is a majority or minority is one of the film’s key points — that is represented and criticized in Fight Club.
From one point of view, it might be fair to say that The Killer coasts on the aforementioned performances and visuals. Fassbender is The Killer, I would be nervous seeing him on the street after this movie. And his narration would sell audiobooks. But these sense pleasures of the text are, really, what a movie amounts to. The fact that The Killer delivers them to an extreme degree is hardly a condemnation. I think the film rewards deep study, but it doesn’t demand it of its audience for better or for worse. Instead, it is insistent. Rhythmic, or repetitive, depending on your overall opinion of the film.
The character of The Killer has less of an “arc” and more of a line — he moves from the point of sardonic cynic to enmeshed social figure. He describes himself as “apart” and gives a cutting evaluation of the human condition:
From the beginning of history, the few have always exploited the many. This is the cornerstone of civilization. The blood in the mortar that binds all bricks. Whatever it takes, make sure you’re one of the few, not one of the many.
At this moment in the film, The Killer is indeed apart. He sits in his privileged perch, evoking L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart) in Rear Window (1954), his mediating perspective on the world the one the audience embodies for 120 minutes.
When everything goes wrong, the cohesion and self-assurance of the narration never wavers. But it’s clear The Killer is failing to live up to his every axiom. The film’s entire motivating factor is fighting a battle for which he is not paid, but instead emotionally invested, vengeance for his girlfriend hospitalized by those searching for him. The state of “apartness” he claims to occupy is only true insofar as he subverts the law. The essence of his being, the things that motivate him, are important to him, are as sentimental as those that animate the exploited masses, “the many.”
Because there is no mea culpa, the film is easy to misread. In The Killer’s injunction to “make sure you’re one of the few, not one of the many,” he doesn’t place himself in either group. However, it is clear he sees himself as one of the few. He provides counterintuitive quips about life, eats his egg McMuffin without the muffin, and accepts “that the great beyond is no more than a cold, infinite void” but also “the freedom that comes from acknowledging that truth.” What this freedom is, precisely, he doesn’t say — one might infer it has something to do with his comfort with killing.
The Killer may be a movie with few peers, but its title character finds himself as one of the exploited, frantically moving masses rather than a domineering author of his own destiny. He has a material freedom because of his wealth and because he can kill those who would wish to harm him. But he is as entangled in social relations as the next guy, something he comes to discover as the movie progresses.
Domestic bliss is not a prison for The Killer, however. In fact, it turns out to just be bliss. As he takes his position on the reclined beach chair in the Dominican Republic next to his avenged girlfriend, he finally aligns himself in the many/few divide:
[M]aybe you’re not one of the few. Maybe you’re just like me. One of the many.
This is not how The Killer would describe himself at the film’s outset, however. Instead of his social tie and status as “many” inspiring ennui, though, there is an ideological tract here embracing some of the trappings of conventional modern life. Despite this, however, there is also something dishonest about someone so idiosyncratic claiming his place among “the many.” One might read this claim ironically, understanding his “manyness” as an assumed feature to avoid detection as he retires from his career as hitman. My reading, however, is that his movement through the world has both disabused him of the notion of his uniqueness — or “apartness” — and instead revealed the exploited masses to be a vibrant group of singular individuals. He is not cut from the cloth of the social order, but necessarily a part of it. The Killer is a parable of the salad bowl over the melting pot, and a testament to the complex interiorities of those who are but cogs in the wheel of society’s machinery.
Weekly Reading List
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/madame-web-bomb-killed-sony-franchise-1235829471/ — Madame Web (2024) is an industry defining flop. I didn’t see the movie. I won’t see the movie. But I did watch this:
New Rockstars gives a great breakdown of what is funny about the movie, but I wouldn’t engage with it beyond this video.
This is Stangg Twin. He is the twin of Stangg. This is Stangg:
Stangg is a legend, from the Legends expansion for Magic: the Gathering. Mark Poole’s art for the card is iconic. I don’t know who drew this Stangg Twin token, but it looks like homemade art from someone playing Magic in 1994. So cool, just like Stangg.
https://artgallery.yale.edu/exhibitions/exhibition/sheila-levrant-de-bretteville-community-activism-and-design — Right now, Sheila Levrant de Brentteville’s art has a beautiful exhibit at the Yale University Art Gallery. Izzy Berenson and Sarah Honeth write:
During the summer after Sheila’s first year of teaching at CalArts, she was asked to create a special issue of the Everywoman newspaper.10 Sheila designed the layout in the format of Consciousness-Raising (C-R), which creates an equality of voices. The newspaper gave a two-page spread to each writer, each having an equal amount of space, regardless of hierarchy in the newspaper. The dissolution of hierarchy was also a way to counter patriarchy. Empowered by the new publication’s focus on women and as the only female faculty member at the CalArts School of Design,11 Sheila approached Victor Papanek, then Dean of the School of Design, to start the Women’s Design Program,12 in which reading and discussion had an equal place alongside design work.
This is just a brief gloss of a small part of de Brentteville’s career. The Yale exhibit is worth the trip if you are in the area.
Until next time.