Brett's Fincher Notes (2)

Panic Room (2002)

General

Panic Room he calls a “footnote movie,” a “guilty pleasure” movie, and a “popcorn movie.” Panic Room is merely “the sum of its parts” (whereas Fight Club is more). But maybe it’s the “footnote” movies that reveal darker truths (maybe unconscious?) about his worldview.

From 2014 Screen International interview:

“I liked the limitations of it, the constraint, the space of it. I liked the idea of an omniscient camera. This is not just getting to do computer generated imagery. The idea was you are separated by three feet of steel between what is happening. Neither party can hear each other but the audience knows more than either party and we’re constantly in suspense wondering if they are going to turn a corner.

“Also, the camera can fly through keyholes. So there’s a good chance that as a viewer you’re going to see something you don’t want to see so there’s a tension to that that the camera can go anywhere, flying under doors. I thought that was kind of cool."

Based on a comment earlier in the interview—in which Fincher distances himself from Hitchcock (talking about Gone Girl) because Hitchcockian suspense implies that the audience knows more than the characters (“dramatic irony)—this film may be Fincher’s most Hitchcockian film.

Interpretations

Meg and Sarah, locked in the panic room, can be taken to be the viewers, who must watch as their attackers/tormentors (the people with “the plan,” i.e., the filmmakers) attempt to break in and take the treasure (the viewer’s mind). Consider the interview where Fincher likens cinema to mind control a la Manchurian Candidate: but to quote Nolan’s Tesla, “science isn’t an exact science,” and the criminals, though they have an “expert” with them, are often bumblers.

Lawrence Knapp:

Panic Room and Zodiac capture the post-Fight Club languor  of the 2000s, the post-9/11 false security of Jodie Foster’s aristocratic brownstone or the lingering dread of the 1960s, a country of faceless, nameless serial killers that lacks even the warped morality and sophistication of a sinister film like The Silence of the Lambs.

I would say “hangover,” instead of languor. The overstimulating, nihilistic cultural grandeur of the 90s was impossible to match; Fincher likely sensed that this was not a moment to make a major film and instead chose to work on his craft.

Themes

Advertising and modeling imagery all over credit sequence. Why? From artofthetitle.com article:

For Panic Room, the sequence takes a trip up the island of Manhattan through quick shots of buildings to get the idea of, “You’re downtown, you’re midtown, you’re traversing the park, you’re moving to the west side: here’s where the story takes place.” This was the same idea as the title sequence to West Side Story, so we had to do something a little different.

A big financier lived in the house before they moved in. Jodie’s estranged husband is a big pharma mogul.

Conspiracy stuff

Shattered mirror: “That’s seven years bad luck.” (Consider underlying theme of childhood trauma.)

Checkerboard floor at ground level.

Forest Whitaker blackmailed into the plot. Powerful people who can blackmail security company employees in a pinch. Leto is the previous owner’s grandson. That the previous owner built a panic room, had a criminal nephew, and now has professional criminals searching for stashed bonds there suggests he was into black market stuff. The criminal underworld downstream of elite blackmarket machinations (a ubiquitous theme in the American crime film).

From the Wikipedia entry on “bearer bonds”: “The main appeal of bearer bonds is anonymity, which has led them to be the financial instrument of choice for money laundering, tax evasion and concealed business transactions in general.”

Misc.

Kristen Stewart deliberately androgynous. (I remember not being sure if this was Foster’s son or daughter when I first saw this movie.)

Zodiac(2007)

Approach

A twist on the police procedural genre, as the perspective is filtered through a liminal narrator, Graysmith, a cartoonist and amateur journalist/sleuth. Clear influence of Pakula’s All the President’s Men (remember that Parallax Viewcomes up in a Fincher interview).

Horlsey, Maps of Hell, 480:

Suspension of disbelief is the business Hollywood is in, and Zodiac proceeds as an artful deception that creates the atmosphere of a serious, conscientious work that would never deliberately distort facts for dramatic purposes, much less dishonorable ones.

Concerning this carefully crafted, or artfully deceptive, verisimilitude, Nayman points to Texas Chainsaw Massacreas an influence: “It was common practice for exploitation movies to advertise themselves (however loosely) as being based on ‘true events,’ a tactic evoked in Zodiac’s opening title card” (68). Characteristically, Fincher has more respect for his audience: the deception is infinitely harder to detect than in Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Cultural engineering and the serial killer

From Nayman’s book: Screenwriter Vanderbilt said that “David wants to make the film that ends the serial killer genre.” Zodiac is very arguably the origin of the modern serial killer phenomenon, or of the serial killer “profile,” especially if one includes the taunting of the police/media as a central component. So Fincher is revisiting the roots of the “genre” to which he is the most famous contributor--arguably a psyop to solidify a psyop, or to “end” (complete?) the psyop as Vanderbilt suggests.

Cultural montage of 70s over blank screen: Fincher’s fascination with serial killers and culture (consider how the serial killer genre is used as a vehicle of cultural nihilism in Se7en), and his fascination perhaps with how the cultural revolution set in motion an era of disorienting cultural change, which had reached dizzying proportions by the time he entered the scene in the late 80s. Nayman considers the opening murder scene as evoking and then destroying a wholesome Norman Rockwell image: if so, he is getting at something besides loss of American innocence, perhaps a loss of a pseudo-American innocence, because the couple turn out not to be innocent high school sweethearts but people involved in infidelity.

But the cultural evolution theme of Zodiac also points to serial killers as cultural engineering through linking serial killer phenomenon to the evolution of post-WWII, post-MKUltra culture which, like the serial killer phenomenon itself, may or may not be so spontaneous/organic.

Self-reflexivity as Revelation of the Method: a movie about the origins of the serial killer phenomenon, which like a lot of Hollywood cinema may be in part a psychological warfare operation aimed at refashioning the culture (consider the villains in Stallone’s Cobra), made by a person who made one of the most famous serial killer movies, Se7en, which serves as a vehicle for spreading the cultural nihilism that, like the spectacular psychopathic violence signified by the serial killer (and maybe the xenomorph), is to shock/traumatize public consciousness into a state ripe for reprinting with the new cultural program, the NWO program.

Traumatizing audience by recreating crimes in gritty, realistic detail. This all has the effect of creating a deceptive verisimilitude (gushed over by critics), but one more complicated than the usual way that Hollywood convinces the audience that historical and biographical films are as good as documentary accounts of their subject matter; here Fincher creates a gritty documentary feel and really does hew very, very closely to the source material, except that, as he hints in places (see below), the real truth about these crimes would take one into deep state-occult territory—so that the verisimilitude he creates mirrors the verisimilitude of the official and quasi-official versions of the Zodiacstory, which are either deliberately constructed to obscure the truth or inadvertently transmitting such deliberate deceptions.

Limited hangout (Dave McGowan)

See notes under Social Network: Zodiac as false enigma.

Clues:

On talk radio: discussion of whether Zodiac a Satanist.

Graysmith has his kids crosschecking murder dates against pagan/neo-pagan calendar. Proto-Dave McGowan.

Graysmith literally says, “I like puzzles.” No doubt Fincher does too!

Pattern ends up being that there is no pattern, as McGowan argues in Programmed to Kill—or actually: McGowan is saying that there’s a very different pattern, the pattern subtly hinted at in this movie with its references to Satanism, the occult, multiple killers: scene where Downey Jr. shows Grayson “secrets,” leading off with fact that Zodiac in letters was cribbing details of (some) crimes from already existing articles.

Arthur Lee Allen as patsy or part of psyop?

In his 2014 Screen International interview, Fincher said this about Zodiac: “Our story is about the unknowability of the truth.” A very convenient thematic statement, given the danger—to the political and intelligence establishments and perhaps to Fincher personally—of the McGowan thesis, which (see above) Fincher nonetheless hints at (military intelligence connections, Satanism, the pagan calendar, serial killers as psychological warfare/cultural engineering tools). Do these limited hangouts, in their implied sensationalism and explosiveness, function basically to reinforce the “unknowability of truth” narrative?

More from Horsley’s Fincher article:

The narrative around the Zodiac killings was created by a combination of the killings themselves, letters and phone calls from the supposed killer, police investigations, newspaper articles, extensive TV coverage, Robert Graysmith’s books, and movies like Dirty Harry. With the codes, ciphers, and cat-and-mouse games, the weird overlaps with popular fiction, the occult references, murders timed with equinox dates, and the multimedia propagation of all these elements, the Zodiac killings have all the earmarks of a domestic psyop—or shall we say, what a domestic psyopmight look like if such a thing existed.

Misc.

From 2014 Screen International interview:

He also revealed how he “haunted the hallways" of Lucas effects company Industrial Light and Magic to learn the science of film.

“Being on sets and watching how shit went down, I watched a lot of directors get rope-a-doped," he recalled.

“I could see that they wanted to execute something and the experts hired to support them said ‘We won’t have time for that’.

“So I watched people I admired get spun and I vowed never to let that happen. I want to know what every motherfucker in the room does. I never wanted to be the person victimised by other people’s laziness."

Benjamin Button (2008)

Background, themes, etc.

Fitzgerald story, like early 90s screenplay, about Jazz Age. Updated under obvious influence of Forrest Gump. Best overall characterization by Elbert Ventura of Reverse Shot: “prestige kitsch.”

Style very derivative. My hypothesis…Studio: “If you direct this piece of crap, you’ll get an Oscar.” Probably wrong, because Fincher has some real interest in this project. But many elements, including the sentimentality, foreign to Fincher’s style.

Not surprisingly, Spielberg and Ron Howard both tried to make this clunker.

Jack meets Forrest Gump with shades of Youth without Youth. Forrest Gump angle not only in tapestry of post-WW2 American culture—a (twisted) sort of neo-Rockwellian Spielbergian view of US cultural history—but in glorification of being a simpleton or “neuro-atypical” outsider

Naivete constantly redounding to his favor a la Being There. Merchant marine episode possibly inspired by John Ford’s The Long Voyage Home.

Eat, Pray, Love ending: dreams of riding motorcycles through Tibet and such narcissistic fantasies.

Deliberately framed like Titanic and Fried Green Tomatoes, with dying old woman narrating story. Shameless use of Katrina to leverage recent concern with New Orleans and Southern Americana (a la Forrest Gump) genre to attain max audience.

Fincher, from his 2014 Screen International interview:

“My father had just died and I’d never experienced that before. I’d never sat with someone as they drew their last breath. It was really profound. No one can prepare you for it. It’s a rite-of-passage that can’t be explained. This is somebody who in a lot of ways - even when you’re reacting against them - they’re shaping you and suddenly they’re gone and have evaporated.

“Benjamin is very much like my father, a wallflower, adrift in time. I loved the idea of a movie about death that is cloaked in a candy fable.”

Sexual revolution programming/reengineering historical consciousness

Uses Forrest Gump operating system to celebrate sexual exploration/transgression for a wide audience—a “clean” version of the sexual revolution. Sex as maturation, narrative of sexual liberation with no real family or social attachments by which society reproduces itself. Cf. Fincher’s background in music videos: MTV. Blanchett is obviously the counterpart of the Jenny (Wright-Penn) character in Forrest Gump, but here she is a morally positive (as opposed to morally abandoned) character who cares for Benjamin as he dies, in direct contrast to the scenario in Forrest Gump, where he cares for her as she dies of AIDS.

Super creepy p-e-d-o stuff pervasive throughout.

Sexualized atmosphere backstage at ballet. Dance party afterward suggests “open relationships” (Blanchett).

Conspiracy stuff

Shot of Masonic city layout and then shot of checkerboard floor.

“He was a spy.” Tilda Swinton’s husband member of British Trade Commission…British trade minister, she also calls him.

Anti-Christian subversion: Jared Harris/captain cracks a joke about Sunday.

From Face to Faceinterview (2009):

NJ: Some people have described the film as magic realist.

DF: It's not a fable for me because it lacks that magic realist sense of the preordained, that if you cross this bridge and climb that mountain then that is the totality of your life. Somebody's always pulling the strings. I wasn't really interested in that. For me Benjamin has no destiny. He's just winging it.

This is not exactly a confession of a conspiratorial worldview (but think about The Game); it does show that Fincher, himself a born Hollywood insider, does not and probably never did buy into the American religion of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and forging your own destiny. Being an eccentric “tourist” (cf. Fight Club) is the most one can do.

Method

Difficult to hear opening dialogue. Cf. Tenet, Green Knight, etc. Trance-inducing?

Misc.

Outro clearly inspired by advertising of the era.

Pitt’s terrible impersonation of a Southern drawl.

Super creepy old Brad Pitt baby.

The Social Network (2010)

Themes

Back story of trans-moral (read, sociopathic) tech oligarch.

Begins with his figurative alienation from the feminine (the true “social,” connectivity, relationship), rejection by the feminine. Then creates site based on hacked photos to rate attractiveness: war on feminine. Big tech as alienated from feminine. Alienation from feminine a theme in several Fincher movies (Fight Club, The Game, Zodiac).

First program was freeware but club/society kids push the profit motive harder on him. Zuckerberg as captive of elite culture.

Sean Parker as super-predator who recruits promising young psychopaths, a master manipulator/imposer type of the class that Horsley thinks run Hollywood and that Hollywood is therefore obsessed with.

Fincher seems to view Zuckerberg as a riddle, or, in other words, the film is about the now tired enigma of Zuckerberg’s character. Or is it all really false enigma, as with Zodiac? Fincher as Gen X. artist with some depth of appreciation of human motivation (or of “what makes people tick”) looking askance at spergy millennial brat who has seemingly no emotion—in some ways the converse of Nolan, a spergy director beloved by millennials for whom human emotion is the ultimate puzzle because it is not a puzzle (something Nolan vaguely appreciates—consider his vain protestation that films are not meant to be puzzles but aesthetic objects—but only in an abstract way).

Conspiracy omission

Fincher omits role of CIA, through In-Q-Tel, in founding of Facebook. Also omits to delve into Sean Parker’s CIA background. Normalization of intelligence culture by omission. From Corbett:

The publicly available record on the Facebook/In-Q-Tel connection is tenuous. Facebook received $12.7 million in venture capital from Accel, whose manager, James Breyer, now sits on their board. He was formerly the chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, whose board included Gilman Louie, then the CEO of In-Q-Tel. The connection is indirect, but the suggestion of CIA involvement with Facebook, however tangential, is disturbing in the light of Facebook's history of violating the privacy of its users.

Google's connection to In-Q-Tel is more straightforward, if officially denied. In 2006, ex-CIA officer Robert David Steele told Homeland Security Today that Google "has been taking money and direction for elements of the US Intelligence Community, including the Office of Research and Development at the Central Intelligence Agency, In-Q-Tel, and in all probability, both the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Army's Intelligence and Security Command." Later that year, a blogger claimed that an official Google spokesman had denied the claims, but no official press statement was released.

Conspiracy stuff

He’s initiated into Harvard society clubs. Consider theme of secret societies in Fincher movies (Fight Club, The Game, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo[?]).

Oligarchs conspiratorial by nature, always scheming against each other.

Loose ends

Parker blames Eduardo (Garfield) for the cocaine bust, but was it another party? In any case, Parker knows the bust is illegitimate because they know how power works and that people of their class don’t get pinched unless they’ve run afoul of someone else of their class or above.

Method

In dance club scene, viewer strains to hear audio.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

Background

Stiegl Larsson suss: leftist who trained members of Marxist-Leninist Etritrean People’s Front right after he left the military. In other installments in the “Millennium” franchise and spinoffs, deep state espionage is an overt theme. Evil Nazi Christian males raping and murdering Jewish women—left wing fantasy stuff.

In 2014 Screen International interview, Fincher as usual tries—implausibly—to play down the fact that he is addicted to the serial killer genre:

“The serial killer aspect of this movie was of no interest to me. I just really loved the idea of these two people. I loved the idea of a 23 year-old social misfit and freak and her relationship with this guy who thinks he knows everything.

“To me, the story was of a guy who has seen the case files, he knows the evil men do, he is conceptually aware and she comes into his life and says: ‘You have no idea what evil is.’”

Horsley (16 Maps of Hell, 475) calls this movie “a vacuous and repellent piece of S & M misandrist agitprop.” I agree. Even Nayman accuses the novels of “misandry” (224).

Themes

Think about Gone Girl and how the film revolved around the media reception/manipulation of spectacular crimes: is Fincher here interested in how the serial killer genre can be used to push socio-political agendas?

Fincher increasingly obsessed with sex and sexual sadism. From grantland.com article:

“I think people are perverts,” Fincher says in a bonus featurette called “Men Who Hate Women” on the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Blu-ray. Then he smiles devilishly. “I’ve maintained that. That’s the foundation of my career.”

Mind control

Cf. lead with lead in La Femme Nikita. Highly sexualized, demoralized, traumatized “rebel” street girl (cf. Tank Girl) who is institutionalized and becomes a kind of super-operative (apotheosis). She was originally institutionalized for trying to burn her father, probably revenge for him “burning” her—so incest, intergenerational abuse theme, shades of Sucker Punch. Like Nikita, Lisbeth is controlled by the elite, in this case by Henrik Vanger (Plummer). How did she get tied up with Vanger? Like Nikita, Lisbeth does the impersonation/alter routineas her part in an op (remember that Harriet, the incest victim, also switches identity—a convenient subterfuge for a trauma victim).

She brands her tormenter when she turns the tables (just like she did with her father, presumably), highlighting the role of branding in BDSM cults and trafficking.

Intergenerational abuse, including possible ritual abuse (judging from nature of murders), connected to serial killer phenomenon. And if you read the anti-Christian subversion in reverse, then Satanism implied also.

Does Harriet cause an accident with her traumagenic mutant psi-powers in one scene?

Serial killer profile propaganda/limited hangout

Films his victims (s-n-u-*-*), has connections in police force. Fascination with “serial killer procedural” (Stellan Skarsgard “confession” speech).

Conspiracy stuff

Plot involves a rich guy (Plummer) funding left-wing muckraking for his own agenda.

Elites using compromised/tarnished people with talent (Craig).

Notes on main credit sequence

Song used is a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song,” which Nayman sees as referring to “the possibilities—and contingencies—of adapting a popular work” (213).

Nayman (221) also mentions that the film was supposed to be the first of a trilogy and that the credit sequence “draws on imagery from the first three Millennium novels.” Tim Miller, the creative director, explains (artofthetitle interview):

…I wrote up little visual stories that abstracted the ideas. For instance, to convey the idea of Lisbeth as a hacker, I came up with the tsunami-engulfed keyboard. Another one treated the keys as giant obelisks and huge fingers would come in and press them down from the black sky. One had Salander’s face melting off to reveal that her “bones” are computer parts. I wrote a whole bunch of these, thinking David would say, ‘These are good but let’s push it, let’s write more.’ But I just got one word back: ‘Go.’ So we storyboarded the best of the bunch.

Fincher thought of the concept in terms of Lisbeth’s “subconscious” oozing out. His original directive to the designers was: “CG, very adult, super dark, leather, skin, blood, snow, breasts, vaginas, needles, piercings, motorcycles, vengeance” (artofthetitle interview). “He said he wanted it to be like a fever dream, lots of abstract imagery.”

Digital rape/invasion of human circuitry: the organic converted to digital (see below on Lisbeth’s “modified” body); in other words, dehumanized (through cultural nihilism) and then raped/invaded/taken over.

Apt that this would be a sort of sequel to the main credit sequence from Se7en, as this reveals the next phase after the full absorption of the brand of cultural nihilism Fincher was pushing in the earlier movie…that next phase being transhumanism/anti-humanism (the phoenix, below), the transformation of human biology. Fincher had Gieger in mind, which reinforces the point (see Fincher 1 on the connection between cosmic and cultural nihilism from Alien 3 to Se7en.)

Also appears to be using cover of abstract digital animation to portray sadistic sexual violence, with blood apparently flowing from closed lips, a human figure bound and apparently tortured, etc.

Something causes the figure to spark into fiery illumination, which is then shown as a phoenix rising/burning (Crowley?). Images of sex, violence, death-and-rebirth, forms uniting or shattering…puking coins (money)?...more circuitry, computer stuff.

Lots of psychedelic-demonic weirdness, forms melting into each other.

Consider too Lisbeth’s look as reflection of 80s-90s trash-punk style, a la Tank Girl. Tattoos and body modification, edgy music, unchecked sexuality…all of this preparing the way, as the main credit sequence shows, for a techno-invasion of the body.

Anti-Christian subversion

Same inversion as in Se7en, namely, the inversion of the reality that the “spirituality” associated with serial killers, wherever evidence of it exists, is almost always Satanic, never or virtually never Christian-motivated.

Christianity as inseparable from savage brutality toward women driven by fear and hatred of female sexuality and related magic powers (consider “psi” scene with Harriet).

Note the attempt to connect the execution death of a woman/witch with the decapitation of sacrificial victims by juxtaposing different scriptural verses in a way as to associate the idea with the Bible: Christian misogyny as violent, sacrificial beheading of woman. Gnostic inversion of Christian scriptures: Old Testament God cast as evil.

Misc.

She’s looking at Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein in one scene.

Her spiral earrings resemble p-e-d-o symbol.

She’s constantly eating junk food, and Fincher draws attention to this detail. Cf. Antibirth, where toxic food and toxic culture are clearly equated (and cf. Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy). Cultural nihilism.

Daniel Craig said Fincher’s relationship with Rooney Mara during filming was “fucking weird.” Vogue noted the creeper element of their public relationship (the fawning protégé ). Later, in 2014 Playboy issue, Fincher and the magazine played this down as a publicity stunt. Not likely.

Method

Opening dialogue difficult to hear, same with dialogue between Craig and Rooney in bed later in film.

Pulsing, percussive soundtrack over credit sequence.

Strobe lighting (flicker rate).

Revelation of the Method: Killer playing “Orinoco Flow” by Enya, an ethereal piece of music that is obviously an aid to dissociationthat clashes with the horrific, psychopathic violence occurring. Nayman connected this “contrapuntal” use of music to the use of “Singing in the Rain” in A Clockwork Orange, of which he thinks the “Stuck in the Middle with You”/ear torture scene in Reservoir Dogs is a reference. Note too that he’s playing the song on a “high-end stereo system” (213): evidently the killer is a music fan, and certainly the enhanced sound helps to overwhelm the senses of his victims.

Ending

A lot is packed into this ending without much explanation. Henrik’s info proves more or less worthless to Craig? So it was all a scam? But things all-too-conveniently work out, including Wennerstrom’s timely “gangland” death.

Gone Girl (2014)

Themes

From the 2014 Screen International interview:

“It begins as a mystery, it becomes an absurdist thriller and is ultimately a satire," said Fincher. “I’d never seen someone try to juggle those things and actually do it. It’s a high wire act."

In same interview, distances himself from Hitchcock:

The filmmaker, celebrated for generating suspense and horror in his films, is often compared to ‘Master of Suspense’ Alfred Hitchcock. But Fincher rejected the comparison.

“The essential element to Hitchcock is dramatic irony. Suspense requires that the audience know more than the characters," he said.

“Usually, the kinds of stories I’m attracted to reveal themselves to be something other than what you suspected them to be. I’m not the anti-Hitchcock but I don’t feel like it’s the same.

“Although, there’s a fulcrum scene in Gone Girl that we did talk about ‘How did they handle it on Vertigo’ but that conversation was probably 18 seconds long."

And again in this interview, he intimates that this movie is about how the media destroys human relationships.

Continuing obvious obsession with the seamier side of sex in Fincher. Sexual transgression. Female sexual sadism a la Basic Instinct, a Paul Verhoeven film. Continuing on turning-the-tables female sexual sadism from Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Lots of language with undertones of sexual violence.

Fincher’s interest in the media side of the serial killer phenomenon (see notes to Girl with Dragon Tattoo). Consider the theme of stage-managing crimes and the perceptions of crimes.

Her journal is a classic disinfo tactic, mingling revelatory fact with strategic fictions.

Serial killer connection

Helter Skelter among the books she’s reading while studying to fake her own death.

Method

Prolonged ear-splitting alarm.

Misc.

Note the Mastermind boardgame. Fincher implausibly claims they chose it more or les at random, as the only or one of the only board games they could get “the rights for.” I happened to be watching The Royal Tenenbaums some time after learning this, and I noticed the scene where Gene Hackman and Ben Stiller are in the closet—there’s dozens of board games! Are you telling me that Fincher’s producers couldn’t afford the rights to any other board games for a top-shelf director’s major production but Wes Anderson could get orders of magnitude more? Or I don’t know, maybe there’s some fair use distinction in how they’re being used, but the claim that he just couldn’t get any other board game seems to patently ridiculous on the face of it, and deeply suss given his well-documented and well-appreciated obsession with puzzles and mind games.

Produced by Mossad agent Arnon Milchan.