David Fincher's new movie 'The Killer' is sigma cinema
Fincher as greentext auteur
David Fincher’s new movie The Killer is out on Netflix today, which I suspect is exciting news to many subscribers of this newsletter, one significant demographic subgrouping of which is “Guys Who Were 14 When Fight Club Came Out.” I want to write about it because I enjoyed it, but also because I think (and we’ll get to this) it’s relevant to the subject of this newsletter, i.e. “internet.”
The movie concerns a perfectionist professional hitman, played by Michael Fassbender, whose girlfriend is savagely beaten by rival assassins after he botches a hit; in response, he chases down the offenders and the man who hired them, seeking revenge and tying up loose ends. I recommend seeing it in theaters, if possible, both because the sound design is incredible and because there’s a running bit where Fassbender’s nameless killer plays The Smiths to himself on his headphones and it’s nice to hear “How Soon Is Now,” etc. on really big speakers.
The Killer has received fine but not rapturous reviews, which I understand. I had a blast, personally, but in most ways it’s a “minor work” and if you’re not a hitman-movie person--or if you find Fincher tiresome--you might skip it. On the other hand, if you like Europacorp-type “assassin revenge” movies--movies that might otherwise star (depending on the particular configuration of international financing) Liam Neeson, Jason Statham, or Scott Adkins--it’s extremely enjoyable to see what can be done with the material when you get a director like Fincher involved. (There’s really only one actual action sequence in the entire movie1 but it’s probably the best fight scene I’ve seen in an American movie in years?)
But something else stuck out to me while watching it. (This is the part that is relevant to the ostensible subject(s) of this newsletter.) Fassbender’s character is a fastidious killer, but he’s also a weird loner who describes his normal-guy outfits as “camo… based on a German tourist.” He is scornful of “normies,” especially other men. He is confident of his own special skills. He justifies his antisocial behavior in the endless, clichéd aphorisms of macho self-help--”kill or be killed”; “survival of the fittest”; “it’s a dog-eat-dog world.”
He is, in other words, a sigma male.
The sigma male
“Sigma male” is foundational concept to what I think of as the “loser internet”--the cross-platform network of self-loathing reactionary forums and influencers whose main activity is inculcating huge amounts of self-pity (and self-justification) in insecure young men. Loser internet includes, of course, the chan universe, Gamergate and its descendents, vast swathes of YouTube, a number of podcasts, “incels,” “hustle culture,” “looksmaxxing,” etc. The basic idea is that “sigma males” are bad-ass and mysterious loners who follow their own path. If you don’t have any friends, and people don’t really want to talk to you? You might just be a Sigma Male. According to Know Your Meme, the concept originated with the right-wing science-fiction writer Vox Day, who defines it as:
Sigma: The outsiders who don't play the social game and manage to win at it anyhow. The alphas hate sigmas because they are the only men who don't accept or at least acknowledge their social dominance. (NB: Alphas absolutely hate to be laughed at and a sigma can enrage an alpha by simply smiling at him.) Everyone else is vaguely confused by them. At the party, it's the guy who stops by to say hello to a few friends accompanied by a tier one girl that no one has ever seen before. Sigmas often like women, but also tend to be contemptuous of them.
Here are “15 Signs You’re a ‘SIGMA’ Male (SUPER RARE)” according to the YouTuber “alpha m.”:
Tends to be a loner
Flexible
Is himself regardless who's watching
Leads without exerting authority
Good listener
Self-aware
Ambiguous morality
Rusty social skills
Fits into friend groups but don't rely on them
Decides own future
Small but close friend circle
Self-sufficient
Isn't afraid to take risks
Isn't an attention seeker
Has the potential to be an alpha
One way of thinking about the “sigma male” concept is as a way of solving the key contradiction of the “alpha male” framework, which is that the people to whom a pseudo-biological theory about social hierarchy would be most appealing are also the people who are most likely to be alienating and insufferable to other humans, and therefore self-evidently not “alphas.” “Sigma male” is a means of maintaining your belief in rigid and hierarchical social typologies while also holding on to your own self-worth.
Day’s first posts about “sigma males” go back to 2010, but the term has been picked up more widely over the last few years, especially in a semi-ironic way by the “Gen Alpha” kids currently entering college. One reason for its growth seems to be that the originally more sex-oriented “sigma male” concept has been adopted by the rising business-hustle influencer culture of YouTube and Instagram, resulting in what KYM calls the “Sigma Grindset”--a mindset for justifying antisociality and friendlessness as not a problem to be solved but an overall strategy for financial (and, somehow, sexual?) success.
Sigma Killer
(Some spoilers follow, if you care.)
When I say Fassbender’s killer is a “sigma male,” I don’t mean in some cheeky, reading-against-the-grain way.2 Nor do I mean that he is simply a “badass loner” in the mode of John Wick or any of the other movie characters who appear in YouTube fancams as sigma role models.3 I mean more specifically he subscribes to the whole set of sigma philosophies--social asceticism, dorm-room Nietzscheanism, weird resentment, boorish self-justification.
We spend the movie “in the back of the killer’s skull,” as editor Kirk Baxter has said, and the near-constant voiceover we hear is probably best understood as his internal monologue--what he says to himself as he goes about his work. In the opening 20 minutes, over shots of the killer doing yoga and sleeping in shifts in an abandoned WeWork across from his target’s apartment, he elaborates a self-justifying vulgar existentialism that often sounds cribbed from half-read Instagram memes: “One is born, lives their life, and eventually, one dies. In the meantime, ‘do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.’ To quote… someone. Can’t remember who.”
The killer likes to think of himself as a kind of warrior-monk, a violent philosopher set apart from the herd. But what he sounds like is a macho hustle-guru YouTuber doing a video called “8 Secrets Of Sigma Success (RARE)”: “If I’m effective, it’s because of one simple thing: I don’t give a fuck… Weakness is vulnerability. Each and every step of the way, ask yourself: What’s in it for me? This is what it takes. What you must commit yourself to. If you want to succeed.”
The punchline is that this is what he’s saying as he pulls the trigger, misses his target, and botches his job. Whatever complicated and ambivalent feelings The Killer has toward its main character, “admiration” is not among them. The killer thinks of himself as having an unmatched clarity about his life and the world, but the movie mostly regards him as self-deluded. He botches his hits, he forms attachments, he misunderstands his own importance. Rather than being freed by his careful planning and elaborately articulated life philosophy, he’s trapped by his own paranoias and resentments.
In one of the movie’s more revealing sequences, the killer arrives in Florida to exact revenge on another hitman. The guy he plans to kill is a sort of stereotypical Floridian meathead, a muscled lunk in a lifted truck and skinny jeans. He is the kind of guy who might in the real world be a social-media crypto-and-masculinity influencer with an OnlyFans girlfriend and one of those podcasts that seems to exist only in 30-second clips on TikTok--an YouTube-vintage “alpha male.” And the killer hates him. The inner monologue--already much less sharp and witty than the killer imagines--begins to stink of fedora: “Ah, the Sunshine State. Where else can you find so many like-minded individuals? Outside a penitentiary.” And: “Maybe a mandatory 30-day waiting period for creatine’s not a bad idea.” These are not the cool, sardonic observations of a clever outsider; they’re forum posts. I guess these are those “rusty social skills.”4
Fincher as greentext auteur
“The killer as sigma male” is obviously not the only way to read this movie; as suggested in the footnotes you could see it as an personal story about a fastidious craftsman learning his own limits, or also a movie about how annoying work is, especially as a contractor. (To quote the killer’s favorite band: “this position I've held/It pays my way and it corrodes my soul.”)
But I like the sigma male reading because it reminds us that throughout his career Fincher has been in dialogue with the concerns of 4chan and the rest of Loser Internet, among them:
Society sucks (Se7en, Fight Club)
Staring at your computer (The Social Network, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo)
Getting pathologically obsessed with stuff (Zodiac, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo)
Women are evil (Gone Girl)
Men are evil too, and creeps (The Social Network, Gone Girl, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo)
You will never be a chad (Fight Club)
Goth gf (Fight Club, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo)
To be clear, I don’t think that Fincher is endorsing these ideas, specifically--except for goth gf--just that he’s interested in exploring them and the kinds of characters who believe them.What’s particularly interesting for such an internet-y set of ideas is that Fincher doesn’t really make movies “about” the internet--even The Social Network was a lot more about ambition, sociopathy, and freak loners than it was about “the internet,” per se. Instead, he made a body of work around a set of broad social (and gender) anxieties that have been particularly shaped by digital culture.
In this sense, The Killer is no exception. One of my favorite touches in the movie is the extensive logo placement: The killer occupies a WeWork; he eats (disgustingly) from McDonald’s; he conveniently orders a special gadget from Amazon. This might feel a bit distracting, if not tacky, but it seems important to me as a way of underlining how uncool this is, how unlike Alain Delon in a Melville movie Fassbender is. (As though the bucket hat was not suggestive enough.) More to the point, it reminds us that the killer and his sociopathic boorishness live in the same tech-wrecked world as the rest of us.
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What we get instead of “action,” it turns out, is a lot of travel and logistical work, which suggests that the funniest way to read the movie is “autobiographically”: it is, after all, roughly two hours of an meticulous and obsessive freak planning and executing a tightly scheduled multi-city production.
The killer doesn’t say the phrase out loud or anything, but he does at one point say “normies,” which is enough to know that Fincher and his screenwriter, Andrew Kevin Walker, have spent some time in and around Loser Internet.
“Sigma male” is a cinema-derived framework to the extent that the people who appear most frequently in Sigma Male memes, fancams, and YouTube thumbnails are characters from movies:
Keanu Reeves as John Wick
Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort in Wolf of Wall Street
Cillian Murphy as Peaky Blinder in Peaky Blinders
Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho
Giancarlo Esposito as Gus Fring in Breaking Bad
The fight with the other hitman all but ends when the meathead impales his butt on a broken table, a bit of metaphorical sodomy that is so unignorable it needs to be mentioned. Unfortunately I don’t really know what do with it except say “boy, David Fincher has some complicated feelings about masculinity,” so I’m sticking it in a footnote and moving on.
It's like fincher created the movie so that no 10 minute sequence could be uploaded to YouTube and attract comments about how clever the killer was, or how he clearly has some kind of honor code, or has great weapons technique. Choose any sequence and it's always utterly confounding.
I thought the film is a dark comedy - the Killer is utterly clueless, and terrible at his job. He screws up the first hit, misjudges how long his boss has left to live, gets beaten half to death in Florida...... a string of mistakes and failures.