The Game Is the Perfect Movie for Our Paranoid Times (and It's on Netflix)
We live in the age of conspiracies, both real and imagined. This week alone, Alex Jones—who claims the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax—was finally banned from many social media platforms, while the utterly bizarre QAnon conspiracy theory (which itself might be a left wing prank on right wing conspiracy nuts) went mainstream and the real world Mueller investigation heated up with the conspiracy and corruption trial against Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort. In a time of hoaxes, surveillance, and paranoia, there might be no better movie to watch than David Fincher’s underrated 1997 film The Game.
Michael Douglas plays investment banker Nicholas Van Orton (a kind of depressed Gordon Gekko) who has all the money you could want, and nothing else. He’s angry, unhappy, and alone. On his 48th birthday, the same year his father committed suicide, his brother Conrad (Sean Penn) shows up to give him a unique gift: a voucher for a game of unknown rules or objectives. Orton visits the blandly named Consumer Recreation Services and is put through hours of humiliating tests—“the game is tailored specifically to each participant”—and told he’s been rejected. Then the game begins.
Orton comes home to find a creepy clown in his driveway. As he inspects it inside, his TV starts talking to him. “A staggering 57% of American workers believe there is a very real chance they will be unemployed in the next 5 to 7 years,” the news anchor says. “But what does that matter to a bloated millionaire fat-cat like you?” Soon Orton finds this game is everywhere, and anyone he meets might be playing it. When he and a waitress, Christine (Deborah Kara Unger), enter a hospital the power cuts out and a hundred people disappear. The pranks go from disturbing to life threatening. He’s chased by a rabid dog, framed for crimes, and trapped in a sinking car. And that’s only the first half of the movie.
How is this game played? How can he make the puppeteers stop? Is it not really a game but an elaborate scam to drain his bank accounts? How can CRS track everything he does and says? Fincher expertly ratchets the tension in each scene, adding twist after twist that make Orton (and the viewer) increasingly confused and paranoid. As with Fincher’s other work (Seven, The Social Network, Zodiac), The Game is gorgeously filmed with a dark oppressive atmosphere. But The Game also keeps a nice of humor even as reality seems to spiral out of control.
While the movie did okay at the box office and the review pages, it wasn’t exactly a smash hit. The film was mostly read as fantasy about a control freak losing his control but discovering his humanity. 21 years later, though, The Game seems more relevant than ever as real conspiracies and fake theories dominate the discourse. In 1997, a gigantic company surveilling everything was a fantasy. A few decades later, and San Francisco—where the movie is set—is run by massive Silicon Valley corporations that claim their algorithms know more about you than you know yourself. Perhaps the reality of The Game doesn’t really make sense, but then does anything about reality make sense in 2018?
