Ever since Laura Mulvey famously penned ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in 1975, the gaze has become one of the most tried, tested, and well known cinematic theories around. Mulvey did not invent the idea of a male gaze, but certainly popularised it. The gaze has since been applied to a number of different perspectives and viewpoints when deconstructing exactly what makes cinema tick. Whether it is premised on gender, sexuality, class, or race, almost all versions of the gaze rely on one unspoken element: closeness.
Be it Rosanna Arquette looking longingly at the life and looks of Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan (1988), or the sheer hostility behind the white gaze in Get Out (2017), looking can seamlessly imply a relationship and connection—even if this is a source of horror or contempt. This connection can be real, desired, or completely imaginary, but however it may manifest, the gaze is the foundation for some kind of relationship between two or more elements in a story. This does not always need to be reciprocated, or even be between people. For instance, if you were Michael Fassbender’s unnamed assassin in The Killer, the latest slick thriller flick from David Fincher, you might be longingly gazing at the illustrious Parisian hotel across the street thinking about how much you want another holiday.
Except Fassbender doesn’t. Instead, his gaze seems all about doing the exact opposite. Through looking, he is drawing attention to the physical and emotional distance between himself and the wider world. He couldn’t care less for the fanciful allure of the places and people around him. As he looks down on the streets of Paris from his empty, cold and dark shared office space, his gaze is one of emptiness and disconnection.
To understand this, it is important to consider what kind of person this unnamed killer is. He is someone who seems to mourn how he will never make a dent in the statistical cycle of births and deaths around the world. Someone who loses their sense of self in a myriad of pseudonyms and fake passports as they travel all over the globe. Someone who makes a point to avoid being seen as much as they can. What he eats, wears, and drives is all carefully chosen to ensure complete and utter anonymity. Even his sunglasses ensure that his act of looking at others is mediated and diluted; a tinted barrier between him and them. To the outside world (minus a few also involved in the business of killing), he does not exist. And if he does not exist, how can he forge a relationship with anybody else?
Such a cold removal from his reality manifests itself in the gaze. During the opening sequence, Fassbender tracks his target through a sniper rifle scope. They are enjoying life in a hotel room while he watches from an open window across the street in the middle of the night. ‘How Soon is Now’ by The Smiths plays through his headphones—part of a collection amusingly titled his ‘work playlist’. The scene immediately heralds comparisons to Rear Window (1954), in which James Stewart looks at goings on from across the street and becomes witness to nefarious events. Confined as he is to his apartment, Stewart uses his gaze for a sense of connection to those living in the other building. Indeed, much has been written on how Stewart is the recipient of scopophilic, patriarchal pleasure courtesy of his act of gazing. Mulvey herself specifically cites Rear Window, identifying the dancer ‘Miss Torso’ as a voyeuristic spectacle. Through pleasurable looking, Stewart has an intimacy and (one-sided) bond with those being looked at.
The dominatrix in The Killer, hired for the enjoyment of Fassbender’s victim, further encourages this direct comparison to Rear Window; once again a woman is spectacularised and acting in the name of male pleasure, even if the power dynamics are different. Except Fassbender is not interested in pleasurable looking. Through gazing, he emphasises how removed he is from any kind of closeness or relationship with those he sees. As the song plays through his headphones, the music swaps from being diegetic when the camera is focused on him, to being apparently non-diegetic and much louder when the audience is looking through his scope and sharing his gaze.
This swapping gives the illusion of travelling a vast distance, with music getting quieter the more removed you are from its source. This is of course paradoxical, since Fassbender is the source of the music (or at least his MP3 player is). For the audience, the music being quieter despite us being closer to the source draws attention to the sheer distance he is putting between himself and the target. While his gaze is unbroken, in combination with the music this looking accentuates a lack of intimacy and connection, rather than an abundance of it.
Put simply, if this unnamed killer looks your way, chances are that you are not long for this world. So why bother wishing for any kind of relationship or closeness? That’s the cold logic that this assassin employs. Even the one exception to this rule—Magdala, his romantic companion—gets not a look of love but a strangely pained, detached expression. A solitary life, enforcing distance between himself and anyone around him, seems to take its toll when he does in fact seek out genuine connection. Fassbender’s terrifying performance, as robotic as it is steely-eyed and almost emotionless, furthers this sense of detachment.
It is easy to see the cinematic gaze as a device for exploring intimacy, attachment, and relationships between people and/or things on the screen. The Killer provides a frosty, calculating lesson on how this is not necessarily the case. Fassbender’s nobody character, who never looks with the intention of forming a relationship, proves this doesn’t have to be the case. Instead, the gaze here is one of terrifying removal and isolation.
Words by James Hanton
The Killer is streaming now on Netflix.
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