Construction Watcher

Rating: Null/10 (17 March 2007)

There's purpose in film, in certain film conventions of narrative. Its a sort of quantum physics of narrative. Not the uncertainty side, but the fact that there are different states; you can be at one state or another or another but never in between. Humans think this way, perhaps because you cannot have half a person, half a mind.
Anyway, there are several discrete stations that we accept in relation to film stories, several discrete distances between what we are allowed to see and what our avatar(s) see in the story. At one end is the mystery where our relationship is more with the writer or some god than the emotions in the story.
And then at the other end is stuff like this, the purest form of which is the procedural. In this case, there is a mystery, a story to discover. We have on-screen detectives and within certain narrow limits, we discover what the detectives do. We may see things a little before, but we never see more or know more than they. Procedurals only appeared well after the detective meme settled into our narrative vocabulary. So it is a sort of second generational shift in the mechanics of discovery.
And who is at the center? Robert Downey Jr, one our most talented folders  and by that I mean someone who plays a role, but also plays a metarole of an actor playing a part. Here his character tries to horn in on the narration and fails, becoming a substance abuser. How meta is that?
I like Fincher. I like it when he is bolder, but all these guys like to do a project from time to time where the art is in the precision of the narrative placement. And he does amazingly well. It would have had to have been a procedural.
There's a shot of the murdercab where the precision is noted as it follows the cab to the place. We are precisely over, precisely. The cab stays precisely in the center of the frame. Precisely. We are locked into what it moving, with no allowance for godly insight from other contexts. Its a statement.
There's another quite wonderful statement. We see the Transamerica being constructed in an animated sequence. It seems particularly automated, deterministic. Like the film it is in, down to the expected text at the end, wherein we read what happened to the "real" people afterward.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.