David Fincher’s new film, Mank—written by his late father, Jack Fincher—follows the charismatic, alcoholic screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz as he pens Citizen Kane. Mankiewicz’s story coincides with muckraker Upton Sinclair’s 1934 bid for California governor—which MGM bosses actively sabotaged, according to the elder Fincher’s telling. The Sinclair subplot is vital to Mank: it contains its most resonant thinking, and inspires the younger Fincher’s most imaginative filmmaking.
Though Gary Oldman’s grizzled Mankiewicz isn’t exactly a revolutionary, he’s intrigued by Sinclair—a firebrand whose reporting catalyzed the implementation of policies and protections like the Food and Drug Administration. Sinclair’s End Poverty in California movement, or EPIC, called for a major investment in public works, near-universal pensions, and tax reform—policies that, while common sense to the working-class public, were fairly radical in the sphere of government in Mank’s time. In the film, as in real life, the socialist is eventually brought down by big business: media moguls who saw the popularity of Sinclair’s policies as a threat to their wealth, particularly MGM cofounder Louis B. Mayer and newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.
Mank himself as a cog in that machine. During the bulk of the film’s flashback sequences, he’s working as a hired hand at MGM—a studio that, as depicted by the Finchers, is about as exploitative as they get. Its overlords slash worker salaries based on false information and empty promises, then use those same employees to produce anti-socialist propaganda intended to derail Sinclair’s campaign. In one memorable scene, Mankiewicz runs into a homeless actor he knows who has finally found work with MGM. But he’s not been hired to perform onscreen; instead, the studio is paying him to pose as a homeless man who supports Sinclair.
MGM’s Mayer supported Sinclair’s challenger, Frank Merriam, in both the film and real life. Using actors to associate Sinclair’s EPIC campaign with aesthetic poverty is a sly bit of movie magic and a Red Scare tactic, as Mank knows full well. He calls socialism “sharing the wealth” and communism “sharing the poverty;” it’s a clever, distortive line that refutes Mayer’s disparaging remarks about Sinclair without going too far, keeping Mankiewicz palatable to polite company. After all, in those flashback sequences, the writer frequently attends dinner parties with Mayer and Hearst. In the film, it’s their plot against Sinclair that leads Mankiewicz to turn against Hearst and write Citizen Kane.
The real Mank was a notorious line-crosser, not only professionally, but socially—known for his biting candor, which could turn some relationships sour. And he was indeed willing to burn bridges with Hearst in order to pen, with Orson Welles, one of the best films of all time. It’s unlikely, though, that the actual man’s politics were as friendly to the masses as the character’s are. Biographers like Richard Meryman and Sydney Ladensohn Stern describe Mankiewicz as a hard-to-pin down louche louche man of letters with a sharp intellect and devastating wit who angrily resisted joining the writers’ guild. Still, there’s reason to believe that Mankiewicz, a former New Yorker theater critic who would spend his life inclined towards East Coast literary circles, might have admired something in Sinclair, a widely respected journalist making his mark in politics.
The author Mankiewicz may have not respected was his career-defining collaborator. Mankiewicz and Welles’s complicated partnership has become the stuff of cinephile legend: Pauline Kael famously claimed that Mankiewicz wrote Kane almost entirely alone, while her New Yorker successor Richard Brody later disparaged Mankiewicz as a “company man” and Welles as the true “independent artist” of the two. David Fincher recently told Vulture that his father Jack’s first draft of the screenplay for Mank hewed too closely to Kael’s reading, amounting to “a takedown of Welles.” But Jack’s later drafts incorporated Sinclair’s campaign, transforming the film from heavy-handed opprobrium into a more broadly reflective tale about the indelibility of words and the entrenched societal power struggles they reflect.
Through Sinclair, Mank becomes less about Hollywood and more about the conditions that allow for potential to be realized. Sinclair saw this potential in terms of material conditions, while Mankiewicz was concerned with aesthetic ones. In the film, Jack Fincher deftly allows the two to connect, revealing the ways in which art gets estranged from labor and the individual corrupted from the collective. Brody argued that Mankiewicz looked down on the movie industry, while Welles loved film and so did greater things with it. He’s right. Still, Kael’s ideas about Welles are not entirely misguided. By boosting Mankiewicz as the true author of Citizen Kane, she was critiquing not just a great director, but the very system that produced greatness in Hollywood. Jack Fincher, looking skeptically at the industry, took those ideas even further.
This complexity is what makes Mank so timely, to use a loaded word. The Democratic Socialists and progressives of today’s Democratic Party aren’t so different from Sinclair, though they’re better able to identify the sordid methodologies of their corporate adversaries. Unlike their journalist forebear, they’ve also made it inside the American political machine, having overwhelmingly succeeded in retaining their seats in Congress this year and even gaining some. Even so, the centrist wing of the Democratic Party has hustled to stifle the influence of their working-class-aligned colleagues.
In her December-issue cover story for Vanity Fair, the extremely popular Democratic Socialist and house representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke frustratedly about the Democratic establishment’s refusal to embrace the working-class-focused strategy espoused by the party’s left wing. “I think, honestly, a lot of my dissent within the Democratic party comes from my lived experience,” she said. “It’s not just that we can be better, it’s that we have to be better. We’re not good enough right now.” In other words: do the Democrats actually want to win, or merely retain some modicum of power that’s materially meaningless to the most vulnerable? It would be a good question to pose to a present-day Hollywood, as well, which has for decades failed to champion and accommodate an increasingly diverse workforce while more recently stumbling through a still-unresolved #MeToo reckoning. Mank, squaring up Old Hollywood to emergent democratic socialism, offers a flash of what progressives are up against: you may have secured your seat at the table, but the corporatists have always protected their interests by pulling sleights of hand.
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