Raising Mank

I FIRST FELL IN LOVE with director David Fincher after watching Se7en (1995), a film about a fictive serial killer with a menacing softness that lent a poetic flair to the truly monstrous—and that made all of us in the theater sit in the shadow of madness. Fincher’s best film, Zodiac (2007), about the real-life serial killer who preyed on the San Francisco Bay Area during the late 1960s, was also a subtle polemic on the idea of monstrosity. Fincher’s latest film, Mank—which was nominated for 10 Academy Awards this year and won for cinematography and best production design—is no exception. The historical figures it portrays, including Orson Welles, Louis B. Mayer, and William Randolph Hearst, all have a monstrous side. It’s Hollywood, after all.

Mank could never have been conceived without the subversive sleight-of-hand of Pauline Kael, whose 1971 two-part essay in The New Yorker, “Raising Kane,” might easily have been called “Waking the Dead.” By 1971, Herman J. Mankiewicz, or Mank, was all but forgotten as the Academy Award–winning cowriter of Citizen Kane (1941), and Kael was a lonely warrior on his behalf. She condemned Welles as a charlatan and the greatest loser in Hollywood history. It was Mank, she wrote, who was the sole author of Citizen Kane.

This is what Fincher feasts upon in . Like Kael, he argues for the greatness of while diminishing Welles’s participation in its making. Tom Burke plays Welles as a cocky young Mephistopheles in a barbed beard, with a black cape and a