The Game is a 1997 thriller film directed by David Fincher. It was written by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, and it stars Michael Douglas, Sean Penn, and Deborah Kara Unger, with James Rebhorn, Peter Donat, Carroll Baker, and Armin Mueller-Stahl.

The Game was well-received by Roger Ebert, The New York Times, and others, but it didn’t do all that well at the box office, as compared to Fincher’s Se7en; since then, though, The Game has gained a cult following among Fincher’s fans, and it’s now considered among some of them to be one of his most underrated films.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the script.

Nicholas Van Orton (Douglas) is a wealthy San Francisco investment banker. The film begins with sad piano music as a soundtrack to old, grainy home movies of his childhood and his rich father. Naturally, little Nicholas would have identified with his successful father, so when–as we later learn–his father has committed suicide by jumping off the roof of the family mansion, with little Nicholas seeing it, the traumatic scene is not only emotionally shattering for him, it’s incomprehensible that his father would have done such a thing…in a Richard Cory sense.

His father would have been the little boy’s idealized parental imago, one pole of Nicholas’s bipolar self, to use Heinz Kohut‘s psychoanalytic terminology. Not only the death, but also the witnessed suicide, of Nicholas’s parental ideal would have almost irreparably damaged that pole, necessitating compensation from the other pole, that of the mirroring of Nicholas’s grandiose self, given in the form of his status as a wealthy man, with his power to hire and fire employees, his wearing of good-looking and expensive clothes, and many opportunities to be icy and condescending to everyone around him.

Van Orton’s defence against psychological fragmentation, which would result from damage to his remaining pole, is thus covert narcissism, which is manifested in his deep insecurity, anxiety, and depression, all hidden behind a False Self of outward confidence and control.

Other manifestations of his covert narcissism include his victim mentality, which exists in spite of his wealth and power, and which is aggravated by the Consumer Recreation Services (CRS) game played on him, which feels increasingly like persecution; the real source of his victim mentality, though, is of course his childhood trauma from having seen his father kill himself. That he’s reached his 48th birthday–his father’s age when he killed himself–and that his birthday gift from his kid brother, Conrad “Connie” Van Orton (Penn), is the paranoia-inducing CRS game, don’t make Nicholas’s associations with his father any less unsettling.

More covert narcissist traits in Nicholas include his social withdrawal, to avoid being compared unfavourably with others and thus to maintain his illusory sense of superiority, and his difficulties in relationships–he’s divorced and lonely, clearly a result of his lack of empathy for others, yet another narcissistic trait.

Now, he should be able to go through life adequately, despite his faults…except that the CRS game is going to tear his whole life apart, and smash the other pole of his already fragile self.

Now, while it is true that birth order has very little impact on one’s personality development (contrary to popular belief), Nicholas and Conrad respectively embody the stereotypes of the high-achieving, organized, mature, and responsible eldest sibling, and the fun-loving, free-spirited, immature, and risk-taking youngest sibling. These stereotypes are evident not only in Conrad’s referring to himself as “Seymour Butts” in his invitation to lunch to Nicholas, but also in Nicholas’s cool, humourless response of yes to the invitation of “Mr. Butts.”

The elder/young sibling stereotypes are also evident later on in the film, when Conrad, flipping out over how the CRS people “just fuck you and they fuck you and they fuck you,” then when Nicholas, equally upset about CRS’s manipulations of his life, nonetheless keeps his cool as best he can and tells Conrad to stop being emotional; now, Conrad complains of having never lived up to the family’s expectations.

Furthermore, at the restaurant where the brothers meet so Conrad can give Nicholas his CRS gift, Nicholas tells Conrad he’s not allowed to smoke there, but Conrad lights up in defiance, anyway. Also, when Nicholas in his uptight nature is skeptical of the CRS “game,” Conrad–insisting it will be the best experience ever for Nicholas–tells him it will make his life fun…implying that Nicholas hardly knows what having fun even is.

Nicholas goes to the CRS building, where he meets Jim Feingold (Rebhorn), who explains that the CRS experience is a game, which will fill in what’s empty in Nicholas’s life. He’s still skeptical, but he does all the psychological and physical tests necessary to tailor the game exactly to his personality. When he asks someone who’s done the game before, he’s answered with a quote from John 9:25, “Whereas once I was blind, now I see.”

In a way, The Game is a modern retelling of A Christmas Carol, with Nicholas as Scrooge, with the game’s wild disrupting of his life comparable to the terrors of the three Christmas ghosts, shocking Nicholas into his final redemption. The naming of the protagonist sounds ironic, a glum receiver of a disruptive gift with a name that’s evocative of a cheerful giver of gifts to children.

There’s yet another association of Nicholas with Scrooge that is important: both men are rich. The CRS game is expensive, so much so that at the end, Nicholas offers to help Conrad pay for it, something the younger brother deeply appreciates. That this “game” is something only rich people can afford to play is significant, for the upsetting things that happen to Nicholas are things that, if one is of the lower or middle classes, one would not be able to walk away from, whereas “a bloated millionaire fat cat” like Nicholas can walk away from them, since none of them are real–just a game. If only they could just be a game for the poor.

The game begins for Nicholas in a surprising way, since after his psychological and physical testing, he’s been contacted by CRS by phone, and they tell him his application for the game has been rejected. So when he drives home at night and sees a wooden clown lying on the ground before his mansion, put there deliberately to look like his father’s dead body after his suicide, Nicholas is soon to realize he’s been thrown into the game, willy-nilly.

With the wooden clown in his living room now, he doesn’t yet know what to make of it, so he has his TV on with the business news, as reported by Daniel Schorr (playing himself). Schorr discusses the bad economy and how “a staggering 57% of American workers believe there is a very real chance they will be unemployed in the next five to seven years.” The image on the TV twitches from time to time, causing a normal news broadcast suddenly to be Schorr directly talking to Nicholas on behalf of CRS.

Soon enough, Nicholas clues in on this oddity, and he starts paying proper attention to Schorr. That CRS, which clearly represents the omniscient, all-controlling powers-that-be, would do this to Nicholas in turn represents how a fascist, totalitarian government would surveil and thus terrorize ordinary people. Nicholas is rich, so in the end, it’s all just a game. Not so for the lower and middle classes.

Now, while smart TVs hadn’t come into their own as of the making of The Game, it’s interesting in hindsight now, as of the 2020s, to make an association of them with the film. Furthermore, one might recall the “telescreens” in Nineteen Eighty-four. And since The Game came out long after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, describing the symbolic totalitarianism of CRS in terms of communism, rather than of capitalism, would be sheer nonsense.

On top of this TVs-that-watch-us surveillance is also a commentary on the manipulative nature of the corporate media, which as of the making of The Game was already two years into the enacting of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which would result in mergers and acquisitions in American media, so that by now, 90% of it is controlled by only six corporations. These super-rich capitalists thus control most of Americans’ access to information. The totalitarianism of today is capitalist and fascist, not in any way socialist.

Nicholas learns from Schorr that the wooden clown’s head has a camera in it, and thus it is what is surveilling Nicholas. Big Bozo is watching you.

Later, Nicholas takes a plane for a business trip, but while waiting for the plane at the gate, he is informed by another man there (a CRS employee, as it eventually turns out) that the pen in his shirt pocket has exploded, staining his shirt with ink. This moment is a mild, early instance of narcissistic injury for him, the beginning of the eating away of his grandiose self, the only pole left of his bipolar self for him to hang onto.

In the nearby men’s room, he tries to remove the ink stain to the best of his ability, and a man in a toilet stall (presumably another CRS employee) asks him to give him a roll of toilet paper from a neighbouring stall. Nicholas leaves the restroom without helping the man, this being an example of Nicholas’s narcissistic lack of empathy, a Scrooge-like moment.

Nicholas meets with an employee of his, Anton Baer (Mueller-Stahl), to fire him and give him a severance package, but he cannot open his suitcase due to more CRS meddling; this is a problem whose significance will be understood later. When we see him outside, smashing his suitcase against a bench in a futile attempt to open it, his manic frustration shows that his personality is already unraveling.

I’ve used the psychoanalysis of Kohut to describe this unravelling; now I’ll use that of Jacques Lacan. The suicide of Nicholas’s father has deprived him of the man who, traditionally speaking, would have pulled him as a boy out of his narcissistic, dyadic, Oedipal relationship with his mother (the realm of the Imaginary), and brought him into the larger society of the Symbolic (hence his inability to relate with others), from the dyadic other to the Other of relating with many people. As his parental ideal, his father was also the object of inverted Oedipal feelings, so losing his father has jeopardized and compromised the stability of both the Symbolic and the Imaginary for him.

The agitations of the CRS game are therefore plunging Nicholas into the traumatic, undifferentiated Chaos of the Real, where one may experience a psychotic break from reality, the fragmentation I mentioned above. Nicholas doesn’t literally succumb to psychosis in the movie, of course, but the disruptions of the normal structure of his life, and the growing paranoia that he feels as a result of these disruptions, are certainly symbolic of such a psychotic break. Now, in Lacanian terms, foreclosure explains how the exclusion of Nicholas’s father from his family life has already set the stage for such psychosis.

Later, he goes to a restaurant where a waitress (actually another CRS employee–Unger) spills drinks all over his suit, to which he reacts with his usual lack of graciousness, in spite of her apologizing. His annoyance is a continuation of the narcissistic injury he felt when his pen exploded, and it will continue when he loses his thousand-dollar shoe from climbing a fire escape ladder as he’s been fleeing CRS agents with her.

He’s not even sure of her actual name: Christine, or Claire, as he learns by the end of the film. CRS has made his grip on reality so slippery that we can reasonably understand CRS to be a pun on curse.

Though she’s initially unfriendly to him as a result of his ungracious response to her apologies over messing up his shirt, she–an attractive young woman–later speaks and behaves in ways to suggest a sexual interest in him: displaying herself in a bright red bra to him (they both need to change clothes and shower in his shower-equipped office after a fall into a dumpster during the chase with the CRS agents), and telling him she was paid to spill drinks on “the attractive guy in the gray flannel suit”; earlier, trapped with him in an elevator, she tells him that she, in a skirt, isn’t wearing underwear when he wants to give her a boost to get out at the top. All of this sexual innuendo, of course, is part of her job as a CRS employee to keep him interested in and hooked on the game.

In the middle of this chase from the CRS agents, Nicholas has lost his impossible-to-open suitcase. What’s more, his American Express card has unaccountably been found at a hotel lobby desk. After retrieving it there, he is directed to a room he has…supposedly…booked, and there he finds his battered suitcase in a trashed room he’s apparently to spend time with a prostitute…and with lines of cocaine.

Now, the danger of a man of his socioeconomic status and reputation being exposed in a sexual scandal of this sort will cause him to feel intolerable narcissistic rage, even after he successfully removes all the evidence of his supposed naughtiness: photos of what looks like him with a prostitute indulging in various forms of kink, the lines of cocaine, video of a moaning pornographic actress, etc. A hotel maid wanting to come in the room to clean it only intensifies the urgency of burying the evidence; as he nervously tries to get rid of the cocaine, he cuts his thumb–symbolic of his narcissistic injury.

Assuming incorrectly that Anson Baer is responsible for the set-up of this potential sexual scandal (the motive supposedly being wanting revenge for Nicholas’s firing him), Nicholas goes over to the hotel he knows Baer to be in and angrily confronts him, throwing the embarrassing pile of photos on a coffee table before Baer, his wife, and their daughter. When it becomes clear that Baer had nothing to do with the photos, cocaine, etc. (he discussed the severance package with Nicholas’s lawyer, Samuel Sutherland [Donat], and he’s quite pleased with it), Nicholas leaves, apologetic and embarrassed, and he knows that the set-up was CRS’s doing.

From the photos, he’s recognized the red bra on the girl, and so assuming it was “Christine,” he knows he must find her again. Before that, though, he goes back to his mansion and finds it broken into. It’s been vandalized, and a loud recording of Jefferson Airplane‘s song “White Rabbit” is playing at top volume. This choice of song is fitting, for its lyric uses the imagery of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to describe the experience of doing drugs. The CRS disruption of Nicholas’s sense of reality is as surreal as an LSD trip (“When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead“), and like Alice, he feels as though he’s falling down a rabbit hole.

And again, where Nicholas, through his wealth and power, can find his way out of a mess like the potential sex scandal (as he’s angrily told Baer, investors won’t care about his reputation, but “whether the stock was up or down”), anyone of lower socioeconomic status would be destroyed. Similarly, Nicholas can handle a break-in far better than a poor man could. After all, for him, it’s all just a game–not so for the poor.

Nicholas meets with Conrad, who is acting (yes, acting) hysterically after apparently having been screwed over by CRS countless and seemingly unending times. The hysterical state we see him in, a display of the psychological fragmentation I described above, is a foreshadowing of what is going to happen to the more-together Nicholas. When Conrad sees a bunch of CRS keys in the glove compartment of Nicholas’s car, the younger brother acts all the more paranoid, as if Nicholas is in on the persecution of Conrad, when if anything it’s the other way around–Conrad is being like a CRS employee.

And of course, in the midst of Conrad’s emotional breakdown in front of his older brother is a revisiting of their family’s old emotional baggage as I’d mentioned above: how the younger sibling feels resentful over seeming ‘inferior’ to the far more successful eldest sibling. Such complaining is a kind of regression to a time of simpler gripes, to help Conrad forget the far more serious…or so it would seem…persecution from CRS. Conrad runs away from Nicholas in his supposedly growing paranoia, and Nicholas–with a flat tire–has to get a taxi.

He soon learns that his cabbie is another CRS employee. The driver jumps out of the cab just before having it go into San Francisco Bay. Again, because Nicholas is a rich man, this is all just a game, from which he’ll be able to escape; whereas a poor man with the bad luck of being in a cab–or any other kind of vehicle, for that matter–in which the driver is a maniac who crashes it is far less likely to get out of the predicament in one piece.

He involves the police and Sutherland, but there’s very little they can do at the moment, since the CRS building has been abandoned. Again, if one were poor, one would get virtually zero help from the police in a situation like this, since we all know who they really serve and protect; in fat cat Nicholas’s case, it will all end up just being a game.

He finally gets together with “Christine” again. At her home, he realizes she’s a CRS employee, for she tells him there’s a hidden camera in the room, with CRS doing their Orwellian spying on him. Such spying in a house anticipates the anxieties and fears many today are getting from the idea of smart home surveillance. Remember also that when I say ‘Orwellian spying,’ it’s within the context of a capitalist society, not a ‘Stalinist’ one. Nicholas will eventually get out of the game, but poorer people are far less likely to escape.

He, of course, doesn’t yet know this is all just a game (unlike the poor, who never have been nor ever will be in just a game), so he gets angry and shows that he knows he’s being surveilled. This provokes armed CRS personnel to swarm the house and fire in its windows. Nicholas and “Christine” flee.

This scene could make viewers of the film today think of what’s happened during Trump’s second term, with such incidents as the immigration raid on Chicago apartments. Or one might be reminded of the 1985 MOVE bombing. Rich Nicholas will learn it’s all just a game soon enough. The real-life victims I’ve just described will never find themselves in a mere game, though.

As Nicholas is fleeing with “Christine,” he comes to understand that CRS has apparently drained his bank accounts by guessing his passwords using the psychological tests he did, though Sutherland reassures him that none of his money has been touched. She says he’s in on the scam. How many poor-to-middle-class people have been conned out of their money, with no comfort of learning in the end that it was all just a game?

Finally, in another house, she gives him a drink, but it is drugged. As he’s getting dizzy and losing consciousness, she admits she’s part of the ‘scam,’ and that CRS is finished taking all of his possessions, since he’s given his card security code over the phone. At the risk of sounding redundant, I must say again: such a scam played on people of modest means would not end up to be a mere game.

He wakes up in a Mexican cemetery, buried there in a filthy white suit. Symbolically, it’s like a death, a harrowing of hell, and a resurrection; but instead of him experiencing a kind of ‘apotheosis’ or ‘deification’ in a ‘spiritual body,’ if you will, he’s been reduced to nothing. Not only is he materially annihilated, but he’s also been humiliated–it’s a Lear-like drop from the royalty of wealth to destitution. This is the greatest narcissistic injury he’s endured yet.

The only thing he has left of any value is a watch, a sentimental gift from his mother that he’ll have to hawk to get some money for a bus ride back to the US. He’ll also have to beg a ride back to San Francisco from a driver in a diner; none of the people asked wants to give a ride to such a filthy-looking ‘bum.’ Nicholas now knows what it’s like to be poor and despised for it.

This is the point where both poles of his bipolar self have been compromised: his birthday has made him the same age when his father, his idealized parental imago, killed himself and thus became an eliminated pole (all the more eliminated with the losing of his mother’s watch); and his grandiose self has been smashed from this financial ruin and abasement of his social status. This means that the other pole has been all but eliminated. He gets back to his (foreclosed!) mansion, takes a cold shower, puts on some respectable-looking clothes, and gets a pistol. Naturally, he wants revenge on CRS. When a carjacker tries to take his car, he points the gun at the guy and tells him he’s “extremely fragile right now”: with his bipolar self so compromised, he certainly is fragile.

He also learns of how fragile Conrad apparently is from the manager of a hotel Conrad was staying in: he’s had a nervous breakdown, it seems, and been taken to a mental institution. The younger brother’s apparent psychological instability is a double of Nicholas’s actual growing instability.

One redemptive moment for him is when he gets together with his ex-wife, Elizabeth (played by Anna Katarina), and he asks her forgiveness for his having been an emotionally neglectful husband. He’s gone through the extreme of hell and come out finding heaven, in this sense: recall the previous player of the game and his quote of John 9:25. I’ve discussed the dialectical relationship of such opposites as heaven and hell in other posts.

While with Elizabeth in a restaurant, Nicholas sees Jim Feingold on TV in a commercial–he’s an actor. He remembers the Chinese restaurant Feingold had gotten food from when they’d met before he did his tests. Nicholas manages to trace Feingold to a local zoo, where he is with his kids. Unbeknownst to Nicholas, this is all CRS just bringing him back into the game.

He forces Feingold at gunpoint to take him to the real CRS office, where he sees all the employees who were involved in his game…including, of course, “Christine.” Nicholas speaks of pulling back the curtain, so he can see, so to speak, the Wizard of Oz.

Such a rising up against the conspiratorial powers-that-be is a fantasy many have had, in their wish to believe that the world is run by some secret, Satanic cabal (run by ‘the globalists,’ ‘the NWO,’ ‘the Freemasons,’ ‘the Jews,’ etc.), since so many like to see the world as a kind of cosmic melodrama than as the banality that it really is. Seeing the world in such a melodramatic manner seems easier, since one can avoid seeing it simply as run by capitalists and see doing something about it as an impossibility; otherwise, one might have to take responsibility and plan a revolution.

Anyway, Nicholas has “Christine” on the roof of the CRS building; she speaks frantically of his gun not being a prop and that the whole thing has really just been a game, which of course he doesn’t believe. Doors open to the roof, and he assumes it’s CRS guards, so he fires…but the bullet goes in Conrad, who’s holding a bottle of champagne while the others with him are there to wish Nicholas a happy birthday.

Devastated, Nicholas has truly reached the lowest point, a low that makes the Mexican cemetery seem mild in comparison. Both poles of his bipolar self have been utterly shattered: he walks off the roof in imitation of his father’s suicide. He lands, however, on a giant air cushion in a banquet hall, where he is to celebrate his birthday.

The CRS employees predicted that he’d be pushed to a suicide like his father’s. Feingold later tells him that if he hadn’t jumped, Feingold would have had to push him off the roof. This all gives us a sense of how disturbingly omniscient CRS seems to be. As representative of a surveilling, totalitarian government, Godlike CRS comes across, in spite of having just played a game, as being just a little too powerful for our comfort.

In this would-be suicide leading to his entry to his birthday party, Nicholas’s ‘death and resurrection’ has truly seen him go through hell and into heaven in the dialectical sense I described above about the Mexican cemetery. Now his character arc is complete, like Scrooge after experiencing the horrors of future Christmases. He is transformed into a good man, willing to give and receive love.

But as I’ve related so many times, he as a wealthy man can afford (literally) to be put through all of this hell and come back okay. Some people might be put off by this ‘happy ending,’ but the point is that the wealthy can experience this kind of thing as a fun adventure, whereas if any of these things happened to the poor, they would never experience it as a game…except in the sense that it is a ‘game’ that the ruling class–the real CRS curse of the world–plays on the common people all the time. The poor would hit a hard ground in such situations; they wouldn’t hit an air cushion.