ABSTRACT
This chapter reads David Fincher’s 1997 lm The Game with an emphasis on those aspects of sibling love we’ve identied as common to the nineteenth century and the postmodern era. Furthermore, I’ll be suggesting that The Game derives its formal and aesthetic energy from the simultaneous ecstasy, catastrophe and spectacle unleashed by falling as a manifestation and a result of sibling love – and queer desire. Falling in The Game is equated with loss and trauma, desire and catharsis. Just as in Melville’s ‘The Monkey-Rope’ it is also intimately connected with sibling proximity, economic vulnerability, same-sex desire and the conduct of community. As David Batchelor notes:
Falling in this lm shares many of these qualities; The Game is a lm whose action is determined by remembered fall (that of Van Orton’s father in suicide) and one which culminates in a fall which is spectacular, elegant, agonizing and beautiful. Falling in The Game (and in the cinematic traditions in which it participates) is virtually synonymous with queering.
