Fight
Club
Rated
R
Now showing
www.foxmovies.com/fightclub
If any film should be labeled as the movie to usher in the
new millennium, it is David Fincher's Fight Club. Based
on the diabolical novel by Portland's Chuck Palahniuk (skillfully
adapted by Jim Uhls), Fight Club is a multifaceted
satire. It attacks not only the dehumanizing, corporate Starbucks/Ikea
world we live in, but also self-help philosophies, the men's
movement, commercials, TV and, interestingly, movies--particularly
the way that cinema is blamed for contributing to real-life
violence. It challenges the many silly articles, books and
movies that have attempted to label "Generation X" as listless,
flannel-wearing, grunge-listening slackers. The film argues
that it's not a lack of passion that keeps those in their
late twenties to early thirties befuddled, but a lack of personal
power, a lack of freedom--the impotence of the soul.
OK, so we lack freedom and personal power. How do we get
it back? The film reveals the absurdity, hilarity and sadness
of the type of man who, for example, would sit at home and
listen to self-help guru Anthony Robbins instructing him
on how to "awaken the giant within," then go through the
motions, achieving nothing. Fight Club asks: Do you
want to awaken your giant? Do you really want to look inside
yourself? OK, but what if your giant turns into a monster?
Fight Club begins with a character who is always
awake but is certainly no giant--not yet, anyway. The film's
insomniac narrator, Jack (Edward Norton), like so many of
his generation, is full of cynicism but mild-mannered and
searching for something. When he gets fed up with sleepwalking
through his job at a major automobile manufacturer (where,
he says, everything looks like "a copy of a copy of a copy"),
Jack finally goes to a doctor and begs for sleeping pills.
The doctor tells him to quit his whining--if he really wants
to see suffering, he should go to a support group for testicular-cancer
survivors. Jack takes the advice and soon becomes addicted
to every support group he can locate. They become the outlet
he has needed for his emotions; he gets the attention he
craves, and he can finally sleep, even though he's only
a "tourist" at the support groups.
The spell is broken when another tourist enters his warm,
fuzzy, self-help universe. Marla (Helena Bonham Carter)
is a chain-smoking accidental-overdose-waiting-to-happen
who goes to meetings because (as she says) "it's cheaper
than a movie, and the coffee is free." Jack sees himself
reflected in her perverse presence; he hates her, which
means he hates himself. They are both fakes.
Jack's weekly epiphanies take yet another major turn when,
during a plane trip, he meets an eccentric soap maker named
Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt); upon returning home, he finds
that his condo has blown up. Desperate, he crashes at Tyler's
place--which Jack describes as a "dilapidated house in a
toxic-waste part of town"--and never leaves.
In Tyler, he finally finds the "power animal" that his
original cancer-support group instructed him to get in touch
with. Tyler teaches him Nietzschean ideals of freedom and
puts him in tune with his manly center--his hunter. Even
more importantly, Jack and Tyler fight: Their fights are
sweaty, bloody releases of rage and enlightenment. After
other men happen upon Tyler and Jack's parking-lot brawls
and ask to join in, it dawns on the two that they
have something here: a new form of therapy for men. Organizing
their brawls into a movement and a philosophy, they create
the "Fight Club," an underground organization in which frustrated
men beat each other to a pulp. As members grow and chapters
sprout up in different cities, the club morphs into something
called "Project Mayhem"--a terrorist revolution that encourages
members to vigilantly apply its philosophy to the outside
world. Tyler is the revolutionaries' charismatic leader,
and in Tyler they trust. His leadership, their trust and
their acts become morbidly funny, increasingly frightening
and oddly inspiring as the film continues.
Written and directed with a sharp, inventive fusion of
style and substance, Fight Club is an exciting, thought-provoking
experience that will no doubt be criticized for its controversial
takes on moviemaking, manhood, violence and corporate culture.
Like Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Fight
Club articulates the darkness (and humor) of those who
don't want to feel numb anymore while simultaneously
commenting on the powers that made them numb in the first
place. And like Kubrick's film, Fight Club will be
considered dangerous, a film that incites violence or promotes
nihilism.
This seems to be exactly what the filmmakers want. The
more fingers wagging at them, the more their point is proven:
It is easier to pin society's ills on entertainment.
And entertainment this film certainly is--especially because
master prankster Tyler is played by movie god Brad Pitt.
Does the film take Tyler's side? In many ways, yes. Though
the movie does poke fun at the men who join Tyler
in the fight club, it understands their pain, and it understands
that their pain has been sold out to self-help groups that
do them no good. In the transformation from "Fight Club"
to "Project Mayhem," the members merely shift their anger
from each other to the outside world--the soul-deadening
culture that has merged New Age spirituality with consumerism,
hiding dehumanization behind politically correct calm. As
Tyler explains, "Self-improvement is masturbation...self-destruction
might be the answer."
But, as the film understands, that answer is too simple;
it can only lead to further confusion. Because the film
is essentially a satire, it knows that though Tyler's eloquent
assertions make sense, they're borderline fascistic and
not entirely reliable. Still, one can't help feeling moved
by him. It is a crowd-pleasing triumph when Tyler says to
a terrified fat cat, whose face has been duct-taped courtesy
of Project Mayhem, "We are the people who take out your
garbage...we watch over you while you sleep...DO NOT FUCK
WITH US!"
The film never denies that violence can be glamorous. Fincher
shows that a fight is a necessary part of life, that a violent
act can be fun, can be a soul-altering experience, can liberate--but
it can also, as the film later shows, entrap one in feelings
of paranoia and pain.
Fincher reaches new levels in filmmaking, not only by his
wink-wink take on violence, but also his wink-wink take
on exploiting his own arena of expression: cinema, or rather
the corporate world of cinema. Like the pranksters he's
chronicling, Fincher bites the hand that feeds him. (In
addition to making Alien 3, Seven and The
Game, Fincher has also directed music videos for Madonna
and made commercials.) The director shows what can be done
within the Hollywood system. He knows how to take
a successful franchise like Alien or an ideal hunk
like Pitt and turn it into something subversive, because,
more than any traditional "indie" director would, he understands
the system he mocks. When Tyler yells at his Project Mayhem
recruits that they will never be movie stars, the scene
works as both a hard truth and as a deconstruction of the
movie ideal. Tyler/Pitt is the ideal movie star we all want
to be, but should we listen to him?
Yes and no. The film is cynical enough to show that a New
World Order like Tyler and Jack's can lose control of itself.
Yet the film doesn't deny that such a "second coming" is
attractive and, in ways, beneficial. After all, what is
more powerful: movie stars putting knuckles to skin, or
fleshy nubs munching scones and itemizing reports? Filled
with so many potent comments on society that it demands
more than one viewing, Fight Club is a challenging
and powerful piece of work that will stick in both the primal
and the intellectual parts of one's brain and never be dislodged--not
even by a sucker punch.
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Willamette Week | originally
published October 20,
1999
|
