Fight Club
Fight Club is a jumble of ambitious, fascinating chaos, swinging wildly between flashes of brilliance and adolescent pouty cynicism. Edward Norton gives Yet Another wonderful performance as the desensitized corporate Everyman whose job of determining which of the fatality-causing automobile safety defects his company is responsible for warrant a recall and which are more cost-effective to let slide leaves him emotionally hollow. He’s a consumer, a sheep, purchasing all the right clothes and furniture, the kind of guy Thom Yorke indicted on OK Computer with the cutting line, "Ambition makes you look pretty ugly – kicking, screaming Gucci little piggy."
I’m all for diatribes against our vapid consumer culture (“You are not your job. You are not how much you have in the bank. You are not your khakis”), although some of the philosophizing of Fight Club is about as deep as a “Kill Your Television” bumper sticker, and likely as effective. But I’m getting ahead of myself. In the excellent first act, Norton’s character frequents survival groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and testicular cancer support groups not because he has problems of his own, but because hearing their piteous stories allows him to finally feel something, anything. When he discovers another woman doing the same thing as him (“Tourist!”, he accuses), he can no longer believe in the reality of others’ pain. What, then, is left? Only his own.
Enter Tyler Durden, a smooth talking soap salesman (one of the film’s more clever conceits, it’s not as innocent as it sounds) with an obvious disdain for The Man. When the two men meet, our narrator is drawn to Durden’s iconoclastic streak, and the two men begin a Fight Club, wherein pounding the hell out of each other allows them to feel alive and vital. Brad Pitt is flat-out great as Durden, egging and goading our narrator to further cast off the shackles of the capitalist military-industrial whatever. While his points about shallow consumerism are valid (if trite – Sprite uses “Image is nothing” as an ad slogan, after all), his solution smacks of more than a little petulant grounded child, the kind who kicks his own dog because his dad yelled at him.
Fight Club’s second act plays like an urban Walden, if Thoreau were a chain-smoking scrapper with a penchant for brutal self-destruction who was more literal about sucking out the marrow of life to the point of spitting it though a chipped grin. The two men live in a dilapidated condemned house, shunning TV and society at large, and as the fight club grows in membership, they begin a campaign of Monkey Wrench Gang antics: blowing up window displays, altering billboards, smashing Volkswagens, and performing oddly moving and philanthropic “human sacrifices” (not at all what the name implies), all designed to irritate the upper class and wake people up from their self-imposed slumber. Of course, the plan of blowing up credit card companies to eliminate the citizens’ personal debt sounds like the musings of a coffeehouse Marxist, and not coincidentally, the hierarchy of the Fight Club grows to mirror the essentially fascist structure of any major corporation.
That’s the point – we see the enemy, and he is us. The third act contains plot twists similar to The Game and Se7en (both of which were also directed by David Fincher, the former a truly amazing piece of work) which I won’t reveal but which force a radical rethinking of what has come before, though the theme remains the same. Fincher brings an impressive arsenal of tricks to keep the action moving. Breaking the fourth wall, intriguing camera work and a rich visual palate, combined with the two principals’ stellar performances make Fight Club never less than a treat to watch and always absorbing – I can guarantee that at no point during the 2 ½ hour length will you be bored.
Much has been made about the film’s violence, and yes, there is blood and punches aplenty, but the essentially masochistic nature of the beatings – these men Want this – make it easier to take, and makes the one beating motivated by hatred instead of twisted liberation that much more unsettling. The ostensibly “whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” idea of the Fight Club seems more like a violent version of Taoism (“I’ll beat myself up before the world has a chance to”), and ultimately makes the characters not self-empowering, but pathetic. Again, the point: Fight Club is not a celebration of violence as much as a sad portrait of one man’s desperation and ultimately, of his strange redemption.
The subversive exploration of post-baby-boomer anomie it tries to send up along the way is just the means to that redemption. While Fight Club sometimes goes for the cheap satirical shot, it hits more targets than it misses and its wicked humor and unflinching portrayal of psychological distress keeps your brain on its toes. (Pardon the ridiculous metaphor.) It will give you plenty to think about, a rarity in mainstream film that warrants the price of admission alone, never mind the priceless revelation that comes with Durden’s soap-buying clientele or the sweet strains of The Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” over the memorable final scene.
- Jared O’Connor
MOVIES
All Content © 1997, 1998, 1999 Jared O'Connor and Michael Baker