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Fight Club
David Fincher’s Fight Club is a movie that people will give either four stars or zero stars, with probably little room in between. It is a film so brutal, so unapologetic, so raw, so unflinching, so repulsive, so graphic, so grotesque, so pessimistic, so sexually explicit, so sadistic, so chauvinist, and so slickly produced that most people will be tricked into believing that it is a poignant film about something terribly important. I for one was not tricked. For me, Fight Club was like the “friend” who everyone loves for reasons no one can figure out. When he shows up at your house party, he is dressed sharp, his hair is neatly combed, and he is a smooth talker, so everyone automatically suspects that he is an important chap. Thus, they don’t notice that his jokes are all bad (though well told), his comments are demeaning, and his attitude is sour. After he leaves, everyone remembers having had a good time with him, but they can’t remember why. The film concerns an unnamed insomniac (Edward Norton) whose monotonous job and life lead him to an unhealthy relationship with three different persons of varying emotional stability. The first is Bob (Meat Loaf), a testicular cancer patient who cries a lot and thinks that Norton is a fellow “survivor.” This might have something to do with the fact that Norton attends cancer-patient meetings for his own moral support, though he is perfectly healthy. These scenes are treated with humor, though I for one don’t find a sickly cancer patient lamenting that she can’t have sex anymore particularly amusing. In any case, the second important person in the Narrator’s life is Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), a neurotic, punkish chain-smoker who also dishonestly attends the meetings and has to deal with the Narrator’s insistence that she is imposing on his space. The third, and most important, figure is Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a freelance, polyester-wearing soap salesman who lives in a rundown house (think Midnight Cowboy) and mutters anarchic lines of shocking redundancy. It is with Durden that the Narrator strikes a true cord. When Norton’s apartment is blown up in a freak “accident,” he moves in with the flamboyant salesman. From here, the two strike up a puzzling relationship that I would not call a friendship; it is more like an alliance, in which the Narrator looks on in awe and respect as Durden teaches him the ways of the world. These “ways” includes animal-like, demeaning sexual behavior with Marla, as well as manipulation, intimidation, and the invention of a fighting club in which Durden and the Narrator are the leaders. This club, sort of like an embryonic Ultimate Fighting Championship, takes place in the basement of a bar, and it involves two men entering into a ring in which they beat each other to a pulp. It eventually attracts many other men who want to develop their masculinity and prove their machismo by taking bloody hits to the face and breaking each other’s limbs, and among their number is poor, weepy-eyed Bob. At first, the Narrator plays along, but soon the club gains countless members and turns into a dictatorship that Durden uses to commit fascist-like terrorist acts. Before the Narrator knows what has happened, he realizes that he’s facing something more than he bargained for. Through all the sex, violence, and vulgarity, Fincher keeps the tone light, so that Fight Club plays more like a dark comedy than a social commentary or a dark thriller. As the slaughter and mayhem build, we are shown scenes of brutality and cruelty, and they are handled with such flippancy that it is downright unsettling. Call me old fashioned, but I do not think that it is very funny to watch a helpless victim try to fight off dozens of large men who want to cut off his testicles. Or to see a man who just shot his throat out with a six-shooter try to reason with his girlfriend as buildings explode in the background. Or to laugh at jokes made about losing one’s virginity in grade school. Or to chuckle at a theater projectionist’s practical joke of inserting the image of a penis into a movie reel, traumatizing little girls in the audience. There is nothing wrong with using scenes this graphic in nature if they are a means to a larger, more poignant end (except maybe that last one), but in Fight Club, everything else is a means to an end for the gruesome display of depravity. By placing a humorous tone over these sickening images, perhaps Fincher believes he is making a social commentary in which he is telling people, as the DVD box put it, to “grow the hell up.” I could ask the same of the filmmakers themselves. It is disturbing the way that Fight Club has developed into such a cult classic, but I suppose it was inevitable. Its violence and machismo (or is that masochism?) seems to have tapped into some sort of hidden rage in the male brain. Like Tyler Durden’s brainwashing fight club, the movie has legions of fans who defend it to the end, sighting its profoundness and enlightenment. How many people have I heard insist, “Fight Club opened my mind!”? My question is, what has it opened their mind to? What is the film trying to say? There are plenty of long-winded speeches in the film, to be sure, but if you listen to them carefully you will realize that they all boil down to Tyler Durden’s more to-the-point statement, “It is only when we have nothing that we are free to do everything!” This is his philosophy for embracing the fascist, terrorist activities that he organizes. Is the film supporting his position? Of course not, but then we must question why all the pointless speeches are there, except to further enhance the illusion that Fight Club is “profound.” In contrast, the film also shakes its fist at the Narrator for embracing material possessions. Perhaps there is an equilibrium between Durden and the Narrator’s conflicting perspectives that must be reached, but Fight Club does not reach it. It is more interested in focusing on sick, demented characters doing terrible things to each other to try to work a meaning into it all. By presenting both sides of human wickedness and taking no sides, Fight Club essentially develops into a movie about, well, nothing. The film boils down to a defenseless depravity that has somehow fooled many a good people into believing that it is “deep.” Its success hinges on its ability to shock you, but it takes you through these horrible acts of senseless human violence with seemingly no payoff. Yes, it is well-directed. Yes, it is well-written. Yes, its cinematography is a feast for the eyes. Yes, Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Meat Loaf, and Helena Bonham Carter are very talented actors. But we are forced to ask an important, poignant question that towers over the film like a dark shadow: Who wants to watch a movie about violence, gore, depression, and evil when there is simply nothing else to it but these elements? These topics can make for wonderful, profound cinematic experiences when they are actually about something—see my glowing reviews for The Exorcist and George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. The problem with Fight Club is that it only pretends to be about something, and the film uses its devices to give a false sense of profoundness. The audience is fooled because they are numbed. Let me give an example: There is a third-act twist that is likely to shock most viewers into believing that it is a profound revelation. I say that it is a blatant cop-out—a twist that has no relation to what we have seen in the rest of the movie that has been thrown at us to give the viewer a left curve. In the end, it is the only logical direction that the story could have taken to maintain the guise of being “brilliant.” If the movie continued on its dark, demented track, it would have brought us to a gory, obvious showdown in which the audience would be forced to realize that Fight Club isn’t about anything but its own senselessness. By throwing this left curve, the audience forgets the direction that the film was going and is instead flabbergasted at this new revelation. If you stop and think about it, you will realize that the twist has little to do with what has been happening on screen. Oh, there has been buildup for it, but not in the theme department. It simply exists to make the audience think, “Wow! That was amazing!”, and to convince them that they are experiencing a movie of sheer poignancy. The audience has been unfairly manipulated by filmmakers, who are desperately trying to succeed in making their film seem more enlightened than it is. It is one thing to be a film like Zombie or Friday the 13th, which do not pretend to be anything better than what they are: Pointless gore-fests. Violence, gore, and sexuality can be used to tell profound stories that try to make statements, such as The Exorcist and Last Tango in Paris. Fight Club’s sin is that it has more in common with the former, and it is disguised as the latter. People who praise it have to sidestep the issue that the ideas that the film explores, such as consumerism, selfishness, and desensitization, are so obvious and overused that the audiences does not need to be convinced that they are bad, at least not by this film’s extreme method. What’s left is a film of such supreme violence that it is closer to pornography than art. Have we become so bitter in our post-postmodernist era that anything with shocking content becomes important, regardless of whether or not it has a point? Whatever the answer is to that question, I am forced to ask another: Where’s George Romero when you need him? Cast: Fox 2000 Pictures presents a film by Art Linson Production. Directed by David Fincher. Written by Jim Uhls, from the novel by Chuck Palahniuk. Rated R, for graphic displays of violence, language, sexuality. Running time: 139 minutes. Original United States theatrical release date: October 15, 1999. Questions? Comments? E-mail me: danel_the_tinman@hotmail.com |
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