Directed by David Fincher
Written by Jim Uhls
Based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk
Starring Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham Carter, Meat Loaf
USA, 1999
PITY THE HUMAN TRASHCANS
I shied away from seeing 1999’s Fight Club for a long time, longer than I should have. When it came out there was no way I would’ve taken my dad to see it with me, given its reputation for blood and gore. Later, friends at my church who loved The Matrix urged me to see this, and I feared another one of those droning, moral “Cultural Conspiracy” apocalypse movies. I didn’t like The Matrix, its barren Christian metaphors, its stupid idea of reality, its dumb stylized violence, its Snow White kiss at the end… But, like American Beauty, these two movies seem to have tapped into the zeitgeist and spoken to my generation and most teenagers and young adults in America. (All three rank in the top fifty of the Internet Movie Database’s Top 250 films of all-time, as voted on by the public.) When people tell me about their favorite movies, it’s no longer Armageddon or Rush Hour; they’re dying for something substantial and they find it in these commercial movies – the new message movies. They tell me that American Beauty or Fight Club or The Matrix is the best film they’ve ever seen and usually they say, “Because it’s so true.”
Well, I like American Beauty, but not because it’s “so true.” I’ve always thought it was the truth exaggerated and, most of all, a cornucopia of today’s morbid suburban stereotypes. American Beauty wasn’t the first to explore the white picket fences and the redder-than-red roses; Edward Scissorhands beat it by almost a decade, and several others came before. But the hit Oscar-winner puts it all right in your face and you definitely react because you definitely recognize, and mainstream audiences hadn’t seen anything like that in a long time (to this day, I can’t forget that poignant, doomed sex scene between Kevin Spacey and Mena Suvari, set to a haunting Neil Young cover by Annie Lennox.) The young crowds, especially, felt gratified because they liked to be told that everything’s a lie. That’s how they, and I, have felt about so many things in the stage of life we’re experiencing. In Fight Club, the hopeless and diseased feeling of today’s youth is the hook, without the heartrending reinforcements American Beauty had; this is the culmination of all the things Society has been shoving into the heads of my generation’s young men. Society, like in punk music, is the enemy, the controlling God, capitalized. This is the movie that renders Josie and the Pussycats, a monotonous lecture, useless. Fight Club isn’t a textbook - it’s an assault, a satirical catalogue of the times, of everything we can buy into nowadays, and it can be summed up in two words: sex and violence.
During the summer I write more prolifically and I watch more movies than usual, and this summer I had little of the same joy I took in discovering The Red Shoes, That Obscure Object of Desire, and others last year. In my reviews I’m talking about sexuality in movies more and more, probably because I’ve been allowed to see more explicit ones (or maybe I’m just being a perverted little kid). But isn’t that what movies, both the frivolous and, often, the best, are about, essentially – sex and violence? Aren’t they what cinema simulates stylistically? Aren’t they dangerous topics for a dangerous medium? Fight Club works on different levels, advancing bit-by-bit and revealing more and more. At the beginning we find Edward Norton (reworking his role in Primal Fear with admirable subtlety; he’s one of the most exciting actors out there) as the product of American consumerism; he has an addiction to buying furniture and gadgets (in one amazing scene his apartment literally becomes an Ikea catalogue) and he gets no sleep. He’s a walking zombie and he wants to feel alive, and heaven knows we’ve all fought vainly the old ennui, even if you are a sheltered teenager. The hell director David Fincher presents as the real world is naively ugly; why is filth and unattractiveness more real than beauty, I wonder? The production design and the cinematography and the costumes are all so great, woven together by the twitching editing done by James Haygood, and this “real world” is not as cheesy as the one depicted in The Matrix. It’s a new kind of glamour for the new millennium, a cross between grunge and glam rock, like a Marilyn Manson video but more unsanitary and foreboding. The scenes in which good little Ed Norton works away at the job he hates aren’t pristine or calm; even the smoothed-over parts of adult life look like festered sores, and fungus green is prevalent throughout the color schemes. The grime is never really grainy or coarse though; it’s depressingly chic.
Fincher used to be a respected music video director (is that an oxymoron?); probably his most famous work was with Madonna on the glossy, coffee-table clips “Express Yourself,” “Vogue,” and “Bad Girl” and Aerosmith on the message-video “Janie’s Got a Gun.” He never had the heart or wit of a Mark Romenak or Spike Jonze because his focus was always on technique and photography; his ideas were usually the obvious ones. He did do a video for “6th Avenue Heartache” by The Wallflowers that expressed the loneliness of the city and restraint he’d never shown before. I think Fight Club is a mixture of the two – young people who lose themselves in their bustling surroundings turn into raging machines – and the look of the film shows that Fincher thinks, visually, pretty much the same way he did when he made those videos in the early ‘90s. A lot of the visual devices are so outside movie realism that you would expect to find them on MTV, not in a movie, and Fincher’s directing exudes some of the channel’s arrogance and excess that makes the film even more problematic and thematically dense. He also doesn’t achieve a sense of steady, scary progression here; the film starts to ramble in the middle. The only other movie I’ve seen of his is The Game with Michael Douglas, which was completely reliant on it’s elaborate joke on the audience, a pretty unimpressive and unfunny hoax that sunk the entire ship. Fincher has the irresponsibility and abandon of the MTV spirit; the molasses-black comedy stems from, and is often at the expense of, suffering people.
Norton becomes addicted to support groups and he cries with the people and changes his name as he visits one after another. It helps him to let go and get some sleep. Testicular cancer patients are lampooned through his eyes (he’s our narrator), and the lack of balls has turned the men into pansies. Fincher has the recklessness to parody torment and illness, and he tackles the ideas of Femininity, Masculinity, and Homosexuality somewhere in there, without bothering about political correctness or any kind of reverence. He dares to suggest that all these support groups support the self-congratulation of being down and blue. People listen to you when they think you’re going to die. In our collective social consciousness, the Straight White Male is probably the most hated kind of person in the world. He has stepped on the blacks, he has kicked out the Natives, he has ridiculed the gays, he has raped the women, and he has neglected the children. A generation born after the civil rights movement of the ‘60s is fed the virtue of tolerance and the reminder that the Straight White Male committed all these moral crimes. He is made to feel sorry and inferior, and he’s beginning to like it; Norton goes to support groups so he can be pitied and feel small. People can only communicate with the Straight White Male if he’s brought down to a lower level.
This character is right out of a Scorsese film. He acts out; he’s lured in by his violent emotions and forms a fight club in which straight white males hit each other for the rush of the pain. He’s awake, a sleepwalker no longer. Of his trampled-upon generation, Brad Pitt’s anarchistic Marxist fascist leader Tyler Durden prophetically says, “We have no unifying cause. We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives.” Norton and the rest of the growing circle of masochists believe him; they want some sympathy thrown their way for the first time in their lives. They’re a generation raised by mothers because all the fathers abandoned their sons; they want to be masculine so badly that they become too macho to want girlfriends. Instead of sensitive homoeroticism, now the men have equated sex to violence. Sex no longer has any thrill for them because it’s been used up by the ever-present media that wants men to pursue the lifestyles of Calvin Klein and Gucci ads. They get their kicks from bruising each other’s bodies.
Theoretically, these young adult men are drawn to this underground counterculture because it makes them feel big, because it frees them from the government and devilish Society that’s out to get them with its guilt-inducing tales and the accusations that today’s young men are lazy and spoiled. But Fincher never makes us understand how this chilly, disgusting world could ever be alluring to anyone. The house that becomes the Fight Club headquarters has red running water; the guys are brushing their teeth with blood. The violence is almost unbearable and it’s not sexy, like some critics accuse it of being. Fincher’s main recklessness comes when Norton bears no real responsibility for the ensuing deaths; when his friend (Meat Loaf) is killed, he mourns and mopes (the friendship is never established very well to begin with), but the guilt is kicked away because, in the last scene and in the entire movie, the thrust of the story is that it’s Society who has done this to the Straight White Male (there are a few black fight club members though, but they figure into the film’s obsession with castration and the downfall of Tyler Durden’s desire to conquer the world). The film links the adolescent hatred of authority to Kafka’s paranoid The Trial.
The script (adapted by Jim Uhls from the Chuck Palahniuk novel) explains away male homosexuality as a case that comes in two forms: castrated men or mental cases who have something wrong with their sex drive, and psychotic ultra-manhood. According to the movie, so much has been filtered through our brains, with subliminal messages and blatant marketing, that we’ve become schizophrenics and masturbators; the dueling forces of Feminine (given to us by our single mothers and academic guilt trips) and Masculine (our sexuality; our inner violence; and the idea that we’re still supposed to make a living in this cruel, harsh world) are literally beating each other up. If only Fincher and the very good debuting director of photography Jeff Cronenweth had done some symmetrical framing in the ambivalently-handled finale; what a priceless shot that would be! Norton’s sense of morality has been so mixed up – most of it’s been completely flipped around – that, even though he comes to hate materialism and popular male fashions, his desired alter-ego is a studly Ideal Man, Brad Pitt. And even though he only intends to hurt himself and others who want to be hurt, the self-pleasuring self-damage can’t help but affect everyone else. Only when the two Male and Female forces meet can Edward Norton begin to love (the perfectly cast) Helena Bonham Carter, a woman who used to frequent the support group circuit with him.
As liberal as Fincher thinks his brilliant pop-up filmmaking is, it still boils down to the old battle of the sexes – only this time, it’s all within men. His ideas of what is “Male” and what is “Female” are primitive and conservative. The amorality is, as always, linked back to bad parenting, the lack of a father figure, and the dashing of childish hopes and ambitions. In one scene, Pitt holds a gun to a storeowner’s head and tells him to pursue his dreams. The film’s surprise twist isn’t really that much of a surprise, and it’s not one of those shockers that seem inevitable and tie up loose ends. But this is a compliment; the film works as a commentary on how easily suckered-in the sorrowful are, and also as a statement on the good and evil that works inside us and how difficult it is to compute which is which in this age of information-bombardment. Thankfully, it’s not heroic or as self-important as I expected it to be.
I’ve made the film sound unforgivably sexist, racist, and homophobic, and maybe it is, and that’s why I’m getting a little puzzled because I still like this movie and respect it. Though this may sound like a cop-out, I think the power of the film is in how confused it seems to be. And though this may sound pretentious, it’s like the kind of album I think the woman- and gay-bashing Marshall Mathers LP is (I haven’t listened to the controversial Eminem album) in that its main value, regardless of whether it really is a hateful or reductive film, is that it chronicles the bad things that are going on in our school hallways, in our streets, in our industries, in our homes on the surface, while also doing something Eminem’s “Stan” does and delving into a few of the causes of the negative mentalities that are shaping our culture. The movie is the kind of pity the Straight White Male characters have been thirsting for – the excuse and pardon for terrorism and rape and violence; the acknowledgment of the (mostly subtle and legal) reverse discrimination they experience – but it doesn’t pander to its characters or audience. It’s at times terrifying and irresponsible, and it builds up the plight of young people just like MTV does, but it unearths the grit in the modern glamour of self-destruction (like anorexia, bulimia, mutilation, drugs, and promiscuity) and explores the mixed messages in ways probably more complex than either Taxi Driver or A Clockwork Orange.
By Andrew Chan [AUGUST 9, 2001]