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Prior to release of the new film by David Fincher, all everybody wanted to talk about was how violent it was supposed to be. Well, they were right. The movie is, after all, titled Fight Club, not Pottery Club or Radio-Controlled Model Sailboat Club. And the violence is pervasive, at times crossing the border into the Land of Downright Irresponsibility. But it’s also got a lot more going on than just the bare-chested, bare-knuckles pugilism featured in all the promotional clips and trailers. Therein, gentle reader, lies the crux of our discussion.
I was entirely prepared to hate this movie. Unlike most trendoid fanboy critics, I found Fincher’s breakout film Se7en to be a vile, wholly irredeemable waste of celluloid and the director’s obvious talent. It amply reflected statements he’s made such as “I don't know how much movies should entertain; to me I'm always interested in movies that scar,” and “I have demons you can't even imagine.” His followup The Game suffered from no such obscene source material, but was rather vacuous, instilling a sense of “well, yeah, that was clever, but so are the graphics on this box of Sweet Tarts.” On the other hand, I seem to be one of the few people who liked his first feature film project (following an early career doing effects photography for George Lucas and videos for Paula Abdul, Aerosmith, and Madonna), Alien3, which with time has become my favorite of that series.
Plus, Fight Club stars Brad Pitt (who was also in Se7en). And what’s not to hate about anyone who would star in the awful Seven Years in Tibet (he must have a numerological fixation)? My only hope was that I’d get to see Edward Norton, costar and probably the best actor of his generation, repeatedly beat the crap out of him.
Then a funny thing happened: the actual movie came out and upset my preconceived notions.
Following another one of Fincher’s wondrous, retina-banging opening credit sequences, we’re introduced to Jack (Norton), a hopeless yuppie whose expensive high-rise New York condo is a shrine to appliance and furniture catalogs though there’s no food in the refrigerator. Jack works for one of the automobile manufacturers, investigating fatal accidents caused by design flaws in order to determine which would be more expensive: a recall, or paying off survivors of those who have died so far and the rest who are likely to die in the future. He despises his life so much that insomnia drives him to hang out with a different disease support group every night, where he begins to find comfort until meeting up with Marla (Helena Bonham Carter). She’s also a “tourist,” suicidal in her own right (I might be too if my hair always looked like it was prepped in a Cuisinart), but her lack of sincerity -- she’s in it strictly for free coffee and donuts (“It’s cheaper than the movies.”) -- upsets his routine, driving him back into sleeplessness.
Which changes not long after he meets Tyler Durden (Pitt). Tyler* is an unencumbered maker of high-priced beauty soap who gives JackÝ a business card he forgets about for a couple weeks until someone blows up his condo and he needs a place to crash. Then they get together for a few beers in a seedy little bar, after which Tyler announces “I don’t wanna die without any scars” and asks Jack to hit him in the face. A rather inept, goofy, two-man brawl ensues that leaves Jack feeling unnaturally refreshed despite a bloody nose and black eye. He moves into the squalid, dank, abandoned house Tyler calls home, and immediately they’re beating each other up every weekend for fun in the same parking lot.
It’s not the kind of hobby patrons of the bar can’t help noticing, so soon they’ve attracted other participants, moved into the bar’s basement, and set down a loose protocol for a new, albeit painful, kind of support group. Tyler becomes a dark, sweaty guru to this disaffected gathering, preaching nuggets of Nietzschean minimalism such as “The things you own end up owning you,” and “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.” While this philosophy is making for a happier Jack (except that Marla has moved in and is continually, loudly banging the plaster with Tyler), it’s also made him increasingly nonchalant about, and scornful of, his job and coworkers (not that they’re too crazy about his new attitude and missing teeth, either).
The real fun starts when Tyler invites his more dedicated troops to move in. They transform the house from a dump into the headquarters for an anarchistic brigade dedicated to well-planned acts of organized mischief against such contemporary icons as coffee shops, computer stores, and corporate art. As rumors spread of fight clubs springing up in other cities, Jack suspects Tyler may be more than he appears, and could have something a lot bigger than petty vandalism in mind...
This is the kind of movie Hemingway would have loved (Ernest, not Margaux) (his name is even evoked in the “If you could fight anybody in history, who would it be?” scene). It’s loaded with antimaterialistic dogma and such Spillane drollery as “You can swallow a pint of blood before you get sick,” and “With a gun barrel between your teeth you only speak in vowels.” It’s also very contemporary/hip, given Fincher’s bag of tricks (including the insertion of “subliminal” frames of film that play into the plot) and a Dust Brothers soundtrack. But it is definitely vi-o-lent. Worse, little of this mayhem is depicted as having any permanent aftermath; reality would have been better served if at least one of the many brutal beatings portrayed had resulted in a character’s death or disfigurement, as could easily result from hand-to-hand combat anywhere else but in a movie or wrestling ring. Speaking of reality, it’s also more than a little off-putting to read that Fincher, who here is espousing such reassessment of modern greed and consumerism in favor of egalitarian simplicity, lives in real life in a gated community.
Still, on the strength of the direction, Norton’s performance (and an interesting supporting turn from the here very aptly named Meat Loaf), and a script (by a first-time writer, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniak) with a mind-blowing twist to rival that in The Sixth Sense, I’ll have to say I enjoyed it. B
*Have you ever noticed how in conversation we tend to refer to celebrities, athletes, politicians, and other well-known people we don’t personally know, almost exclusively by their last names? I do it all the time in these reviews, extending the practice to character names. “Tyler,” however, is an exception, sounding rather like a last name, and more aurally ergonomic than “drrdn,” a phoneme one might expect to hear echoing through a swamp after midnight.
ÝWe never get Jack’s last name, so it was either use his first name or refer to him throughout as “this guy,” which may have a certain Lenny Bruce charm but wears thin quickly on the printed page.
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