Robert Bly and the mythopoetic men's movement

In 'Teaching Men and Film', Matthew Hall references Robert Bly and the mythopoetic men's movement as a way of understanding some of the themes in 'Fight Club'.

From wikipedia:

The leaders of the mythopoetic men's movement believe that modernization has led to the feminization of men. Mythopoets believe that the rise of the urban industrial society "trapped men into straitjackets of rationality, thus blunting the powerful emotional communion and collective spiritual transcendence that they believe men in tribal societies typically enjoyed" (p. 20 Messner). Most importantly, the movement seeks to restore the "deep masculine" to men who have lost it in their more modern lifestyles.^[1] Other causes for the loss of the "deep masculine" include:

• Men no longer being comrades who celebrated their masculinity together. Rather, they had become competitors within their workplaces.^[2]
• Men spending more time in their houses with women than they did with men (in non-competitive terms outside of work). Excessive interaction with women generally kept men from realizing their internal masculinity.^[2]
• Feminism bringing attention to the 'feminine voice.' Through this, the mythopoetic men felt that their voices had been muted (though Bly and others are careful in not blaming feminism for this).^[3]
• The separation of men from their fathers kept them from being truly initiated into manhood, and was a source of emotional damage.^[4]
• Men were suffering further emotional damage due to feminist accusations about sexism. Men should celebrate their differences from women, rather than feeling guilty about them.^[4]
• Men being discouraged from expressing their emotions. Male inexpressivity is an epidemic and does not correspond to their "deep masculine" natures.^[3]

Robert Bly:

Much of Bly's writing focuses on what he saw as the particularly troubled situation in which many males find themselves today. He understood this to be a result of, among other things, the decline of traditional fathering which left young boys unguided through the stages of life leading to maturity. He claimed that in contrast with women who are better informed by their bodies (notably by the beginning and end of their menstrual cycle), men need to be actively guided out of boyhood and into manhood by their elders. Pre-modern cultures had elaborate myths, often enacted as rites of passage, as well as "men's societies" where older men would teach young boys about these gender-specific issues. As modern fathers have become increasingly absent, this knowledge is no longer being passed down the generations, resulting in what he referred to as a Sibling Society.^[12] The "Absence of the Father" is a recurrent theme in Bly's work and many of the phenomena of depression, juvenile delinquency and lack of leadership in business and politics are linked to it.

Bly therefore sees today's men as half-adults, trapped between boyhood and maturity, in a state where they find it hard to become responsible in their work as well as leaders in their communities. Eventually they might become weak or absent fathers themselves which will lead this behaviour to be passed down to their children. In his book The Sibling Society (1997), Bly argues that a society formed of such men is inherently problematic as it lacks creativity and a deep sense of empathy. The image of half-adults is further reinforced by popular culture which often portrays fathers as naive, overweight and almost always emotionally co-dependent. Historically this represents a recent shift from a traditional patriarchal model and Bly believes that women rushed to fill the gap that was formed through the various youth movements during the 1960s,^[13] enhancing men's emotional capacities and helping them to connect with women's age-old pain of repression. It has however also led to the creation of "soft males" which lacked the outwardly directed strength to revitalize the community with assertiveness and a certain warrior strength.

In Bly's view, a potential solution lies in the rediscovery of the meanings hidden in traditional myths and fairytales as well as works of poetry. He researched and collected myths that concern male maturity, often originating from the Grimms' Fairy Tales and published them in various books, Iron John being the best known example.^[14] In contrast to the continual pursuit of higher achievements, that is constantly taught to young men today, the theme of spiritual descent  which is to be found in many of these myths, is presented as a necessary step for coming in contact with the deeper aspects of the masculine self and achieving its full potential. This is often presented as hero, often during the middle of his quest, going underground to pass a period of solitude and sorrow in semi-bestial mode. Bly notices that a cultural space existed in most traditional societies for such a period in a man's life, in the absence of which, many men today go into a depression and alcoholism as they subconsciously try to emulate this innate ritual.

Also, read this article on the mythpoetic men's movement.

http://www.context.org/iclib/ic16/bliss/

Revisioning Masculinity

A report on the growing men's movement

By Shepherd Bliss

One of the articles in Gender (IC#16)
Originally published in Spring 1987 on page 21
Copyright (c)1987, 1997 by Context Institute

Shepherd Bliss. Ph.D., teaches psychology at John F. Kennedy University in Orinda, California. He edited The New Holistic Health Handbook and currently co-edits The Men’s Studies Review and hosts the "Changing Men" program on KPFA radio. Shepherd divides his time between Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area. This article first appeared in the Yoga Journal (November/December 1986) and is reprinted here with permission.

"MEN ARE SUCH INTERESTING CREATURES," I overhear the woman tell the bus driver in Atlanta, where I’m attending the 11th National Conference on Men and Masculinity. "They’re so mysterious."

"Yes," I nod to myself in agreement.

"Wild without being cruel, angry without being violent, sexual without being coercive, spiritual without being unsexed, and able to truly love" is how another woman, the feminist writer Starhawk, describes the men she would like to see emerging.

"Yes," I nod again in agreement.

Passionate. Sensitive. Unpredictable. Vital. Clear-thinking. Courageous. Willing to listen. Committed. Communicative. Your list might differ from mine. But, whether you are a man or a woman, you probably have your own image of how you would like men to be. Fortunately, more men are becoming aware of their masculinity and learning to develop and transform it, rather than merely inheriting the old masculinity of past generations.

Men in increasing numbers are assembling at local, regional, and national gatherings throughout the country to deal with men’s issues. In 1986 alone I attended such events in San Francisco, Florida, Boston, Minneapolis, and northern California’s Mendocino woods.

Each event has a distinct character: from the 700 men in San Francisco who came to spend a day with the elder poet Robert Bly, to the feminist men in Atlanta, to the smaller support groups that are now proliferating across the country.

In the Mendocino woods each year since 1982, nearly 100 men have gathered to spend a week together drumming, reciting poetry, learning aikido, playing volleyball, telling stories, making masks, listening to presentations by men like Robert Bly and psychologist James Hillman, and dancing a wild samba late into the night. In Florida I was invited to speak about the growing men’s movements to the Franciscans, a men’s community begun in the 13th century to continue the work of Francis of Assisi. These men, who live and work together, listened intently, bringing the wisdom of centuries of male community into the room.

Men are drawn to these gatherings for various reasons: to express their pain and grief, to have fun, to support women (and to complain about them), to improve their lives, to make music and dance, and just to hang out. Young adults, mid-lifers, and elders all participate. At the Mendocino gatherings, for example, the average age is late 30s/early 40s, but the oldest participants have been in their 70s and the youngest in their teens. At some gatherings, such as Atlanta and the annual California Men’s Gatherings, women also attend, although they usually comprise less than 10 percent of the participants.

"I’m here because I feel isolated back home," one man in Atlanta explained. "I don’t fit into the usual mold of what it means to be a man."

"Mendocino offers me a place away from work and women," observed another man. "I can just be myself here. There’s something very primitive about being out here in the woods with all these guys."

NEW IMAGES OF MASCULINITY

The consensus about what it means to be a man in America today is eroding, a development that some applaud and others bemoan. Two factors have been primary in altering traditional concepts of manhood: the women’s movement and changing economic and work situations. Women have demanded more access to traditionally male jobs, thus threatening the "breadwinner" image of men. Women have also demanded that men help care for children and do housework, thus threatening the image of the "king of the castle." Whereas men in America once tamed the wilds, moved West, and worked mainly with their hands, most men today work at jobs in which physical know-how and strength are not primary.

Yet the images of the old masculinity still prevail – from the Marlboro man on billboards to Sylvester Stallone on screen and Ronald Reagan in the White House. The man they assert is supposed to be tough, hide his feelings, and remain in charge.

As a result, many men feel conflicting pressures: on the one hand, to live up to these male stereotypes, and on the other to conform to the more realistic expectations of wives, lovers, and co-workers.

Groups of men first challenged traditional masculinity in the early 1970s, when men influenced by the women’s movement organized consciousness-raising groups, founded men’s centers, and hosted men’s gatherings. Berkeley, California, was the scene of some of the earliest of these pro-feminist gatherings, and many of the founders of this trend, such as writer and teacher Joseph Pleck, remain quite active.

The feminist men’s perspective is represented by the National Organization of Changing Men (NOCM), which hosted the Atlanta gathering. Its publications include Brother and Changing Men, and its activities include organizing demonstrations opposing male violence against women and supporting the rights of gays. NOCM describes itself as pro-feminist, gay-affirmative, and male-supportive.

In the early 1980s there emerged another alternative vision of what it means to be a man: the mythopoetic approach. This approach looks to ancient mythology and fairytales, to Jungian and archetypal psychology, and to poets and teachers like Robert Bly and James Hillman. The mythopoetic approach is advanced by such groups as the Minnesota Men’s Council and the Golden Gate Men’s Council in San Francisco, as well as at the annual men’s gatherings led by Robert Bly in northern California, Minnesota, and Boston. Its voices include Manalive, from Minnesota, and The Men’s Journal, from the San Francisco Bay Area.

The feminist and mythopoetic approaches contrast sharply to the prevailing images of manhood, and they differ also from one another and from the other alternative visions of manhood being advocated within the diverse men’s movement. Feminists want men to learn more from women, whereas the mythopoetic approach emphasizes what Bly calls the "deep masculine". Women and their agendas receive considerable attention from groups like NOCM and the California Anti-Sexist Men’s Political Caucus (CAMP); women are even welcome to attend their events. In contrast, the mythopoetic men concentrate more on their own psychological and spiritual needs, and their gatherings are all male.

In addition to these two primary trends within the men’s movement, other groups also exist. For example, the Free Men Coalition and the National Congress of Men represent the men’s rights advocates, many of whom are divorced fathers concerned with child custody issues. Many of these men are angry at women, whom they see as oppressing them.

Another significant recent development within the men’s movement has been the academic field of men’s studies. The women’s movement spawned hundreds of courses around the country on women, as well as hundreds of books and thousands of articles. Now the men’s movement has begun to influence the development of classes on men as men. About 100 such courses are currently taught in the United States, and a quarterly publication entitled Men’s Studies Review, now in its fourth year, focuses on this emerging field.

THE MYTHOPOETIC APPROACH

In this article, I will focus on the mythopoetic approach, at least in part. The men’s movement has developed from an early focus on political and personal issues to include a cultural dimension and a growing concern with larger spiritual and transpersonal questions.

The mythopoetic approach seeks to learn from ancestors and retrieve wisdom from the past that can be applied to the lives of men today. Rather than exploring rational, analytical, or political thinking, this approach thinks mythopoetically, i.e. using symbols, metaphors, and archetypal images.

Ancient myths, such as those of the Greeks, are studied not for their historical merit or for what they teach about literature or the outer world, but for what they tell us about the inner world of the male psyche. "Mythology is a psychology of antiquity," according to archetypal psychologist James Hillman, who has emerged alongside Bly as an elder spokesman for this approach.

Bly and Hillman are interested in the "deep masculine," the route which takes a man down into pain, grief, and ultimately ecstasy, rather than upward into denial and the abstract realm of ideas. "Grief rather than anger is the doorway to a man’s feelings," Bly asserts.

Bly and Hillman note that many men today act out of the puer aeternus (eternal youth) archetype, which can benefit from being balanced by the archetype of the senex (old man). But younger men now are often very hostile to older men. The puer lives a provisional life, often with a great deal of creativity, but he tends to lack discipline, commitment, groundedness, and the ability to persevere. In a famous essay entitled "Peaks and Vales," Hillman notes that our tendency is to rise up to the heights of the mountains, whereas we can also learn much in the depths of the valleys. Mythopoetic gatherings employ various routes down into the vales, including storytelling, ritual, poetry recitation, drumming, and dancing.

TWO ROLE MODELS

Two of the more prominent ancestors of the mythopoetic approach are Francis of Assisi and Henry David Thoreau. Both were poets, and both present a positive image of manhood within a larger spiritual context. Both the 13th-century communal Francis, traveling the countryside singing troubadour songs, and the 19th-century solitary Thoreau, writing alone in his journal by Walden Pond, contributed to our understanding of what it means to be a man.

Yet the lives of these two nature mystics were quite distinct from what we expect of men today. Most contemporary men seem to be out of touch with nature, which, according to deep ecologists and feminists like Susan Griffin (author of Woman and Nature), has been the basis for many of our problems. Francis and Thoreau, in contrast, deeply immersed themselves in nature. Francis, while living communally with the other brothers of his order, was drawn to the earth. He lived for periods in a cave, spent many hours communing with animals (which he addressed as "brother"), and frequently flung himself upon the earth in ecstasy. A man of great passion, he learned to channel his passion without subjugating or extinguishing it.

Though solitary, Thoreau was also a man of passion, and he frequently celebrated the "wildness" in man. "Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones," he writes, using a term now prized by Robert Bly. "All good things are wild and free," he observes elsewhere. "I would have every man so much like a wild antelope. The most alive is the wildest." And in a statement made famous by the Sierra Club, he prophesies: "In wildness is the preservation of the world."

But the wildness Thoreau recommends is neither savage nor brutal. In fact, when men are in contact with this primal quality in themselves and in nature, they are far less likely to be violent. By contemplating and integrating this wildness, such men are better able to understand and participate in what Thoreau calls the "higher laws:" the universal cycles of life and death, growth and decay.

KEY ISSUES

Men are drawn to the men’s movement for different reasons. I’ve participated in that movement for a decade now, having been influenced by various groups, authors, teachers, and ideas. As I reflect on what I’ve learned about men in that time and concentrate on the future of men in the 80s, a number of issues emerge as primary for the men’s movement to address:

1) The Father-Son Connection. The longing of men for better contact with their fathers is not new, though it seems to have grown worse since the Industrial Revolution, when men left the countryside for the city and the farm for the factory. A mythopoetic approach to men guides us back to ancient literature to better understand this phenomenon. In Homer’s Odyssey, one of the great father-son stories, the warrior-king Odysseus returns and reveals himself to his teenaged son Telemachus: "I am that father whom your boyhood lacked and suffered pain for lack of. I am he…" Throwing his arms around this marvel of a father, Telemachus begins to weep. Salt tears rose from wells of longing in both men. Studies reveal that most men today never have such a healing reconciliation with their fathers.

"The Odysseus myth points to a deep yearning for each other in both father and son, and it contains a lesson for our times," notes Sam Osherson in his book Finding Our Fathers: The Unfinished Business of Manhood. "Like many men, Telemachus spent his childhood among women. He was like many of us – his father was off fighting distant wars." According to Osherson, "For a man to grow up, he must find the good and the strong in his own father – he must find the heroic in the figure he hardly knew. The alternative is to be dominated by vile, degraded images of manhood." Such images, unfortunately, prevail in our culture today.

"We need the father who helps us define masculine strength in a changing world," Osherson continues," what Robert Bly has called ‘the moist father,’ strong and caring." Working on the father-son connection helps men to deal with their fears of each other, grow closer together, and develop deep, lasting male friendships.

2) Male Friendships. Men are kept apart by many things, including fear, competition, busyness, and homophobia. By homophobia I mean the fear of same sex contact, which includes the fear of homosexuality. Men are socialized to compete with and better each other, rather than to cooperate. One of the major accomplishments of the men’s movement has been to provide an environment within which male friendships can develop and flourish. Such friendships can draw men closer, not only to each other, but to women and children as well.

But the obstacles to male friendship are substantial. "Much of our heat had to do with unexpressed/unresolved competition, conditional trust, jealousy, and fear," writes one man of his friendship with another. "Is it that we went too far? In our male, awkward intimate ways, did we frighten one another and blow it?" How often in male friendships the first real conflict becomes the last, and one or both men back out entirely. Frequently the withdrawal is not even openly acknowledged, and the mistrust of male relationships deepens.

3) Men’s Health. In the U.S. today, men die an average of eight years younger than women, for various reasons. As a result, men’s health should be a primary concern to all who care for men. Men can do something about their health, including teaching each other how to stay healthy, learning from women, and taking better care of themselves.

4) Male Modes of Intimacy. We think most often in terms of face-to-face intimacy, such as sharing a meal with someone or making love. But men are also quite good at what I like to call side-by-side intimacy: running together, playing racquetball, gardening, working on long-term projects, or engaging in other activities in which the presence of the other is important, but the contact is not necessarily verbal. Back-to-back intimacy is also common among men, as when one man "backs up" another.

5) Male Modes of Feeling. We have been socialized to associate women with feelings, when in fact men’s feelings are just as strong. Men just express them differently. Men seem to have a tendency to hold their feelings "closer to their chests" than women, to practice what Robert Bly calls "containment," which is quite different from either repression or expression. Women often criticize men for not expressing their feelings openly enough, and although this may often be true, there is also a sense in which men have a unique "mode" of feeling that they must learn to understand and honor.

6) The Male Body. In his forthcoming book The Loneliness of the Male Body, bodyworker and author Don Johnson describes how men learn about their bodies almost exclusively from women – their mothers and lovers – rather than from men. Fathers and male friends seldom initiate men into the mystery of their bodies. Instead, men tend to base their body images on what they learn from women and see in the media.

But men can learn to be proud rather than ashamed of their bodies. And they can also work, individually or together, to change them, dropping the armor, increasing flexibility, or adding strength and self-confidence, as necessary.

These are certainly not the only issues facing the man’s movement today. Other key issues include male-female relationships, homophobia, domestic violence, and men and war. I’ve focused on these six because they’ve emerged as paramount among the many men I’ve encountered in my talks and workshops throughout the country.

The primary forum that men have developed for working on these issues has been the men’s gathering. As author Keith Thompson observes in a recent issue of Utne Reader (May 1986), men have traditionally needed a "lodge" where they can be together, a place of refuge, privacy, friendship, and camaraderie. At these gatherings, which last anywhere from a day to a week or longer, men can establish intimate relationships in the absence of women, dealing in a supportive environment with their deepest feelings of shame, sadness, anger, and grief.

CONCLUSION

My life and the lives of thousands of men in the United States have been permanently changed by the men’s movement. My father was one of the many classically absent fathers, off at work to provide for the family. The men’s movement has helped me to move beyond blaming him to understanding how he lived out the prevailing stereotype of what it means to be a man. As I reflect on my own personal decisions as an adolescent and young adult – such as going into the military and then to seminary – I realize that one motivating factor was my need to deal with my relationships with men. In adolescence, men are drawn to what psychotherapist Gordon Murray calls "buddies." Yet men seldom retain those friends into adulthood. The men’s movement provides a variety of ways for men to interact with each other and develop ongoing connections. Being with men can be healing, stimulating, or just old-fashioned fun.

The men’s movement also has the potential to impact our culture as a whole. If men were to place greater value on their relationships with other men, spend more time with children, have a better connection to nature, work with women for equality, and take better care of their bodies, society as a whole would almost certainly be transformed for the better.

Men are changing today, too fast for some and not fast enough for others. Though confusing to many, ours is a time for revisioning masculinity and redefining what it means to be a man.

Genre themes and ideas to write about in 'Fight Club'

• Masculinity, emasculation and homo-eroticism (fetishization of the male body)
• Loneliness and frustration with your life
• Identity 
• The lost 'everyman'
• Coming of age 
• Relationships and communication issues
• Nihilism
• The sexuality of destructiveness (Crash 1996 and Nightcrawler 2014 also fetishize death and destruction)
• Material possessions
• Parenting and abandonment
• The Hollywood love story subverted
• Satire - e.g. consumerism, the workplace, desire, sexual issues, relationships, support groups

Formula for success:

1. State your film: Fight Club (Fincher 1999)
2. Introduce your critical framework (genre) and explain how you are going to use it - you can use the quotations about genre from Neale or Tudor here and explain how you are going to view Fight Club; as a satirical comedy, or a 'coming of age' film, or both
3. Introduce one of the above themes (e.g. masculinity) in a new paragraph as a point for discussion.
4. Use an example(s) of how this theme is represented in Fight Club.
5. Support your example with a quotation(s) from the dialogue in Fight Club this shows that you know the film well).
6. Support your example with a point about the same theme from a critical writer (you can start your paragraph with the point from the critical writer if you wish).  You should name the critical writer and the essay, article or book in which they made the point.  A direct quotation from the critical writer is far more impressive (and accurate) than you paraphrasing what they wrote.
7. Relate your theme to genre by referring to similar themes and incidents in your other films -The Graduate (Nichols 1967), American Beauty (Mendes 1999) and Rebel Without a Cause (Ray 1955).  You can also reference Crash (Cronenberg 1996) and Nightcrawler (Gilroy 2014).

Repeat this formula (points 3-7) for your other themes.


Critical writers to use

• David Fincher, Edward Norton and Brad Pitt provide a critical commentary on the two disc edition (2004) of the film
• Matthew Hall - 'Teaching Men and Film' (2005)
• Brian Baker - 'Masculinity in Fiction and Film' (2008), especially the chapter 'The Psycho in the Grey Flannel Suit'
• Mark Ramey - 'Studying Fight Club' (2012)
• Robert Bly - 'Iron John: A Book about Men' (1990)
• Gavin Smith interviewing David Fincher in 'Film Comment' magazine (September/October 1999)
• Arthur Chu - 'Complaining like it's 1999: Fight club, American Beauty and the revolt of the cubicle drone' on the 'Daily Beast' (2014)
• Stephen Schaefer interviewing Edward Norton for 'Mrshowbiz.com'
• Philip French - 'You looking at me?' (The Guardian Nov 1999)
• Roger Ebert - review of Fight Club on rogerebert.com
• Jim Emerson - Fight Club: Punching in the dark (1999) on rogerebert.com
• Janet Maslin - 'Such a very long way from duvets to danger', review in the New York Times (Oct 1999)
• Kim Newman - Fight Club review in 'Empire' magazine (Jan 2000)
• Alexander Walker - review in the Evening Standard (1999)
• David Rooney - review in Variety magazine (Sept 1999)
• Peter Bradshaw - review in The Guardian (Nov 1999)
  

  
  

Themes in Fight Club - from Wikipedia

Themes[edit]

For academic interpretations of the film, see Interpretations of Fight Club.

We're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of shopping. There's nothing to kill anymore, there's nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman [the narrator] is created.

—David Fincher^[5]

Fincher said Fight Club was a coming of age film, like the 1967 film The Graduate but for people in their 30s. Fincher described the narrator as an "everyman";^[5] the character is identified in the script as "Jack", but left unnamed in the film.^[6] Fincher outlined the narrator's background: "He's tried to do everything he was taught to do, tried to fit into the world by becoming the thing he isn't." The narrator cannot find happiness, so he travels on a path to enlightenment in which he must "kill" his parents, his god, and his teacher. At the start of the film, he has killed his parents. With Tyler Durden, he kills his god by doing things they are not supposed to do. To complete the process of maturing, the narrator has to kill his teacher, Tyler Durden.^[7]

The character is a 1990s inverse of The Graduate archetype: "a guy who does not have a world of possibilities in front of him, he has nopossibilities, he literally cannot imagine a way to change his life." He is confused and enraged, so he responds to his environment by creating Tyler Durden, a Nietzschean Übermensch, in his mind. While Tyler is who the narrator would want to be, he is not empathetic and does not help the narrator face decisions in his life "that are complicated and have moral and ethical implications". Fincher explained, "[Tyler] can deal with the concepts of our lives in an idealistic fashion, but it doesn't have anything to do with the compromises of real life as modern man knows it. Which is: You're not really necessary to a lot of what's going on. It's built, it just needs to run now."^[5] While studio executives worried that Fight Club was going to be "sinister and seditious", Fincher sought to make it "funny and seditious" by including humor to temper the sinister element.^[8]

Uhls described the film as a "romantic comedy", explaining, "It has to do with the characters' attitudes toward a healthy relationship, which is a lot of behavior which seems unhealthy and harsh to each other, but in fact does work for them—because both characters are out on the edge psychologically."^[9] The narrator seeks intimacy, but he avoids it with Marla Singer, seeing too much of himself in her.^[10] While Marla is a seductive and negativist prospect for the narrator, he instead embraces the novelty and excitement that comes with befriending Tyler Durden. The narrator is comfortable being personally connected to Tyler Durden, but he becomes jealous when Tyler becomes sexually involved with Marla. When the narrator argues with Tyler about their friendship, Tyler tells him that being friends is secondary to pursuing the philosophy they have been exploring.^[11] Tyler also suggests doing something about Marla, implying that she is a risk to be removed. When Tyler says this, the narrator realizes that his desires should have been focused on Marla and begins to diverge from Tyler's path.^[10]

We decided early on that I would start to starve myself as the film went on, while [Brad Pitt] would lift and go to tanning beds; he would become more and more idealized as I wasted away.

—Edward Norton^[12]

The unreliable narrator is not immediately aware that Tyler Durden originated in him and is being mentally projected.^[13] He also mistakenly promotes the fight clubs as a way to feel powerful,^[14]though the narrator's physical condition worsens while Tyler Durden's appearance improves. While Tyler desires "real experiences" of actual fights like the narrator at first,^[15] he manifests anihilistic attitude of rejecting and destroying institutions and value systems.^[16] His impulsive nature, representing the id,^[10] conveys an attitude that is seductive and liberating to the narrator and the members of Project Mayhem. Tyler's initiatives and methods become dehumanizing;^[16]he orders around the members of Project Mayhem with a megaphone similar to camp directors at Chinese re-education camps.^[10] The narrator pulls back from Tyler and in the end, he arrives at a middle ground between his two conflicting selves.^[11]

Norton said, "I feel that Fight Club really, in a way ... probed into the despair and paralysis that people feel in the face of having inherited this value system out of advertising."^[15] Pitt said, "Fight Club is a metaphor for the need to push through the walls we put around ourselves and just go for it, so for the first time we can experience the pain."^[17] Fight Club also parallels the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause; both probe the frustrations of the people that live in the system.^[15] The characters, having undergone societal emasculation, are reduced to "a generation of spectators".^[18] A culture of advertising defines society's "external signifiers of happiness", causing an unnecessary chase for material goods that replaces the more essential pursuit of spiritual happiness. The film references Calvin Klein, IKEA, and the Volkswagen New Beetle. Norton said of the Beetle, "We smash it ... because it seemed like the classic example of a Baby Boomer generation marketing plan that sold culture back to us."^[19] His character also walks through his apartment while visual effects identify his many IKEA possessions. Fincher described the narrator's immersion, "It was just the idea of living in this fraudulent idea of happiness."^[20] Pitt explained the dissonance, "I think there's a self-defense mechanism that keeps my generation from having any real honest connection or commitment with our true feelings. We're rooting for ball teams, but we're not getting in there to play. We're so concerned with failure and success—like these two things are all that's going to sum you up at the end."^[17]

The violence of the fight clubs serves not to promote or glorify physical combat, but for participants to experience feeling in a society where they are otherwise numb.^[21] The fights tangibly represent a resistance to the impulse to be "cocooned" in society.^[18] Norton believed that the fighting between the men strips away the "fear of pain" and "the reliance on material signifiers of their self-worth", leaving them to experience something valuable.^[15] When the fights evolve into revolutionary violence, the film only half-accepts the revolutionary dialectic by Tyler Durden; the narrator pulls back and rejects Durden's ideas.^[11] Fight Club purposely shapes an ambiguous message, the interpretation of which is left to the audience.^[16]Fincher elaborated, "I love this idea that you can have fascism without offering any direction or solution. Isn't the point of fascism to say, 'This is the way we should be going'? But this movie couldn't be further from offering any kind of solution."^[8]

Fight Club and Genre - useful critical reviews

Your overall critical approach is the concept of genre.

Here are two useful quotes from media theorists relating to genre that are useful for your essay introduction

'genres are instances of repetition and difference' (Neale 1980)

'a genre... defines a moral and social world' (Tudor 1974)

If you see Fight Club as a satirical comedy then we can compare it (repetition and difference) to The Graduate and American Beauty.

If you see Fight Club as a 'coming of age' and/or 'transitional' film (a moral and social world) then you can compare it to The Graduate, American Beauty and Rebel Without A Cause.

You could always see Fight Club as both a satirical comedy and a coming of age film in which case you can draw on all the other films.

Whichever interpretation you choose, you must write primarily about Fight Club and relate it to the other films using critical writers' approaches wherever possible.

Also see here http://howardschoolfilm.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/fm4-single-film-critical-study-past.html

The Graduate (1967 Dir. Mike Nichols)

David Fincher (the director of Fight Club) interviewed by Gavin Smith in 'Film Comment' magazine (September/October 1999) http://www.edward-norton.org/fc/articles/filmcom.html

Is the narrator a kind of everyman?

Fincher: "Yeah, definitely. Every young man. Again, The Graduate is a good parallel. It was talking about that moment in time when you have this world of possibilities, all these expectations, and you don't know who it is you're supposed to be. And you choose this one path, Mrs. Robinson, and it turns out to be bleak, but it's part of your initiation, your trial by fire. And then, by choosing the wrong path, you find your way onto the right path, but you've created this mess. Fight Club is the Nineties inverse of that: a guy who does not have a world a possibilities in front of him, he had no possibilities, he literally cannot imagine a way to change his life."

Like The Graduate it's also a satire.

Fincher: "A stylized version of our Ikea present. It is talking about very simple concepts. We're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of shopping. There's nothing to kill anymore, there's nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman is created."


On the commentary on the two disc DVD edition of Fight Club, Edward Norton (the Narrator) compares Fight Club to The Graduate: “It’s the story of youthful dislocation and of the feeling of entering the adult world and feeling out of sync with the value system that you’re expected to engage in and trying to figure out the answer to the question of how to be happy.”

Well, the studio didn’t know how to market Fight Club. They tried to sell it to people as “guys lighting bombs.” But women loved Fight Club, they loved it, and the studio didn’t even try to sell it to them. There was a guy who will remain nameless at Fox. David [Fincher] and I were like, people are going to relate to this film the way people related toThe Graduate. We were like, this is funny, and this film is about being young and not knowing what the fuck you’re doing in life and going off the rails. And I remember the head of marketing at Fox, he said, “Can one single person tell me what the fuck is funny about this movie?” And, Fincher looked at me…it was like what do you do when you have not only this level of misunderstanding, but animosity toward a film?  (Edward Norton interviewed by Hunter Stephenson 2010)   http://www.slashfilm.com/interview-edward-norton-discusses-the-thoughtful-summer-thriller-leaves-of-grass-his-goals-as-an-actor-and-the-legacies-of-fight-club-and-spike-lee/

Themes and ideas shared between Fight Club and the Graduate:

• 'Coming of Age' - The Narrator is struggling with manhood in his 30s while Braddock is making a similarly difficult transition from his teens into his 20s
• Both are the 'everyman' character
• The Narrator and Benjamin Braddock both see their lives as a waste
• Both characters undergo a transition from slightly 'nerdy' guy to a cooler version of themselves (Tyler Durden is the man the narrator would like to be)
• Material possessions are rejected - e.g. living in the run-down Paper Street house (Fight Club) and the steady destruction of Braddock's Alfa Romeo sports car
• Both films deal with a struggle for identity; not knowing who you are supposed to be
• Both characters struggle with their relationships with women - Braddock is intimidated by Mrs Robinson's sexual confidence as is the Narrator with Marla Singer
• Both characters have to develop a kind of alter ego to become more sexually confident - Braddock develops an air of nonchalant indifference and hides his shyness behind sunglasses, while the Narrator unconsciously becomes the 'ubermensch', Durden.
• Both can be read as satirical comedies (see Fincher's comments on this).

American Beauty  (1999 Dir.Sam Mendes)

In his 2012 essay, 'The Midlife Crisis of 1999', Soren Hough from Movie Fail writes about the similar "premise of middle-aged male desire" found in American Beauty, Fight Club, The Matrix, Office Space, The Boondock Saints, and Being John Malkovich.  All of these films were released in 1999.
http://moviefail.com/op-ed-the-midlife-crisis-of-1999/

"...the protagonists are stuck in dead-end jobs, and are reaching their breaking point. Then some outside stimulus triggers something inside their brain, and they have an abrupt revelation about the inanity of their day-to-day lives. This epiphany inevitably spurs them to break out of their suffocating shell of drudgery...these epiphanies have a profound effect on the film’s lead character(s), and they are hit with the reality  that filing papers all day, or making phone calls, or packing meat, is the extent of their life’s fulfillment. Each one begins to stand up to “the system.” They say “no” to the authorities of society, and declare openly that they’ve had enough."

"For me, the most realistic of these movies is Sam Mendes’s American Beauty. That film’s protagonist, Lester, eschewed the other films’ tendencies toward out-and-out violence, vengeance, and anger in favor of a more resigned approach to dealing with a mid-life crisis: self-improvement...striking something of a middle ground...Fight Club, a masterpiece of filmmaking (was) unfortunately saddled with a title that distracted contemporaneous critics everywhere from recognizing its true message."

"Indeed, for all of Tyler Durden’s rage-filled monologues, it isn’t until the end of Fight Club that the audience comes to understand that maybe his attractive, testosterone-filled, but ultimately shallow rhetoric makes him no better than the establishment against which he’s fighting. Following that note, American Beauty‘s Lester understands that after identifying the problems he has with his life, succumbing to base instinct is not the answer."

"When Fight Club ends, Ed Norton’s protagonist “Jack” makes an enigmatic, humorous, and wildly subdued understatement to Marla Singer:

“You met me at a very strange time in my life.”

And in American Beauty, Lester makes his final declaration regarding his strange behavior:

“You have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m sure. But don’t worry… you will someday.“

In a weird way, Fight Club and American Beauty are almost kindred spirits, delivering a profound message amidst tales of brutal violence, dark humor, and sexual exploration. Both films conclude with simple bits of monologue from their protagonists, and in those final moments we are clued in to the idea of male unrest that Hollywood supposedly managed to detect. Whether this was accurate to the general feelings of the public we may never know, but the immense cult popularity of many of these movies has shown that the market was certainly there."

In 'Complaining Like It’s 1999: ‘Fight Club,’ ‘American Beauty,’ and the Revolt of the Cubicle Drone', Arthur Chu, observes the clear plot link between Fight Club and American Beauty:

"American Beauty and Fight Club share the plot point of their protagonists walking off the job using the “severance package” of blackmailing their boss (a tactic that probably works less smoothly in real life). American Beauty’s Lester Burnham leaves his advertising job to work at a fast-food drive-thru and leer at his daughter’s best friend. Fight Club’s unnamed narrator abandons the auto industry in favor of life in a decrepit slum squat making soap and explosives in his basement."

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/03/complaining-like-it-s-1999-fight-club-american-beauty-and-the-revolt-of-the-cubicle-drone.html

Brian Baker in "Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres, 1945-2000" considers the male body and masculinity in Fight Club and American Beauty.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2cjUAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA80&lpg=PA80&dq=fight+club+and+american+beauty&source=bl&ots=VGDUK7dzrf&sig=Go-IzhWtwq0v5BvoRBn7FLFAfTs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiRyND6_7fKAhXEzRQKHcxuDCc4ChDoAQgqMAI#v=onepage&q=fight%20club%20and%20american%20beauty&f=false

Themes and ideas shared between Fight Club and American Beauty:

• Both the Narrator and Lester Burnham are dissatisfied with work and blackmail their bosses into giving them each a severance package.
• Both characters have problems with women - the Narrator has a difficult relationship with Marla while Lester's marriage is troubled and his daughter finds him embarrassing.
• Men provide support in both films.  The Narrator feels supported by Tyler and the Fight Club organisation and Ricky provides Lester with male support in American Beauty.
• Mrs Robinson and Lester desire younger people in each film.
• The Narrator and Lester are both frustrated with their lives and set out to change them.
• Both characters appear to reject materialism but there is a contradiction with Lester in that he does not give up his comfortable middle-class life and buys a Firebird sports car.  However, he does give up a well-paid, respectable job to flip burgers in a fast food joint and he reminds his wife that a couch is just a couch.
• A number of writers have picked up on the homo-eroticism of the two films.  The men in Fight Club are shown fighting shirtless in all-male environments and sweatily embrace each other at the end of each fight.  Brad Pitt's oiled, muscular body is represented sexually on several occasions with the other men but with Marla too.  Lester's body is also important to American Beauty.  As he tries to make himself more attractive to Angela, he is shown lifting weights and posing, topless and even naked.  There is also a scene where Lester appears to be receiving a 'blow job' from Ricky and another where Colonel Fitts kisses Lester.
• Both films can be read as satirical comedies.  In particular, 'American Beauty' satirises our relationship with work and the family.  'Fight Club' is also concerned with those two relationships as is 'The Graduate'. 
• Both films can be read as having a Buddist philosophy, where death brings spiritual fulfilment. Tyler makes a number of pronouncements about death and Lester seems contented in death:
  "I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me... but it's hard to stay mad, when there's so much beauty in the world."
  It could be argued that the Narrator becomes less mature in his behaviour after meeting Tyler (e.g. his attitude at work, destructive actions etc.). Lester too seems to regress into adolescence: he buys the Firebird because his cousin Tony had one when Lester was a kid; he gets high on pot with Ricky; he works at a burger bar like he did as a teenager; he reminisces with his wife about when they first met and were having fun together; and he desires a teenage friend of his daughter, as if he were a teenager himself.
  Lester also makes the 'wrong decision' that Fincher talks about (see the beginning of this post). He pursues Angela in the same misguided way that the Narrator follows a destructive relationship with Tyler (Ben does the same with Mrs Robinson and Jim with the gang).
• Obsession is a theme across our films - the Narrator with his 'Fight Club', Lester with Angela and Benjamin with Elaine.

Rebel Without A Cause (1955 Dir. Nicholas Ray)

"It was the first thing I'd ever read that I felt could be like what The Graduate was for that generation, or what Rebel Without a Cause was [for its generation] - something that really rooted around in the dynamics of these frustrations." (Edward Norton interviewed by Stephen Schaefer on MrShowbiz.com http://www.edward-norton.org/fc/articles/mrshowbiz1099.html )

"Like Hamlet's disgust at his mother's betrayal of his father, Jim's feelings mask a deeper malaise, a feeling that life is a pointless choice between being and not being." (Roger Ebert) http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-rebel-without-a-cause-1955

"The strong implication of this picture is that the real delinquency is not juvenile but parental." (Time magazine review, Nov 28 1955)

"The goal, then, of Jim, Judy and Plato is to search for an ideal father figure, one who will offer them support and encouragement without abandoning them physically or emotionally..."  (Chris wood, 
'Finding the Father: A Psychoanalytic Study of Rebel Without a Cause', Senses of Cinema, April 2000)  http://sensesofcinema.com/2000/feature-articles/finding/

"IT is a violent, brutal and disturbing picture of modern teen-agers that Warner Brothers presents in its new melodrama, Rebel Without a Cause. Young people neglected by their parents or given no understanding and moral support by fathers and mothers who are themselves unable to achieve balance and security in their homes are the bristling heroes and heroines of this excessively graphic exercise." (New York Times review, Oct 27 1955) http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9F02E0DB1F3AEF34BC4F51DFB667838E649EDE

"Rebel Without a Cause gives us a nihilistic world where adults are relegated to supporting players in the dramatic lives of their children. Kids fall in love, react violently, kill, and die in a concentrated span of time lasting just about one full day. And Ray never presents it from any point-of-view other than that of the teens."  (Tony Dayoub, Cinema Viewfinder, March 24 2010)  http://www.cinemaviewfinder.com/2010/03/rebel-without-cause-1955-synergy.html

"Jack is clearly powerless and sickly. His heavily mediated life, with its shallow consumerist values and amoral business practices, has destroyed his sense of personal worth. Jack’s subsequent depression and mental illness is a symptom of his descent into moral and existential nihilism. He is unable to find true meaning in his life and cannot endorse a moral scheme: only the pain of life seems to give him the opportunity to ‘sleep like a baby’. Either he continues to slide into a suicidal nihilism or he must create new values and regain his power."  (Mark Ramey, Studying Fight Club, 2014)
http://metafilm.wikispaces.com/file/view/Studying+Fight+Club.pdf


"The adults of the 1950s had lived through the Great Depression and World War II, and many of them were old enough to remember World War I. Their teenage kids, though, had been little children during World War II, shielded from the most worrying of its effects. And this was the thanks their dear parents got? Carefree attitudes, raucous new music, and a general lack of respect for authority?" (Eric D. Snider, 'What's the Big Deal, Rebel Without a Cause', March 9 2010)  http://www.film.com/movies/whats-the-big-deal-rebel-without-a-cause-1955

"Fight Club is about three things, which some could feel are interchangeable in many respects. We'll call them the Triple As:
Anti-Establishment
Anti-Authoritarianism
Anarchy"    (Ken Miyamoto)  https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-philosophy-behind-Fight-Club-What-are-Tyler-Durdens-motives-and-philosophies 

Themes and ideas shared between Fight Club and Rebel Without A Cause:

• Both films have characters who blame weak parenting and absent fathers for some of their problems (The Narrator, Tyler, Plato and Judy).  Benjamin in The Graduate also feels disconnected from his parents.
• Both films deal with characters who begin new relationships - the Narrator with Marla and Tyler and Jim with Judy and Plato.
• The central character in each film adapts to a new environment, the Narrator with Paper Street and Jim with a new town and school.
• Deaths of friends come as a shocking, transitional event for both characters (Bob in Fight Club and Buzz and Plato in 'Rebel').
• Cars are used recklessly in both films.  Tyler allows a hire car to steer itself into a crash in Fight Club and Buzz and Jim engage in a fatal game of 'chicken run'.  
• Note also how cars are a symbol of rejected materialism.  Tyler steals a car and later crashes another one.  He and the Narrator vandalise cars with baseball bats, encourage pigeons to poo all over BMWs and reverse the 'Alligator's Teeth' in car parks.  In Rebel Without a Cause, Jim does not get angry when Buzz slashes his car's tyre and later stolen cars are driven over a cliff. Finally, Benjamin doesn't seem to care about damaging the sports car that his parents bought him as a graduation present (The Graduate).  Of course, a sad additional fact is that James Dean died before 'Rebel' was released at the wheel of his Porsche.
• The Narrator and Jim are both outsiders who have become alienated from society.  The Narrator is alienated first through loneliness and his 'single-serving' life and later through his choice to reject respectability for the anti-social fighting club that he co-founds with Tyler.
• Jim's defiance to his parents in mirrored in the Narrator's defiance to his boss and his demands for professionalism.
• Both films hint at homo-erotic relationships.  Fight Club has the relationship between the Narrator and Tyler (and all the other members of the club) while 'Rebel' suggests the homosexuality of Plato, who clearly adores and admires Jim.
• Conflict with the Police and authority is present in both films.  Bob is shot by a security guard and Plato is killed by police gunfire.
• Both films are violent with fights (fist-fights and knife fights) and deaths.  The deaths are all senseless and result from tragic accidents.
• Marla and Judy are both troubled young women who long for men (the Narrator and Judy's father) to show them more attention.  Both seem to see death as a desirable alternative to life.
• 
  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_Without_a_Cause

http://www.filmsite.org/rebel.html

http://sensesofcinema.com/2000/feature-articles/finding/

http://www.deepfocusreview.com/reviews/rebelwithoutacause.asp

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-rebel-without-a-cause-1955

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/rebel-without-a-cause

http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/17964%7C0/Rebel-Without-a-Cause.html

http://axisofaccess.blogspot.co.uk/2008/03/fight-club-and-nihilism.html

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=TLnDAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA95&lpg=PA95&dq=the+absent+father+and+fight+club&source=bl&ots=Xfv5ftLYE_&sig=t8zmUARtO3P88CgAXAczV2Hvrsw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwib1Zykm8rKAhUB2D4KHckxBOAQ6AEINjAE#v=onepage&q=the%20absent%20father%20and%20fight%20club&f=false

Fight Club quotes:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137523/quotes
http://www.quotes.net/movies/3908
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/fight_club/quotes/
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fight_Club_(film)
http://www.moviequotesandmore.com/fight-club-quotes/

Rebel Without A Cause quotes:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048545/quotes
http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0012696/quotes
http://www.moviequotedb.com/movies/rebel-without-a-cause.html
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rebel_Without_a_Cause

Fight Club Reviews:

Philip French – The guardian (Nov 1999)

“You looking at me?”

After Aliens3, Seven and The Game, you do not go to a David Fincher film expecting realism. His films are dark, apocalyptic fables set in imaginary cities, paranoid tales that jangle millennial nerves, and Fight Club is the most jarring thing he's done because it takes us inside the skull of a disturbed man. Both the movie's male stars - Ed Norton and Brad Pitt - have specialised in playing lunatics, fascists, psychotic killers, and together they're combustible.

Based quite closely on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club belongs to a tradition of fiction that stretches back to the Bible, in which the protagonist confronts a beguiling stranger that he seems to have conjured up. In the earlier versions this figure is clearly Satan or his representative.

But since the romantic movement, the doppelgängers in books, ranging from James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner of 1824 to Martin Amis's Money of 1984, by way of Poe, Dickens and Dostoevsky, are more problematic. The nineteenth-century examples anticipate Freud's writing on the ego, superego and id, the twentieth-century ones are steeped in Freud, and the whole subject is comprehensively dealt with by Karl Miller in his brilliant book, Doubles.

The unnamed Narrator of Fight Club (Ed Norton) is first seen at night, battered and bleeding in an unfurnished room of a glass skyscraper, a gun stuck in his mouth. In flashback, he explains in voice-over how he came to be there. He was a 30-year-old yuppie, living alone in an immaculate flat in an anonymous apartment block and devoted to consumerism. Discontented with the good life and his well-paid, somewhat dubious job as an accident calculator for an automobile firm, he's troubled with insomnia.

A doctor tells this unhappy loner that if he wants to see real suffering he should visit a support group for men suffering from testicular cancer. In a darkly comic fashion, he becomes addicted to support groups for the terminally ill, going to a different one every night. 'When people think you're dying they really listen to you,' he remarks.

Along the way, he meets another 'disease tourist', the death-seeking Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), a whey-faced skid-row Liz Taylor, and they agree to divide up the support sessions so they don't meet. This is brilliantly funny in a manner that recalls Crash, but it's shot out of sequence in a fashion gauged to puzzle and disorient.

Then, on one of his frequent plane trips, the Narrator meets the raffish, charismatic Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) who transforms his life. One recalls Raymond Chandler's working note for his screenplay of Strangers on a Train : 'If you shake hands with a maniac you may have sold your soul to the devil.' Tyler is a silver-tongued prankster, the bad boy your mother warned you to keep away from, the id in its most uncontrolled form.

The Narrator moves into Tyler's spectacularly squalid home, a rotting mansion on an urban wasteland that might have belonged to some poor relatives of the Addams family. Tyler is the enemy of bourgeois conformity, a moral saboteur on the lines of Guy Grand, the malevolent hoaxer in Terry Southern's Magic Christian. He works as a waiter to pollute the food of smart restaurants, uses his job as a projectionist to cut subliminal pornographic frames into Disney pictures (one of Guy Grand's tricks), recycles the fat extracted from rich women during liposuction to manufacture expensive beauty soap and redesigns airline emergency books to hilariously offensive effect.

Above all, Tyler preaches a philosophy of returning to the primitive. 'We're a generation of boys raised by women,' he says. 'Our Great War is a spiritual war, our Depression is our lives. Self-improvement is masturbation, self-destruction might be the answer', and he suggests that the way to restore masculinity is less through aggression than through the willing absorption of pain.

He and the Narrator form the clandestine Fight Club in the cellar of a rundown bar where men can batter each other senseless in bare-knuckle contests. One is reminded of the masochism of Hemingway, Philip Marlowe and those endless scenes in films from the Fifties and Sixties where an unresisting Brando is beaten to a bloody pulp. The punishment Fight Club members receive would, of course, be too much for a punch-bag, let alone a person.

The Narrator thrives in this new world, gaining a new purchase on life. But the smile is gradually wiped off his bruised face as it is off ours. First, Tyler becomes Marla's sexually athletic lover, and her presence exposes the homoerotic aspect of the ménage. Next, Tyler starts recruiting shaven-headed, black-shirted zealots from the Fight Club to form an underground army. The Narrator becomes increasingly alarmed at what he has unleashed when he learns about Project Mayhem, Tyler's all-out guerrilla war against capitalist society.

Although it falters a little towards the end, Fight Club is a dazzling and disturbing fable about the discontent of men at the end of this terrible century, and it satirises the fantasies we have of achieving a different, supposedly more natural life. Some of those fantasies have been harnessed as reality, most especially in Nazism and other movements devoted to a politics of the blood.

It's a dangerous and unnerving movie because, while they are manifestly defending civilised values, Fincher and company involve us at a visceral level in the seductive attractions of what the film attacks. It's like having a bad dream in which you go out for a night on the town and find yourself marching in a brown shirt at a Nuremberg rally.

What the censor says

Since Philip French saw Fight Club, the British Board of Film Classification has chosen to cut two scenes from it. Robin Duval, Director of the BBFC, explains that decision: 'There were two scenes that were cut in the British version: in the first Brad Pitt is beaten up at length. The second is where Ed Norton beats up a blond boy to ruin his looks. We're quite stern with the 1968 guidelines on promoting sadism as a source of pleasure. Indulging in the pleasure of violence is relatively rare, but here the point was made and then followed by a long scene where a helpless victim has his face smashed up.'

ROGER EBERT –ROGEREBERT.COM

Sometimes, for variety, they beat up themselves. It's macho porn -- the sex movie Hollywood has been moving toward for years, in which eroticism between the sexes is replaced by all-guy locker-room fights. Women, who have had a lifetime of practice at dealing with little-boy posturing, will instinctively see through it; men may get off on the testosterone rush. The fact that it is very well made and has a great first act certainly clouds the issue.

Edward Norton stars as a depressed urban loner filled up to here with angst. He describes his world in dialogue of sardonic social satire. His life and job are driving him crazy. As a means of dealing with his pain, he seeks out 12-step meetings, where he can hug those less fortunate than himself and find catharsis in their suffering. It is not without irony that the first meeting he attends is for post-surgical victims of testicular cancer, since the whole movie is about guys afraid of losing their cojones.

These early scenes have a nice sly tone; they're narrated by the Norton character in the kind of voice Nathaneal West used in Miss Lonelyhearts. He's known only as the Narrator, for reasons later made clear. The meetings are working as a sedative, and his life is marginally manageable when tragedy strikes: He begins to notice Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) at meetings. She's a "tourist" like himself--someone not addicted to anything but meetings. She spoils it for him. He knows he's a faker, but wants to believe everyone else's pain is real.

On an airplane, he has another key encounter, with Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a man whose manner cuts through the fog. He seems able to see right into the Narrator's soul, and shortly after, when the Narrator's high-rise apartment turns into a fireball, he turns to Tyler for shelter. He gets more than that. He gets in on the ground floor of Fight Club, a secret society of men who meet in order to find freedom and self-realization through beating one another into pulp.

It's at about this point that the movie stops being smart and savage and witty, and turns to some of the most brutal, unremitting, nonstop violence ever filmed. Although sensible people know that if you hit someone with an ungloved hand hard enough, you're going to end up with broken bones, the guys in "Fight Club" have fists of steel, and hammer one another while the sound effects guys beat the hell out of Naugahyde sofas with Ping-Pong paddles. Later, the movie takes still another turn. A lot of recent films seem unsatisfied unless they can add final scenes that redefine the reality of everything that has gone before; call it the Keyser Soze syndrome.

What is all this about? According to Durden, it is about freeing yourself from the shackles of modern life, which imprisons and emasculates men. By being willing to give and receive pain and risk death, Fight Club members find freedom. Movies like "Crash" (1997), must play like cartoons for Durden. He's a shadowy, charismatic figure, able to inspire a legion of men in big cities to descend into the secret cellars of a Fight Club and beat one another up.

Only gradually are the final outlines of his master plan revealed. Is Tyler Durden in fact a leader of men with a useful philosophy? "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," he says, sounding like a man who tripped over the Nietzsche display on his way to the coffee bar in Borders. In my opinion, he has no useful truths. He's a bully--Werner Erhard plus S & M, a leather club operator without the decor. None of the Fight Club members grows stronger or freer because of their membership; they're reduced to pathetic cultists. Issue them black shirts and sign them up as skinheads. Whether Durden represents hidden aspects of the male psyche is a question the movie uses as a loophole--but is not able to escape through, because "Fight Club" is not about its ending but about its action.

Of course, "Fight Club" itself does not advocate Durden's philosophy. It is a warning against it, I guess; one critic I like says it makes "a telling point about the bestial nature of man and what can happen when the numbing effects of day-to-day drudgery cause people to go a little crazy." I think it's the numbing effects of movies like this that cause people go to a little crazy. Although sophisticates will be able to rationalize the movie as an argument against the behavior it shows, my guess is that audience will like the behavior but not the argument. Certainly they'll buy tickets because they can see Pitt and Norton pounding on each other; a lot more people will leave this movie and get in fights than will leave it discussing Tyler Durden's moral philosophy. The images in movies like this argue for themselves, and it takes a lot of narration (or Narration) to argue against them.

Lord knows the actors work hard enough. Norton and Pitt go through almost as much physical suffering in this movie as Demi Moore endured in "G.I. Jane," and Helena Bonham Carter creates a feisty chain-smoking hellcat who is probably so angry because none of the guys thinks having sex with her is as much fun as a broken nose. When you see good actors in a project like this, you wonder if they signed up as an alternative to canyoneering.

The movie was directed by David Fincher and written by Jim Uhls, who adapted the novel by Chuck Palahniuk. In many ways, it's like Fincher's movie "The Game" (1997), with the violence cranked up for teenage boys of all ages. That film was also about a testing process in which a man drowning in capitalism (Michael Douglas) has the rug of his life pulled out from under him and has to learn to fight for survival. I admired "The Game" much more than "Fight Club" because it was really about its theme, while the message in "Fight Club" is like bleeding scraps of Socially Redeeming Content thrown to the howling mob.

Fincher is a good director (his work includes "Alien 3," one of the best-looking bad movies I have ever seen, and "Seven," the grisly and intelligent thriller). With "Fight Club" he seems to be setting himself some kind of a test--how far over the top can he go? The movie is visceral and hard-edged, with levels of irony and commentary above and below the action. If it had all continued in the vein explored in the first act, it might have become a great film. But the second act is pandering and the third is trickery, and whatever Fincher thinks the message is, that's not what most audience members will get. "Fight Club" is a thrill ride masquerading as philosophy--the kind of ride where some people puke and others can't wait to get on again.

FIGHT CLUB: PUNCHING IN THE DARK

by Jim Emerson

October 25, 1999  

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"A fascist rhapsody!" — David Denby, The New Yorker

Ooof!

"Morally repugnant! Socially irresponsible!" — Anita M. Busch, The Hollywood Reporter

Ugh!

"Deeply misogynistic!" — Susan Stark, The Detroit News

Awfff!

"Macho porn!" — Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times

Ouch!

Don't expect to see any of the above quotes in movie ads for "Fight Club" (although, come to think of it, if Fox did decide to use 'em, it would certainly be in keeping with the gleefully subversive, anti-consumerist spirit of this major studio movie). "Fight Club," a brutally funny and provocative satire directed by David Fincher ("Seven"), may have scored a late-round box office victory in its first weekend, but it also received a vicious pummeling from a number of (mostly mainstream) critics. While some reviewers praised the film as "an apocalyptic comedy of rage" (Jay Carr, Boston Globe) and "an uncompromising American classic" (Peter Travers,Rolling Stone), those who felt less enthusiastic about the picture didn't just dislike it -- they loathed it, reviled it, demonized it.

A number of these critical low-blows and wild punches, however, were almost as irresponsible and off-target as the writers accused the movie of being. Hollywood Reporter editor Anita M. Busch was so outraged that she suffered premonition fits: "'Fight Club' will, no doubt, become Washington's poster child for what's wrong with Hollywood. And Washington, for once, will be right. The film is exactly the kind of product that lawmakers should target for being socially irresponsible in a nation that has deteriorated to the point of Columbine." (Them's fightin' words, and in response to the Reporter's ranting, 20th Century Fox pulled all advertising from the trade paper indefinitely. Which didn't last long.)

In the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, some writers were genuinely concerned that the movie might inspire copycat beatings or bombings. Roger Ebert, in theChicago Sun-Times, acknowledged that the film has "levels of irony and commentary above and below the action," but he worried: "[W]hatever Fincher thinks the message is, that's not what most audience members will get." Wrote Ebert: "I think it's the numbing effect of movies like this that cause people to go a little crazy."

Meanwhile, both Busch and the Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan were aghast that the movie's stylized, flash-frame nudity and relentlessly barbaric fight scenes had not earned it an NC-17 rating from the MPAA. They have a point — and, of course, if certain major newspapers would agree to accept advertising for NC-17-rated movies, and if certain major theater chains would agree to show them, and if certain major video store chains would agree to stock them ... then Hollywood might actually be allowed to create and exhibit movies made by and for adults that are rated for adults only. Indeed, the way that corporations such as these exert repressive, paternalistic control over so many parts of our lives -- and the barely contained rage that builds up inside people as a consequence -- is one of the themes of "Fight Club."

Oddly, a few of the critics who excoriated "Fight Club" actually applauded the mindless thrill-ride violence of "Natural Born Killers" a few years back. What's easier to understand is how some of them found the trite and smug "satire" of the recent "American Beauty" so much more appealing ("Oh, look -- that suburban American family lives in a red, white, and blue house with a white picket fence! How scathingly witty and insightful!"). At any rate, it's been a while -- since "Crash," or even "Natural Born Killers" -- that a movie has so profoundly disturbed and polarized people who see movies for a living. (I've seen it twice, by the way, and I'm pleased to report that audiences themselves seem to "get it" just fine. I've witnessed plenty of cathartic laughter, but no cheering of the movie's mayhem, the way bloodthirsty audiences audibly rooted for the exuberantly wacky purveyors of carnage in "NBK" -- mainly because the thought-provoking, authority-questioning "Fight Club" doesn't encourage knee-jerk crowd responses the way the pandering "NBK" so shamelessly did.)

But, wait, let's back up a little bit and see what this fracas is really about by actually examining what "Fight Club" does and how it works. (WARNING: If you haven't seen "Fight Club" and don't want to go in with preconceptions, you might want to delay reading further until you've seen the movie for yourself.) I suppose it's best to begin at the beginning, and "Fight Club" begins (and stays) deep inside the brain of its nameless, hilariously unreliable Narrator (Edward Norton), a nearly somnambulistic insomniac who twists, rewinds, flashes forward, and otherwise manipulates every frame of the story. Everything that happens in the movie happens inside his consciousness — or unconscious or subconscious.

You can debate all you want about what's "real" and what's "fantasy" in a movie like this (or "Eyes Wide Shut," or "The Wizard of Oz") but that doesn't really get you anywhere. All that matters is that what's on the screen reflects what's going on inside the protagonist's head. (I mean, you may as well waste time pondering whether Dorothy really goes to Oz and meets a Scarecrow, a Tin Man, and a Cowardly Lion who teach her about her own intelligence, compassion, and courage ... or whether it's all "just" a dream. Who cares?)

It's been said that all good movies tell you how to watch them, but you do have to pay attention -- something a few of "Fight Club"'s critics failed to do. "Fight Club" continually reminds viewers that they're watching one man's illustrated interior monologue; all the characters are seen as projections of his own psyche — his desires, his fears, his frustrations. The film also continually tinkers with the properties of the medium to emphasize the sheer movie-ness of what's on the screen. (This must surely be the first movie to point out the projectionist's changeover marks on the print.)

Keeping all this in mind (heh-heh), the "Sixth Sense"-like shift in awareness that happens in the third act of "Fight Club" shouldn't come as that much of a surprise to the audience; it's the Narrator who finds himself waking up into a nightmare of his own making. "Fight Club" is a lot of things all at once -- a grim fairy tale for adults, a consumerist revenge fantasy, a portrait of a disintegrating personality, and, for all its hyper-active stylization, an astonishingly vivid portrait of the berserk materialist wasteland in which (like it or not) billions of city dwellers live today.

"Was I asleep? Had I slept? Was Tyler my bad dream or was I Tyler's? I was living in a state of perpetual deja vu." -- the Narrator

The Narrator doesn't have a name, but let's call him "Jack" (as the script does), after his penchant for ironically identifying himself with various parts of the physical and psychological anatomy ("I am Jack's medulla oblongata," "I am Jack's inflamed sense of rejection"). Jack is a white-collar urban drone who is so alienated from everyone around him -- and, most of all, from himself -- that he views his life as if it were "a copy of a copy of a copy." If he were in therapy, his shrink would say he's having an "existential crisis" and diagnose him as clinically depressed. Over the course of the movie, Jack falls (apart) from depression into manic depression into paranoid schizophrenia. Even when he thinks he's getting better, he's getting worse. The big question is, how far will he sink before he hits bottom?

Like Kevin Spacey's narrator/protagonist in "American Beauty," Jack is figuratively and/or literally dead (and it doesn't much matter which). His soul is numb and empty and, in a kind of compulsive re-enactment of ancient hunter-gatherer instinct, he keeps trying to fill it with retail goods. But he's never satisfied. "What kind of dining set defines me as a person?" he finds himself wondering. Jack tells himself that he's acquired a good couch, a decent stereo system, and a nice wardrobe; that he's just on the verge of feeling "complete." But, instead, he's suffocating under the weight of his purchases. He imagines himself a prisoner of his IKEA catalog. Shopping becomes his only outlet for self-expression, sexual or otherwise, in a society ruled by the cult of consumerism. To anyone who's ever felt possessed by his/her possessions, this is painfully familiar -- and funny -- stuff.

Pathetic, tormented Jack discovers that the only way he can find any peace (or get any sleep) is to attend support groups for people with terminal conditions. Being that close to death and hopelessness somehow soothes him and makes him feel, perversely, more alive. And, besides, when people think you're dying they tend to actually notice that you exist. "Fight Club" explores modern modes of addiction — to consumerism, to 12-step programs, to ritualized "extreme sports" risk-taking — as Jack goes from being an IKEA addict, to a support-group addict, to a fight club addict. (The "Fight Club" itself could be an offshoot of a bungee-jumping fraternity.) Turan accuses the movie of "playing like the delusional rantings of testosterone-addicted thugs" — which is exactly the point, though he misses the movie's irony. Unlike Turan, "Fight Club" and its Narrator do not unquestioningly accept these characters' patently grandiose delusions at face value.

When (upon abruptly awakening from a self-destructive wish-fulfillment nightmare that his plane is exploding in mid-air) Jack meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), he's encountering nothing less than his own Id, his alter-ego, his doppelganger. Tyler (decked out in garish red duds to suggest danger, excitement, bloodlust, and a complete lack of anything resembling taste) is a volatile dude -- cocky, confident, spontaneous, irrational, irrepressible, infantile, aggressive, anti-social, hedonistic, uncontrollable. Jack is fascinated by him, drawn to him, and also scared of him. Like any (in-)decent Id, Tyler is prone to crude, impulsive, and reckless behavior: He splices frames from porno movies into family films, pees in the soup at his restaurant job; he is a mess of raging appetites who likes to drink, fight, screw, and blow up things. But for all that, Jack sees Tyler as his breakthrough, a way out of his rut, the voice that will finally tell him: "You are not your f***ing khakis!"

In one of the film's most inspired metaphors (and there are lots of 'em), Tyler is also the consummate soap salesman, the personification of untamed capitalism. You see, Tyler's special deluxe soap is made from the fat of liposuction patients. The by-products of these people's own gluttony and vanity (their fat) are sold back to them as a luxury cleansing item. (Taking the metaphor one step further, Tyler later uses the soap, combined with other common household ingredients, to make bombs that rock the foundations of the very capitalist enterprises his soap business would otherwise appear to epitomize.)

Anyone familiar with the history and methodology of advertising will notice a few salient themes emerging here. Advertising is most often not about selling you a product, it's about selling you an image of your own identity, and about creating an identification with a product, which leads to the addictive phenomenon known as "brand loyalty." And some of the most successful early advertising campaigns (in the late 1800s) were for soap products that sold themselves as solutions to an advertiser-defined "problem" (whether it was "germs" or "b.o." or, later, "ring around the collar"). First you package and sell the problem, then you package and sell the solution to the problem.

And that's pretty much what Tyler and Jack do with their invention, Fight Club -- they articulate the impotent rage and disillusionment felt by so many wage slaves today, give it a name and a structure and a set of rules, and sell it back to them as a means for achieving cathartic release and feelings of empowerment. The idea is patently absurd, but on some level it makes sense -- not unlike David Cronenberg's collision of sex and car wrecks in "Crash (1997)." These guys have to beat the life back into themselves. Fight Club is not about "winning" or beating up somebody else; it's a form of manual electro-shock therapy, a way of jolting themselves out of their numbness and reconnecting with reality. The metaphor is so clearly a psychological one that to say "Fight Club" is about fist-fighting is like saying "Taxi Driver" is about cab driving.

What begins as Tyler and Jack's exclusive basement ritual soon spreads and becomes a very successful corporate franchise (I kept expecting an IPO), a messianic cult -- and a fascist, terrorist paramilitary organization that its co-founder is powerless to stop. Jack's life suddenly turns into "Frankenstein" Meets "Life of Brian" as he desperately attempts to tame his own creation-run-amok. But no matter what he says or does, his followers doggedly continue with their apocalyptic plan, blindly hailing him as a genius every step of the way. The critics who accuse "Fight Club" of promoting fascism and terrorism don't seem to notice that Jack is appalled by the monster he has helped to bring into the world, and that has now gone out of control -- which is what happens when you let the Id run wild. On one level, "Fight Club" can be seen as the story of a guy who wakes up one day and discovers to his profound horror that that he is Jim Jones, David Koresh, Ted Kazinski, and Timothy McVeigh all rolled into one.

Tyler takes capitalism, and then anti-capitalism, to the illogical extreme of fascism and terrorism, but that doesn't make the movie a "fascist tract." In the final third of the film the devotees of Fight Club (now re-christened Project Mayhem) turn into mindless, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" pod people and Jack turns into Kevin McCarthy, hysterically trying to warn everybody that the sky is falling. I was reminded, too, of the ravenous undead zombies in George Romero's "Dawn of the Dead," who instinctively flock to the shopping mall because "it was once an important place in their lives."

"Fight Club"'s jabs at consumerism seem to have particularly upset certain critics, because the movie doesn't typecast its corporate villains. "Why pick on IKEA?" wonders David Denby. It would have been easy to get an audience to hate ruthless, faceless, monolithic monsters of greed like IBM or Microsoft. Everybody hates them already. But "Fight Club" targets a more insidious kind of corporate enterprise -- the kind that markets itself as your best friend and uses cutesy branding images to get under your skin and into your wallet: IKEA, Volkswagen, Apple, Starbuck's. If you don't get some sort of vicarious thrill from seeing one of those insufferably precious (and overpriced) new VW bugs receive a facial with a sledgehammer, or from watching that smug Apple logo blown to bits (how's that for "Think Different"?) ... well, as they say, check your pulse.

Fight Club (1999)

FILM REVIEW; Such a Very Long Way From Duvets to Danger

By JANET MASLIN

Published: October 15, 1999

Of the two current films in which buttoned-down businessmen rebel against middle-class notions of masculinity, David Fincher's savage ''Fight Club'' is by far the more visionary and disturbing. Where ''American Beauty'' hinges on the subversive allure of a rose-covered blond cheerleader, Mr. Fincher has something a good deal tougher in mind. The director of ''Seven'' and ''The Game'' for the first time finds subject matter audacious enough to suit his lightning-fast visual sophistication, and puts that style to stunningly effective use. Lurid sensationalism and computer gamesmanship left this filmmaker's earlier work looking hollow and manipulative. But the sardonic, testosterone-fueled science fiction of ''Fight Club'' touches a raw nerve.

In a film as strange and single-mindedly conceived as ''Eyes Wide Shut,'' Mr. Fincher's angry, diffidently witty ideas about contemporary manhood unfold. As based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk (and deftly written by Jim Uhls), it builds a huge, phantasmagorical structure around the search for lost masculine authority, and attempts to psychoanalyze an entire society in the process. Complete with an even bigger narrative whammy than the one that ends ''The Sixth Sense,'' this film twists and turns in ways that only add up fully on the way out of the theater and might just require another viewing. Mr. Fincher uses his huge arsenal of tricks to bury little hints at what this story is really about.

''Fight Club'' has two central figures, the milquetoast narrator played by Edward Norton and his charismatic, raging crony played by Brad Pitt. The narrator has been driven to the edge of his sanity by a dull white-collar job, an empty fondness for material things (''I'd flip through catalogues and wonder what kind of dining set defined me as a person'') and the utter absence of anything to make him feel alive. Tormented by insomnia, he finds his only relief in going to meetings of 12-step support groups, where he can at least cry. The film hurtles along so smoothly that its meaningfully bizarre touches, like Meat Loaf Aday as a testicular cancer patient with very large breasts, aren't jarring at all.

The narrator finds a fellow 12-step addict in Marla, played with witchy sensuality by Helena Bonham Carter and described by the script as ''the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you could stop tonguing it -- but you can't.'' As that suggests, Marla's grunge recklessness makes a big impression on the film's narrator, and can mostly be blamed for setting the story in motion. Soon after meeting her he is on an airplane, craving any sensation but antiseptic boredom, and he meets Mr. Pitt's Tyler Durden in the next seat. Surveying the bourgeois wimp he nicknames Ikea Boy, Tyler asks all the hard questions. Like: ''Why do guys like you and I know what a duvet is?''

Mr. Norton, drawn into Tyler's spell, soon forsakes his tidy ways and moves into the abandoned wreck that is ground central for Tyler. Then Tyler teaches his new roommate to fight in a nearby parking lot. The tacitly homoerotic bouts between these two men become addictive (as does sex with Marla), and their fight group expands into a secret society, all of which the film presents with the curious matter-of-factness of a dream. Somehow nobody gets hurt badly, but the fights leave frustrated, otherwise emasculated men with secret badges of not-quite-honor.

''Fight Club'' watches this form of escapism morph into something much more dangerous. Tyler somehow builds a bridge from the anti-materialist rhetoric of the 1960's (''It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything'') into the kind of paramilitary dream project that Ayn Rand might have admired. The group's rigorous training and subversive agenda are as deeply disturbing to Mr. Norton's mild-mannered character as Tyler's original wild streak was thrilling. But even when acts of terrorism are in the offing, he can't seem to tear himself away.

Like Kevin Smith's ''Dogma,'' ''Fight Club'' sounds offensive from afar. If watched sufficiently mindlessly, it might be mistaken for a dangerous endorsement of totalitarian tactics and super-violent nihilism in an all-out assault on society. But this is a much less gruesome film than ''Seven'' and a notably more serious one. It means to explore the lure of violence in an even more dangerously regimented, dehumanized culture. That's a hard thing to illustrate this powerfully without, so to speak, stepping on a few toes.

In an expertly shot and edited film spiked with clever computer-generated surprises, Mr. Fincher also benefits, of course, from marquee appeal. The teamwork of Mr. Norton and Mr. Pitt is as provocative and complex as it's meant to be. Mr. Norton, an ingenious actor, is once again trickier than he looks. Mr. Pitt struts through the film with rekindled brio and a visceral sense of purpose. He's right at home in a movie that warns against worshiping false idols. 

Empire - Kim Newman, Jan 2000

When it opened in America to somewhat disappointing business, there was a widespread misjudgement that Fight Club was an action movie about underground bare-knuckle boxing contests — perhaps an inflated, star-powered version of Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicles like Bloodsport or Kickboxer.

Actually, it's a horror movie which literally begins in the fear-centre of its narrator's brain (and arguably stays there) and spins a postmodern rethink of Psycho with enough dizzying side-trips to pull off yet again the long-blown surprise ending that two apparent antagonists are, in fact, the same person. Adapted faithfully from Chuck Palahniuk's novel, the film follows a buttoned-down insurance minion (Norton) who projects himself as flamboyant, anti-social, charismatic genius revolutionary Tyler Durden (Pitt), in order to shake up his own life and, in the end, society as a whole. The splitting of one persona into "Jack" (if that's his real name and not a convenience plucked from a Reader's Digest-ish magazine he finds) and "Tyler Durden" evokes Norman Bates and his mother, but also echoes that other once-surprising revelation, that respectable Dr. Jekyll and murderous Mr. Hyde are the same person.

By externalising an alter ego as an apparent actual person played by another actor, Fight Club might seem to be cheating — but is merely using the device Robert Bloch did in his Psycho novel, where Norman and Mother have long talks. There are similar instances in not a few horror films, like the Lucy Comes To Stay segment of 1972's Asylym (which Bloch wrote) where repressed Charlotte Rampling and homicidal Britt Ekland are one person, or The Other (1972), from Tom Tryon's novel, where one of a set of twins turns out to be either a ghost or an alternate personality.

This gambit, which many of Fight Club's original audiences found infuriating, is actually so well established in the genre that Brian De Palma could play a joke at its expense in Raising Cain, where John Lithgow's imaginary father turns out to be real after all. Fight Club is the third and most complex in director David Fincher's loose trilogy of nightmare movies, following Seven (or Se7en, to be strictly accurate) and The Game. It begins in the fear-centre of a brain and spins a postmodern rethink on Psycho Fincher's theme — trace elements can be found even in his compromised debut, Alien3 — is the crisis of middle-class masculinity in a world torn between oppressive conformity and a libido-like anarchic underbelly that is at once dangerous, alluring and life-changing.

Seven is also about an unsatisfied minion (there, Pitt) who meets his monster alter ego (Kevin Spacey) and is manipulated into murdering him, while The Game also strips away every trapping of success and wealth from Michael Douglas as he realises his whole life is a conspiracy whose purpose he fears and desires at the same time. The trajectory of Fincher's career is away from strict genre and into an unclassifiable twilight zone, but he takes with him an evolving, unique filmmaking style that suggests a final evolutionary form of the horror movie as a species of black satire shot through with impolite bursts of violence as terrifying as they are liberating.

A chronic insomniac addicted to kibitzing at self-help groups, Jack encounters goth chick Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), who has a similar kink, and is forced into a wilder sphere when he hooks up with Durden, whom he seems to meet on an aeroplane. When his Ikea-outfitted condo is blown up in a mysterious explosion, Jack moves into a dilapidated old house (reminiscent of the Bates Motel) with him. The pair indulge in recreational fistfights in a bar parking lot, which expands into an underground club for alienated men to take out their frustrations on each other as a homosocial and homoerotic act.

Though Durden and Maria have a noisy affair, fantasised and actualised by Jack, women almost don't impinge on the world of Tyler Durden. It's a plot feint about the overt attraction between the male leads, beautiful Brad and wiry Edward, that winds in on itself with the revelation that Jack has been fighting himself. Durden turns Fight Club into Project Mayhem, a campaign of revolutionary pranks which extends so far into the infrastructure of society that when Jack catches on to his double life and confesses, most of the cops turn out to be in on it.

There is a great deal of sick humour at the expense of masculinist ideals and white-collar society — Durden's bizarre pranks (splicing porno frames into family films, making soap of liposucked human fat) to the dizzying third act as Jack is bewildered by the escalation of the project his disciples know he has initiated, with his statements taken up as chanted slogans and seemingly every bruised man he meets in on the scheme. It culminates in real horror as Jack purges himself of Durden by shooting himself in the mouth, blowing out Durden's brains but not his own, and embracing the puzzled Maria as the skyline of financial buildings explodes.

"Fight Club" by Alexander Walker (1999)

Read Alexander Walker on the latest films every Thursday in the Evening Standard

My verdict on Fight Club is already in: it is an inadmissible assault on personal decency. And on society itself. At its Venice Film Festival world premiere in September, it caused well-justified outrage as a movie phenomenon well in line with the current tentative but threatening revival of Nazism. In particular, it alarmed my Jewish film critic friends.

They saw its story - correctly, I think - as a paradigm of the Hitler state. Even though it is set in contemporary America, it's not simply about young guys beating the hell out of each other with bare fists in secret fight clubs. Its story may be insane and septic, but it uncritically enshrines principles that once underpinned the politics of fascism, and ultimately sent millions of Jews to the death camps.

It echoes propaganda that gave licence to the brutal activities of the SA and the SS. It resurrects the Fuhrer principle. It promotes pain and suffering as the virtues of the strongest. It tramples every democratic decency underfoot. Like Hitler, its characters elevate the halbstarken, the "middle children of history", the underclass of outsiders who feel alienated and unvalued, and form them into disciplined cells, giving them a purpose in life which is to inflict panic and anarchy on the community.

Such a disreputable rebranding of Nazi goods is directed by David Fincher for 20th Century-Fox. Fincher made the cleverest and sickest of recent film noirs with Seven, a movie that cynically avoided depicting violence by dwelling almost entirely on autopsies and posthumous images of its dead and decomposing victims of violence.

Fight Club is an even more toxic experience. It's set in some big but unnamed American city where Edward Norton is a self-loathing nerd employed to see if auto crashes justify recalling the cars his bosses make, or simply settling out of court - whichever is the smaller cost to the company.

At first the film looks as if it's shaping up to be a laconic commentary on the distorted values of US consumerism. I'd have settled for that. But its material gets grosser and alienating. Norton, an insomniac wanderer, gate-crashes pathetic "support groups" for those with diseases like testicular and bowel cancer, TB and Aids, working off his own angsts on the realities of the terminally ill. Then he meets Brad Pitt.

Pitt is an active sociopath, an articulate apprentice of random malice. Like Guy Grand, the prankster-hero of Terry Southern's anarchic novel The Magic Christian, he is a public enemy: sometimes he works as a waiter, peeing in the soup, farting on the puddings; sometimes as a movie projectionist, splicing erect penises subliminally into family films.

But once he and Norton form a homo-erotic alliance, cohabiting in a grungy house built (but barely) on a waste dump, the two owners of the same psychopathy set up a secret league of fight clubs where the maladjusted and the macho slug it out nightly to get in touch with their diminished manhood by demonstrating how much pain they can endure.

Some apologists for Fight Club say that's what - and that's all - it's about: men proving they're men again. Even if this were true, which it's not, it's a malicious film-maker who sees masculinity served by pulping each other into bloody insensibility with bare knuckles. A year or two ago, David Cronenberg's Crash suggested that people could top up their sexual libido by crashing their cars into each other on the public highways. Fight Club promotes a perversion that's a potentially more dangerous franchise.

This one requires only the weaponry we all possess (given the will) of bare fists and the less costly allure of secret illegality and doing harm only to the body-work of a human being, not an expensive automobile. Even with the cuts made in it by our film censors, it's an irresponsible attraction to promote in a community like ours, already over-stretched just to maintain the semblance of public safety.

Norton is soon going to the office with bleeding gums, black eyes, bruised cheeks, damaged hearing and bloodstained clothes, and spitting out (along with loose teeth) such bits of acquired wisdom as: "You can swallow a pint of blood before getting sick." The fights themselves disgust and deafen eye and ear. They are grotesquely explicit and pornographically amplified. They exceed the limits of all screen violence I've seen in recent years. They are the apotheosis of the way in which today's moronic American super-stars pump up their ego muscles in public to exhibit themselves as Hollywood supremacists scornful of all values save those of their own box-office.

The movie gradually makes its analogy with Nazi Germany even more overt. Pitt and Norton raid liposuction waste dumpsters at night, retrieving "the richest cream fat in the world", that's been siphoned out of the obese, and rendering it into red soap tablets they then flog to exclusive boutiques. It's unbelievable any film would dare use, even as such a sick gag, a sequence reminiscent of that chapter of the Holocaust in which Nazi thoroughness rendered the Jews down into similar, no doubt less pricy soap bars. But Fight Club has no reticence, no memory, no shame.

Ultimately, the club membership expands into a nationwide secret army of proto-Nazis who embark on what's grandly called Project Mayhem. They pick fights with innocent passers-by, graffiti-spray buildings, befoul fountains, rob stores, sabotage public works, set off bombs - do all, in short, that Hitler's Brown Shirts did to destabilise the frightened society of their own time. One of Pitt's acolytes, played by Meat Loaf as a hormonal freak with pecs like women's breasts, is shot dead: he becomes an instant martyr-hero whose name is chanted in the same sort of solidarity mantra as Horst Wessel's when that young SA man became the first saint of the Nazi movement with an anthem to memorialise him.

It defies belief that such a film could have been conceived, shot and distributed by a film company whose ultimate boss, Rupert Murdoch, is an arch-exponent of the very capitalist system that Fight Club scorns. You sit there aghast at the amorality and opportunism of the film business. Not for the first time, I admit. But this time its impact is far more inflammatory. Even the metaphysical twist at the end - which I am asked not to disclose, and which is so confusing that to describe it would be a waste of time - cannot convert a film that is a summons to anarchy into an anodyne screen fantasy.

In any well-adjusted society, its stars would feel a backlash of public indignation well beyond the box-office. Edward Norton is one of America's most gifted actors; Brad Pitt one of its most personable. Both, curiously, played Nazis in two earlier films, American History X and Seven Years in Tibet. For their future good, they should explore the world beyond Mein Kampf. As for Britain's own Helena Bonham Carter, playing a sleazy, white-faced slut, on drugs, suicidal, servicing the flesh and fantasies of both men, she shows the extent that actresses are willing to go in order to trash their screen images and enjoy notoriety without responsibility. It is not a pretty sight.

David Rooney  'Variety' magazine, September 1999

Rarely has a film been so keyed into its time — in ways that, commercially, will be both advantageous and damaging — as “Fight Club.” On one hand, the Fox 2000 feature is the perfect reflection of the millennium malaise that pits pervasive nihilism against an urgent need for something to grasp onto; on the other, it caps off a period in which the media and Washington have never been so assiduous in pointing the finger at Hollywood over the impact of screen violence on society and on youth in particular. But despite certain hostility from some sectors, especially in the U.S., this bold, inventive, sustained adrenaline rush of a movie about a guru who advocates brutality and mayhem should excite and exhilarate young audiences everywhere in significant numbers.

From “Alien3” through “Seven” and “The Game,” David Fincher has always been attracted to dark material. In Chuck Palahniuk’s novel of the same name about a cult of men who channel their pent-up physical aggression into increasingly destructive pursuits, the director has found his most disturbing subject matter yet. And in debuting screenwriter Jim Uhls’ clever, savagely witty script and the unremitting volley of information it launches, Fincher has found the perfect countermeasures to balance his coldly atmospheric, often distancing style.

The position on violence here can be read on a number of levels. Somewhat controversially in light of the post-Littleton, Colo., debate, “Fight Club” plays mischievously with film conventions, almost winking at the audience to convey the characters’ awareness of being part of a movie that deals in hot-button issues. This rather audaciously gives the impression of a film throwing the responsibility for violence back onto society and refusing to accept blame.

Set in an unidentified, semi-stylized city, the story’s nameless narrator (Edward Norton) is introduced with a gun in his mouth before backing up six months to recap his troubles with insomnia. Refusing to treat him, a doctor instructs him instead to sit in on a testicular cancer victims’ group to put his own pain in perspective. He quickly becomes addicted to support groups for a range of terminal illnesses, freely weeping and embracing his “fellow” sufferers as a means to find the release he needs to sleep.

But the arrival of another tourist, Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), makes him uncomfortable with his dishonesty. Her blithe admission that the support groups are “cheaper than a movie and there’s free coffee” is one of many instances in which pitch-black, corrosive humor touches subjects that will make many audiences blanch with indignation.

Around this time, he meets enigmatic Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), who makes and sells soap for a living while moonlighting as a projectionist, splicing pornographic images into family films, and as a waiter, sabotaging meals. When the narrator’s apartment and all his diligently accumulated material possessions are destroyed in a freak explosion, he calls Tyler for a place to stay.

They meet at a bar and get tanked together, after which Tyler amicably picks a fight that seals their bond and marks the beginning of a phenomenon that each week attracts new participants. The narrator moves into the dilapidated mansion in a toxic waste area that Tyler calls home, routinely continuing his job all week as an auto safety checker but waiting for the charge that comes with fighting each Saturday night in a club whose members are sworn to secrecy.

A persuasive speaker who encourages a lost generation of men to access pain as a remedy for contemporary despair and numbness, Tyler’s following quickly grows. Fight club chapters start springing up across the country and when Tyler begins assigning homework, the members take their aggressive behavior into the outside world with acts of violence, vandalism and subversiveness. His disciples start turning up at the house to enlist in an army for Project Mayhem, the full extent of which is only gradually revealed.

The narrator’s feelings veer from rejection and abandonment after Tyler’s sudden disappearance to moral revulsion as he sets out to stop a dramatic chain of events and is brought face to face with discoveries regarding his true nature that provide the story’s big twist.

Uhls’ stimulating screenplay explores its existential themes articulately and accessibly, unleashing a steady stream of humor, razor-sharp dialogue, droll popular culture references and wry comments on consumerism, corporate culture and capitalism. These qualities serve to temper the story’s brutality, though many no doubt will still find it repellent.

The film also contains pronounced homoerotic undercurrents. These are present both on a surface level in the many toned bodies and especially in the way Pitt is costumed, and less superficially in themes of self-love, in the narrator’s magnetic attraction to Tyler, his almost jealous resentment first over Marla, who invades their home and Tyler’s bed, and later over the legions of followers that compromise his 2IC status, causing him to retaliate by destroying the beauty of an angel-faced blond (Jared Leto).

Performances by the three leads are uniformly potent, with Norton’s character demanding by far the greatest range. His journey from trying to create an ordered, middle-class universe furnished by Ikea and clothed by DKNY, CK and A/X to throwing it all in and finding meaning only in violence represents an uncommonly challenging attack from a major studio film on contemporary values and suppressed instincts.

Alert and edgy, Norton guides the narrator from the deadening awareness that his life is ending a minute at a time through the invigorating rush that comes when he embraces his dark side and destructive urges to the ultimate confrontation with his own responsibility for the out-of-control spiral of events. In one especially remarkable scene, the actor literally pummels himself into a bloody mess before his stunned boss.

Pitt is cool, charismatic and more dynamically physical perhaps than he has been since his breakthrough role in “Thelma and Louise,” while Bonham Carter, outfitted like a gothic prom queen and spouting acerbic maxims with attitude to burn, demolishes any residue of her buttoned-up Merchant-Ivory image in a tough, sharp-edged turn.

In a film that requires the viewer to keep absorbing information for most of its two-hours-plus duration, Fincher never loosens his grip on the material, with editor James Haygood contributing to establish a driving pace. As always with the director’s work, visual aspects are consistently impressive, from Alex McDowell’s richly elaborate, at times a little too slick production design to the drained, often greenish or jaundiced tones of d.p. Jeff Cronenweth’s extremely mobile widescreen lensing, which includes several knockout sequences in which the camera careens through skin tissue, electrical circuitry or bomb wiring. Also notable are the complex sound design and dreamy techno score by the Dust Brothers (Michael Simpson, John King).

Peter Bradshaw
Friday 12 November 1999
The Guardian 
The trajectory of Fight Club is baffling. In its first hour or so, this picture appears to be a gloriously spiteful and well-acted satire of our bogus contemporary "crisis of masculinity": self-pitying guys hugging in groups and claiming victim status - modern consumer society having allegedly rendered the poor dears' hunter-gathering instincts obsolete.

But, by the end, it has unravelled catastrophically into a strident, shallow, pretentious bore with a "twist" ending that doesn't work. And it is a film which smugly flirts, oh-so-very-controversially, with some of the intellectual and cultural paraphernalia of fascism - but does not have anything like the nerve, still less the cerebral equipment, to back this pose up.

Edward Norton gives a compulsively twitchy, nerdy, hollow-eyed performance as Fight Club's Narrator: a 30-year-old single guy with a white collar job in the automotive industry and a secret addiction; he loves attending support groups posing as a sufferer. Hilariously, this is the only thing that gives him an emotional high.

Fight Club has a classic scene where he turns up at a testicular cancer victims' group and the participants have to pair off, hugging, sobbing and letting it all out. He teams up with Robert - a cracking performance from the singer Meat Loaf (no kidding) - who has grown tits after his balls have been cut off. How pathetic is that? How metaphorical is that?

Into this ghastly and frankly dysfunctional existence steps the super-cool and way charismatic Tyler Durden, a travelling soap salesman in a cerise leather jacket and funky, Elvis-ish shades: a witty and seductive performance from Brad Pitt, who has never been better. Tyler introduces Ed to the Fight Club: secret bare-knuckle brawls where nerdy wimps such as Norton get to reconnect life-changingly with their inner macho men.

So far, so cool. There's stylish rollercoaster direction from David Fincher, terrific performances from Brad and Ed, and also a sexy, gravelly-voiced, cynical Helena Bonham Carter as Marla, the girl they both want to screw. And Jim Uhls' screenplay gets roof-raising laughs with the pair's fantasy about which celebrity and historical figure they'd most like to fight (respectively, Gandhi and William Shatner).

Where it all comes apart is where Tyler tries to use the fight club as the basis for a kind of anarcho-terrorist gang, subverting and blowing up the symbols of bullshit corporate America that have taken their testicles away. Tyler brands Ed Norton's arm with a "kiss" mark in acid, laying down a sub-Sadeian/Nietzschean riff about how it is only in pain that you can forget about the fatuity of God and become yourself. He reveals that the soap he sells is made of human fat, stolen from liposuction clinics - and later we hear his followers will have to provide their own black shirts.

Pretty unsubtle. We know which associations and images Brad and Ed are fooling around with. But do they? The implications are never followed through, and the movie never has the balls really to take responsibility for the nihilism, rage and despair it appears to be gesturing towards.

Indeed, there is a scene in which Tyler, in full existential/Zarathustra mode, terrifies a Korean student dropout working in a convenience store into restarting his biology classes because a veterinarian is what he really wanted to be. So, there is, like, a good side to the whole human-fat-soap, blackshirt thing! Fight Club is a dumbed-down extremism, Extremism Lite, no-brainer extremism for the Rush Limbaugh generation, an audience that thinks the "diceman" is a really challenging philosophy.

Moreover, those much-lauded, much-censored fight scenes, for all their crunchy, nose-popping verité, are as free from genuine consequence as Itchy and Scratchy. The Fight Club never gets out of control; scrappers seem to know when to stop, like Judo contestants in the Commonwealth Games; and the thing never escalates or has to be policed by bigger guys with tyre irons - what a dashed sporting, chivalrous Fight Club!

Brad mixes it up loads without his lovely features getting a scratch (Ed bears his bruises as a mark of macho courage). Frankly, as Brad ponces about the place with his trousers hitched down to his hips, to show off as much pert musculature as possible, he looks like he couldn't fight his way out of a pair of Calvin Klein boxer briefs. Has anyone connected with this film ever actually been in any fights?

The awful truth is that Fight Club jettisons its sense of humour 60 minutes in, and, so far from satirising the tiresome "crisis of masculinity" stuff sloshing around the airwaves either side of the Atlantic, the film simply endorses it, with Tyler presented as a deeply interesting Zeitgeist anti-hero. And, in the end, this just doesn't pack much of a punch.