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
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
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."
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
"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
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:
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 )
"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/
"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:
"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.
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:
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
|
"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
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.
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.
