October 14–21, 1999

movie shorts

Fight Club

A whirligig of images set to a slamming beat, a warp-speed kaleidoscope of pop cultural references, Fight Club is tough on the eyes and easy on the brain, a visual tour de force whose abundant style nearly succeeds in camouflaging the glibness of its pronouncements. The story of an auto-recall supervisor (Edward Norton) who falls under the sway of a charismatic anarchist (Brad Pitt), Fight Club is about men regaining their masculinity through the act of physical combat, about shrugging off the values of a society that has essentially emasculated them, turned them into careful planners and catalog shoppers and distracted them from life’s essentials. But David Fincher, the slick stylist behind The Game and Seven, is so enamored of commercial stylings that Fight Club’s visuals consistently supplant its script; the film’s lame jabs at consumerism go over with all the force of the "Drink Responsibly" tag at the end of a beer commercial. Fight Club is fast and entertaining, even astonishing, but it’s a gilded toy, a Chinese box with nothing inside. It’s a 140-minute commercial that tells you not to buy things.

The first thing we learn about our unnamed narrator (Norton) is that he can’t sleep. It’s not trouble at home, not financial or romantic difficulties, just idle dissatisfaction, the curse of middle management. Unable to pinpoint his own problem, he starts dropping in on support groups: cancer, Gamblers Anonymous, blood parasites. It’s the testicular cancer support groups he seems to find most satisfying, not least because it’s there that he meets Bob (Meat Loaf), a giant whale of a man whose hormone therapy has given him cantaloupe-sized "man-tits." Clutched between those abnormal appendages, with Bob sobbing on his shoulder, the narrator finds he too can cry, and soon he’s sleeping like a baby.

It can’t last, of course. Just as the narrator’s settled into his groove, up pops Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), she of wild hair, heavy makeup and identical psychosis. Every group he goes to, she’s there too. She even turns up at his testicular cancer group. The way she figures, she’s got more right to be there than he does; after all, she knows what it’s like not to have balls.

Angry at the presence of another fraud (which ruins the illusion), the narrator confronts Marla, and after a thorny discussion they split the support group week down the middle. But soon after, the narrator finds another solution to his creeping aimlessness, a solution named Tyler Durden. Incarnated by Brad Pitt, Tyler is a rakish, hyper-confident sort who’s good enough to take the narrator in when his apartment mysteriously explodes soon after they meet, sending Ikea furniture flying thirty stories to the ground.

It’s that night, after several beers and Tyler’s lecture on the evils of materialism, that the two discover Fight Club. In the parking lot outside the bar, Tyler asks the narrator to hit him. When he demurs, Tyler taunts him: "How much can you know about yourself [if] you’ve never been in a fight?" They start swinging, a crowd gathers, and they realize this is everything they’ve been missing: self-expression, catharsis, a clearly defined objective. Beat or be beaten. Soon their impromptu gathering has moved indoors, acquired rules and become a weekly ritual, a purifying act. "When a man started going to Fight Club, his ass was made out of soap," says the narrator. "Three weeks later, he was carved out of wood."

’Course, this is all just so much Robert Bly-inspired bullshit, right? I mean, a guy with no balls and artificial tits? Classic wild-man-adrift-in-the-modern-world, cut-off-from-his-primal-nature psychobabble. At one point, Tyler tells the narrator, "We’re a society of men raised by women — makes me wonder if more women is what we need." Not that we should think there’s anything, you know, funny going on between them. After all, Tyler does finally get around to screwing Marla (they meet when she calls the narrator up to tell him she’s overdosing on Xanax), and it’s a king-size, Olympic-quality fuck, captured in strobing shots with computerized cameras which spin their naked bodies around like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. But like real men, Tyler and the narrator know better than to let a woman fuck up a good thing: Marla drifts out of the movie for around an hour, and she never finds out the truth about Fight Club.

Of course, Fincher is too clever to play all this straight. Every idea in the movie is ironized, or undercut, or played out to an absurd extreme (i.e. Meat Loaf with 38DD falsies). No doubt that hipster façade comes partly from Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, which, based on the narration, is full of offhand product references and adjectival lists, like Bright Lights, Big City in a head-on with a Sunday circular. But despite the fact that Fight Club knows better than to present its weepy, emasculated-man thesis straight up, the fact is that, however ironized the idea of late-20th-century man walking around with his dick in his side pocket may be, there are no other ideas in Fight Club to oppose it. Not only does Fincher know better than to take that idea seriously; he apparently knows better than to take any idea seriously.

Discarding the rampantly tedious self-seriousness of Fincher’s earlier films — especially the execrable, appalling Seven, perhaps one of the most disgustingly lauded movies of the 20th century — Fight Club aims for something closer to the baroque cynicism of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (or to a lesser extent 12 Monkeys, which also used Pitt as its crazed idealist). But Gilliam’s films are moored by his own profound idealism; his dystopias imply their utopian counterparts. Despite Tyler Durden’s sermonizing, there’s no moral center to Fight Club. When Tyler tells the narrator "We are all by-products of consumerism," the camera cuts back to the narrator, illuminated by the glowing neon of a Budweiser sign. If that’s meant to be irony, it only comes off as a smart-ass joke, and serves the dual purpose of reminding us that Budweiser paid for the privilege of being briefly demonized. Any press is good press.

As he showed in 12 Monkeys, Pitt can play a maniac who speaks the truth, but here he’s just a rabble-rouser, a thrill jockey getting off on pummeling and being pummeled. Pitt certainly has the off-kilter charisma to play a leader of men, but it’s a shallow performance; like Fight Club as a whole, Pitt seems most concerned with looking good. Tyler lectures the narrator on how today’s men have become obsessed with image instead of substance, how they tone their muscles in gyms instead of teaching themselves to fight. Sneering at an underwear ad on a bus, Tyler asks, "Is that what a man looks like?" But before anyone knew Pitt for anything else, he was "that guy with the great pecs in Thelma and Louise," and here he looks like he just hit the Abdominizer five minutes before the cameras started rolling.

Fight Club’s most provocative move — and its most solipsistic — is merging Tyler’s male-empowerment rhetoric with a classic Marxist analysis of alienation. Insulated from the means of production, a corporate drone like the narrator (or the others who flock to the growing network of Fight Clubs) is denied an understanding of his purpose in life and tries to fill that void with meaningless purchases. "It’s only after we’ve lost everything," says Tyler, "that we’re free to do anything."

As Fight Club spreads and gathers new adherents, it begins to develop into something called "Project Mayhem," a quasi-revolutionary movement whose real purpose is hidden from the narrator ("The first rule of Project Mayhem is you do not ask questions, sir!"). Suddenly Tyler’s house is filled with black-clad men with shaved heads, all following orders toward some unseen end. But he knows it’s destructive, and he knows that, horrified as he is, part of him wants Tyler to succeed.

"Self-improvement," says Tyler Durden, "is masturbation. Now, self-destruction…" It’s an easy credo to espouse, of course, teenage nihilism masquerading as enlightenment. Rather than an anarchist who sees an inherent order under the socially imposed one, he’s just concerned with ripping things down and starting over, on the principle that we couldn’t possibly do things as badly next time.

In addition to a gig making designer soap (the focus of the film’s cryptic marketing campaign), Tyler has a night job as a projectionist, where he amuses himself by splicing frames of hardcore porn into children’s movies. Would that Fincher’s iconoclasm was so understated. Fight Club is a tremendously energetic movie, and entertaining if you take it on its own, non-thinking terms. But the movie is so desperately provocative — it ends with a shot of a man’s penis — that it begs the question: What is it provoking you to? After all, it doesn’t take a genius to push people’s buttons. But getting a Brad Pitt audience to think — now that would be something.

—Sam Adams