Adopted from Chuck Palahniuk’s breakthrough first novel, FIGHT CLUB is a comedy. And a funny one at that. A razor-sharp satire that viciously skewers new age self-absorption, anarchism, romance, and then turns around and smacks you on the face with your own egoism for missing the point. Of course, most of the critics seemed to have missed the point as well. The film’s detractors accuse it of neo-fascist leanings. They call it brutal, sexist, void of ideas. One review I read called the film “irresponsible”! It may be that, but only in the way that art should be irresponsible.
FIGHT CLUB opens with Edward Norton’s character sitting on the toilet, leafing through an Ikea catalogue. It is an indelible film image of the late ‘90s. Modern man: passive, impotent, vulnerable, consumed with consuming. Norton spends the rest of his free time going to various support groups and sharing made up sob-stories with the sick and the terminally ill. It gives him an emotional outlet, but it’s not nearly enough, and he feels like a fraud in the process.
Enter Tyler Durden (Pitt), a slick soap peddler who seems to know Norton better than he knows himself. The two men stumble on the idea of a “fight club” and it catches on quickly. The point of the fight club is not to defeat the other guy as much as it is to defeat your own lack of direction; to beat yourself. In fact, Norton’s character does exactly that in one very funny scene. This scene, in effect, becomes the main metaphor of the film as Norton struggles to come to terms with Durden’s peculiar philosophy. In order to overcome fear, inertia, and the catatonic state that most of us live in, the men of the fight club beat the shit out of one another in basements of seedy bars. But instead of finding their identities, they seem to lose them, becoming faceless soldiers in Durden’s anarchist militia. Eventually for Durden, the fight club isn’t far reaching enough. He wants to destroy the whole materialistic system. The masked anarchists in the Seattle riots had the same idea when they tore apart Starbucks and Nike stores. And whether you cheered or were repulsed by their actions may determine your view on the film. But if your feelings were conflicted, you have a lot in common with Norton’s character in FIGHT CLUB.
FIGHT CLUB is an infuriating picture. It’s a work that refuses to follow an established story pattern or to provide easy answers. It dazzles you with its over-the-top visuals, surprises you with its intelligence, and finally pulls the rug out from under you. It’s this relentless punk esthetic, the “we don’t give a fuck if you don’t like us” attitude that I found so refreshing about FIGHT CLUB. What other film have you seen lately, that is so willing to piss you off? Kubrick’s A CLOCKWORK ORANGE comes to mind from nearly thirty years ago. That’s it. I can see why some people really hated this movie. All the magazines called it “a bomb” or “a disappointment” both in terms of box office and critical praise. No surprise there: it fails to live up to expectations of genre and provides no emotional resolutions. And it’s certainly no action film. The fights themselves are shot in flat, unglamorous, long takes, without a hint of violence fetishism that characterizes American cinema. Pitt and Norton give excellent performances. So do Helena Bonham Carter and Meatloaf. But their characters aren’t very likable; frankly they’re all freaks. And if, like me, you really like this film, maybe you’re a freak too.
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