Given the first two rules of Fight Club, I was reluctant to write this review at all. However, after trying to tackle a few deeper topics, I've decided to write a simple movie review.
Too bad Fight Club is anything but a simple movie. When it made its debut at the dawn of the millennium, I remember hearing a flurry of controversial buzz about it. Roger Ebert dubbed it "macho porn" in his first review and it seemed to generate a following mainly among my male friends impressed with its more overt moments of violence. I had no problem with violence in cinema as twelve year old, but even as a young critic, I had a problem with films that pandered to demographics for the sake of pandering. Fight Club was unfortunately marketed as macho porn for mindless action fans, so I skipped over it for many years.
I didn't have the chance to experience the movie until a junior college English composition class. The focus of the class was reflections of art and literature in society. When our professor took out two days of our schedule to watch Fight Club, I was wondering if we were going to study the film from an ironic perspective, or perhaps study the effects of violence in cinema. When the credits rolled to the Pixies classic "Where is My Mind", I was left with a bad taste. The movie just didn't sit well with me. I couldn't get over the film's overall nasty tone and its puzzling, juvenile off-color jokes interspersed with a few gross beatings. I disliked Brad Pitt's smug Tyler Durden so much, I was actually upset he got away with half the things he did in the film, even if he was a figment of someone imagination. A week later, I still couldn't get the film out of my head. It was like a car wreck; appalling yet I was compelled enough to buy the DVD. A few months and ten views after the class ended, Fight Club somehow raked its way into the top five films I'd seen that year.
My experience with the film isn't an uncommon one. Even its biggest fans like myself will tell you it demands repeat viewings to truly absorb not only its energy and ragged aesthetics, but its deeper messages. Both Edward Norton and director David Fincher have compared it to the counter-culture classic The Graduate. Like that 1967 satirical classic, Fight Club is indeed a coming of age film with social and cultural themes embedded in its dense story.
There is no single answer to the question of what the film is "about". Consumerism? Male aggression? The insecurities of turning thirty? Finding definition and self worth in the "me" generation? The rise to prominence and corruption of an underground cult? The complexities of true love? How about all of the above? Any time I've seen someone attempt to summarize the film's plot in one sentence, they completely overlook another extremely important element of the film. It's not about one or even two of these things, it's about all of them.
Similarly, it's difficult to categorize this movie. For a film called Fight Club with an underground boxing ring as its centerpiece, the fighting itself isn't viewed as a competition or even a persuasive plot device. It's more a symbol of the characters freeing themselves from the confines of a comfortable lifestyle, a form of non-conformist bonding therapy. In a way, fighting is the ultimate anti-social activity and these characters employ it as the ultimate middle finger to the established capitalist society which strips them of their identity. The film begins with a lament on how the narrator has become a helplessly addictive slave to consumer culture and ends with him watching credit card companies crumble to the ground while holding his outcast girlfriend's hand.
With the terrorist activities and completely non-romantic overtones that suggest a love triangle, the film almost reads like American History X meets Pretty in Pink. But while it is far from that, it's also been referred to as a "misunderstood romantic comedy" by the filmmaker. Understandably, the marketing team would have scratched their heads if Fincher pitched his bloody movie as such. But in addition to all of the silly phallic jokes and dark slapstick humor, there is indeed something of a screwball love story at the center of Fight Club. Like the film however, it's a puzzle trying to identify the players. Is the Narrator in love with Marla, or is he jealous of how she domineers Tyler (himself)? Maybe that's why he beats the prettier Jared Leto for becoming Tyler's new "favorite".
I read the book almost ten years after first becoming engrossed with the movie and while the film was surprisingly dedicated in replicating many of the book's lines, I would place it in the "movie did it better" category. For all of the endlessly quotable lines and rich plot twists, there's just something inexplicably rich about experiencing the story onscreen. The ending plot twist is one of the film's most-discussed elements, yet
it's not exactly its defining payoff the way one might see in an M.
Night Shyamalan film. In fact, the first two acts of Fight Club only become more interesting to watch once you know how it ends.
Ebert was wrong to first label the film as "macho porn". I would argue that it's quite the opposite. The story is not about alpha males flexing their dominance over all others. It's more about insecure men feeling betrayed by their upbringing, which has stripped them of any self-reassurance. From this perspective, it was a complete stroke of genius to cast Pitt as Tyler Durden. Pitt's Durden is supposed to be the embodiment of male perfection, as wise as he is completely confident and strong. He is the fictitious creation of the Narrator's ambitions for perfection, and appropriately the Narrator's last trial on the road to personal enlightenment is to kill Tyler, effectively letting go of that drive for "perfection". One of my favorite lines from the film follows the Narrator pointing out a Calvin Klein underwear ad, to which Tyler responds "Self improvement is masturbation...now self-destruction?"
As I've grown older and seen it many more times, these deeper themes
have only become more relevant and I grow more impressed with how they
are presented in such an entertaining manner. For all the bloodshed and relentless beatings, this really is something of an upbeat film in the end. It's the classic story of a lost soul finding redemption and meaning in this crazy world, in an appropriately crazy manner. It's like a twisted, violent version of my favorite film It's a Wonderful Life, another story of a young man at the dawn of his thirties struggling with self-definition in a world perversely obsessed with glamor.
5/5: an all time Top Ten favorite for this viewer.
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