Fight Club (2000, VHS)

I don't like violent movies and I'm not going to beat myself up about it. However, I enjoyed Fight Club.

Pre-viewing jitters:

Don't get me wrong, some of my favorite movies have violent content. The ones I have trouble enjoying are usually set in present or at least modern times, in settings that seem to have real counterparts and they usually involve some sort of abusive power over weak characters. I can watch Neo/Mr. Anderson getting a mechanical bug put into his stomach without a flinch or see the bloody battles of Gettysburg with an attitude of historical detachment but I am a complete and total wuss when it comes to films like Reservoir Dogs or GoodFellas or Pulp Fiction. All the people I know who have seen and loved those three films also seemed to love Fight Club. In fact one of my sons told me, "It's not your kind of movie, Mom." I decided to steer far away from it when it was in the theaters.

Here comes my nervous breakdown of the film:

Why nervous? 502 people have reviewed it before me on Epinions and another 1210 have reviewed it on Amazon. I'm not sure what else I can bring to the party. Four years after its release I've finally seen Fight Club, in fact I've seen it twice. Ironically, now that I've seen it I would not characterize it as a "violent film" and I had no trouble viewing even its more violent scenes of which there are plenty.

Based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, I suspect the story is better told in print because the screenplay, as good as it is, constantly has a literary and, to me, a somewhat annoying ring to it and I couldn't help visualizing the dialog on a printed page. It's kind of like a darker, more psychotic cousin of High Fidelity with its voice-over narration and characters who speak in quips. There is an embarrassing cleverness that is slightly perceptible.

The film was directed by David Fincher. I think he showed a marked degree of artistry. The film is 100% engaging and careens along at a pace that never bogs down. The lighting is dim to dark and made me feel as if I was watching the whole film from the shadows...nice touch. The soundtrack by the Dust Brothers amps up the testosterone from the opening credits and sets an edgy tone that suggests an exhilarating sense of disintegration.

The four key actors all did commendable jobs. Edward Norton who plays the Narrator and 1/2 of the team who creates the "Fight Club" doesn't even appear to be acting. He's that good. He makes us forget that he is playing a character. He plays a hapless and disillusioned cubicle clone who works as a re-call specialist for a major auto manufacturer. His job requires him to assess the bottom line with regard to faulty equipment failures that cost people their lives. He has to crunch the numbers and determine what's cheaper...law suits or a recall. Just like the real-life cost-benefit analysis which Ford Motor Company used with regard to its flawed and lethal Pinto in the '70s, the Norton character's company-mandated and formulaic decisions cost lives....day in day out...but they help him buy trendy furniture and preppy name brand clothes. Not surprisingly, he suffers from insomnia.

Brad Pitt plays Tyler Durden, an enigmatic and charismatic anarchist with a hot bod and a nihilistic streak wider than the Grand Canyon. Brad Pitt, people...he's perfect for this role. He's a living action figure, a perfect example of art imitating life imitating art imitating life. With his chiseled abs, pecs, lats and jaw he looks the part and with his familiar skill he fleshes out the character of Tyler to perfection, however without much of a stretch from anything we've seen previously. This is a sign of great casting but not necessarily great acting, although I have nothing much to fault here. Tyler is the master-mind of Fight Club.

Helena Bonham Carter plays Marla Singer, a jaded, sleezy-looking urban wraith who exhibits a flickering pilot light of sensitivity and humanity. As Tyler once puts it, "At least she's trying to hit bottom." Carter is great in this role and brings an understated humor to the part and elicits sympathy for her character without ever coming out and asking for it.

Meat Loaf plays Bob, a testicular cancer survivor who has developed huge boobs from the hormone imbalances of steroid abuse and the surgery. For the most part, Meat Loaf plays this part well, and shows a pathetic boyish innocence and need for acceptance. His earliest scene in which he meets the Norton character at a support group seems to flirt too incautiously with slap stick for my taste but otherwise he comports himself with skill in this role. The supporting cast is perfect to the last man.

Norton's character who is also the Narrator goes to a large number of different support groups, nearly every day of the week. These are support groups for catastrophic illnesses like testicular cancer, tuberculosis, blood parasites. People go to these because they're trying to cope with suffering by sharing their feelings. Norton goes because he can't sleep. Listening to the sufferers vent their pain gives him permission to vent his own and he is cleansed enough by his mini-emotional breakdowns to get a little shut-eye now and then. It's all working pretty well until he notices Marla at several of the groups and his realization that she is a tourist confronts him with his own tourism and wrecks it for him. As he puts it, "I can't cry if there's another faker present." He can't stand Marla and they agree to divy up the groups and avoid each other.

The Norton character meets Tyler on a plane on one of his business trips. Tyler, a soap salesman dressed in a mismatched ensemble that looks like an explosion in a Goodwill store spouts an intriguing bunch of anarchistic rhetoric that prompts the Norton guy to say, "Tyler, you are by far the most interesting single-serving friend I've ever met. When Norton gets back to his apartment he discovers it has been destroyed along with all his substantial collection of trendy worldly possessions. He has nowhere to go and no real friends to which to turn. He thinks about dialing up Marla but hangs up without speaking. Using the business card he got on the plane, he dials up Tyler, they get together and Tyler agrees to allow the Narrator to live with him. He then asks the Narrator to hit him. At first the Narrator thinks that is just too weird but goaded on by Tyler, the two eventually get into a full blown fist fight. Afterward they feel a sense of release and the Fight Club is born. Narrator ends up living with Tyler in his filthy, dilapidated and abandoned house lost in the Twilight Zone of urban and industrial decay. The house is the metaphorical opposite of the sterile, cookie-cutter materialism he has previously assembled around himself.

As time goes by their fights escalate, they are seen fighting by a few random passersby and Fight Club begins to grow. It grows and grows until thousands of men in many cities are members. Even weepy, emotionally fragile Bob becomes a member...and feels much better. The men meet in various dark and dank basements in the wee small hours and take turns beating the hell out of each other. There are strict rules and the fights seem to help the men cope with their dehumanizing lives in the world of corporate everything. Like an inflated version of William Holden's anchorman in 1976's Network the club members are mad as hell and they're not gonna take it anymore. They don't resort to suicide though, they beat each other to bloody pulp instead. It is like a cruder, more blatant mass performance of cutting that yields catharsis. As the Narrator says, "After fighting everything in your life had the violence turned down."

Meanwhile, Tyler is involved in a mutual sport-f*cking relationship with Marla who seems, in her quest for rock bottom, to subject herself to degrading and violent sex with no emotional content. Her run-ins with the Norton character in the house inexplicably seem to disappoint and insult her.

Fight Club escalates to Operation Mayhem and its members engage in covert acts of vandalism on a large scale with corporate America as its target and terrorism upon the dronelike average Joe as its ironic focus of compassion. A training camp for Operation Mayhem is instituted by Tyler without consulting the Norton character. This doesn't sit well with him and it starts to seem like the Fight Club thing has gotten out of hand. As it spirals out of control there is a big plot twist.

Post-viewing musings:

I enjoyed this movie. It kept me thinking and it kept me engaged. The violent content seemed cosmetic to the statements it was making about modern culture. The narration blunts the emotional trauma of the violence and creates a sense of detachment from it. I would recommend that you not skip this film, as I did for awhile, simply because you fear violence. The violence is a prop.

I did ask myself why a fictional illustration of "You are not your job" seemed interesting enough to create a book and a film around. I thought everybody knew that at least in their heart of hearts. This is not a new concept. Having seen the whole film, I now realize that while not a new concept this rendering of it is brilliant. This film, seemed to me to be a comedy (albeit a dark one), a fantasy (for those of us capable of realizing the parameters of this construct we call modern life) and a satire that not only pokes fun of modern life but of our convoluted coping mechanisms and our own whiny failure to accept responsibility for this travesty of materialistic infantilism. It seemed to me to say that caring about other human beings is the key to sanity in the insane not-so-funhouse of our culture. The satire is a double-edged sword that hews not only corporate world/material world but also the Narrator/Tyler analysis of it, their method for combating it and their ultimate re-creation of a similar mindless world, different only in that its insensitivity and violence is physical rather than abstract.

I'm a female so maybe I'm making something of this that isn't there but femininity seems to be used as a foil in this film and I feel this "seeming" is part of the satire. The discarded liposuction waste fat from rich women's "fat asses" is rendered to make the grotesque soaps that Tyler sells. The modern man's fear of the potential Loreena Bobbitt in all women is mentioned. As though Mother is to blame Tyler says "We are a generation of men raised by women. I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need." A female terminal cancer patient yearns to get laid like a pathetic Make a Wish recipient. Bob, probably the most pathetic of the male characters has femalelike breasts. Looking like a woman, who wouldn't need a support group? Marla seeks something real, even in the unlikely arena of sport-f*ucking and decay. For most of the film Tyler uses her. The Narrator is aggravated and annoyed by her. Tyler eventually thinks she must be dispensed with because she knows too much. In part of the opening statement by the Narrator, when he says, "all of this had something to do with a girl named Marla Singer," we are given our best glimpse into the message behind the plot mayhem. The males all seem to miss the point when it comes to females...or do they just plain miss the point about themselves and that's the point? There are no female fight club members. Throughout the film Marla is a key to real time, figuratively and literally.

Along the way and sprinkled liberally throughout this satire are droll one-liners that have elements of truth, like "The things you own end up owning you," or "Self-improvement is masturbation," or "Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy $hit we don't need."

I admit to enjoying the part where the Fight Club mayhem unit grabs the Police Commissioner. The old trade unionist in me exulted. The Police Commissioner has pledged to stop the underground terrorist cells operating in his city but the mayhem boys gag him with duct tape and hold a blade to his balls as Tyler tells him, "The people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances, we guard you while you sleep. Do not f*ck with us!" I think the general atmosphere of anarchy is what so many people love about this film. There is more to this film than this sentiment however and I think a lot of people miss that.

The scene where Tyler is holding a convenience store night-clerk at gunpoint and ordering him to go back to school and get the degree in veterinary medicine that he has given up on, ostensibly, so that he will savor life all the more and do something meaningful with his life is a perfect tongue-in-cheek jab at Tyler's self-righteousness. After all, who's to say a convenience store clerk's job is any less meaningful than a corporate-minded veterinarian who puts down the pets of people who can't afford treatment. It's not the job we do but the way we do the job. Tyler does not seem to get this.

The relationship between Tyler and the Narrator seems to explore the extremes of self-analysis and self-help. It illuminates the fragmentation experienced by the Narrator when he finds himself swept along by the impetus of the machine of commercialism, materialism and capitalism. Tyler shepherds the Narrator along telling him that "hitting bottom isn't a weekend retreat. Stop trying to control everything and just let go," and also "Never be complete. Stop being perfect." The Norton character reaches a point in the Fight Club where, as he says,"Everywhere we went we were sizing things up." His life becomes the fight against corporate dehumanization and the fight becomes just as depersonalizing as that which he fights against.

Well, I'm starting to get into blah, blah, blah land now...so I'll stop, but I can say that I am glad I saw this movie because it was fun. It was creative and pulled me in and made me think. It didn't do any damage to my sensitive tree-hugging soul because its violence was as much the object of satire as the cardboard and plastic world it more openly lampooned. If you are one of the few people who haven't seen it (or reviewed it), check it out.


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This has been my contribution to lynus' Let's See You Review This Write-Off, Part 2. I initially considered pnutmom's choice of this film for me to review as somewhat harsh in light of what a flower-child I am. I actually freaked out a little bit...no...a lot. She even offered me a second choice. Now I'm glad that I watched it. If you want to get the scoop on this W/O go here to find out.