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WHAT does a title like Fight club convey? Another Rocky or Raging Bull ? But that’s only half the truth. Against the sporadic slug-fests, David Fincher’s Fight Club takes his worldview to extremes. The subjects include bare-kunckle fighting, urban terrorism and nihilism while sex and violence are the very essence of the film.
Fincher’s last film was the stylishly dark drama Seven (Brad Pitt was in it too) which made waves. Set in an unidentified, semi-stylised 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 to sit on a cancer victims group to put his own problem in perspective and he soon becomes addicted to support groups for a range of terminal illnesses, freely weeping and embracing "fellow sufferers" as a means of overcoming his insomnia. |
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| But the arrival of another tourist, Marla
Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) makes him uncomfortable
with his dishonesty. Around this time, he meets the
enigmatic Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), who moonlights as a
projectionist splicing pornographic images into family
films and as a waiter who sabotages meals. Weird with a
capital W Tyler Cakes the narrator to his lodgings after
his apartment and all his material possessions are gutted
in a freak explosion. Thus begins their bond or
brotherhood. A persuasive speaker, Tyler encourages a lost generation of men to access pain as a remedy for contemporary despair or numbness. This brotherhood grows to alarming proportions and with devastating results. It is megalomaniacal, even diabolic. Like any secret society, its activities are seditious. But it is also about the battle of the sexes. When the narrator and Tyler are both in love with Marla you think of a Jules and Jim or Willie and Phil kind of relationship but the story then moves on to hint at an In Cold Blood type of liaison in which two characters complement each other to commit a string of murders. The situation is explosive. David Fincher, who learned his trade making movie-videos for the likes of Aerosmith, Madonna and the Rolling Stones, is equally uncompromising about what he does in Fight Club. He says "you should educate people about the repercussions of violence... this is a moral movie, every bit as moral as say M.A.S.H." Fight Club is based on a first novel by Chuck Palahnuik, a mid-30s truck mechanic from Portland, Oregan, who got so fed up of fixing transmissions that didn’t need fixing that he joined the writers club. But Hillary Johnson, writing in the Village Voice, claims what drives Palahnuik’s novel is what she calls "the emasculation of Western civilisation." And she has some interesting observations on the subject. Citing a story in The Economist, Johnson writes on "imminent large-scale social and economic obsolescence of the male species. Men are failing at work, at school and in families, in theory because the modern knowledge and skill-oriented world is basically testosterone-intolerant. While men’s strength and aggression were useful in establishing the modern world, they are an impediment to its smooth day-to-day operation, a task better suited to the instincts and behaviour of females." Author Palahnuik says "we are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we’ll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won’t." Be that as it may, Fight Club comes up with some startling and thought-provoking theories. "First rule of Fight Club. You don’t talk about Fight Club. Second rule of Fight Club. You don’t talk about Fight Club." Then "Tyler says the things you own end up owning you. It’s only after you’ve lost everything you’re really free to do anything. Fight Club represents a kind of freedom." there are more. "Tyler says self-improvement is masturbation." Then again "Tyler says self-destruction might be the answer." It is like a game of Simon says. Step by step, this weird brotherhood is heading for its catastrophic climax. At one time you begin to wonder why do they make films like this? Then it dawns on you it isn’t glorifying violence. In truth it is against it. It is not just nihilism but a vibrant brand of it. Well structured and with the right blend of form and content, Fincher comes out with a winner. Edward Norton is brilliant, picking up from where he left off in American History X and Brad Pitt runs neck and neck with Nortan as the enigmatic, megalomaniacal nihilist, at times trying to imitate the legendary James Dean. As for Helena Bonham Carter she is able to project her versatility as an erotic woman, not the sweet young thing she was in A Room With a View. So don’t miss Fight Club which is a real stunner. As scary as it is thought-provoking. |
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Says Nick Roddick in last
September/October issue of Preview: "In an
early scene, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton go down in a
dank basement and beat the crap out of one another,
almost for the sake of it. In Fight Club fighting
is about fighting, not winning. There are no rules, other
than you don’t tell anyone about the club. It’s
part of a process of finding yourself in a world where
your identity has become increasingly tied down with what
you do, where you live, what you wear, what you
earn..."