Fight Club is one of the odder movies I've seen in some time. That's partly a good thing, partly not. It's certainly one of last year's more challenging offerings.
***Spoilers to follow throughout***
Edward Norton, who is well on his way to becoming one of our better actors (provided he steers clear of crap like Keeping the Faith) is Our Hero -- or rather, Our Anti-Hero -- a cubicle rat whose lone mode of expression seems to be accessorizing his cinder-block apartment. Norton's nameless protagonist manifests his deep-seated dissatisfaction with his drone life by becoming a hardcore insomniac, and in turn prowling late-night encounter groups. Like an episode of Jerry Springer, Norton's pseudonymous forays into testicle cancer survivors' groups make him feel at least a little better about his own existence. After all, at least he still has his balls.
Or does he?
Norton begins a push-pull relationship with a fellow encounter group "imposter", played with skanky vigor by Helena Bonham Carter. Alternately attracted and repelled to each other, these two oddballs set the stage for a bizarre relationship to follow.
Norton's peripatetic job as a automotive recall actuary pairs him up with a soapmaker called Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). Durden is everything Norton wishes he could be -- bold, good-looking, flashy. After an "accident" at Norton's apartment building, he moves in with Durden in a rundown house, and begins his metamorphosis. In so doing, the two form a club of after-hours brawling, sort of a blue-collar urban alternative to the drum-beating, forest-wuss, men-who-hug Iron John crap that floated through a decade ago.
Not having read Chuck Palahniuk's novel, it's difficult for me to say just how loosely director David Fincher adapted from it. But there are several themes Fincher plays with, to varying degrees and effects. The primary one is the recurring theme of emasculation, both individual and societal. As Fight Club evolves into the urban-terrorist collective Project Mayhem, the maximum penalty becomes castration, and there are mentions of how an entire generation of modern men have lost touch with their primal masculinity because they were raised by their mothers. Also, there is the more subtle form of emasculation, in the form of people being slaves to their possessions, clinging to jobs they loathe so they can buy more shit. No one ever dreamed of becoming an automotive recall actuary when they were a kid, and Norton realizes too late that he has hidden his fear behind his Ikea furniture for too long.
Then we have the theme of the fight itself as a sort of purification ritual. Pitt augments this theme with maybe the most intriguing notion in the movie: "What if God hates us? What if He's there after all, but just doesn't like us?" Unfortunately, there's really no follow-up to this line of thought at all; it's just a means to an end. Again, I have no idea if this is Fincher's doing, or Palahniuk's original intent. The ultimate goal, according to Pitt, is to use God's indifference or dislike as an incentive to evolve past what we are, in spite of everything. Sort of a celestial va fan cul, if you will (and you might).
The third theme, borne out in the "Project Mayhem" final third of the movie, is the indictment of the consumer culture. Durden rails against the advertisers and marketers who "make us spend money we don't have to buy shit we don't want", and ultimately wants to cripple the credit system, in order to level the financial playing field. By far, the best scene illustrating this theme, occurring before the Project Mayhem stuff, is where Pitt and Norton steal fat from a liposuction clinic -- and make high-dollar boutique soap out of it. "We're selling their fat asses right back to them," Pitt gloats. While all these themes are worth discussing, the movie doesn't really discuss them so much as to bring them up to dance with briefly. Not that any of them are new themes to begin with -- in fact, all three themes were part and parcel of Tool's spectacular 1996 concept album Ænima, some of whose videos, ironically, were also directed by Fincher. Small world.
Where Fight Club works best is as a dark satire. As an attempt to show one man's strange descent into madness, it's full of holes. And it's even more full of holes attempting to illustrate his ascent from insanity. As what was fairly obvious early on finally becomes a fact in the movie, and Norton's adventure unravels into a prolonged psychotic illusion, only Norton's and Pitt's excellent performances keep the movie on track. Like the "kicker" in Sixth Sense, Fight Club's kicker is not the mule kick its makers intended, but more of an irritating kick to the shins, especially since it wasn't at all a surprise.
Is it Nietzschean übermenschen philosophy, Jungian psychometry, Kaczynski-esque technophobia, post-Bly hyper-macho bonding ritual, or merely Office Space meets Taxi Driver meets Harvey? Fight Club is all of those things, yet it is also none of them, because of its refusal to commit to any or all of those ideas. Everything else is secondary to the raw primality of fist meets face.
But it deserves credit for at least bringing those and other inventive ideas up, and encouraging some post-movie thought and discussion. Fincher's direction is sharp and solid, Pitt and Norton are excellent (as is, surprisingly, Meat Loaf -- yes, that Meat Loaf), and the movie's bloody action never flags. Three planets out of five. Joe Bob says check it out.
