Fight Club (10/10)
In Don DeLillo's novel Underworld, one character argues that "Rage and violence can be elements of productive tension in a soul. They can serve the fullness of one's identity. One way a man untrivialises himself is to punch another man in the mouth." This is the subversive idea at the heart of Fight Club.
Edward Norton plays The Narrator. He has a respectable job and an apartment full of nice furniture and clothes, but he is troubled - his job is unsatisfying and he cannot sleep. He seeks comfort in attending self-help groups for people with diseases he doesn't have, finding particular solace in a support group for victims of testicular cancer. Just as The Narrator's life seems a little more settled, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), an anarchic crazy-man with several night-time jobs who spreads a little chaos with everything he does. As a waiter he urinates in the soup. As a cinema projectionist he splices subliminal frames from pornographic movies into family films. As a soap salesman he... but that would be giving away too much.
Outside a bar, Tyler invites The Narrator to hit him. He is reluctant at first, but they soon start brawling. They find a strange satisfaction in their cuts and bruises and meet every week to fight. Other men gather to watch, and eventually one of then asks to join in. The first Fight Club is born. Men from all walks of life gather in a dingy basement and take turns at fist-fighting, beating each other to a pulp, and in the process fighting back against their emasculation at the hands of society and finding out what it means to be a brutish primaeval man again in an over-civilised world. The club is an instant success and fight clubs start appearing all over the country. Tyler Durden becomes an underground hero, but is unsatisfied and seeks to inspire further chaos through the sinister Project Mayhem.
David Fincher directs with a manic hyperactive inventiveness. Astonishing images illustrate throwaway ideas, such as The Narrator's apartment seen as items in an Ikea catalogue, or for a few seconds, a terrifyingly realised mid-air plane collision. The medium of film itself is played with: barely noticeable images appear only for a frame or two, fake cue dots are used, and the film appears to judder and slip in the projector showing its sprocket holes on the screen. And yet none of this comes across as being tricksy: it all makes perfect sense in the context of this surreal wham-bam beat-em-up world. Jim Uhls' screenplay (from Chuck Palahniuk's novel) crackles along providing deliciously dangerous fun. The film contains many jokes, but laughing is rarely an option - the context of the jokes is so dark and the film so quickfire that by the time you've had time to register that something was actually pretty funny, the story has moved on.
Some have expressed outrage at the violence in the film. The fight scenes are indeed very hard to watch, the savageness heightened by the sounds of fist splitting flesh and breaking bone and tooth. One beating in particular is so brutal and bloody that I was glad it had been slightly cut. But like A Clockwork Orange nearly thirty years ago, Fight Club is not so much a violent film as a film about violence, so its disturbing depiction of savagery is more justifiable than the meaningless violence in the average Hollywood action movie. Stanley Kubrick's film raised the question of whether it is right for society to suppress a man's natural brutality. Fight Club takes as a premise that it's too late - social changes have already done it to men on a huge scale - and tells the story of some men's reaction to this denial of their true nature.
Both Norton and Pitt are magnificent, with Norton perhaps just coming out on top given the more complex character he has to play. Excellent design, sound and make-up all contribute to the film's impact and a fine soundtrack from The Dust Brothers provides a perfect hard-but-cool backdrop. There is a staggering and quite bizarre twist in the plot which some people will find harder to stomach than the film's violence, but I thought it gave the film a mythical, fantastical edge and provided a retrospective justification for the film's wild visual style. Dangerous and dazzling, Fight Club is as near as makes no difference a masterpiece and beats Election into second place as my film of the year.
--
Gary Jones
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