"The Fight Club" is ordinarily the kind of film I would stay away from. The only reason I went is that it thematically related to "American Beauty" and would serve as a useful counterpoint in preparing this review. It seemed over-hyped and, even worse, starred the odious Brad Pitt. Although I found the film nearly unwatchable, it certainly did satisfy in terms of documenting the current scene in the United States through the peculiar perspective of the young director David Fincher and the screenplay based on the novel of Chuck Palahniuk.
The central character in this film, who remains nameless and who is played by Edward Norton, is very much like Lester Burnham. He is trapped in the corporate world and finds himself increasingly dissatisfied with the fruits it is supposed to deliver. He works for an automobile company as a risk assessor. His job is to prepare technical reports on accidents involving his company's products. If it cost more money to fix a car rather than pay off successful claimants in suits against the company, the company opts for not making the necessary changes to make the car safe.
Norton's character leads an unfulfilled and aimless life. Rather than masturbating as an outlet, he buys furniture from Ikea. His entire apartment is covered with tables, chairs, lamps and sofas ordered from their catalog, which also appears to be his only reading material. He also suffers from insomnia for which the only cure seems to come in the form of going to self-help groups for terminal diseases like testicular cancer or tuberculosis. The emotional confessions of the participants gives him a vicarious sense of being alive, which then allows him to sleep soundly. While he enjoys good health, he is closer to death than the people he communes with on a nightly basis. They face physical mortality at any moment. He faces spiritual mortality every moment of his waking life.
On an airplane ride to visit an accident site on behalf of his company, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) who is everything he is not. Brash, self-confident and dressed like a pimp, Durden describes himself as a soap salesman but he gives every indication of leading a darker existence. The Norton character finds himself drawn to Durden.
When he arrives back at his apartment building, he discovers police cars and fire trucks on the scene as flames pour from the windows of his apartment. His precious Ikea furniture and all his belongings have been destroyed in a mysterious explosion, possibly the result of a pilot light having failed on his stove.
Since Durden gave him his business card on the plane, he decides to call him up. In the back of his mind, he considers staying with him until finding a more permanent residence. The two men meet for drinks at a seedy bar and continue the conversation they had on the plane. Basically, Durden puts forth a critique of consumerist society that is absolute to the point of being monomaniacal. There is nothing more evil in this world view than shopping and status-seeking.
After they have had several pitchers of beer, they leave the bar and continue talking in the parking lot. Out of the blue, Durden asks the Norton character to punch him. There is no particular reason for this, but he accommodates him. Whereupon Durden punches him back and the two men trade blows until they fall to the ground bloody and exhausted. Meanwhile, a group of men from the bar stand in a circle around them both entertained and bemused. Why are the two men, who appear to be friends, pounding each other into senselessness? Eventually other men follow in their path and a fight club becomes a regularly scheduled event in the basement of the bar.
While the film does not really take the trouble to explore through dialog the appeal such pointless violence has for these men, it obvious that we are dealing with violence as a form of existential authenticity. Men--and it is men we are talking about--feel trapped in a meaningless existence. To transcend the emptiness of such existence, the only release seems to be the feel of a punch in the nose and the sight of blood pouring from it, either your own or your opponent's. In many ways, this message is simply a recycling of the theme of Camus' "The Stranger", whose existentially unrealized French Algerian character discovers authenticity through the murder of an Arab on the beach, whom he has never met. It also evokes "Clockwork Orange," whose teenaged rebels inflict random violence on peaceful citizens in order to protest the social control of a well-engineered and well-controlled society of the future. "The Fight Club" would seem to be saying that such a world exists today.
Eventually fight clubs spring up around the United States and begin to mutate into nihilistic bands of black clad militia types with shaved heads, who attack symbols of consumer society. In a very telling scene, evocative of recent events in Seattle, they send an immense globular corporate sculpture crashing into a Starbucks coffee bar. The revolution of fight club activists is designed to destroy modern society, not transform it into a positive alternative. This is not far removed from the vision of the Unabomber and the intellectuals like Kirkpatrick Sale and John Zerzan who provide spin-doctoring services for him.
Where "The Fight Club" fails as both cinema and as effective social commentary is in its total lack of engagement with the ideas that might propel these men into such an extreme posture. While one would not expect a film to include the sort of psychological and political analysis of Dostoyevsky's "The Possessed", its total absence leaves the viewer with an inability to understand their motivations. It is simply not sufficient to state that all of a sudden men find themselves willing to be beaten into senselessness as an escape. Anybody who has been beaten up, and I speak from personal experience, does not go through such an experience as a lark. In contrast "Clockwork Orange" is filled with characters explaining why they commit random acts of terror. Their words, drawn from Anthony Burgess's capable prose, are indeed what makes the film successful.
Whatever the flaws of the film, it is a useful snapshot of American society at a peculiar juncture in its unfolding as an empire. In the final years of the second term of the Clinton administration, which by some standards has produced more material success than has been enjoyed in many years, Hollywood is turning out films that curse the system that produced it.
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