If you buy a ticket to Fight Club expecting to see blood, most of Brad Pitt, and a healthy serving of violence, you won't be disappointed. But this is no simple fight movie. With this follow-up to his unnerving 1995 thriller Seven, David Fincher delivers a powerful, fast-moving and thought-provoking film that stimulates on numerous levels. The cinematography is first-rate, the special effects excellent, and the film offers one of the best narratives in years. Edward Norton is simply superb as the deadpan off-screen Jack that guides us through the story and adds snippets of background information where necessary.
At the beginning we meet Jack, a milquetoast corporate drone who provides our first look at writer Jim Uhls' depiction of his 90's everyman, trapped in a thankless nine-to-five job and ground down by the banality of his modern existence as a by-the-numbers consuming automaton. This role is set into sharp relief in an early scene where Jack sits hunched over the toilet with an Ikea catalog in one hand and a portable phone in the other, placing an order for living room pieces that would finish out his all-Ikea condo. "I'd flip through catalogs, trying to figure out which dining set defines me as a person," he recounts in the narrative.
Jack works for a large, unnamed auto company as an incident investigator, looking into accidents and employing simplistic formulae as the basis for deciding whether or not to conduct recalls. The dissatisfaction with his work, the constant travel and the general malaise into which his life has slid finds him unable to sleep, and he consequently begins to spend his days and nights in a kind of hazy purgatory between waking and sleep.
And then he meets Tyler Durden. Brad Pitt is almost perfect in this role as the insolent, charismatic, and reckless antithesis to Jack's everyman. Tyler is rather enigmatic (for a soap salesman) and leaves a strong enough impression on Jack that he rings him up later when his Ikea-intensive condo takes a turn for the worst. Tyler ends up putting Jack up in his fabulously dilapidated urban mansion, and then things really start to take off.
Tyler and Jack start Fight Club, an informal gathering of 20- and 30-something, mostly muscular men disaffected with their dull, monotonous lives in the service and manufacturing industries and looking for the charge of real experience. Or something. This is never made very clear, but these figures evidently find something cathartic in the brutal, consensual violence in which they participate week after week. There are countless scenes showing shirtless men beating one another bloody before finishing with a close embrace of masculine camaraderie. The homoeroticism is clear in these and other scenes, but never develops into anything other than male pattern bonding.
Before long their numbers begin to grow, and the Fight Club expands its activities beyond the walls of the club basement where things began. This new direction, dubbed Club Mayhem, is driven and managed by an increasingly mythic Tyler, ever more powerful with the full and unwavering support of a growing cadre of adherents who have come to serve him. Soon Tyler and Jack's ramshackle house becomes a bustling nerve center of activity as Club Mayhem sets about preparing for their biggest act of urban terrorism yet.
But rather than give the entire story away, I'll conclude my overview of the storyline with that.
There are other things happening on the periphery that I've neglected to mention, including a bizarre love/hate relationship between Jack and Tyler and the darkly sensual, chain-smoking Marla, played by Helena Bonham Carter. Initially appearing as a fellow addict of the 12-step and support group circuit, she is described by narrator Jack as "the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if you could only stop tonguing it--but you can't." She and Jack eventually butt heads at a support group meeting and work out an arrangement to "split things up." But then a twist brings Tyler and Marla together for marathon sessions of vocal, rambunctious sex that soon infuriate Jack.
And then there's Meat Loaf, bigger than ever and appearing as testicular cancer survivor Bob, hair cropped short and sporting prosthetic "b*tch tits" due to the hormonal havoc wrought following the removal of his testes. Bob's character is ludicrous yet believable as the Testicular Cancer Support Group member who joins the others every week to "stand together and cry."
Fincher and Ulhs tie all of this together nicely, mostly succeeding at keeping the viewer firmly held within the confines of the phantasmagorical reality they've created with Fight Club. The numerous messages that appear throughout the film are less clearly defined, however, and often end up diluted or forgotten all together as the movie careens through a succession of rapid twists and turns. The anti-consumerism message, symbolized early in the film by an Ikea catalog and echoed later in the words of Tyler as he exhorts Jack, "You are not what you own. You are not how much you have in the bank. You are not your khakis. You are not a unique and beautiful snowflake." Warnings about materialism and its discontents recur periodically throughout the film, but are never supported to the extent necessary to make believable their implicitly tendered corollary--that our empty materialism leads inevitably to the kind of haunted disaffection with life and living epitomized by the everyman figures that populate the film's backdrop. Remember, these guys (and they are all guys, by the way) have ostensibly been so hollowed out emotionally and mentally, so detached from other people and the world around them that they actually crave the feeling of knuckles pounding flesh, of blood pouring forth from their own shredded lips and gums, of the sheer rush of physical combat.
It's difficult to correlate these raucous, well-muscled extras with the actual Ikea and Seinfeld set and the almost bovine-like contentedness they exhibit, happily immersed in carefully crafted demographic cocoons. In the Coca-Cola (TM) society of the early 21st century we see no machine-directed rage, no throaty paeans to vaguely-defined anarchistic ideology, no crumpled paycheck stubs in the clenched fists of workers. The fact is, for most of us, if you wannna see these things yourself you need to pay the man at the door and go find a seat, a fact that makes Fight Club all the more presumptuous in the final analysis.
They've given us what we want--all the brutality, spilled blood and sex we expect in a Brad Pitt blockbuster--only packaged in a way that leaves us free to swagger out of the theatre with the smug assurance of the rebel consumer--in on the joke, freshly entertained, and only seven bucks for the worse.
On the surface, Fight Club aspires to more than the typical, formulaic parade of eye candy and hip machismo, but in the end it fails to deliver on this promise. It's entertaining, it's thought provoking, and it has some worthwhile things to say. But in the end it's basically Brad Pitt with his shirt off, a script with some potential, and just another lesson in What's Cool Now.
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