FIGHT CLUB

FIGHT CLUB (1999) ***1/2

Reviewed 10/29/99

At the risk of pulling an Armond White (obnoxious critic at The New York Press for those who don't know), I think many reviewers have missed the boat on David Fincher's new film, Fight Club. Few films this year has been as divisive among opinion-makers as Fight Club has. While the soon-to-be-retiring Janet Maslin liked the movie, the usually artist-friendly Sunday Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times sported a harshly critical article on the film and its director by David Thomson. The normally intelligent veteran New Yorker critic David Denby and Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwartzbaum completely misread the movie. Even the film's supporters confuse the issue by focusing on what the film has to say about 1990s' American culture. Fight Club is about two things, two different problems. The first problem is capitalism and its spawn, gross materialism. The second problem is with a potential solution to the first one -- terrorism fed by male emasculation in a postmodern society. Misreadings of Fight Club emerge when critics believe the film is offering an answer. It is not. It is offering a warning.

The story starts with our narrator protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), obsessed with Ikea furniture and suffering from insomnia. He finds a cure in attending support group meetings for ailments he does not have until another faker, the impoverished Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) invades his turf. Then he meets the charismatic Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) on a business flight. After Jack's apartment mysteriously burns up, he moves in with Tyler in a decrepit old house. Tyler laments about how today's consumer lifestyle drowns away reality and he introduces Jack to fighting as a way to feel alive. The high comes not only from beating on others, but on the vivid, sadomasochistic pain one experiences and shares. Soon they have drawn many other men into their fight club, and before Jack knows it, Tyler is turning Fight Club into a terrorist organization. Their relationship is further complicated by Tyler's sexual relationship with Marla.

If this sounds completely unreal, that's because it's supposed to be. Implausibility is one method Fincher utilizes to avoid promoting of Fight Club-type violence in the real world. The other is to simply criticize that fighting in the film itself. My fellow net critic, Skander Halim describes David Fincher's style just right in his own review of Fight Club -- "the 'bleak chic,' the wallowing in sadism, the MTV camera tricks, the gimmicky twist endings, the severe credibility problems, the absence of any real emotional core." These are present in all of Fincher's overrated oeuvre, Alien³, Se7en, The Game, and they are in Fight Club too. But this time, Fincher criticizes his own aesthetic by turning it into pointed black comedy. I don't understand how people can overlook Fincher's romanticization of Kevin Spacey's serial killer in Se7en, but Fincher is much more self-aware here.

Adapting Chuck Palahniuk's book, writer Jim Uhls and Fincher apply Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of the Will to Power in a world of alienation brought about through consumer culture. When Tyler says one has to lose everything to be free, Uhls dialogue is emphasizing Nietzsche's belief that the awareness of nihilism had to be obtained before we could in turn establish meaningfulness. Tyler embodies Nietzsche's frequently misunderstood übermensch in his supreme amorality and in his testing of others -- that which does not kill makes us stronger. But ultimately Nietzsche's philosophy was one of meaning and creation, not nihilism and destruction. Tyler's objective is to destroy everything without giving a hint as to what will replace it.

What we see from Uhls and Fincher though is precisely how those who rebel from society form their own groups with their own repressive conformity. In this case, Tyler's soldiers are absurdly loyal in their stupidity. More so, three-quarters of the way through the film, Fight Club delivers an unbelievable twist. What would have been a fatal flaw in another film is a surprisingly subversive thematic challenge in this one. The twist demolishes most of what the film seemed to be striving for until then, and suddenly the viewer is open to make a choice between the problem and the solution. And this is where Fincher's tale becomes truly cautionary, not against explosions of violence stemming from male frustration, but against dismantling rampant materialism while replacing it with mass chaos.

Fight Club is far from a perfect film. Fincher is still too self-indulgent, and the final scene (not the split-second joke) is crude. Also the film's connection between superficial consumerism and male castration anxiety is rather vapid; otherwise, we wouldn't have professional wrestling. Though they share the same theme of the shallowness of capitalist-induced materialism, Fight Club does not have the sophistication of Todd Haynes' Safe, but it is rare to get something so thought-provoking from a big-budgeted Hollywood film, and for that, we should be thankful.