Boys' Night Out. - Review - movie review

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Jan, 2000 by Christopher Sharrett

DAVID FINCHER'S "Fight Club," like the director's earlier "Seven," places doomsday moodiness within humdrum routines and neuroses. While "Seven," a latter-day film noir, expressed a surprisingly medieval vision of the abyss within the conventions of a police thriller about the collapse of the justice system and all notions of meaning and normality, "Fight Club" finds its terror in the equally familiar terrain of the angry white male narrative. It isn't as flat-footed and polemical a film as "Falling Down," but it shares the anxieties of a host of cultural products that suggest the world's problems take a backseat to male frustrations.

The nameless narrator (Edward Norton) is a "recall coordinator" for a nameless megacorporation. He travels around the country inspecting car wrecks and plane crashes, protecting his employer from liability. The movie is a whirlwind of images that would make Russian director Sergei Eisenstein dizzy. The narrator addresses the audience head-on, after an unnerving prologue/flash-forward showing him with a 9mm automatic shoved into his mouth as he sits hog-tied on the barren top floor of an office towel He then takes the audience all over the place. For long stretches, viewers are inside trash cans, medicine cabinets, and one of the many Ikea catalogues that take up the narrator's free hours and disposable income.

The densely written script, a close adaptation of a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, is a kind of primal scream that pushes the envelope of film narrative style. At times, the movie looks like a political tract against consumer society and its associated profound alienation and ennui. It is also one of those pictures that want to rip the medium apart. At a couple of points, the film's sprocket holes are seen as the image vibrates violently and threatens to explode. The movie also plays with subliminal images that, if audiences catch them on first viewing, seem gratuitous and unnerving until their role is seen in the narrator's escapades.

Like the works of David Cronenberg and a host of pictures that seem to recognize the exhaustion of the medium, "Fight Club" is about the slow death of capitalist civilization and the ravages it has perpetrated on everyday life. The narrator finds solace in 12-step programs and support groups, including one for men with testicular cancer, and it is here that the other side of the film's agenda becomes explicit.

In his nighttime journeys in search of psychological catharsis, the narrator meets a punkish businessman named Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), who, while manifestly unhinged, simultaneously has it all together, and promptly becomes the guru/ego ideal for the narrator. After the narrator's luxury condo mysteriously explodes, he moves in with Durden, who forsakes upper mobility to occupy a condemned building in "the most toxic part of town." The duo begins to express with a vengeance the picture's concern with demasculinization and the notion that "we are a generation of men raised by women."

After a chance confrontation in a parking lot, the two men learn the joys of primeval bloodletting within the male group, and set up a "fight club" in the basement of a local bar where men regain their lost selves by pounding each other to a pulp. The corporatized nerd narrator learns what it means to have a red badge of courage, and soon enjoys a form of male bonding that reveals with neon lights the trick the film has in store.

The two men find a following and, before long, fight clubs spring up all over the nation. Durden becomes a neo-fascist demagogue with a democratic face, and the nighttime exploits evolve from punch-outs to trashing the facades of corporate headquarters and terrorizing fast-food clerks. Viewers are informed that Durden makes his living by manufacturing a high-class soap product, but it turns out the soap is derived from bags of body fat lifted from the biohazard bins of liposuction clinics. Durden wants to "sell women's fat asses back to them." The resonance here is disturbing, especially in the association of misogyny with some real horrors of the century--the Nazis had similar notions about the recyclability of the human body.

It develops that Durden is a doppelganger in the tradition of the German expressionist films of the 1920s that are so much an influence on all of Fincher's work. It's a tired device, with the macho Durden merely the unleashed id of the nebbish everyman who speaks to the men in the audience (I've yet to find a woman who finds the picture especially interesting) about the collapse of male identity. The only woman in the movie is a ghost-like vamp (Helena Bonham Carter), a figure also borrowed from the Weimar cinema, whose role, such as it is, seems to be to poke holes in male self-absorption while at the same time being the archetypal wet dream/castrating bitch of adolescent male fantasies.

The anger directed at the feminization of America is as explicit as its hysterical anti-consumer preoccupation. The source of frustration is constantly located in the female, whose presence, embodied in Carter, looms over the film like a death's head. She is either a prize to be possessed or an unhealthy part of the male conscience that must be denied. The film seems to want it both ways, as the narrator annihilates his masculine identity (in so doing wiping out Durden's influence), and joins hands with his girlfriend just in time to watch the apocalyptic fireworks as capitalism explodes around them.