Fighting Talk - Fight Club - David Fincher's film - Edward Norton, who stars - Interview

Interview, Nov, 1999 by Graham Fuller

Fight Club - David Fincher's film about an underground society for guys who beat each other to a pulp while training to blow up America's corporation's - is one of the most genuinely shocking mainstream movies of the decade. Edward Norton, who stars in it with Brad Pitt, tells us what he thinks it's saying

David Fincher's Fight Club, which unfolds at warp speed on a dank American cityscape and in skyways fraught with plane crashes waiting to happen, takes the shape of a confessional: that of a yuppie (Edward Norton) who has invested so deeply into brand-name consumerism that his apartment is an Ikea showroom and his co-opted life a swamp of soulless despair. Unable to connect, unable to sleep, he becomes a support-group junkie and meets Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), a walking mess with a death wish from which she needs saving, and, crucially, the Mephistophelian Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), with whom he forms an underground society for men who seek to shake themselves out of spiritual torpidity by beating each other up. For Tyler, the logical conclusion to this project is the wholesale destruction of corporate America. Rather late in the day, Norton's narrator realizes that Tyler's anarchic solution is no solution at all.

One of the most provocative Hollywood movies in many a year, this hyperstylized adaptation of Chuck Palahnluk's sardonic novel is both an unrepentantly nihilistic appraisal of twentysomething disaffection and a trenchant storm warning about materialistic self-enslavement: It's best summed up as a cinematic Y2K of the soul. But whichever way you interpret it, it's going to invoke reactionary wrath. We asked Norton to tell us what the movie means to him.

GRAHAM FULLER: What were the core ideas in the Fight Club script that you wanted to get your teeth into as an actor?

EDWARD NORTON: Fincher sent me the novel, and I read it in one sitting. It's obviously a surreal piece that operates at an almost allegorical level within someone's madness, and I felt immediately that it was on the pulse of a zeitgeist I recognized. It speaks to my generation's conflict with the American material values system at its worst. I guess I've felt for a long time that a lot of the films that were aimed at my generation were some baby boomer perception of what Gen-X was about. They seemed to be tailored to a kind of reductive image of us as slackers and to have a banal, glib, low-energy, angst-ridden realism, none of which I or anyone I know relates to. They didn't speak to the deeper and darker underlying sense of despair and paralysis and numbness in the face of the overwhelming onslaught of media information that we've received from the cradle.

Fight Club seemed much more on the money because it named a lot of what we resent about our inheritance. On one reading of the book, I could remember aphorisms from it that had the immediate ring of a real generational voice welling up and crystallizing ideas about our being raised on television to believe that we all should be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, and saying that advertising has us working in jobs to make money so we can buy a bunch of shit that we don't need.

I called Fincher and told him I thought it was disturbing but that it made me laugh, because I recognize so much of it and because the narrator's plight is so desperate. I found myself relating to his self-indulgent but valid sense of complete dislocation. You just don't get to read generational nerve pieces like that very often.

GF: Isn't there a danger it could be an overreaction to the Ikea-and-Starbucks culture it criticizes? It's an easy target.

EN: Whether or not it's an easy target, it's certainly the source of a common complaint, and I personally find it to be very pernicious. I think there is a serious corruption in the idea sold through advertising that you can attain spiritual peace through lifestyle, and the notion of building your happiness from the outside-in by acquiring things - which, if you think about it, is the essence of advertising. This is where I completely agree with Tyler Durden - it's a recipe for spiritual disaster. We tried to set up a mournful, almost Holden Caulfield-like inner narrative in the film as my character talks about his life of travel and hotel rooms with mouthwash and toothbrushes and single servings and mini-everythings. Tyler, of course, is very quick to bust him for sidestepping the pain he feels about the textures of his life by being smug and cynical. Tyler is, in effect, the reassertion of the purer self. He has a moral certainty, and he's willing to name hypocrisy when he sees it. He's willing to do whatever he has to do to explore what might be right, whereas my character acknowledges what's wrong but holds back from completely stripping himself of those things because they are still a security blanket for him.

A lot of people have been responding to Tyler as a sort of Nietzschean ubermensch in the sense that he's advocating liberation of the human individual through the rejection and destruction of the institutions and value systems that are enslaving us. Now, that's certainly correct. But the tension in the film comes from my character asking, What are the limitations of a nihilistic attitude? It can be enthralling, it can be seductive, it can feel liberating on certain levels. But at what point do the practical applications of it start to become exactly the things they're critiquing, and at what point do Tyler's initiatives start to dehumanize people just as much? I like that the film raises those questions, but then it dumps them in your lap and leaves you to sort it all out instead of supplying an easy answer.