Fight Club
“Fight Club,” directed by David Fincher, strives to create a world in which men are encouraged to beat each other senseless. The film, a cinematic adaptation of the novel originally written by Chuck Palahniuk, paints a violent and bizarre view of our world.
In this brutal film about the self-loathing that comes with emasculation, the antidote to a life without manly feelings is to get together in the basement of a rundown bar for purgative fistfights. The more broken bones, faces destroyed and black eyes given, the happier the members feel the next day at their ordinary day jobs.
Edward Norton plays an insurance inspector whose life is so mundane that buying and assembling Ikea furniture for his one bedroom suite is the biggest flash of excitement for his year. Due to the crippling banality of his day-to-day routine, he can neither sleep nor feel basic human emotion.
Norton’s character, listed in the credits as the narrator of the story, finds support in medical support groups designated for addicts and terminally ill cancer patients. After visiting many, he decides that his favorite group is the one for testicular cancer. He has only lost metaphorically what the other men in his group are missing, but the weekly hug-fests comfort him.
As the story drags on, two opposing forces enter Norton’s life, and for much of the movie, it’s hard to tell which is more destructive to his well-being. There’s Helena Bonham Carter, who plays a fellow support-group junkie and Maria Singer, who also attends these weekly meetings and obstructs the narrator’s false sense of happiness. There is also the decisive, traveling soap salesman Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a rebellious visionary who pulls the narrator into his cruel world of Fight Club, which include chemical burns and meaningless acts of vandalism.
As Norton begins to withdraw himself from human interactions, the narrator and Durden become a team, fighting against the rules and laws implemented by society. Most of their conflicts, however, are with each other.
“Fight Club” felt taxing and empty, but not unintelligent, and its loathing of the eight hour job life won’t meet much resistance. There are those who will disapprove of its use of violence, although it’s hardly groundbreaking just because everyone’s faces get bashed. And there are those who will embrace it for the wrong reasons, thinking it’s a daring indictment of society.
In its final moments, “Fight Club” resorts to a trick ending that sends a final left hook of new information your way. It requires the viewer to backtrack over the whole film, reviewing his or her perceptions—never mind that this action opens all sorts of new plot holes that will leave you wondering where you went wrong.
Overall, the film, although viewed and praised by many, is far too distant, bizarre and unnecessarily violent in my opinion to have become a classic since its release in 1999.