When I used Spout.com’s “Movie Mind” to find what films I might like, “Fight Club” came up more often than any other movie. So I watched it last night and did not like it at all. For those who haven’t seen it, a conventional, repressed, conservative guy working a boring, compromised corporate job meets an unconventional, wild guy and they discover a catharsis and healing in fist fights and, beyond that, in subverting the system.
I’ve got to say I see why a lot of guys like this film. The acting is superb: Brad Pitt is menacing and mercurial; Edward Norton is convincingly troubled; and Helena Bonham Carter is a lost soul who gets worse than she gives. Furthermore, the film is extremely well constructed in a technical sense. One reviewer described it as “heat and movement,” another as “post-MTV.” Most of all, the film has an important theme directly relevant to millions of people: Male homo sapiens do not fit in modern corporate society. For these reasons, I think, a lot of guys say they love this film.
Unfortunately, on three more important counts, the film fails miserably. First, the film strikes a bargain in bad faith with its viewers. Let me make this point inductively by using another movie as an example. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, an unlikely pair, have teamed up, committed adventurous crimes, and are at the last holed up in a Mexican cantina with armed troops surrounding them. The two guys look at each other and . . . which ending would you chose? A) They nod and come out with guns blazing, knowing that it is better for them to die than live cooped up in a stinking jail. Or, B) Butch says to Sundance, “You don’t actually exist. You are really just a part of me, the other half of my split personality. The only way I can get rid of you is to shoot myself.” So he shoots himself in the head. Well, Fight Clubs chooses the second ending. The entire movie portrays the Norton and Pitt characters as different, and near the end Norton discovers that the wild and violent Pitt persona was only the opposite of his conventional side. Surprise! Then comes a second problem. After the entire movie has emphasized gritty realism and feeling pain in order to get in touch what is real, the Norton character shoots himself in the head, the Pitt persona dies, and Norton stands there talking to, and holding hands with, his girl friend. What!?
Those kind of flaws are fatal to any movie you want to call good. But Fight Club also has a more general, nebulous shortcoming. Director David Fincher portrays the reaction of quite a few men in our society, and critics have been split over whether simply portraying the reaction is adequate or whether the director and the writer should take some stand on the issue. But more fundamental questions are simply whether the portrayal is reasonably accurate and whether the movie gives any support for the portrait it paints. When the men get together in clubs all over the country and beat each other, it makes a kind of sense to me and is supported by the movie’s depiction of the conventional office career and the psychological problems it brings. But the movie falls apart when the opposition to society moves to the next level. The men organize and start Operation Mayhem, attacking miscellaneous targets, destroying an elite coffee shop, blowing up a television store, and threatening to kill a convenience store owner/worker unless he follows his dream of becoming a veterinarian. The movie does not take time to explain why most of this mayhem is justified. Worse, it does not explain at all why the men willing become fascist robots. Fincher and his colleagues are not saying this is good or bad but rather that this is the way it will be or could be. But Fight Club does nothing to convince us of why men who felt oppressed and belittled by society would gladly join another society that oppressed and belittled them even more. Are male homo sapiens that stupid?