JimBell Blog

Fight Club

Under discussion:
Fight Club (1999)

Under discussion:

Fight Club (1999)

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?

posted on Friday, June 15, 2007 1:12 AM by JimBell

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SkyPilot
Posted Monday, June 18, 2007 1:07 PM

As fight clubs spread around the nation, the occupations of the fighters vary greatly from boring, compromised corporate jobs. So waiters and airline workers and executives are finding common ground in this fight club, and what I think the film shows is "conventional" about all of them, is that modern society has no rites of passage of men.

Put another way, doesn't Tyler Durden (Pitt) say in the movie "We are the first generation without fathers" ? In other words, we are the first generation of men who haven't been shown how to BE men BY men. What can men do anymore?

Destructiveness is easier than constructiveness, especially when that destructiveness includes the first 'family' these un-manned men have ever had. Tyler Durden is the father who gives them meaning, and I think history is full of people who are willing to become powerful fascist robots.

I don't see the movie as trying to justify itself. I see Fincher's film, unlike Palahniuh's pubescent book, to be a mature warning/observation about what happens when men of all stripes (not just corporate, not just American, not just 'western') are not shown how to be--good men. The ambiguity of the question "What is a good man?" is not sufficient grounds to throw out the question, because throwing out the possibility of a good man leaves men without role models. Then--enter Tyler Durden...

Candywarholl
Posted Saturday, June 16, 2007 5:37 AM

have either of you ead yhe book out of interest
movies insanly good but check out chuck palniuk
superb

quint
Posted Friday, June 15, 2007 2:40 PM

You raise some great points here. Wow. Fantastic review. In retrospect, I think the fantasy of male empowerment against corporate bureaucracy has a good glow to it, but I found those very twists the movie takes to justify itself without taking a stance, to be cheap ploys. What satisfies is worn thin and only held together by confusion. We are left with the safety of a lover's arms while the world collapses and the Pixies serenade a weary generation.

In the end, the best answer this movie can come up with is simple love. But the pitch was so much bigger than that. The author and the filmmaker seem to throw up their hands and pull the magic levers and the wizard of oz speaks on.

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