FIGHT CLUB Biff! Pow! Socko! Ow, my nose! (I started writing this review in about November of 1999, but decided that I'd hold off finishing it until I'd seen this movie a second time. Most of this has been sitting on my computer for a year and a half. Why the long wait? See my Rosemary's Baby review. Not exactly the same thing, but pretty similar sentiments. I almost erased the whole thing.) It was with a heavy heart that I first saw this movie; 'twas the last night my favorite theater in town, the Showcase Grand, would be in operation. They turned it into some sort of golf dome, the bastards! Heavy heart or not, I came away from this movie the first time thinking and feeling a lot of things, most prominent among them being that this probably worked better as a book. It took months to get around to reading the book this is based on (by Chuck Palahniuk), and the experience only cemented that impression. But it did make me curious to see the film again, so that brings me here; I liked the movie more the second time around, and now I think it worked better as a movie. A second viewing actually managed to dismiss most of the logic problems I had the first time around, and at least made more clear to me where the movie works and where it doesn't. Fight Club, scripted by Jim Uhls (with, reportedly, some uncredited work from Andrew Kevin Walker) is fairly faithful to Palahniuk's book to the best of my remembrance. I'm guessing that before this movie came out, not a lot of people read that book because until the first trailers started showing up, everybody thought this was going to be near-future science fiction. Edward Norton stars playing...well, he doesn't really have a name, but that's the point I guess, because he's kind of without any real identity of his own anyway. (I'm just gonna call him EN; the credits call him "narrator".) He can't sleep, and the only way he can is to attend support groups of various kinds (people with brain parasites, men who've had their testicles removed, etc.) and sob his heart out as if he belonged there. Soon he meets two people; Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), who crashes those support groups the same way EN does and ruins EN's, uh, whatever he gets out of the crying, and Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt, who for reasons which'll become clear in the movie soon enough, I just call BP), who shows EN another way to satisfy that part of himself. Together, EN and BP form Fight Club, a weekend (and soon enough, everyday) gathering of men who, not knowing any other way to be masculine, beat the living shit out of each other. Jared Leto is here too as one of the Fight Clubbers, and what happens with him is sure to give you some immediate revulsion, until you remember "Wait a sec, this is Jared Leto!" Actually, once the twist at the end (more on that later) is resolved, it's actually kind of depressing, even if it IS Jared Leto. I mean, he tried his best, right? There's also Meat Loaf, playing a former bodybuilder, now a gelded mountain of constantly-sobbing jello with big, sweaty bitchtits (EN's words, not mine). Add in a big (nationwide!) stack of dead-eyed men who'll do anything BP says for the chance to beat the shit out of each other (like they couldn't do it at home), and you've got yourself Fight Club! There are kind of two movies at work here, and only one of them seems to have been the pedestal-raised icon of "At last, a movie that speaks to us, the lost generation!" worship to so many. I think it's the wrong one. There's a fine movie here about conflict between personalities, resolved in a twist at the end that makes a second viewing just about mandatory. Yeah, the ol' twist-at-the-end, but this one really works, and going through a second viewing, the script doesn't cheat and director David Fincher only cheats once, on the bus (and even that seemed so out of place, I can't help but think it's intentional). Besides, it's the best kind of surprise ending, the kind that have had so many clues dropped about it along the way that you feel like a damn fool for not having figured it out yourself. But there's also a fairly silly, poorly-reasoned movie here with a lot of attempted philosophical discourse about the "plight" of men today, and it kinda freaks me out that that's the one that gets so much fawning adoration out there. You people are weird! Fincher had, until Fight Club, specialized in taking scripts that were bad (Alien3), scattershot (Seven) or just kind of bland (The Game) and making fine films out of them. Fight Club is the best script he's gotten yet; while that might not be saying much, it at least tells a fun story that doesn't NEED to be glitzed-up by a talented director. Fincher usually pulls off what's needed, and does it slyly and without...grr! It's so impossible to discuss this movie without getting into what's revealed at the end! Now, that's not to say a perfect job is done. There are two key scenes where Norton is required to beat the living shit out of himself. The first is splendidly done, though it becomes kind of ambiguous after a second viewing and I'm not entirely sure just what it is I saw. The second is totally inane, dragged kicking and screaming from a fantasy of inner conflict into a rigid reality viewed through surveillance monitors. The key here is inner conflict; why hammer it into reality with such literalness? It just doesn't work. The same inner conflict is also poorly externalized in clumsy flashbacks, like one with a dropped beer bottle, or another where one has to wonder how things got from one man beating the crap out of himself, to two men beating the crap out of each other. There are other problems which linger even after a second viewing, like how a self-inflicted gunshot is meant to accomplish anything, let alone what it does. Or how easy it appears to be to start up brand new FC's with fanatical followers in such a short period of time, fanatical enough that they don't seem to notice anything unusual in that scene in the car. (on a first viewing, you wouldn't notice anything all that unusual either, but...surprise ending, again) Script-wise, it's a mixed bag but mostly successful. The philosophizing is shaky at best, and the EN character gets WAY too many voice-over catch-phrases, and it's the catch-phrases which most serve to hamper Norton's performance, making him quite annoying in short order. But the story is always interesting, and really has fun with its creations. Fight Club even starts developing its own culture, like how members make their names known only in death. But there is a point where I think the script chickened out. The plot ultimately culminates in a military-esque mission called Operation Mayhem, which is described to us in cheerful detail as if it's just going to screw up a lot of things economically but not really hurt anybody. (this was a bit different in the book, which said at the beginning that the "national museum" was the "real target", but annoyingly never mentioned it again) Now, aside from the obvious socioeconomic complications that are going to be put into motion by this, we're asked to believe that ten major high-rises are completely empty of people because all of the maintenance and security are in on the plot. Aside from this being a total crock (since Fight Club is all men, are we to believe that every last maintenance and security employee in every one of these buildings are men?), if we've made it this far through the movie, do we really need something "harmless" like this spoon-fed to us as if it'll actually make us go "Oh, well, then it's not that big of a deal"? And while it might not be chickening out, I do have to question the intentions of the script (and the book) regarding its idea of what the "plight" is of men today (this is where the philosophical side of the movie comes in). Get a load of this silly shit; EN calls himself "a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct", as if such a thing ever actually existed in unattached males. I mean, the "your possessions start to own you" message is a valid one, but the way it presents itself is self-defeating. Look what we're shown, a man who's owned by his yin/yang coffee table and the rest of his IKEA stuff. Do you know of ANY men who that describes, at least ones that aren't married? Maybe the script should've mentioned men owned by their cars and their electronics and their thousands-strong CD collections, but then, that would've made it hit a little too close to home, wouldn't it? A satire of the feminization of today's men? Maybe. One of the dangers of satire is that when you exaggerate things to make a point, you run the risk of exaggerating things so much that you're no longer satirizing anything which actually exists. It's too comfortable to see a man buried under his own accumulation of possessions when those possessions don't actually reflect the subject of the satire. Pointing the finger at EN's straw man is easy to do from a distance. I would've appreciated a reflection of real people that wouldn't be so easy for viewers to separate themselves from. I also find it odd that the story would try to examine this while completely excluding women from the equation. Sure, there's Marla, but her purpose here is to be the only character who gets to regularly interact with both BP and EN. Her relationship with them is so weird in the end that it bears no resemblance to anything that, well, actually happens with people in the real world, at least not the "feminized" men that this movie thinks it's portraying (and besides, I've heard more than one person put forth the theory that she's merely a hallucination). I know, I'm harping a lot that this movie doesn't reflect the real world enough, but if you're going to make philosophical points, they're meaningless if you can't apply them to real life. Looking at men with their relationships with women removed from the equation isn't looking at men at all. Fight Club - the club, not the movie - as a cure for what ails ye is not convincingly shown either (though I don't really think it's supposed to be, since by the end of the movie one of the two leads becomes a villain and the Fight Club his henchmen), since except maybe for EN himself, everybody who joins Fight Club just becomes a dead-eyed follower of BP, not too far removed from Scientologists, I suppose. EN looks on at a Tommy Hilfiger ad with a buff male torso and asks BP rhetorically, "Is that what a man looks like?" Neither of them seem to notice that that is indeed what they and just about every man in this movie looks like. While some of the points about fighting are well-illustrated (like how people will to just about anything to avoid one - the shots with the guy with the hose are hilarious), just why anybody would volunteer "Can I be next?" when they're not actually fighting OVER anything is left a mystery. I know, I know, I'm bitching a lot about this movie, and there are a lot of ways I think it just came up short. Besides, it's annoying when people quote it, and I hear that all the time. But there's easily enough going for it for me to give it a cheerful recommendation, and Fight Club is definitely one of those movies you have to see for yourself and make up your own mind about. (I know, they're all like that, but you're not fooling me; we all do it, make up our minds about movies before seeing them) Christ, don't let me, or, uh, Roger Ebert, or some guy yammering "At last, a movie that speaks to us!" tell you what to think about it. See it for yourself; even if you just come away confused, you'll probably be glad you saw it. Fight Club was not a rousing box-office success, but it'll probably make a very large profit in the long run thanks to its legion of fans who have flocked behind it like few fan-legions I've ever seen, snapping up copies of the DVD in stacks. It's like with The Matrix; I like this film a lot, but I keep catching shit from its fans for not liking it ENOUGH. Whatever. (Lori, I love ya, you're refreshingly down to earth.) On the other side, it caught a lot of shit for its violence and what a lot of people perceive as a glorification of fascism. I dunno; except for Operation Mayhem itself, I found FC to be one of the few movies out there which really shows the consequences of violence. When people get hit, they lose teeth, they break noses, they get scarred and put in neckbraces (and they have to go to work the next day), and they remind me why I try to avoid fistfights. Thank you, I like my teeth where they are. BACK TO THE F's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE