Fight Club. Such a simplistic name for a film, and a book upon which it is based. On the surface, Fight Club is a story about a bunch of n’er do wells, has beens, and never was’ who congregate to beat the crap out of one another and commiserate about their sorry lives. Sounds like a good reason for anyone to want to fight? People will do many a varied thing to escape the life they currently live. That these men, seemingly with an over-active Y chromosome and an under-active sense of self esteem, are engaging in an activity not unlike “cutting” seems fairly natural. But that’s not what they’re doing at all.
Edward Norton plays the Narrator, who is never properly named. He is called Jack by some devotees of the film due to first-person medical articles he reads in the film. They say an unexamined life is not one worth living. The narrator’s problem is that he has thoroughly examined his life. It’s nice. He has a lovely apartment, and a fairly successful job, which presumably pays him medical benefits as well. But he cannot sleep. He can’t sleep partially due to the stress of his job that keeps him flying around inspecting recall possibilities on cars. The other reason is that hates himself and everything about his life. But why? He has most things the American Dream and marketing tell him he should have. That’s precisely his problem. Fight Club was made at a time, and the book written at a time, of incredible prosperity in this country. Prosperity which bred malaise. Due to the changing role of men in society, men no longer felt like men. No longer knew where they fit and what was accepted behavior. Their Fight Club is a catharsis. The film makes this point when Brad Pitt’s character says “We are the middle children of history, with no purpose or place”. He is describing that his generation, now all over 30 and some nearing 40 or so, had no mountain to climb. The film came out on the heels of relentless praise of the World War 2 crowd being called The Greatest Generation. Praise they deserved. But in the face of zero hardship, there was to be no triumph over adversity resulting in a thousand yard stare. This generation’s greatest triumph is saving 60% by purchasing things on Ebay.
This is a motif explored in some regard by the recent release The Expendables. A bunch of guys doing guy things, for the first time in what seems like ages. And the box office showed there was interest in such activity. So many of the activities of these men are a allegory to their lost masculinity. From the Testicular Cancer support group to the making of soap. Not just as a means of making money by actually producing something, but as to provide a means of literally washing off the stink of consumerism and complacency they feel they have on them.
So once the narrator begins visiting support groups he feels better about himself and can once again sleep, though he still feels like a fake. Once confronted on this fact by Marla (Helena Bonham-Carter) he once again cannot sleep. A meeting with a stranger on a plane named Tyler Durden leads to the formation of Fight Club and eventually Project Mayhem. Dozens of displaced rejects from the Burning Man festival flock to this leadership under the promise of relief from this mostly imagined misery.
Eventually things get out of hand and the narrator calls a stop to the action, only to find that he can’t. The project has become a Frankenstein’s Monster of sorts and not even the realization that Tyler Durden is his own imagined, idealized version of himself, can stop it. So he loses control over everything he ever made to compensate for not having control of his life. But in the end, he’s ok with that.
Fight Club succeeds in nearly everything it sets out to do. It is tense, surprising, funny, poignant, gory, violent, and most importantly reflective of the society that produced it. The film may be a thing of the past, but its themes are not. Indeed they only grow larger today. Solution anyone? Maybe it will be better if we don’t talk about it. 9.5/10
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