Fight Club Review

I was originally going to do this weekend's review on 2001: A Space Odyssey, but between school and catching a decent night's sleep I couldn't really find time for watching a 3-hour long meditation on the existence of humanity. Then, I thought I could do a review on The Dark Knight, but nothing I could say about that felt too revelatory; everybody and their grandmother knows why that film was good and they don't need to hear it analyzed by everybody and a lackluster film student. So I was sitting around wondering what I could possibly do for this week's post when I saw my Blu-ray of Fight Club, untouched since the day I first took it out of the Best Buy bargain bin. My mind thusly made up, I popped it in and was treated to one of the bleakest film experiences I've ever had.

The premise is that our unnamed narrator (Edward Norton) is nihilistically tired of life and looking for something more fulfilling than sitting on his couch all day and ordering more furniture. Luckily for him, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), an anarchist who helps the Narrator create Fight Club, where men can act out their wild aggressions away from the rest of society. However, as Tyler's influence over the restless men grows so does the Narrator's distrust of him...

Fight Club had already earned my distaste before I put it in because from what I understood the film was about socialism and socialist movies are always annoyingly unself-aware. These are movies made by rich people backed up by a multi-billion dollar corporation trying to send a message about how we should tear down corporations and strip the wealth from rich people. That's just hypocrisy on a level I can't deal with. However, after having watched it I'm not actually sure what it's about which is a problem because that's what I'm supposed to be discerning here.

It starts off with a very Marxian view of society, where every man is a helpless pawn the capitalist's plan to make you buy more crap you don't need. All the offices are lit and colored very blandly to signify the emptiness of corporate capitalism shown in the Narrator's endless insomnia. The sets of Tyler's house and the basements they use for their fight club, however, are brimming with personality and vibrancy, with hot orange lighting and random props strewn across the floor, symbolizing the anarchic freedom offered to the Narrator with the arrival of Tyler. It looks like Tyler and the Narrator are helping set men free with Fight Club, but then the film makes Fight Club seem like a dangerous cult, with the members of the club's Project Mayhem forgetting the value of individual human life and not even listening to Tyler's orders when they run contradictory to Project Mayhem's ultimate goal: tearing down society and sending it back to the stone age. It's like the message is that we're slaves no matter what we follow and that an anti-establishment movement can itself become the establishment. And if that's the case then why do so many fans of the film consider it to be a work of anti-establishment fiction, as if we're actually supposed to be rooting for Tyler and Project Mayhem to throw the world into chaos? Did they miss the point? Did I miss the point?

Putting aside conflicting interpretations of art for the moment, how does Fight Club hold up from a technical standpoint? Well, it's a David Fincher movie, so you can expect pitch perfect cinematography, blocking that tells the story and brilliant performances from actors you've always been iffy about. Speaking of which, Brad Pitt gives probably the best performance of his career. His natural likable charisma serves him a lot better as the larger than life Tyler than it did in something like Se7en, where he was playing an everyman who eventually falls into ruin. Edward Norton turns in a good performance as the audience surrogate, though there's not much personality to work with. Helena Bonham Carter turns in one of her more nuance performances as the narrator's psychotic love interest and even the members of the Fight Club turn in memorable performances.

The most impressive thing about the film is the screenplay. Not only the dialogue really natural and many of the lines extremely memorable, but it actually has visual storytelling. Alfred Hitchcock once said that if a movie is good the sound could be turned off and the audience could still have a good idea of what's going on and Fight Club accomplishes that beautifully. Even without the Narrator's constant internal monologue you could still pretty much tell what the plot and relationships between the characters are. I, for one, appreciate this kind of storytelling seeing as how most screenwriters pretend that the camera doesn't exist and therefore don't give it anything to do.

While I can certainly say Fight Club is a supremely well-made and even entertaining psychological thriller I can't say I wholeheartedly recommend it. As I mentioned earlier it's an extremely bleak experience, entirely focused on how we're being brainwashed by society and how the only way to stop it is to violently rebel. If you connect with that kind of message for some reason and can look past the film's hypocritical message of anti-capitalism, I suppose you might be able to get on board the weird cult fandom of this film. However, if any of that sounds like something that would just make you more depressed about life in general, I say skip it.