"Fight Club" is a movie to endure, not to enjoy. But it may well merit a second viewing.
David Fincher's brutal examination of the fractured male psyche rips an open sore in your soul. It's hard to imagine that Fincher could make a film harder to swallow than his terrifying "Seven," but he's done it with this raw, unhinged look at the sickeningly violent exploits of Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) and his followers. It batters you till you're numb.
As Tyler repeats to the new members of his upstart, underground boxing organization, both the first and second rules of Fight Club are this: "Do not talk about Fight Club." Appropriate, then, that the movie would render you unable to talk about "Fight Club." It's the head-shaker of the year, but that's because a part of you is asking, 'Why is it such a head-shaker?'
Fincher and screenwriter Jim Uhls' main argument is clear, the same one being made (more eloquently, I presume) by Susan Faludi in her hot new feminist-anti-feminist tome, "Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man": Today's men have been stabbed in the back, trained as patriarchal providers in a society that no longer values that role. Their only recourse is the pumped-up, designer-dressed, ersatz masculinity that the consumer world is selling.
And if taken literally, the solution posited by "Fight Club" is absurd: a regressive, boys club tribalism, a cult of violence that values physical pain as a defining life experience. By the time the members of Fight Club are marching around in black clothing, heads shaved, chanting ridiculous mantras as they terrorize sites of consumerist excess, you'll wonder, this is the best response they can come up with?
Yet precisely because it can't be taken literally, the movie isn't so easy to dismiss; it lingers like a multicolored bruise. Amid Fincher's surrealistic atmosphere and fragmented storytelling emerge uneasy, ambiguous ideas, as he examines the insanity that lurks beneath the simple desire to feel. Is feeling possible in the world of today? It is if you burn the back of your hand with lye.
For the narrator (Edward Norton), who calls himself Jack and whose smart, raspy voice-overs provide the only solid ground for the movie to stand on, intense emotion is a means to an end, a cure for insomnia. He begins frequenting support groups for diseases he doesn't have, like testicular cancer and sickle-cell anemia. His addiction to false empathy allows him to meet Marla (zonked-out Helena Bonham Carter), a fellow group-therapy junkie.
Jack leaves the sufferers behind when he finds pain of his own, courtesy of Tyler, a freelance soap manufacturer. (When they meet on a plane, Tyler casually mentions that the soap-making process creates explosive byproducts -- funny, then, that Jack returns home to find a smoldering cavern where his yuppie-dream condo used to be.) Jack's new addiction comes from Tyler's simple request: "I want you to hit me as hard as you can."
Soon the two are sharing a dilapidated house and battering each other regularly -- along with everybody else who meets them in the basement of a ramshackle tavern. As a result, they get in touch with their primal sides and expose the emptiness of their financially driven existences. After all, why spend $50 to watch palookas on pay-per-view when you can pummel your pals for free?
But recreation doesn't satisfy Tyler; revolution does, and he soon takes Fight Club out into the world that created it, with intentionally catastrophic results. (Tyler also starts having wild sex with Marla in the movie's least interesting thread.)
Your tour guide through the madness is Fincher's fluid, acrobatic camera, always prowling for some bizarre new perspective while keeping things dark as a crypt. Even Jack's fluorescent-lit office has a drained, dreary quality. A growling, groaning techno score by the Dust Brothers complements the visuals in creating an atmosphere of encompassing bleakness, which keeps the viewer immersed despite the lack of a credible narrative arc. The movie moves so inexorably toward chaos, the forces of order have no chance; the only escalation of conflict resides inside Jack's psyche.
Fincher's references to the artifice of cinema compound the surrealism. Both Jack and Tyler speak directly to the audience, keeping everyone aware that what they're watching is a construct. In a seemingly superfluous interlude, we see that Tyler works part-time as a projectionist, and, as a hobby, he splices single frames of pornography into family films. This explains the occasional blips that have already popped up in the otherwise seamlessly constructed "Fight Club." But who's responsible -- Fincher or Tyler?
Whoever the controlling party is, "Fight Club" painstakingly creates a roughly woven, subjective reality and then rips through it with a shocking development two-thirds of the way through. The rest of the film requires the viewer to undergo a difficult act of repositioning, but the weird structure is what allows its ideas about fragmented male identity to flourish.
When it's finally all over, you'll feel beaten and drained, like you've gone 12 rounds and maybe eked out a split decision. But the purpose of the fight, and "Fight Club," is that you feel something.
Grade: B+
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