Fight Club (1999)

***FOR THOSE WHO HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE: WARNING THIS CONTAINS SPOILERS!!***

”The first rule of fight club is….”

You do not talk shit about David Fincher! Fight Club is one of those movies that has over the years risen to a cult status where it is now considered a classic among many a movie fan. In other words you do not talk shit about Fight Club. Well, i am going to. Sort of.

Gentlemen, welcome to Fight Club

Let’s begin with David Fincher the director of the movie. Fincher is widely considered as one of the great big American filmmakers of today - together with for example Christopher Nolan and Zack Snyder – and his films are praised by critics and moviegoers alike. I have to say that i am somewhat bemused by the unanimous admiration his work seems to receive. I think the man has only ever made one fully coherent movie and that is Seven (1995). To be honest that movie was mostly about Brad Pitt’s beautiful eyes and how Brad Pitt lost his innocence. Well, truth be told Seven was actually one of my favorite movies for a long time and i still think it is a solid film with all of it’s different cinematic elements (it’s overall look, dialogue, directing, acting, editing, pacing, storytelling, rhythm, cinematography, atmosphere etc.) executed beautifully. 

What about Mr. Fincher’s other movies then? The Game: tolerable. Gone Girl: corny and cheesy, i almost stopped watching after about 20 minutes. At the end i wished i had. Benjamin Button: an overindulgent and overextended bore about Brad Pitt’s good looks, especially his face. The Social Network: yet again another overextended narrative that's tiresomely heavy in its cinematic execution.

What about Fight Club then? It is basically a story about the lack of male role models and how that can spiral males into deep conflicts regarding their masculinity and its place in society. I haven’t read Chuck Palahniuk's novel that the movie is based on, so i can’t say how loyal the movie is to it’s source material or what themes the author might have tackled in his book that are not included in the movie’s narrative. I have the book in my bookshelf though. It was given to me as a present, by my father of all people. Anyone who has seen Fight Club will appreciate the irony in that.

I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need

Fight Club is considered widely as a critique on the modern man who has no outlet for his raging violent tendencies that are presumably caused by a neutering society and a difficult relationship with his own father (who had a difficult relationship with his own father, who had a difficult relationship with his own…). It is also considered as a critique on our modern consumerist culture that has it’s basis in our capitalistic society and its materialist value system. The movie says that all this causes tremendous conflicts within every male and violence is one outlet for the complex emotions that arise as a result of it all. Fight Club is an analysis on ”how to be a man” so to speak when you have all these emotions inside you and you are not allowed to show them in our cultural framework, but you can’t let them out in bursts of random violence either.

The caveman could do all that though, i’m pretty sure of that. He could beat up the weaker ones in his tribe if he couldn’t fathom the emotions he was going through and had to have some kind of an outlet. So who wants to talk to a therapist anyway if you can go to a basement and beat the hell out of another guy until you are too tired to think about your psychic problems and their origins? Where Fight Club does quite a good job is in that it does not moralize it’s subject matter but leaves it to the audience to decide whether they accept the solutions the movie gives or condemn them.

Where Fight Club fails is in that it largely waters down it’s critical subtexts (our materialistic culture, difficult relationships with fathers that affect our whole culture and society and that seem to create role models that are passed on from generation to generation) when it starts to fetishize the violence that is at the core of its story. Sure i like the fetishization of strong and able bodies as much as the next person. Half of all movies (and every action movie) are essentially based on this: if only a common man could look and behave like this guy does! (movies are unfortunately still quite a male dominated business and it shows).

Where Fight Club ultimately misses its point is when it turns into a movie about Brad Pitt’s body instead of the commentary it was supposed to be. There are quite a few shots of a shirtless Brad Pitt in there. In the movie’s context Brad Pitt is seen as some kind of an ultimate alpha male fantasy: a leader of men who walks silently among his pack of followers and an anarchist who lives outside of society’s rules simply because he is so strong that he can do it. He seems so good looking, cool, assertive, masculine and charismatic that you do not dare question his antics or decisions. This is of course completely fine as a narrative tool and a nice basis for some discussion about the role a male has in our culture and society: what kind of masculine traits are valued, whereas others are frowned upon. Unfortunately the movie does not participate in this analysis, but instead becomes a fanboy to Pitt’s Tyler Durden and sheepishly makes this character seem as cool and sexy as possible.

Then again maybe i’m wrong. Maybe Fincher is a smarter movie maker than i give him credit for and he is fully aware of all the connotations and associations we as moviegoers make as we see ”the most handsome guy in the world”, Brad Pitt, as the ultimate alpha male fantasy. One has to remember that in the movie Tyler Durden is actually a fragment of the main character's - called simply The Narrator and played by Edward Norton – imagination (on a side note: in the movie American Psycho (2000) the main character is called Patrick Bateman but his name is never actually mentioned in it by anyone else besides Bateman himself. That is not the only similarity between these two movies). 

Compared to Pitt Norton is the scrawny everyday guy that we all can easily identify with, although we’d much rather identify with Pitt (just a fun/scary thought: think about Tyler Durden fighting the guy Edward Norton played in American History X (1998) ). Tyler Durden is The Narrator’s – that means us all, just to hammer in the point here - ultimate fantasy: ”what if i could escape my non meaningful 9 to 5 cubicle slave existence and become and anarchist supermodel sex god ultimate fighter!” Kind of reminds me of one other movie now that i think about it…...The Matrix: ”what if i could leave my boring job at an open-plan office and become Jesus!”

Remember what i said earlier on about movies being a fantasy - that is often told from the perspective of a male - about breaking out of the confines of society and its rules. This thought can be taken even further and say that movies often play on the idea of someone breaking out from being a human and becoming something more, something completely autonomous and free (superhero movies come to mind here). In Fight Club there is only one essential female character. She is called Marla Singer and is played by Helena Bonham Carter. In the movie’s context she is both the love interest of the two main characters, but also a nuisance and an obstacle in their grand plan. 

Since Fight Club is essentially a movie about males i'm going to assume that Fincher is very aware about the narrow space that he allows his only female character to express herself in. We may even draw the conclusion that the character of Marla represents all women withing the movie's thematical framework: in the world of violent men women have very little space. This thought is even referenced to explicitly in the movie's dialogue when Durden says to The Narrator: "we're a generation of men raised by women. I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need". On a side note: it's pretty interesting to see Tyler Durden being played by an actor who has publicly admitted that he comes from a background where it was not acceptable to show such emotions as vulnerability or weakness. And what an epitome of strong and able masculine wholesome post-modern America Brad Pitt is! Oh, lawdy!

The underlying misogyny seems to be a given in Fight Club and i am pretty sure Fincher wants the audience to notice it and feel it. As i said earlier Fight Club is about the constructed idea of a male. So let’s say Fincher is fully aware of how we as viewers perceive Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden…...and of course he is. Durden is as much our own fantasy as he is The Narrator’s. As such all the indulgence in Brad Pitt’s looks and his physique can be seen as a self aware joke on us the moviegoers, on the movie makers themselves and on our whole society. As much as we want to criticize the so called shallowness of our body-obsessed culture ,we are on the other hand obsessed with human physique and like to fetishize it. I think it’s only human. Look at the ancient statues and you’ll see that people were obsessed with the bradpitts of their times all along.

Is that what a real man is supposed to look like?

The self-awareness of Fight Club’s own contradictory approach to its subject matter is crystallized in one scene in particular. In it The Narrator and Durden ride the subway and stumble upon an advertisement for Calvin Klein underwear. It is a black-n-white picture of a male model with a perfect body covered partly by white briefs. You’ve all seen the like, it is a standard normative cultural image of our times. At this point in the movie The Narrator and Durden have just recently started formulating their anarchistic philosophy and are walking around town discussing it. They see the add and The Narrator asks ”is that what a real man is supposed to look like?” Pitt’s Durden laughs at the picture and says something along the lines of ”self-improvement is masturbation, self-destruction on the other hand...” You have to see the film to get the whole point. Moments later we see Brad Pitt shirtless looking maybe even more physically perfect than the guy in the Calvin Klein add. 

This all can be seen as a meta-commentary on movies and celebrity culture at large, maybe even as self-commentary on Fincher as a movie maker: Hollywood movies and Brad Pitt, what more are they than extreme examples of our culutre’s values and aspirations. Not much different from Calvin Klein advertisements. ”Figure it our for yourself though”, the movie seems to say. ”We give you no easy answers”.

So, to conclude my rambling i say that Fight Club is a movie that turns the societal and cultural commentary of how males can not express emotions in our society without violence being a factor in it into a violent entertainment fantasy. This fantasy fethisizes and eroticizes the male body in problematic ways much in the same way that male emotions are compartmentalized: the male is allowed to feel and be sensual only through violence. In doing so Fight Club only adds to the problem it was supposed to comment on in the first place. But the movie is completely aware of all of this all along (i assume...). There is also an Ingmar Bergman reference there in the form of a penis being flashed at the audience (what the filmmakers want to say with that is up to your own imagination. I guess you could ask Freud for an opinion) and some IKEA furniture gets blown up. Not sure if those two things are thematically connected though otherwise than both being Swedish. Coincidence…..?

Go and see for yourself if you don’t believe me!

With today’s hate against women and non-cis people, body shaming, dick pics, body obsessed selfie-culture, talk about ”Insels” and ”Chads” (google that!) and endless need for self-absorbed self-improvement i’d say Fight Club is almost as poignant today and thought provoking as it was when it came out.

Greetings!

xoxo

The Author (or….The Narrator?)

P.S. I was overcome by a strong urge to write about Fight Club as my first review for this blog although the movie is some 25 years old. I guess i could have picked a more up to date topic, but hey even the name of my blog is from the 90s. I got the whole idea for the blog when i met this guy who tried to sell me soap. I ended up hitting golf balls into windows at an abandoned industrial area... 

alone... 

at night.