Fight Club
Reviewed by Dave Sims

For the first hour and a half of David Fincher's latest film, Fight Club, it appears to be his apotheosis as a director. Already established as one of the best up-and-coming stylists in the industry (previous films include Seven and The Game), Fincher weaves a taut, two-fisted jeremiad against consumer culture and corporate soullessness. But after an eye-popping start, the film starts to implode under the weight of its own hypocrisy and lack of focus, building to an incendiary climax that is as spectacular as it is pointless.

Based on the surprising debut novel by Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club could have been an effective slap in the face to an image-obsessed society that surely needs it. But to become a true gadfly, one must find higher ground than Fincher has staked out, and Fight Club the movie lacks the authority or acerbic polemic punch of Fight Club the book. Fincher might have used his virtuoso command of style against itself to create a morally complex film that would have had viewers asking questions of themselves and their community. Instead, style becomes the whole point. It's an antiestablishment film with its roots too deeply embedded in the establishment to make any real impact.

The story follows the life of a young, nameless corporate denizen, played by Edward Norton, whose shallow existence is made all the more intolerable by chronic insomnia. He spends his time poring over Horchow catalogs ("trying to decide what dining set really defines me as a person") and collecting single serving items from endless business trips. His only solace comes from his visits to terminal illness support groups (testicular cancer, brain parasites, etc.). By surrounding himself with death and pain, he is finally able to feel alive as well as get some sleep -- that is until Marla Singer, played by Helena Bonham Carter, shows up. Marla is a tourist and a faker like himself, and her presence spoils his momentary respite.

Enter Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt. Durden is a cynical soap salesman -- a charismatic fast talker with a quip for every occasion and inordinate amount of knowledge regarding the home manufacture of explosive substances. Norton's character meets Durden on a plane and is completely taken in by his above-it-all banter and self-determination. Following the trip, Norton discovers that his luxury apartment has been blown to bits, and immediately gives Durden a call.

After a couple of beers and a philosophical discussion consisting of Durden's pre-fab aphorisms -- "the things you own end up owning you" -- Durden asks Norton to hit him as hard as he can. After a brief hesitation, Norton complies, and the ensuing fight makes them feel more alive than they ever have. Bloodied and exhausted, Norton looks up and says, "We should do this again sometime." They do.

Their fights get the attention of like-minded alienated souls, and they begin gathering weekly to beat each other to a bloody pulp in the basement of a local bar. An underground culture of sorts forms around these secret meetings. "The first rule of Fight Club," says Durden, "is that you DO NOT talk about Fight Club." Despite the oath of silence, their numbers begin to grow, and workers all over the city are showing up to the office with minor (and major) contusions and a new lease on life.

Durden becomes the de facto leader of the group, which quickly (a little too quickly to be believed, actually) evolves far beyond being merely a cathartic exercise. He gives rousing speeches on the failed promises and spiritual void of modern society. One by one, the members take up residence in Durden and Norton's ramshackle house, and begin engaging in clandestine acts of coordinated mischief and vandalism, which, to Norton's horror, spiral out of control. Meanwhile, Marla takes up with Durden in a love/hate relationship that gives codependency a whole new meaning.

From the opening credits' creative tracking shot through the narrator's brain and out his mouth, with Norton's superbly understated narration and a fiendishly catchy soundtrack courtesy of the Dust Brothers, Fight Club takes you by the collar and doesn't let go. Fincher uses the fast cut techniques he learned directing music videos against the background of throbbing techno music to create a mood that is both urgent and hypnotizing. This is what Fincher does best: use pacing and the technology of film to create psychological tension. In this sense he stakes a legitimate claim to the Hitchcock tradition. But where Sir Alfred shined is where Fincher comes up short -- there are no real characters here, only warm bodies to prop up a script that has lost its sense of purpose.

This is not because the scenario itself is implausible. Many of the protesters involved in the recent Seattle demonstrations were informed by this kind of thinking. Organizations like Adbusters are already advocating a return to such tactics and finding a sympathetic audience. Such ideas have more than a passing similarity to the Dadaists of the first half of this century and their inheritors, the Surrealists, Lettrists, and later the Situationists Internationale, or SI. SI logos that were plastered on walls and posters during an uprising at the Sorbonne in 1968 could have been taken straight out of a Tyler Durden monologue:

GO AND DIE IN NAPLES WITH THE CLUB MEDITERRANEE

BE REALISTIC DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE

TAKE YOUR DESIRES FOR REALITY

REFUSE YOUR ASSIGNED ROLES

NEVER WORK

CONSUMPTION IS THE OPIUM OF THE PEOPLE

THEY ARE BUYING YOUR HAPPINESS, STEAL IT

ART IS DEAD: DO NOT CONSUME ITS CORPSE

UNDER THE PAVEMENT THE BEACH

But the sense of urgency and desperation that must have motivated those French students in 1968 (not to mention the SI-influenced punk band the Sex Pistols in the 70s, and organizations like Adbusters today) is entirely missing from Fight Club. Fincher seems too distracted by his ability as a filmmaker to let on that he really understands these men's spiritual vacuum. His characters act more like frat boys on a romp than real, disaffected men whom society has pushed one step beyond. At one point, while watching the results of their exploits on the nightly news, Fincher has this enlightened group pass a six-pack around and snicker like Beavis and Butthead.

And it is difficult, to say the least, to take Tyler Durden seriously as the leader of a national rebellion against materialism while constantly being reminded that you are indeed watching Brad Pitt. It probably wasn't hard to believe Johnny Rotten in London in the late 70s, trilling his r's and hissing through teeth that might as well have been filed down to points, declaring himself an antichrist and screaming for "Anarchy in the U.K." But imagine Brad Pitt sneering at a Gucci underwear model for having a body sculpted into nothing more than fashion statement. Now that's irony.

Fincher is a stylist first, and about halfway through it becomes clear that he has no idea why his characters are doing what they're doing. The pace actually slackens as it approaches the impossibly muddled climax, and the whole thing has to be resolved with pyrotechnics and a gratuitous plot twist.

To Fincher's credit (actually Palahniuk's), Fight Club is not simply a rehash of Situationist political moralizing. The cultural malaise it diagnoses looks more like the one described in Walker Percy's The Moviegoer -- a spiritual crisis rather than a political one. Durden says as much several times throughout the book and the film. At one crucial moment he is branding Norton's hand, while burning a mantra into his head: "Your father is your model for God...but if your father bails what can you believe about God?" "Gentlemen," he says in another of his soliloquies, "this is a spiritual war." But in the film those moments are brief and disconnected from the tone of the rest of the movie. Palahniuk makes clear in his book what is obscured in the film -- these antiheroes are looking for personal redemption by bottoming out:

How Tyler saw it was that getting God's attention for being bad was better than getting no attention at all. Maybe because God's hate is better than his indifference...Unless we get God's attention, we have no hope of damnation or redemption.

"If the prodigal son had never left home," one of Tyler's lackeys quips, "the fatted calf would still be alive."

Fight Club the book is simultaneously an indictment of consumer-culture narcissism and a reductio ad absurdum argument against the extreme tactics of culture jammers like the Situationists. The disease and the response to it are deemed equally pathetic. The central figure in Fight Club the book is a delusional schizophrenic who feels he's been given the right to do whatever he wants -- even take a human life -- because he never had a father figure. Fight Club the film only acknowledges this spiritual impoverishment in the abstract; it doesn't truly understand it. In the end Fincher has no other choice but to turn Norton's character into a helpless hero caught in circumstances beyond his control. There is no real insight to be had in Fight Club the film. All Fincher can do is riff on a theme that he's sympathetic to but doesn't comprehend. Nor does he possess the Kubrick-like boldness it would take to make the disturbing film that Fight Club should have been.

My advice: Read the book and enjoy; see the film, but don't expect much more than a spectacle.