During last summer, I had seen
the trailer for Fight Club a couple of times and
thought the movie might be worth taking a look at. However,
when Fight Club came out in the Fall, I momentarily
hesitated because of the almost uniformly hostile reviews it
received and only decided to catch it after reading David
Poland's well-argued defense of the film in The Hot Button, the column that appears Monday
through Saturday on roughcut. Fight Club is more
imaginatively effective and ingenious than intellectually
coherent, but nonetheless a powerful motion picture. I have
only seen one other film directed by David Fincher, Alien
3; while I by no means thought it contemptible, nothing
in it would have prepared me for his most recent movie. For me, the
film succeeds where David Cronenberg's inert adaptation of
James Ballard's Crash failed: in
fusing beauty with horror, in ambiguously finding beauty in
horror and horror in beauty. (I apologize for using Cronenberg for a second
time as a whipping boy in this Raft of Reviews, but he fits
the purpose so well.) Based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk
adapted by Palahniuk and Jim Uhls, Fight Club recounts
how a young professional, played to perfection by Edward
Norton, whose life consists mainly in buying Ikea furniture,
succumbs to the charms of a self-styled rebel and aspiring
demagogue, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). After Tyler
surreptitiously blows up Norton's fancy condo, the white
collar nerd moves in with Tyler and quickly becomes an
instrument in the latter's plans for creating social disorder
on an enormous scale in order to end the domination of large
corporations over American life and return the country to a
state of frontier simplicity and purity. Tyler's principal
means of recruiting followers, however, is the "fight
club" of the title, a secret society whose clandestine
meetings take place in the basement of a saloon and which
offers young males a chance to recover the masculinity they
have forfeited through the process of socialization by
beating each other to a bloody pulp.
If Bringing Out the Dead
might be characterized as allegory, Fight Club almost
wholly belongs to allegory's darker sister, satire--and few
genres so notoriously lend themselves to misinterpretation as
does satire. Jonathan Swift was accused of being irreligious
for having penned The Tale of a Tub, and Swift
published his devastating "A Modest Proposal"
anonymously. I would hardly put Fight Club in the same
class as those works, but it has suffered a similar fate at
the hands of its critics, who have denounced it as being
nihilistic, or even fascistic. To interpret the film in this
way, however, is like imagining that Swift was in fact
advocating eating babies in "A Modest Proposal."
Although Tyler might seem to combine the traits of an
eco-terrorist with those of a member of one of the screwier
1960's radical groups like the Weathermen, the film leaves
little doubt about the direction he is headed when he
progresses from being the lone anarchist to playing the role
of Führer to a bunch of guys wearing black shirts who follow
his every command. Even Tyler's grotesque scheme for
manufacturing soap out of human fat seems a horrifying
allusion to one of the Nazi's most barbaric crimes against
humanity. More
than anything else, Fight Club seems to me a
very effective parable about fascism and the potential for
fascization latent in more than a few manifestations of
contemporary American culture which appeal to violent,
irrational solutions to problems--such as conflicts of race,
of gender, or of political or religious beliefs--that do not
admit of simple solutions at all.
But the film further
reinforces the parallel by its striking use of the motif of
the double, whose underlying role in the leader-follower
dynamic that shows up in so many pre-Nazi era German films
was rightly pointed by Siegfried Kracaurer in From
Caligari to Hitler. Appearances to the contrary, the guy
in the condo whose life is invested in furniture is just
waiting for a street dude like Tyler to come along and set
him free. A tacit complementarity binds the weaker to the
stronger man, and although there is nothing overtly
homosexual in the relation between the nerd and Tyler, yet
the way the former falls prey to the latter has all the
characteristics of a classic erotic seduction, the conquest
of a middle class wimp by a stud outlaw. (It is in no way to
belittle Brad Pitt's abilities as an actor to say that his
classic good looks and physical presence are his strongest
assets in the movie.) As the film progresses, the nerd--who
significantly never bears a name of his own--cedes more and
more of his already fragile identity to his hero, whatever
misgivings he might have as he grasps more and more of
Tyler's paranoid grand design. At the end, Tyler apparently
has disappeared from the scene but only to be reborn more
perniciously in the person of the follower who has now
completely merged with his leader and ideal image, an event
celebrated with a titanic potlatch of blazing skyscrapers
across the vista of Manhattan, putting to shame forever the
apocalyptic finale of Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie
Point. If anyone should miss the point, the film further
underlines it by cutting into the final frames what might be
termed the sign of Tyler, the shot of an erect penis that he
had spliced into an otherwise innocuous picture at the
theater where he worked as projectionist--the now
transcendent phallus of the despot. Instead of
piously lecturing the audience on its moral shortcomings or
falling back upon ideological platitudes, Fight Club exposes the
maleficent fascination of Tyler's depraved fantasy--which is
a very different thing from endorsing it.