Fight Club Reviewed

ROVIN' AND RAVIN' WITH MIKE

Fight Club

About a half hour into Fight Club, the natives got restless. Several groups of large young white males in oversized clothing had stomped into the theater during the previews and staked out different corners of the auditorium. Fight Club, director David Fincher’s latest film (he gave us The Game two years ago and Seven two years before that), opens with a witty, at times, elegant satire, but that was not what the boys in the corners had come to see. Where were the promised bare-knuckle fists, the well-advertised bare-chest fights? Where, oh, where was the main attraction—blood?

If blood and testosterone are what you want, wait about a third of the way through the 139 minutes of Fight Club, when the unnamed narrator (Edward Norton) finds himself seated on an airplane next to Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt. B.P. (Before Pitt) the narrator has a lucrative job in a Dilbert office in a city that is almost New York but isn’t quite and a high rise condo filled with yup-scale tchotchkes. He is neither married nor involved with anyone, and he cannot sleep. His doctor suggests that instead of feeling sorry for himself, he should go to a support group for men with testicular cancer to see what suffering is all about. At the meeting, he encounters Bob, who has grown large breasts as a result of the hormone imbalance in his body, a role amply fleshed out by rock star Meat Loaf.

The narrator discovers that after a tearful embrace by Bob, he can sleep and so every night, he crashes a support group for another affliction, using the emotional catharsis of such groups to ease his insomnia. Soon, he notices another fellow traveler on the support circuit, Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter, in a career-stretching role and performance) with great initials and bad attitude. By the time she shows up at his testicular cancer support group, he realizes something is not right.

Then, Pitt happens, and this poor movie is left in bad need of a support group for films with multiple personalities. In the middle of the film, Tyler Durden and the narrator create a group for men who need to get some kind of stuff—blood, that is—beat out of themselves. There is a narrative logic at work, and Fight Club, with its loose structure of facilitation and strong rules of confidentiality, continues the satire of support groups.

The narrator gets himself fired but with enough threats of blackmail that he continues to get paid, an arrangement very much like the one in American Beauty. That’s not the only similarity between the two films, both of which offer a glorification of juvenile behavior in lieu of maturity. In Beauty, that takes the form of obsessing about a high school cheerleader, buying a sports car, and working in a fast food restaurant, while in Fight Club, it takes the form of locker-room style brawling, more low-paying jobs and adolescent pranks. The only death in the very violent Fight Club, by the way, occurs during an act of simple vandalism.

A few years ago poet Robert Bly got himself on the best-seller lists (unlikely territory for a poet) by lamenting in Iron John that boys in our society never grow up, because they never undergo any sort of initiation into manhood. Fight Club—the group, not the film itself—might offer such an initiation. But, Durden goes too far, taking his scheme and the movie over the top with a shadowy paramilitary terrorist organization.

The film bogs down in sermons as boring as those in Patch Adams and Instinct, with Durden hammering home homilies about freedom. "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," Tyler says, not sounding like an old-time existentialist in a stuffy bar but like Janis Joplin on the juke box wailing, "Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose." The boy-men of this film do have something left to lose, however, their dignity, individuality, and self-respect. Fight Club morphs into a cult, with Durden’s followers chanting responses like the sheep in Animal Farm. Is sheephood what the new manhood is all about?

Director Fincher can have it both ways and claim that "Fight Club," the movie, is a warning about Fight Club, the mentality. But, it doesn’t quite work that way. Jerzy Kosinski, one of the most gentle men I’ve ever known, who wrote some of the most violent novels I’ve ever read, never allowed his novels (except the atypical Being There) to be filmed. He understood the different powers of the word and the image, that what in the novel could be a warning in the film could become a seduction. That’s a subtlety lost on the boys in the corners, I’m afraid, who hooted and hollered their approval of the excessive violence in this film.

At two hours and twenty minutes, Fight Club sprawls in too many directions. If the film is a critique of violence, we don’t need so many repetitions of violent images. Some moments I will long remember, from Tyler’s twenty-bucks-a-bar (wholesale) soap to a moving admission by a woman with cancer that what she really wants is to have sex. The conceit of the club itself is perversely right. If somehow the film could have gone that far but spared us the final absurdities, it would have been a much better film. This material should have stayed intense, should have, in fact, packed a punch, but more than once, I found myself looking with more interest at my watch than at the screen.

Fight Club is rated R for sex and a great deal of violence, but since in most instances the violence involves two willing participants, it is not very distressing. Sex, heard but not seen, played for laughs, has seldom been presented with more ugliness. Helen Bonham Carter’s Marla starts off ferociously, but by the end, she is the most degraded camp follower since Marlene Dietrich kicked off her high heels to follow Gary Cooper into the desert in Morocco almost seven decades ago.

This is a film and a view of life with no room for women. The ultimate threat is not death but castration. The male-bonding at times gets almost too bonded. During one conversation between Tyler and the narrator, Tyler in the bathtub (the psychic territory of this film never stretches far from the locker room) says that maybe they do not need another woman. By the time we get the punch line (of course, this film has a punch line), however, we find that a mere sexual connection would be insignificant compared to what really joins the narrator and Tyler.

Coming so soon after American Beauty, this film is especially troubling. Is maturity, manhood, so unappealing? Perhaps that accounts for a juvenilizing (if I may coin a word) of popular culture. Just in the past week, a word that I never thought to hear on network television was heard on network television, and a word that I never expected to see on the comics page of a family newspaper appeared there. A lot of misguided, perhaps testosterone fueled emotion shows up in domestic violence, road rage and The Jerry Springer Show. The day on which I’m completing this review, a college student in the comic strip Doonesbury looks forward to life after graduation, being able to "hang with your boys, drink brews, play video games all night," then realizes that that is his life already. A couple months ago, I heard a man in his late twenties refer to himself as one of "today’s kids." If I can remember that far back, when as a youthful high school teacher, I was his age, the last thing in the world I would have called myself was a "kid."

And all I can offer you is the advice to keep your feet dry and your heart full of noble thoughts. Keep those noble thoughts coming, because we live in a decidedly ignoble society.