# Fight Club (1999)

### reviewed by
Curtis Edmonds

    by Curtis Edmonds -- blueduck@hsbr.org

I am an amateur movie reviewer. "Amateur", of course, implies two things -- that I am not very good, and that I am not getting paid. (All those who wish to remedy this status, either by telling me how wonderful I am or by giving me money, are free to do so.)

But being an amateur, I have certain freedoms. I do not have to see every movie, whether it's one of those arthouse flicks that gets hyped on NPR or one of those mindless teen slasher movies. I do not have to review every bad movie I see, which meant that I did not have to chronicle the multiple sillinesses in, let's say, The Thirteenth Warrior. (Or, as they're calling it at the studio, the Chapter Thirteenth Warrior.)

But most importantly, if a movie is really important for me, if it really speaks to me in meaningful ways, if I can't write a coherent sentence about it because of the flood of feelings that come washing through me, I don't have to write a review. I tried for weeks to write a Good Will Hunting review before I figured out that I could stop and go to the next review. I didn't have to search my emotional thesaurus to fight the right words to describe how Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's script affected me.

And I thought, there for a while, that I wouldn't be able to write a Fight Club review. I had the first paragraph done, but I got stuck. "Fight Club is a movie about men and manliness," I wrote, right after I first saw the movie. "It is about blood and courage and recklessness. It celebrates the raw power of men beating the stuffing out of each other. It is a macho, savage movie with scene after scene of bloodletting and violence. These things are all true, to some degree, but they do not encompass the movie. The truest thing about Fight Club is its resonance, the way it tugs on the little harp strings in your chest that let you know when something is... is..."

I thought, there for a while, that Fight Club had a capital-M Message. A message specifically tailored for bored 30-year-old urban professional children of divorce. A message that would ring in our ears and inspire us. Somewhere in all that high-sounding bombast ("Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives.") there was something that was talking to us. Something that would be the final word for all of us lost, soulless Generation X slackers.

    And I was right.

    There is a message in Fight Club.  And that message is:  Grow the hell
    up.

The key scene in Fight Club comes very early on in the movie, and is, in the way, the pebble that starts the avalanche of silliness. Jack the Narrator (Ed Norton) starts the movie with a description of his life as a thirtysomething cog in a corporate machine. Cogs in machines don't get to sleep, and neither does Jack, whose insomnia leaves him stumbling through life. Jack goes to see his doctor, begging for sleeping pills.

The doctor says no. (Incredibly, he doesn't seem motivated by any desire to save Kaiser's prescription plan a couple bucks.) The doctor tells Jack that he doesn't need pills, that he's really not going through any real pain. Go visit the testicular cancer survivor's support group, the doc says, and see what real pain is like.

For a long while, I was mad at the doctor. How dare he be so callous? Just because Jack (or me) has trouble sleeping, or is depressed about work and life and the quality of the furniture in our apartments, doesn't mean that our struggles and our problems and our sense of emptiness can be dismissed? Just because our pain isn't as severe as people with cancer or parents of murdered children or Rwandan refugees doesn't mean that it's not important, doesn't it? Doesn't it?

    Well, maybe it does.

What I think the doctor is trying to tell Jack is two simple, universal truths: 1. Everybody's got problems. 2. Everybody's got to deal with their own problems.

Jack learns the first part of this lesson, but not the second part. He begins to infiltrate support groups for diseases he doesn't have, sucking up the grief of others like a sponge. It helps him to sleep, somehow, and gives him an emotional release. (Thankfully, it gives the audience some satiric fun, too.) But it's not a real solution, as is demonstrated when another faker (Helena Bonham-Carter) starts haunting the same groups. And when the real world hits Jack with a real and very personal catastrophe, he can't use the twelve-steps to sidestep his pain.

At this point, Fight Club opens the door for Brad Pitt's nihilistic maniac Tyler Durden. After a brief meeting on an airplane, Tyler and Jack somehow form a relationship as balanced as the yin and the yang on Jack's departed coffee table. Tyler doesn't have any trouble sleeping. He's a soap-making entrepreneur (you learn a lot more about the soap-making process than you want to), outside the system, outside materialism, outside any sense of right or wrong.

Tyler, himself a walking sartorial sight gag, lives in a trashed-out nightmare of a house that represents a fantastic step forward in the lively art of set design. This house would cause Kosovar refugees to turn up their noses and ask for a nice, dry tent. Martha Stewart would go mad with horror and fear. This is the kind of house that would make Bob Vila drop his tool belt and sadly walk away, frustrated by the magnitude of the opportunity.

Together, Tyler and Durden found Fight Club, where men of all shapes and sizes can pummel each other senselessly. I said earlier that I thought that Fight Club was about men and manliness, which is 100% wrong. It's about boys and boyishness. Men fight, but they fight for reasons, be it honor or protection of the weak or a multi-million-dollar pay-per-view purse. Fight Club is fighting for the sake of fighting, just the way it took place on the Johnson Elementary playground. The only thing different is that no one is stealing anyone else's lunch money.

Fight Club eventually develops into Project Mayhem, which is more childish but is childishly creative as well. The men of Fight Club set up code words and play soldier and get to stay up all night smashing things. The audience can, and does, take some juvenile pleasure in seeing the world's biggest bowling ball run over a Starbucks, but that's it. No one in Project Mayhem is dealing with their problems, they're blowing them up instead.

Fight Club itself has problems if its own that it doesn't deal with, either. Fight Club is as nonsensical as a history lesson from Pat Buchanan or (to be nonpartisan) grand jury testimony from Bill Clinton. It is lavishly overproduced, with baroque touches like talking penguins and subliminal film splicing. Everything is laid on too thick, from the incessant, whiny narration to the blood flowing from Edward Norton's nose to Brad Pitt's tough-guy act to Helena Bonham Carter's eyeshadow. The whole movie screams of excess. (The screaming, unfortunately, is loud enough to drown out a solid performance by Ed Norton and a dead-on Winona Ryder impression by Helena Bonham Carter.)

The final verdict on Fight Club is a split decision. There's a lot to like and admire about the moviemaking skill that all parties (even Brad Pitt) display. If all you're looking for is a fun, mindless movie, Fight Club may be for you. But just as there's a message in Fight Club -- a message that none of the actors heed -- there's also a danger. The danger in Fight Club, like the danger in nihilism itself, is that some people will actually take it seriously.

    --
    Curtis D. Edmonds
    blueduck@hsbr.org

Movie Reviews: http://us.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Curtis+Edmonds

"So how does a conservative movie reviewer, who doesn't want to spoil the movie, write a review? The same way he takes the lamb chop from rottweiller -- carefully. Another way is to fill two-thirds of the column with irrelevant woolgathering about other topics so that you only have room for a paragraph for the real review." -- Jonah Goldberg

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