Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999): USA
Reviewed by Brendan Fleming. Viewed on DVD.
*Spoiler review* “In Fight Club I see the strongest and smartest men who have ever lived. I see all this potential. And I see squander. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas and waiting tables. Slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes. Working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history man. No purpose or place. We have no great war. No great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, movie gods and rock stars. But we won’t. We’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off”.
This monologue that Brad Pitt gives in the middle of Fight Club has always stuck with me. Maybe even more than any other film I’ve seen. It really is filled with a lot of truth. The part about being a “movie god” always gets me a little depressed, though I’m just looking to be a paid actor. And I do find it more than a little ironic that it is Brad Pitt saying that line. But still, it’s hard not to listen to that and understand exactly what the writer is getting at. For those of you who haven’t seen Fight Club because you think it’s about a bunch of guys beating the shit out of each other, or you just don’t like violence are missing out on maybe one of the most interesting opinions about a generation ever told. The generation being looked at is Generation X. The children of the Baby Boomers who are now in their thirties and forties. It’s also a fascinating story about a man slowly going insane, complete with split personalities.
Edward Norton plays a character, who’s name is never mentioned. He works as a recall coordinator for a major car manufacturer. He spends much of his time in airports, in planes and in hotels. He goes from town to town and city to city looking at, and writing reports on accidents in which cars that were involved were ones made by his company. This is mentioned briefly in the film, showing us just a couple of quick shots of mangled cars, and one scene devoted to the viewing of a car involved in an accident. What we see more of is how the travel that this job demands is taking a toll on this guys mind. Airports, rental cars and hotels. Over and over and over again. He happens to make very good money at this job, but can’t really enjoy it because he lives alone in an apartment on top of a building. He spends most of his time ordering things for his apartment from catalogs. He has lots and lots of nice things, but none of this makes him happy. Insomnia arrives and he stays in a constant state of fog day after day. He tries to beat this depression that he finds himself in by attending group therapy sessions. Not for insomnia or depression. He attends group therapy for things that don’t even ail him. Cancer and parasite infestation are things that he attends. Listening to people with far worse problems than he make him feel much better about is life. He finds freedom in pretending to loose everything. He finally sleeps, and things are going good.
That is until Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) enters the picture. “She like a cut in the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you could stop tonguing it.” He finds out that she is doing the same thing. She is board and possible depressed, but she’s not dying. This pushes Ed’s character past the point of no return. He refers to her as a “tourist”. He confronts her and they agree to share different sessions on different days. Her arrival starts his final decent into madness, and it all finally comes to a head when he almost falls asleep on a plane. His eyes snap open to find someone sitting next to him. This is where we meet Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) for the first time. Hipster Goodwill suit, sunglasses, and spiky hair. Meet Ed’s alter ego. Tyler looks like how Ed wants to look, talks like he wants to talk, and has his way with the woman like he would like to. With the splitting of the personality, Ed’s character finds freedom to do what he wants and think how he wants to think with out feeling guilt about it. After meeting on the plane and exchanging business cards, Ed finally arrives home after another business trip only to find that his apartment has blown up and all his worldly possessions on the street below. He calls Tyler and meet at a bar where they have a discussion about society. Ed’s alter ego tells him that, “he should be concerned with war and poverty, not celebrity magazines, televisions with five-hundred channels and some guys name in my underwear. I say lets not be perfect, lets never be complete”. Of course this is Ed’s character talking to him self at this point. He’s blown up his own apartment and has nowhere to go. He drinks three pitchers of beer and then takes himself out of the bar where his Tyler tells him, “I want you to hit me as hard as you can”. This is the beginning of a different kind of group therapy, the one that Marla could never be apart of. Fight Club. Tyler asks, “how well can you know yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?” It’s a great question. Tyler and Ed begin to fight, which gets the attention of a couple of other guys. And how could it not? From their point of view, Ed is kicking the crap out of himself. More and more guys start to come, and eventually it’s a Saturday night group session hosted down stairs in the bar where their conversation first took place. To the members of Fight Club who “enter as a wad of cookie dough and end of being cut from wood”, this is what their lives have been missing. Even though this extra curricular activities are indeed violent, this is making these men’s lives feel real. And so it goes. The men meet every Saturday night, and Fight Club continues. But, the insanity continues. Ed’s character has no idea that Tyler and he are the same person. Marla calls up one day, and Ed wants nothing to do with her, Tyler on the other hand wants to get her in bed. This of course plays games with Marla’s mind. At one moment she’s being bedded by a sex machine, and the next morning she’s being asked what’s she’s doing there.
After a while, the basis of Fight Club changes. Now it seems that just a group of men fighting in the basement of a bar isn’t good enough any more. Now it seems that what is important is to push the Fight Club ideals on the American people and businesses. The club turns into a terrorist organization. Writing that sentence seems like a bit of a leap of faith, that it could go from one extreme to quite another. When you have a large group of people, in this case a group of young men in their twenties and thirties, with no direction or purpose and give them a leader as dynamic as Tyler Durden, anything is possible. Once the army is assembled, Tyler launches his ultimate plan. It starts off little. In one memorable scene, Tyler walks into a convenience store and takes the clerk out back at gun-point. He asks the clerk what he wanted to be when he was a kid. The clerk doesn’t answer and Tyler pulls the hammer back on the gun. The clerk tells Tyler he wanted to be a veterinarian. Tyler tells him that he will check back in six months, and if he hasn’t started his schooling yet, he’ll kill him. Talk about motivation. The group gets a bit bolder as they threaten a local politician and set fire to the side of a financial building. The ultimate goal however is the total destruction of the downtown financial district. The final scene of the film is the same as the first, Ed sitting in a chair with Tyler holding a gun in his mouth. The duration of the film tells the story to how he got to this point. Fight Club has formed, and now bombs are set in a handful of buildings, including the one that he’s in now. Suddenly Ed has the realization that he and Tyler are the same person, and that the gun in Tyler’s hand is actually in his hand. To get rid of Tyler once and for all, Ed’s shoots himself in the mouth. The bullet goes out the side of his mouth, but for Tyler it goes out the back of his head. Tyler “dies” and Ed is back to just one person. Just in time to watch his work as the building explode and drop around him until, presumably the building he’s in.
Fight Club has a lot of things going for it. Edward Norton and Brad Pitt give great performances. The film is loaded with great music, including “Going out West” by Tom Waits and ‘Where is my Mind” by the Pixies. But it’s the story that has to be there, and it is. Of course it’s a little far fetched, but if you squint your eyes just enough you can see the plausibility. “I’m the middle child of history man”. And though I’m not pissed, it’s a perspective I’ve never been able to shake since I first watched Fight Club.
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