Fight Club Clearly Fight Club has had a polarizing effect on its audience and I don't want to take

away from the fact that some people simply don't like it because of personal preference, but I also feel that that's part of the design of the film. Fight Club is an extremely complex film, in a way that we haven't seen in a long time (or maybe ever). In films that are actually about something and that have a lead character with whom we are supposed to identify, there are several key changes in attitude that you can chart from the beginning to the end. The character learns the lessons put before him and becomes a different person. Like the various epiphanies that Travis has in Taxi Driver or Max in Rushmore. Sometimes, like in American Psycho the lesson is that there are no lessons. There is some element of this in Taxi Driver as well. The movie follows these characters and gives us external clues to their internal changes (Max and Travis both make dramatic wardrobe changes at key moments in their developments) but the movie usually remains consistent in its storytelling style. (In films that are not about anything at all, like Bond films, the character learns nothing at all and doesn't ever change) In Fight Club the narrator goes through countless major changes and the film is divided up into so many little emotional turns and cues that it boggles the mind. Everything in the film (everything!) is a clue to the character's inner struggle. The entire movie happens in this constantly evolving state. It seems to be about dozens of different things at any given moment only to flip it's entire meaning the next. If you hang in until the end the payoff is extraordinary. But if you get stuck along the way or lose interest it all seems to be pointless. People who say it is a critique / glorification of violence, of capitalism, of men, of women, of whatever are getting little bits that are dropped along the way, like bread crumbs in a dense forest. The ads made it out to be an anti-consumerist film (a little irony all its own) but that is only a small part of the movie and not, ultimately, the crucial one anyway. The way that the film changes point of view is excellent. Director David Fincher indicates that he is going to do this early on when we first see Remaining Men Together. The meeting is portrayed for maximum comic effect and the narrator smirks at the prospect of crying on Bob's bitch tits. That's because we haven't gone through enough yet to appreciate the weight of this situation and are seeing it as if we had walked in cold. Then he takes us back further and we see the desperation in his life. When he comes back around to Remaining Men Together there is nothing funny about it; From the first man's incredibly sad story to the narrator's complete and total abandon on Bob's chest, the scene takes on a totally different tone. Unlike something like The Sixth Sense which invites you to look at all the ways the trick ending "works" on repeat viewing, Fight Club

changes tone with the lead character and as he sees things differently the entire film becomes different. What you see in the beginning may not necessarily still be true by the end. People will be writing dissertations on Fight Club for years to come. That is not to say that academia is all-important, but rather that the film may grow to be a touchstone of our culture, like Taxi Driver, Warhol, and Elvis. Something that you have to have an opinion on, that you can disagree with and still find endlessly interesting. To misinterpret it as a film saying that fighting in basements is good or that we should do public destruction is tragic, but inevitable. The kind of mindset in the movie is real. Leaders are tormented, confused people and that dynamic draws attention. Is Project Mayhem unrealistic? Hardly. Is Fight Club misogynistic? Is the movie misogynistic? Not at all. In fact, like Chuck Palahniuk's "Invisible Monsters", the story dissects what it is that makes us men and women. Marla is an extremely sympathetic character caught up in the life of someone who doesn't understand what she means to him. The entire movie is clouded by his misperceptions and she seems unstable. Of course, we come to realize that she's not the one that's unstable. The narrator rejects her ("I don't think another woman is what we really need.") because he is exploring what he thinks his male needs are. Tyler represents his male ideal and he is in love with that. There is a reason why the domestic scenes with Tyler and the narrator have such strong homoerotic overtones. The narrator is not able to process the masculine and feminine sides of his soul and mind and has split in two. At the beginning he is, while not happy, maintaining in his consumerist, wage-slave, "feminine" (not female, but feminine) life, accepting that that is right. It is not right and Tyler shows him a much more aggressive masculine side and at first that seems right. That is why fight club initially seems so cool and sexy. The movie shows it to you through his eyes. That is not enough and Tyler creates Project Mayhem. Eventually, as the character changes, fight club does not seem so right anymore. The intense beating he gives the blonde angel is a turning point in fight club. Project Mayhem now seems to be the answer. With the silly music, the homework assignments, and the perfect targets like Starbucks it's hard to argue with the goals of Project Mayhem. That, of course, is eventually shown to be wrong too. It is not liberating, although it initially seems like it is. It is just more fascist BS. The narrator is disillusioned with that and with Tyler. Then the truth about Tyler is revealed and the narrator realizes how he has wronged Marla. He tries to undo some of the damage that he now realizes that he has done. Marla has accused him of being sensitive one minute and a jerk the next. He didn't realize that he had been any of those things, but the two sides now make sense and he feels the need to balance them. When he "kills"

Tyler he is not banishing his masculine traits, but rather reabsorbing them and finding the balance that he needs. The movie ends with the linking of the man and the woman as they watch the apocalypse, basically Adam and Eve starting over and unmaking all the mistakes they have made, getting it finally right. So ultimately this is the opposite of misogynistic. In fact, it explores what the masculine and feminine sides of human nature are with an openness that you won't find in any number of cynical films like Anywhere But Here that pander to women by assuming that they want uncomplicated weepies. Fight Club dares to ask questions and try out different theories. It makes arguments and then disproves them. Fight Club deserves concentration and actually demands it. You can watch it purely as entertainment, but that would be an emotionally and physically draining experience. It is so uncompromising in its tone and themes that you have to see the thought process behind the razzle-dazzle. That there even is one is already remarkable, but that it is so complex is astounding. So many films, like Boogie Nights seem to be going somewhere and then go off track and end up achieving nothing. When I first saw Fight Club opening night I wasn't sure that I knew where it was going and felt myself being jerked into a million different directions. It was exhausting and I wasn't really sure what I thought afterwards. But after hours and hours of discussion and thought I felt like I had figured it out and now that I am confident that it leads somewhere worthwhile I can watch it and completely give myself over to it. Even having seen it already it constantly surprises. I don't think there has ever been a film like this before. Interpretations Fight Club is clearly about something, although it takes hard work and thought to figure out exactly what. And even then what you take away may be different from others. That's the beauty of it. You don't NEED to look for messages and themes in film. That's fine. But don't say they're not there. A lot of films make statements on surprising topics (Fincher's own much maligned Alien 3 was supposed to be an allegory for the then-rampant AIDS virus; John Ford's iconic Western The Searchers, which on the surface seems to utilize every genre cliche in the book, is actually a searing look at racism; Fight Club happens, in my opinion, to be about masculine and feminine identities and how they fuse to create our psychological makeup more than anything else) but they're only important if you care. If you don't, just enjoy the eye candy. Fight Club certainly excels on that level as well. To those that think the message is something like "Get out and live": Glad to see you're thinking about the movie beyond a knee-

jerk "It's stupid / it's fascist / it's kick-ass!" reaction. Now watch again and look closer. It is so much more than that. To those that think it is an anti-capitalism movie: It's not. That was the ad campaign and it was geared to get you in. Ultimately it is about a lot more than that. To those searching for answers: Yes this movie is complex. But it is consistent. The points it tries to make it makes. It doesn't fall apart at the end. If you read the book you'll find a less meaningful, more standard ending. The movie has a sort of happy ending that combines all of the themes from the film: hitting bottom, self destruction, gender issues, control issues...

'A' Grade Exam Response: Fight Club

Despite the gesture of destroying symbols of corporate power at the end, Fight Club is a film about power and control, not liberation. How far do you agree? When looking at Fight Club, power, control and liberation are themes that cannot be ignored. I think that, how far I agree with the statement made would depend entirely upon which aspect of the film I was looking from. For example, right from the beginning of the film we can see that Jack has become a slave to the Ikea resting unit. This gives a strong suggestion of the consumerist values of western culture, how materialistic society has become. It has developed a strong consumerist ideology. It would seem to me that the burning of Jacks apartment (unknown to the viewer at the time but it is in fact himself that causes the fire) is a symbol of his rebellion against this mainstream ideology. He becomes freed from the idea that he needs material possessions to complete his life and himself. I would be inclined to say that it is in this respect that Fight Club is about liberation. It is about removing yourself from the ties put in place by society and the ideology that is imposed upon us. This Marxist idea that is strongly shown through this escape would suggest that the film is about liberation. However, the character of Tyler has very much control over Jack. This would lead me to agree with the statement that Fight Club is about power and control. We can see right from the beginning of the film, this kind of power Tyler may have, the splicing of Tylers image flashing at important aspects of the opening suggests we can expect him to change the way Jack acts, as it could almost suggest to the audience that he is part of a fabrication of Jacks mind (although this is not clear until we have seen the ending). Nietzsches theory of nihilism is quite relevant to this film. Despite Jacks journey being one of what should be self-discovery, Tylers power over Jacks actions turns it into one of self-destruction. Unaware of what he is in fact doing to himself, Jack goes along with the plans of Fight Club and is sub-consciously having his path altered into destruction and not into freedom. One of the more prominent scenes to display this controlling idea, would be the scene in which Tyler lets go of the steering wheel of a moving car and Jack tries to take

control but Tyler convinces him to just let go. This scene clearly shows the audience of how controlling and powerful Tyler is towards Jack. He can convince to effectively drive himself to death.

In this scene Tyler also says, we are not special I feel that this is quite contradictory to the message he is trying to get through to Jack. He initially begins by getting him to rebel against mainstream ideology and be different, and this turning into we are not special throws many different ideas at Jack and it is only when Fight Club turns into Project Mayhem that Jack finally sees whats happening. He finally begins to see the control this figure has over him. This begins a whole new liberation process; he needs to free himself of Tylers influence and free himself of his nihilistic personality to regain his own control and have his own actions overwrite that of Tylers. Another theme that runs throughout this film is one of masculinity. In modern western society, women seem to have more relevance than ever before. This is shown through the femme fatale-like character of, Marla. At the very opening of this film, Jacks voice over tells us that Marla is at the root of it all. This warning of her is inflated more by the constant diegetic alarms/bells that sound every time she appears in the frame. (Marla is an anagram of alarm suggesting she is a clear threat.) It would seem that masculinity if questioned throughout this film and Marla is a character that threatens to undermine Jacks masculinity. The character of Bob is another example of how men are being feminised, (after having testicular cancer, the medication has given him breasts). The Fight Club initially starts out a form of liberation for them, only men are allowed. It allows them to fight with only there fists, to regain the feeling of masculinity that is considered to be lost in modern society. The underground nature of this club, (literally in the sense that it takes place in a basement) brings the men together. We are still men. Men is what we are. Again I would suggest that in this sense, Fight Club is about liberation, regaining the male status. Almost taking them back to caveman roots. Nevertheless, Fight Club once again, simply becomes another form of control and a new ideology to conform to. Everyone needs direction, need somebody for reassurance. Fight Club is considered to be quite a post-modern text, continuous selfreferential scenes, most clearly the scene in which Tyler is working as a projectionist. Fight Club also refers to several other cult films, one shot in particular is notably famous to be an imitation of the rape scene from A Clockwork Orange. Nearer the beginning of the film Jack says a copy of a copy of a copy this almost suggests that a post-modern text is nothing more

than a mixture of themes, shots and meanings taken from other texts. This could be a suggestion of how society moving. No longer moving forward, just moving in circles picking up parts of the past to mix into a new. I feel that this post-modern aspect of the film would suggest that liberation cannot be accessed because there is no way forward out of a society of ideologies that are imposed upon us subconsciously. With that in mind, I would tend top agree with the statement that Fight Club is simply about having power, may that be over a society, a gender or one person

| Roger Ebert - Review October 15, 1999 "Fight Club" is the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since "Death Wish," a celebration of violence in which the heroes write themselves a license to drink, smoke, screw and beat one another up. Sometimes, for variety, they beat up themselves. It's macho porn -- the sex movie Hollywood has been moving toward for years, in which eroticism between the sexes is replaced by all-guy locker-room fights. Women, who have had a lifetime of practice at dealing with little-boy posturing, will instinctively see through it; men may get off on the testosterone rush. The fact that it is very well made and has a great first act certainly clouds the issue. Edward Norton stars as a depressed urban loner filled up to here with angst. He describes his world in dialogue of sardonic social satire. His life and job are driving him crazy. As a means of dealing with his pain, he seeks out 12-step meetings, where he can hug those less fortunate than himself and find catharsis in their suffering. It is not without irony that the first meeting he attends is for post-surgical victims of testicular cancer, since the whole movie is about guys afraid of losing their cojones. These early scenes have a nice sly tone; they're narrated by the Norton character in the kind of voice Nathanael West used in Miss Lonelyhearts. He's known only as the Narrator, for reasons later made clear. The meetings are working as a sedative, and his life is marginally manageable when tragedy strikes: He begins to notice Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) at meetings. She's a "tourist" like himself--someone not addicted to anything but meetings. She spoils it for him. He knows he's a faker, but wants to believe everyone else's pain is real. On an airplane, he has another key encounter, with Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a man whose manner cuts through the fog. He seems able to see right into the Narrator's soul, and shortly after, when the Narrator's high-rise apartment turns into a fireball, he turns to Tyler for shelter. He gets more than that. He gets in on the ground floor of Fight Club, a secret society of men who meet in order to find freedom and selfrealization through beating one another into pulp. It's at about this point that the movie stops being smart and savage and witty, and turns to some of the most brutal, unremitting, nonstop violence ever filmed. Although sensible people know that if you hit someone with an ungloved hand hard enough, you're going to end up with broken bones, the guys in "Fight Club" have fists of steel, and hammer one another while the sound effects guys beat the hell out of Naugahyde sofas with Ping-Pong paddles. Later, the movie takes still another turn. A lot of recent films seem unsatisfied unless they can add final scenes that redefine the reality of everything that has gone before; call it the Keyser Soze syndrome. What is all this about? According to Durden, it is about freeing yourself from the shackles of modern life, which imprisons and emasculates men. By being willing to give and receive pain and risk death, Fight Club members find freedom. Movies like "Crash" must play like cartoons for Durden. He's a shadowy, charismatic figure, able to inspire a legion of men in big cities to descend into the secret cellars of a Fight Club and beat one another up. Only gradually are the final outlines of his master plan revealed. Is Tyler Durden in fact a leader of men with a useful philosophy? "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," he says, sounding like a man who tripped over the Nietzsche display on his way to the coffee bar in Borders. In my opinion, he has no useful truths. He's a bully--Werner Erhard plus S & M, a leather club operator without the decor. None of the Fight Club members grows stronger or freer because of their

membership; they're reduced to pathetic cultists. Issue them black shirts and sign them up as skinheads. Whether Durden represents hidden aspects of the male psyche is a question the movie uses as a loophole--but is not able to escape through, because "Fight Club" is not about its ending but about its action. Of course, "Fight Club" itself does not advocate Durden's philosophy. It is a warning against it, I guess; one critic I like says it makes "a telling point about the bestial nature of man and what can happen when the numbing effects of day-to-day drudgery cause people to go a little crazy." I think it's the numbing effects of movies like this that cause people go to a little crazy. Although sophisticates will be able to rationalize the movie as an argument against the behavior it shows, my guess is that audience will like the behavior but not the argument. Certainly they'll buy tickets because they can see Pitt and Norton pounding on each other; a lot more people will leave this movie and get in fights than will leave it discussing Tyler Durden's moral philosophy. The images in movies like this argue for themselves, and it takes a lot of narration (or Narration) to argue against them. Lord knows the actors work hard enough. Norton and Pitt go through almost as much physical suffering in this movie as Demi Moore endured in "G.I. Jane," and Helena Bonham Carter creates a feisty chain-smoking hellcat who is probably so angry because none of the guys thinks having sex with her is as much fun as a broken nose. When you see good actors in a project like this, you wonder if they signed up as an alternative to canyoneering. The movie was directed by David Fincher and written by Jim Uhls, who adapted the novel by Chuck Palahniuk. In many ways, it's like Fincher's movie "The Game" (1997), with the violence cranked up for teenage boys of all ages. That film was also about a testing process in which a man drowning in capitalism (Michael Douglas) has the rug of his life pulled out from under him and has to learn to fight for survival. I admired "The Game" much more than "Fight Club" because it was really about its theme, while the message in "Fight Club" is like bleeding scraps of Socially Redeeming Content thrown to the howling mob. Fincher is a good director (his work includes "Alien 3," one of the best-looking bad movies I have ever seen, and "Seven," the grisly and intelligent thriller). With "Fight Club" he seems to be setting himself some kind of a test--how far over the top can he go? The movie is visceral and hard-edged, with levels of irony and commentary above and below the action. If it had all continued in the vein explored in the first act, it might have become a great film. But the second act is pandering and the third is trickery, and whatever Fincher thinks the message is, that's not what most audience members will get. "Fight Club" is a thrill ride masquerading as philosophy--the kind of ride where some people puke and others can't wait to get on again.

Fight Club - social, political and cultural contexts The fight against commercialisation Jack is a character that represents a heavily domesticated male. He himself fears that has become commercialised, asking himself what kind of dining set defines me as a person? - personality is something not be assessed when looking at Jack. Instead, we make our judgments on his surrounding objects. There is no emotion, he is a product on the conveyer belt. He is manufactured. However, it appears that he is not the only one. Jack and Tyler form the Fight Club in order to deal with this outrage. They form it to claim male individuality back - as Tyler puts it himself How much do you know about yourself if youve never been in a fight? This, ultimately, is why Project Mayhem is introduced - its aim is to destroy commercialisation through mass chaos. The men who take part all feel the same way. They are sick of being plain, sick of being textbook. Now that they have regained their masculine identities with the help of Fight Club, they are prepared to show this to the commercialised world by destroying everything that they felt had pushed their purpose and existence out of the way. While the press may have argued that a good idea about male insecurity became lost with right-wing nutters, it is also possible that this insecurity was just a stepping stone on the path to extremism. It provides a source, a reason for their actions. Identity and masculinity From the early stages of the film, it is clear that the masculine identity is something that Jack is trying to re-gain. It has become buried and alluded by capitalism. What capitalism has done to this generation of men is taken away their place in the world, and the intentions of Project Mayhem is to destroy capitalism, so that these men can have a purpose once more. They can feel useful for doing what they do. This could explain why Jack is able to view Tyler in such a fascinated way - he is everything that he wants his life to be like. This also could be why so many other men were eager to be part of Fight Club - through violence, they have the chance to cling on to whatever is left of masculinity. It is a place where they can feel like men again. Identity crises is also suggested at an early stage in the film - during an encounter with Robert Paulson, a member of the testicular cancer support group who has grown breasts because of his treatment. Jack tells him that were still men. As Robert has gained breasts, he probably feels less like a man, so this is simply an a attempt at a comforting sentence. For Jack, however, it applies that his depressed, domesticated lifestyle has drained away all masculinity from him. He wants to cling on to what he can. How has this affected culture? Two schoolboys grapple with each other as bystanders look on and shout encouragementpupils have set up their own Fight Club, based on the ultraviolent film of the same name starring Brad Pitt. In the film, disaffected young men fight each other in illegal bare-knuckle bouts. - Daily Mail, February 2008 (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-522110/Pupils-set-lunch-breakFight-Club-post-shocking-videos-YouTube.html)

Inspired by the 1999 film Fight Club, starring Brad Pitt and Ed Norton, underground bare-knuckle brawling clubs have sprung up across the country as a way for desk jockeys and disgruntled youths to vent their frustrations and prove themselves. - USA Today, 2000, May 2006 (http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-05-29-fight-club_x.htm) A 17-year-old mimicking Brad Pitts Fight Club character, who plans attacks on corporate America, was arrested on suspicion of masterminding a pre-dawn blast outside a Starbucks Coffee shop - The Washington Times, July 2009 (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/16/starbucks-bombingblamed-on-fight-club-fancy/?page=1) Critical reception Fight Club is a dumbed-down extremism, Extremism Lite, no-brainer extremism for the Rush Limbaugh generation, an audience that thinks the "diceman" is a really challenging philosophy - The Guardian "This monstrous film brutalises men everywhere" - Daily Mail "Fincher started out with a good idea about male insecurity, but somehow got this snarled up with a daft story about right-wing nutters. It's hard to think of another movie this year that has begun so promisingly and ended so poorly" The Independent Shot in a convulsive, stream-of-unconsciousness style... Fight Club does everything short of rattling your seat to get a reaction. You can call that irresponsible. Or you can call it the only essential Hollywood film of the year" Time Out It means to explore the lure of violence in an even more dangerously regimented, dehumanized culture. That's a hard thing to illustrate this powerfully without, so to speak, stepping on a few toes - New York Times

Fight Club (United States, 1999, 139 minutes, color, 35mm) Directed by David Fincher (Based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk) Cast: Edward Norton . . . . . . . . . . Narrator Brad Pitt . . . . . . . . . . Tyler Durden Helena Bonham Carter . . . . . . . . . .Marla Singer Meat Loaf . . . . . . . . . . Robert "Bob" Paulson The following film notes were prepared for the New York State Writers Institute by Kevin Jack Hagopian, Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Pennsylvania State University: In this A Clockwork Orange for the new millennium, violence is the lingua franca of a generation battered by a mass media that offers its citizens a universe with two hells and no heaven, a world in which desire and fear are permanently linked. Here, desire is an Ikea showroom of hip consumer goodies that seem the very purpose of the good life, but that never satisfy. Instead, where satisfaction should live, fear dwells. Not the fear borne of privation, but the fear borne of prosperity, the nameless, alienating fear that asks, "is this really all there is?" In Fight Club, you throw off the coil of plush consumerism, and reach for the immortality of the barroom brawl. Fight Club is no club. It is a cult. It is men beating each other to blood-sodden pulps for nothing more than the existential thrill of it. Circling, dodging, feinting, and then striking for the face and the gut of their opponents, the Fight Clubbers seek a new, vital life by chancing their own death. The bloody imprint of their own crushed face on a concrete floor is their self-portrait. The films unnamed narrator is played by Edward Norton, who goes through life as an imperfect chameleon, never fully comfortable either in the skin of a junior salary man, or an apprentice brownshirt in Fight Club. At first addicted to one kind of pain (the narrator serially joins support groups for diseases hes never had), he soon becomes addicted to the explosive rituals of Fight Club. As he exchanges vicarious pain for the real thing, he begins to find the authenticity his life as a corporate drone had never allowed him. Nortons face and manner is designed for this role. His is a bland and boyish visage, and he becomes a waxen, walking-around portrait of Dorian Gray, absorbing the joyous spirit of cruelty of Fight Club without much comment. Norton plays the narrators life as a cog in the corporate machine as jittery and false, his life as a Fight Clubber manic and deadly. The narrator stands in awe of his mentor, the incredible Tyler Durden, vibrating to Tylers manic energy like a tuning fork. Tyler is the happy-go-lucky punch-out artist,

nighttime robber of liposuction clinic detritus, and impresario of Fight Club. His home is a Black Museum of every twisted nightmare of the aboveground society the narrator has just left, an Addams mansion of sex, violence, and crime. Here is misanthropy so rich and fully-dimensioned that it is a kind of poetry. Here, selfdestruction is self-help. Tyler invites the impressionable narrator to be the Goering to his Hitler, to enrich themselves as Fight Club goes franchise. Then, a sidewalk Himmler appears, and the narrator starts to wonder if therell be a night of the long knives in the Fight Club HQ. Critics were bitterly divided over Fight Club during its theatrical run, in a repeat of some of the themes that chopped up the critics community when Bonnie and Clyde opened 35 years before. Many found it the film a paean to a bloody-minded narcissism, cheesy exploitation masked as analysis. But others found the films wallowing in brutality an Absurdist way of cauterizing the psychic wounds American society has inflicted on itself through media glorification of violence. Critic James Berardinelli has rightly pointed out that kids were shooting each other in schools and postal clerks gunning each down long before Fight Club hit the screens. An even more intriguing possibility presents itself than the either/or terms of the critics debate, however: does Fight Club simultaneously enthrone fascism while pulling it apart limb from limb? "Only after disaster can we be resurrected," goes a line from Chuck Palanhiuks novel on which the film is based, and this film is an unrelieved human disaster from the opening titles to the copyright notice. Is the disaster the narrators life as a nameless suit in a corporate office, from which Fight Club delivers him? Or is the disaster Fight Club itself, from which the movie delivers us, bruised but wiser? Palahniuks Fight Club is an intensely epigrammatic novel; its trademark sayings have entered the vocabulary of white male college students everywhere, like a perverted Poor Richards Almanac. David Finchers film, however, seeks something different than the shotgunning of antithetical mottoes about the death of society that made Palahniuks book so rousing. For Fincher, as in his other major films, The Game, Se7ven, and Panic Room, the spaces and characters of evil are as fascinating as the theory of evil. In Edward Nortons narrator and Brad Pitts cyclonic Tyler Durden, hes found characters who make Palahniuks language take strange and mesmerizing human form. Likewise the astonishing visuals of the film, which realize the darkest imaginings of the novel. (Some of the films baroque mise-en-scene is hereditary; the films director of photography is Jeff Cronenweth, the son of Jordan Cronenweth, the cinematographer who gave another generation its own cinematic dystopia in Bladerunner.)

Thirty years ago, Stanley Kubrick built a cinematic annex to Anthony Burgesss linguistic tour-de-force novel A Clockwork Orange, and here, Fincher succeeds in making Chuck Palahniuks argumentative essay-novel into, at once, a social critique and an instructional video. Kevin Hagopian, Penn State University

You looking at me? David Fincher's Fight Club is a dazzling portrait of brutality and fascism

o o

Philip French The Observer, Sunday 14 November 1999 00.47 GMT

After Aliens3, Seven and The Game, you do not go to a David Fincher film expecting realism. His films are dark, apocalyptic fables set in imaginary cities, paranoid tales that jangle millennial nerves, and Fight Club is the most jarring thing he's done because it takes us inside the skull of a disturbed man. Both the movie's male stars Ed Norton and Brad Pitt - have specialised in playing lunatics, fascists, psychotic killers, and together they're combustible. Based quite closely on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club belongs to a tradition of fiction that stretches back to the Bible, in which the protagonist confronts a beguiling stranger that he seems to have conjured up. In the earlier versions this figure is clearly Satan or his representative. But since the romantic movement, the doppelgngers in books, ranging from James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner of 1824 to Martin Amis's Money of 1984, by way of Poe, Dickens and Dostoevsky, are more problematic. The nineteenth-century examples anticipate Freud's writing on the ego, superego and id, the twentieth-century ones are steeped in Freud, and the whole subject is comprehensively dealt with by Karl Miller in his brilliant book, Doubles. The unnamed Narrator of Fight Club (Ed Norton) is first seen at night, battered and bleeding in an unfurnished room of a glass skyscraper, a gun stuck in his mouth. In flashback, he explains in voice-over how he came to be there. He was a 30-year-old yuppie, living alone in an immaculate flat in an anonymous apartment block and devoted to consumerism. Discontented with the good life and his well-paid, somewhat dubious job as an accident calculator for an automobile firm, he's troubled with insomnia. A doctor tells this unhappy loner that if he wants to see real suffering he should visit a support group for men suffering from testicular cancer. In a darkly comic fashion, he becomes addicted to support groups for the terminally ill, going to a different one every night. 'When people think you're dying they really listen to you,' he remarks. Along the way, he meets another 'disease tourist', the death-seeking Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), a whey-faced skid-row Liz Taylor, and they agree to divide

up the support sessions so they don't meet. This is brilliantly funny in a manner that recalls Crash, but it's shot out of sequence in a fashion gauged to puzzle and disorient. Then, on one of his frequent plane trips, the Narrator meets the raffish, charismatic Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) who transforms his life. One recalls Raymond Chandler's working note for his screenplay of Strangers on a Train : 'If you shake hands with a maniac you may have sold your soul to the devil.' Tyler is a silver-tongued prankster, the bad boy your mother warned you to keep away from, the id in its most uncontrolled form. The Narrator moves into Tyler's spectacularly squalid home, a rotting mansion on an urban wasteland that might have belonged to some poor relatives of the Addams family. Tyler is the enemy of bourgeois conformity, a moral saboteur on the lines of Guy Grand, the malevolent hoaxer in Terry Southern's Magic Christian. He works as a waiter to pollute the food of smart restaurants, uses his job as a projectionist to cut subliminal pornographic frames into Disney pictures (one of Guy Grand's tricks), recycles the fat extracted from rich women during liposuction to manufacture expensive beauty soap and redesigns airline emergency books to hilariously offensive effect. Above all, Tyler preaches a philosophy of returning to the primitive. 'We're a generation of boys raised by women,' he says. 'Our Great War is a spiritual war, our Depression is our lives. Self-improvement is masturbation, self-destruction might be the answer', and he suggests that the way to restore masculinity is less through aggression than through the willing absorption of pain. He and the Narrator form the clandestine Fight Club in the cellar of a rundown bar where men can batter each other senseless in bare-knuckle contests. One is reminded of the masochism of Hemingway, Philip Marlowe and those endless scenes in films from the Fifties and Sixties where an unresisting Brando is beaten to a bloody pulp. The punishment Fight Club members receive would, of course, be too much for a punch-bag, let alone a person. The Narrator thrives in this new world, gaining a new purchase on life. But the smile is gradually wiped off his bruised face as it is off ours. First, Tyler becomes Marla's sexually athletic lover, and her presence exposes the homoerotic aspect of the mnage. Next, Tyler starts recruiting shaven-headed, black-shirted zealots from the Fight Club to form an underground army. The Narrator becomes increasingly alarmed at what he has unleashed when he learns about Project Mayhem, Tyler's all-out guerrilla war against capitalist society, Although it falters a little towards the end, Fight Club is a dazzling and disturbing fable about the discontent of men at the end of this terrible century, and it satirises the fantasies we have of achieving a different, supposedly more natural life. Some of those fantasies have been harnessed as reality, most especially in Nazism and other movements devoted to a politics of the blood. It's a dangerous and unnerving movie because, while they are manifestly defending civilised values, Fincher and company involve us at a visceral level in the seductive attractions of what the film attacks. It's like having a bad dream in which you go out for a night on the town and find yourself marching in a brown shirt at a Nuremberg rally. What the censor says Since Philip French saw Fight Club, the British Board of Film Classification has chosen to cut two scenes from it. Robin Duval, Director of the BBFC, explains that decision: 'There were two scenes that were cut in the British version: in the first Brad Pitt is beaten up at length. The second is where Ed Norton beats up a blond boy to

ruin his looks. We're quite stern with the 1968 guidelines on promoting sadism as a source of pleasure. Indulging in the pleasure of violence is relatively rare, but here the point was made and then followed by a long scene where a helpless victim has his face smashed up.'