(Note:
This entry is intended for readers who have seen Fight Club. Others are advised to see
it first—and why haven't you already?—and come back later.)
"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. 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, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't.
And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off." —Tyler Durden
With
that little monologue alone, Fight Club asserts itself—rightly, to my mind—as
the quintessential Generation X film. (At least for men, anyway. Women may
respond to it, too, much as an anthropologist might study a foreign species,
but its raw appeal is strictly for the XY set.) Based on Chuck Palahniuk's
short, staccato first novel about the withered state of modern masculinity, Fight Club offers the fantasy of
neutered men finding an outlet for their muted frustrations, a way of feeling something, even if that
feeling is sadness or pain. And since that outlet is an underground,
bare-knuckles fight club—and later, a full-on anarchist
movement—the film has been perceived as dangerous in much the same way as
a Marilyn Manson record or the latest Grand Theft Auto game rouses the moral
alarmists. If you stopped watching after the first hour or so, the film might
fairly be dismissed as socially irresponsible, but its attitudes and
conclusions are far more complex and ambivalent than its critics give it credit
for being.
In
fact, look past the ultra-violence and flashy punk aesthetic, and Fight Club would make a fine companion
piece to Mike Judge's Office
Space,
another film that not-so-coincidentally opened to mixed reviews, tanked in
theaters, and found an avid cult appreciation on DVD. (I'll cover it here
someday, I promise.) Though the anonymous protagonist played by Edward Norton
enjoys a slightly more upscale lifestyle than the Everyman played by Ron
Livingston in Office
Space,
they're essentially the same character: a dead-eyed cubicle-dweller who
experiences a life-changing revelation, snaps out of his numb funk, gleefully
bucks the rules, and eventually ropes others into criminal conspiracy. One is a
deadpan office comedy and the other a blood-spattered provocation, but both
strike a chord in people fed up with the soul-crushing, 9-to-5 busywork of TPS
reports and automobile-recall assessments. When Norton and Livingston suddenly
decide to liberate themselves from the straight and narrow, it's a wage slave's
dream, as exhilarating as any piece of Hollywood escapism could ever hope to
be.
Granted, Fight
Club goes to
greater extremes than Office
Space: A few
guys defrauding a faceless company one fraction of penny at a time isn't the
same as a terrorist operation laying waste to 10 city skyscrapers that
represent the foundation of our credit system. But appropriately, Fight Club seriously questions the
limits of anarchy with the same fervor with which it dismantles the trappings
of consumer culture. The problem is, this tends to be the part that critics of
the film (and some viewers, too) usually miss when they dismiss it as nihilist
garbage, just like members of Tyler Durden's "Project Mayhem" choose to ignore
their leader when he has a change of heart. It's easy to accept rebellion,
because it's what we desire, but harder to examine the consequences, because we
don't like the hangover. If Fight Club could be considered "dangerous," the responsibility
for that lies more with the willful obliviousness of some viewers than the
moral deficiencies of its creators.
But
I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let us first consider "The Narrator"
(Norton), an average guy who wears a crisp white shirt and tie (but no jacket)
to work every day, and comes home to a cookie-cutter condo furnished by IKEA.
("What kind of dining set defines me as a person?" he wonders.) He's seized by
some indefinable anxiety and pain that's turned him into an insomniac, but his
doctor refuses to prescribe more than valerian root, exercise, and—if he
wants to see what real pain looks like—a visit to the support groups at
his local church-based community center. Slapping on nametags for made-up
personas like Cornelius and Rupert, the narrator slips into meetings for
tuberculosis, testicular cancer, and various strains of organ- and
brain-deteriorating parasites. The experience is a revelation, because the
suffering he witnesses is authentic and personal, and he can pretend that other
people's trials are his own. "Every evening I died," he says, "and every
evening I was born again, resurrected."
Just
when the narrator finally gets the nightly catharsis he needs for sleep, along
comes Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), a chain-smoking fellow support-group
"faker" whose presence prevents him from letting go. The two agree to split up
the classes, but Marla seems to have one up on him philosophically: She
operates without limits, whether swiping clothes from a Laundromat to sell on
the next block, or walking straight into traffic as if she could care less
about getting struck down. The narrator can see the freedom in that, and it's
no mistake that Tyler Durden appears to him shortly after he makes Marla's
acquaintance.
Played
by Brad Pitt with a movie star's brash confidence, Tyler is Mr. Hyde to the
narrator's Dr. Jekyll, a raging id who detests the deadening effects of consumer
culture and seeks to prank it out of existence. He explains that oxygen on
planes is intended not as a safety measure, but as a way to make passengers
high and euphoric, and thus more willing to accept their terrible fate. And in
a great exchange, he also dismantles a favorite Gen-X defense mechanism, humor,
when the narrator explains the concept of a "single-serving friend"—those
strangers that exist between take-off and landing, then evaporate like a
complimentary pat of butter:
Tyler: Oh I get it.
It's very clever.