| Overall Grade: |
A |
|
| Story: |
A+ |
|
|
| Acting: |
A+ |
|
|
| Direction: |
A- |
|
|
| Visuals: |
A- |
|
|
Truly Unforgettable, A Modern Classic.
by The Gent (movies profile)
Oct 12, 2007
3
of
3 people found this review helpful
I watched this movie only after several years of its release and by now,I think I might have watched it over 20 times already.This movie,to me,is a masterpiece and a movie like no other.David Fincher's 'Fight Club'(1999) is a modern classic. Hard to swallow,surprisingly easy on the eyes,wonderfully shot and truly unforgettable.
Stay till the last scene and you will be rewarded.Everything you wish you could do but were too afraid to can be found here.
The narrator (Edward Norton) is a nameless automobile company employee who travels to accident sites for the purposes of calculating whether or not to issue product recalls based on the likely cost of lawsuits that would be incurred otherwise.He is a disiilusioned yuppie whose repressed rage and is emotionally numbed by chronic insomnia.His doctor refuses to write a prescription for his insomnia, and instead recommends that he visits a support group for testicular cancer sufferers to appreciate real suffering.The narrator attends the group and is able to find catharsis,sleeping soundly without a problem.
Meanwhile, the narrator's routine is again disrupted when he notices another person faking these illnesses (like himself), Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter). Her presence at his support groups causes his insomnia to relapse.
During a flight for a business trip, the narrator meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a flamboyant soap salesman. When the narrator arrives home, he finds that his apartment has been destroyed by an explosion. He calls Tyler and meets him at a bar, where Tyler permits the narrator to stay at his place. Leaving the bar, Tyler asks the narrator to hit him. The narrator reluctantly complies, and the two end up enjoying a fist fight. The narrator moves in with Tyler at an abandoned house, and they fight again outside the bar. After attracting a crowd, they establish a 'fight club' in the bar's basement. Soon, more clubs spring up around the country. At one point, Marla overdoses on Xanax and is rescued by Tyler Durden. The two begin a sexual relationship, and Tyler forbids the narrator from talking to Marla or anyone else about him.
Eventually, Tyler's fight club becomes "Project Mayhem," which commits increasingly destructive acts of anti-capitalist vandalism in the city. The fight clubs become a network for Project Mayhem, and the narrator is left out of Tyler's activities with the project, feeling disillusioned and disturbed about their actions. Tyler and the narrator have an argument and Tyler disappears from the narrator's life.
When a member of Project Mayhem, Bob (Meat Loaf), dies on a mission, the narrator decides to take action to shut down the project. He tries to trace Tyler's steps, traveling all over the country and feeling a sense of déjà vu wherever he travels. He is disturbed to find that fight clubs have been started in every city and that he is recognized everywhere he goes. To his shock, he is identified as Tyler Durden by one of the men he encounters. In panic, he calls Marla Singer, and asks her to say his name. When she responds "Tyler Durden," he realizes the truth; Tyler is an alter ego of his own split personality. Tyler appears in his room and explains that he is in control of the narrator's body whenever he is asleep. The narrator faints, and later wakes to find phone calls made during his blackout. He tracks Tyler's plans to the downtown headquarters of several major credit card companies, which Tyler plans to destroy in order to cripple the consumerist financial system. Failing to find help with the police, many of whom are members of Project Mayhem themselves, the narrator attempts to disarm the explosives in the basement of one of the buildings. He is confronted by Tyler, knocked unconscious, and taken to the upper floor of another building to witness the impending destruction.
The narrator, held by Tyler at gunpoint, realizes that in sharing the same body with Tyler, he is the one who is truly holding the gun. He fires it into his mouth, shooting through the cheek without killing himself. The illusion of Tyler collapses, with an exit wound to the back of his head. Members of Project Mayhem, who still see the narrator as Tyler, bring Marla Singer to him and leave them alone, despite being shocked by his wound. Marla, who was warned to leave the city by the narrator, concernedly asks what happened. The narrator explains that he shot himself and assures her that everything will be fine seconds before Project Mayhem's bombs detonate. Holding hands as they watch buildings explode in a collapsing skyline outside the windows, the narrator sedately tells Marla that she met him at a very strange time in his life.
Fight Club is a black comedy that applies heavy satire.The director chose to temper the film with humor to avoid a sinister nature, keeping it as "funny and seditious".Norton described the film to be a "dark, comic, sort of surrealist look" at young people's failures to interact with the value system of which they are expected to be a part.Fight Club parallels Rebel Without a Cause by probing into the frustrations of the people that live in the system.The people had been reduced to "a generation of spectators", having undergone societal emasculation.The culture of advertising had defined society's "external signifiers of happiness", causing an unnecessary chase for material objects where the pursuit was supposed to be for spiritual happiness.
The violence of the fight clubs serve not to promote or glorify the notion, but as a metaphor for feeling.The fights are physical representations of resisting the impulse to be cocooned in society.Norton explained that the fighting between the men stripped away the "fear of pain" and "the reliance on material signifiers of their self-worth", leaving them to have really experienced something valuable.When the fights transform into revolutionary violence, this dialectic by Tyler Durden only serves as one-half of the film's dialectic, with the narrator pulling back from Durden.Fight Club purposely shapes an ambiguous message that is left for the film audiences to interpret. Described Fincher: "I love this idea that you can have fascism without offering any direction or solution. Isn't the point of fascism to say, 'This is the way we should be going'? But this movie couldn't be further from offering any kind of solution."
In Fight Club, the nameless narrator is an everyman who lacks a world of possibilities and initially cannot find a way to change his life. The narrator finds himself unable to match society's requirements for happiness and embarks on a path to enlightenment, which involves metaphorically killing his parents, his God, and his teacher. At the beginning of the film, the narrator has killed off his parents but still finds himself trapped in his false world. The narrator meets Tyler Durden, with whom he kills off his metaphorical God by going against the norms of society. Ultimately, the narrator has to face killing his teacher, Tyler Durden, to complete the process of maturity.
The narrator also seeks a form of intimacy, but he avoids this at first with Marla Singer, seeing too much of himself in her.Though Marla presents a seductive and negativist prospect for the narrator, he instead embraces the newness that Tyler Durden has to offer him. The narrator finds himself comfortable having the personal connection to Tyler Durden, but he becomes jealous when Marla becomes sexually involved with Tyler. When the narrator argues with Tyler about their friendship, Tyler explains that the relationship between the two men is secondary to the active pursuit of the philosophy they had been exploring.Tyler also suggests doing something about Marla, implying that she is a risk to be removed. When Tyler says this, the narrator realizes that his desires should have been focused on Marla and begins to part from Tyler's path.
The unreliable narrator is not immediately aware that Tyler Durden is also himself.The narrator also unreliably advocates the fight clubs as a way to feel powerful. Instead, the narrator's body worsens throughout his fights, while Tyler Durden's self-image instead improves due to the narrator's idealistic perception of him. The transformations were reflected in production with Norton losing weight and Pitt working out and becoming tan.Tyler Durden, who initially embarks on a journey with the narrator in desiring "real experiences" like actual fights,becomes a Nietzschean model in possessing the nihilistic attitude of rejecting and destroying institutions and value systems. Tyler, who represents the Id with his impulsive nature,conveys an attitude that is seductive and liberating to the narrator and the followers. Eventually, Tyler's initiatives approach the point of being dehumanizing, with Tyler using a megaphone to order around members of Project Mayhem in a similar fashion to the approach of Chinese re-education camps.The narrator pulls back from Tyler and retreats from what Tyler is going toward. Instead, the narrator ultimately arrives at a middle ground between his conflicting selves. |
My Public Profile 
