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The Great Movies: Fight Club
by Eric (movies profile)
Sep 7, 2007
4
of
5 people found this review helpful
There are some movies that show you how things should be. There are some movies that show you how things are. Then there are some films that show us an image of the way the world could go, whether it be good or bad, if tensions keep going where they're going. David Fincher's Fight Club is such a movie as much as it's an ugly look at the brutal nature of men.
Fight Club shows us a world like ours where the most primitive of manly behavior is being wiped out with commercialism and a social unacceptablity of even the mildest of male nature. "Jack" (the character played by Edward Norton doesn't have an official name, I believe to allow men to put themselves in his shoes) is such a man. After a lifetime of being told what is social acceptable (from how to do his job to what kind of furniture to put in his apartment), it puts him in a state of perpetual insomnia. His life has spun out of his control to a point that he feels outside himself. Attending group sessions, it is required for him to lie and make himself apart of these groups, further isolating him from society in his own mind. These groups require him to cry, generally not a male characteristic. The repression of his male attributes make him a prime candidate for Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt)
Durden is an excess of machismo and selfish male cheuvinism. It is commonly known as manly to punish, destroy, dominate ruthlessly, which is Durden's specialty. He is the social rougue that is dangerous if left unchecked. What starts off as philosophy quickly becomes action as Durden challenges Jack to a fight. This action stirs the men around him. The release of this inhibition, most primal of male attributes, brings these men into a bond of destruction. First on themselves, then on the world around them. The escallation follows the same patterns as wars do, first show that you can. Then if they don't change, show them that you will. When the so-called Fight Club becomes an organized force, it became a beast of repessed anger at a world that no longer needed men to act manly.
The revelation of the bond between Jack and Tyler isn't even the most important aspect of this argument. Let's look at a scene where Jack talks about his own mother and father. About the indecision of inaction that allowed Jack to become lost in his own prison. This same argument he gives are the same ones that started many of the sexual harrassment problems. I recently watched North Country, which shows that most of the torment these men did to hurt women were in the forms of vicious "pranks", just like the ones that the fight clubs ensued. Under the philosophy that man needs to destroy to have something to rebuild, Durden allowed these things to escallate to the point of explosives.
This is all vital to an ending that doesn't make sense unless you look at the metaphors. What Jack becomes in the end is not entire the man before or after Durden, but a representation of all men who knows there is work to do.
Fincher's film is masagonistic and vile. It's not meant to be politically safe or even to be logical. The primiative man sees things in emotional states and Fincher is calling out the part of man that civilization can't take out of him. He doesn't so much glorify this, but allows it to be seen, to be contemplated and to be talked about. With Pitt portraying a man to calls down on civilizations perversities, he has a man's man that can both sound instantly crazy and disturbingly sane. And it's that sanity that's the scariest part about him.
I think it's great that Fight Club has a cult status, although I doubt that many look at what Fincher is saying. Many men who see this film might find themselves agreeing with Durden, but not understanding why. The reason is quite simple, he wants men to go back to Mars where they belong.
So will civilization change. It will, but I don't know where that change will lead. Let's just hope that Tyler Durden isn't there to give people a few wrong ideas. |
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