Fight Club: Ambitious and Inflammatory

If Tyler Durden didn't want us to talk about his fight club, he'd be appalled by my article, because that's all I'm going to do for the next several paragraphs. True to its nature, Fight Club is the odd man out in ultra-popular cinema. It's not really a dark comedy, although it contains plenty of darkly comedic moments. It's not really a crime movie either, even though plenty of crimes get committed. An adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's 1996 novel of the same name, it's a movie with so many different moving parts and so many different tones that it's a bit difficult to classify. It's both a critique and a celebration of reactionary anti-social behavior, and I can see why it's become almost synonymous with, in particular, dissatisfied and disaffected young men, a demographic I'm far more in-tune with than ninety-nine percent of the journalists out there complaining about such people. It's a violent, don't-care rejection of many of the admittedly-meaningless formalities of our American society, and even if I understand fully that the behavior portrayed in this movie is appalling, the sentiment of Durden and his cohorts is not entirely lost on me. That both scares and excites me.

To give you the short and sweet of it, Fight Club is about just that - a fight club, one that gets wildly out of hand and even terroristic with time. Tyler Durden, a soapmaker and head of this underground anarchist fighting ring, becomes a worse and worse influence on our unnamed protagonist with time, and the question is not if things will become too much for our hero to handle, but when. Everyone has a breaking point; sometimes it's hard to tell if Durden is trying to build our protagonist up or find it. Either way, Fight Club is an excellent movie. Its narrated exposition by this unnamed protagonist is an awesome feature, and the story is an intriguing character study of a man who should be anything but. The strange thing is that it works far more often than not. The filmmaking techniques are interesting, ambitious, and even experimental in some ways, in their blood-pumping exploration of this protagonist and his life of both mundane office work and illegal underground bare-knuckle brawls.

The dialogue of Fight Club is cuttingly funny, beautifully sarcastic, and unexpectedly unexpected at nearly every turn. This movie is just as fun to listen to as it is to watch, and it practically hums a tune as it deconstructs almost everything we take for granted as Americans. It's a joyfully nihilistic escape from the mundanities of our society, an anti-social cinematic feast that gleefully shocks and willingly surprises. At the core of this borderline-unpalatable spectacle is the eccentric Tyler Durden, brought to life by a magnetic performance from Brad Pitt. I've never met a character quite like him, and the ways in which he influences our protagonist are daring and even dangerous.

Have you ever heard the memo that a frog will allow you to boil it alive if you would only slowly raise the temperature of the water in the pot? Tyler's antics become less and less tolerable, riskier and riskier with time, not unlike he's trying to slowly boil our protagonist and those around him, so long as they allow him to. That's likely the best example I can give to illustrate how Fight Club operates as a film. It's like Fincher is sitting next to you, periodically asking you if what they're doing is okay every fifteen minutes or so. Tyler's antics become less and less tolerable and riskier and riskier with time, and the frogs hardly seem to mind enough. It's truly a marvelous effect. What's not so marvelous is how Fight Club needs to be a blockbuster. The final third of this movie is woefully out of proportion with the rest of its story, and while some of the twists and revelations are fun, Fight Club can behave like two different movies, and not in a good way. Still, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, and Fight Club is undeniably delicious.

This movie is a sucker punch of original filmmaking who's ambitions can sometimes take it further than it's equipped to go. Nevertheless, Fight Club is a dirty, grungy, and radically different approach to filmmaking that was evidently appreciated by many, and for good reason. It's an endlessly macho and uncomfortably antisocial movie that takes a baseball bat to the habits of a first-world nation. It asks some good questions, laughing at us as it gives largely and intentionally insufficient answers. It raises many thought-provoking philosophical challenges in a destructively devil-may-care manner, leaving a trail of property damage in its wake. I want to think I'm beyond finding fault in a movie for its mere propagation of a worldview different from my own, but in some ways, I can see perfectly why many reviewers found Fight Club reprehensible. I can also see why others found it inspiring. And best of all, I now fully understand why we never really stopped talking about it.

Fight Club - 9/10

Proverbs 28:25