Posted by Chunk in Featured, Film | 0 comments
Fight Club: A look back on a modern classic
What do the following films have in common? Alien 3. Se7en, Fight Club, Panic Room, The Curious case of Benjamin Button. Many will notice that three are films that starred Brad Pitt back in the days when he wasn’t just another pretty boy in Hollywood, but the more eagle eyed amongst you will note that while the three you’ve noticed , along with the latter are collaborative efforts with one of my favourite Directors of all time – David Fincher.
If you’re of a certain age, let’s say 32, you’re around the right age to appreciate and even remember three movies that defined the late nineties and emerging 21st century – Memento, Se7en…And Fight Club. While Christopher Nolan has certainly done well off the back of a film that by any standards a work of genius and artistic vision, Memento is barely considered to be on a par with Fight Club in any way, shape or form; sure, memento is a film that fucks with your head in a way that only a cult leader could, but Fight Club is a film that fucks with your head in a different way; like its elder brother, Fight Club worms its way into the psyche, makes you think about the context of the story. And then combines it with photography and lighting that few men with relatively little experience could master. Very few people could take a story like Chuck Palahniuk’s and visualise it in such a way that would be gratifying to the base instinct of the unthinking, casual film viewer who just digs the violence, and then equally allow the deeper thinking viewer to be immersed in a world that attempts to communicate the banality and futility of modern living. Fight Club is an expression of nihilism on film in its purest form, an expression of anger on the part of the author towards consumerism and established laws that seek to supress and subjugate as opposed to grant the freedom and liberty that people, at least in theory, would and should enjoy – if only they didn’t think about their meagre existence quite so much. Fight Club is, quite simply, David Fincher and Chuck Palahniuk’s lesson to the masses that ignorance is bliss, and an expression of contempt that we as a people are so accepting of our roles and our fates.
More so, they do such a thing with a sadistic smile on their face and a soundtrack that’s quite simply designed to fuck to. I have rarely, in all my years of enjoying film, heard a soundtrack that was more perfectly keyed to what was happening on the screen.
In case you haven’t watched the film, ( and if this is the case, I urge you to wake the hell up and watch the damned film) or you just need a refresher, Fight Club follows the life of someone simply referred to as The Narrator, performed by Ed Norton. The Narrator is a risk assessor, bored, and granted respite from a meaningless life by temporary spurts of mail order purchases at Ikea, and eventually group therapy sessions to offer him some kind of release from massive bouts of insomnia. That is, until a character by the name of Tyler Durden walks (or rather, sits) into his life on a particularly long ride home from another case. Thinking that this is the end of his “single serving buddy” relationship, the narrator makes his way home to find his Ikea swamped home on fire, leaving him literally homeless and with nowhere to go – which leaves him calling upon the services of Tyler Durden.
This is where the fun starts. Tyler takes our view into this world, the Narrator into a journey of destruction and self-discovery; of violence to alleviate boredom, and of chaos in a world of control. As the film progresses, fight club progresses from an underground network where men come together to fight the shit out of each other for mutual entertainment, into the greater realm of a movement whereby the members become initiates into an almost cult-like collective whereby all the members forgo their possessions in favour of a school of thought that seeks to disrupt the status quo from their norms and essentially wake up the populous.
This is the beauty and simplicity of Fight Club; it mocks the unthinking brute who simply loves meaningless violence, while providing them from entertainment. It mocks consumerism, which again is an irony as the film’s commercial success has been long-lived for a while now. This film is a paradox in the sense that the production is not only distributed by fox, but is a film that isn’t a product of the sterile, Hollywood formula thinking – in essence, a rare blessing and moment of calm in the eye of the storm.
The film itself shows a certain flair and style of film that has been evident in Fincher’s work from the very start; Fincher has an almost innate, spiritual knack to be able to do everything right in his films, like choosing the right scene to edit into the final cut, framing his scenes in a way that makes it look like a combination of professionally amateur photography, which I think in a way unsettles me as a person, because I immediately make the mistake of thinking that the dark, gritty feel of the film forsakes the professionalism that Fincher has in spades for a cheap, shoestring budget production. I’ve always felt that David Fincher has the very grail that many directors in Hollywood today, including Tarantino and Rodriguez wish they possessed. To boot, the relationship that had obviously been built up between Pitt and Fincher in their previous collaboration, se7en permeates the entire production, relaying a mutual respect between actor and director that allows an eerie commitment to the character and the scene. This, combined with the intensity and immense talent of Ed Norton (who’d literally previously worked on American History X) completes the central cast, making even the most lowly actors, such as Helena Bonham Carter tolerable in a way that I could never have anticipated. Even Meat Loaf is a surprise in this film, and is actually the only member of the cast that I think has the honour of being even distinctly connectable.
I think then, that is the key to this film; the hyper reality combined with glossy production values and a rage that isn’t even close to being matched by any Tarantino film; indeed, whereas Tarantino produces masturbation violence, single service snippets of blood and guts that offer no meaning and no real reason, Fincher is masterful in communicating the reason for such violence, while reiterating the fact that there is no possible way we could relate to or understand the psyche of either the Narrator or Tyler without a possible psychotic break – beyond the periphery of understanding the disdain this film shows for conformity and consumerism.
