Fightclubbooklet

Fight Club (1999)
Director – David Fincher

Six Important Scenes
Scene description 1:
Narrative:
Stylistic features:
Narrative:
Stylistic features:
Narrative:
Stylistic features:

Six Important Scenes
Narrative:
Stylistic features:
Narrative:
Stylistic features:
Narrative:
Stylistic features:

Gender – Homoerotic or
Misogynistic?
‘Fight Club’ could be read as either ‘homoerotic’ or ‘misogynistic’. Jack’s ‘crisis of
masculinity’ could be seen to lead to his inability to form real relationships due to
the ideological pressures of modern day society and lifestyles.
 Is Jack struggling with homosexuality?
 Is Jack jealous of Tyler’s (his own) attraction to ‘Angel-face’ (Jared Leto)
 Is Fight Club just an excuse to form physical relationships with other
men?
 Is this why Fight Club has to remain underground and not talked about (‘in
the closet’)?
 Is this why ‘Fight Club’ shares moments of intertextuality with Kenneth
Anger’s homoerotic experimental debut ‘Fireworks’ (1947)?
 Is Jack’s rejection of Marla a ‘symptom’ of his sexual confusion?
 Can the split into the Tyler Durden persona explain ways of dealing with
this sexual confusion?
 Does Jack really hate Marla or flee her because he is afraid of
commitment?

Crisis Of Masculinity?
Fight Club comments upon America's problems of meaning (e.g. indentured
servitude to capitalism in a land of freedom, violence in a land of justice,
consumer Darwinism in a land of community, meaning in a post-modern reality
that understands all meaning as a relative cultural construct, etc.). In sociological
terms, Jack, a white male, could represent the hierarchical leadership of the
American patriarchy. "I was the warm little centre that the life of this world
crowded around." America seems to love him, but he feels hurt and betrayed by
his culture and the dulled-down consumerist dreams he has inherited.
We're consumers. We're by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime,
poverty -- these things don't concern me. What concerns me is celebrity
magazines, television with five hundred channels, some guy's name on my
underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra.
But according to Fincher, "We're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of
shopping. There's nothing to kill anymore, there's nothing to fight, nothing to
overcome, nothing to explore – a reworking of the hunter/gatherer myth. In that
societal emasculation this everyman is created." Where does Jack go to discuss
his problems? What community exists to support him emotionally and spiritually?
Seeking guidance, Jack stumbles into a group for men with testicular cancer. He
finds that a weekly session Bob's breasts rids him of his insomnia by allowing
him to feel. But this apparent solution produces a new dilemma for Jack-crying
men.
BOB
We're still men.
JACK
Yes. We're men. Men is what we are.
The feminising of the male?
The castrated man develops
breasts and is encouraged to ‘feel’.

JACK (V.O.)
Bob cried. Six months ago, his testicles were removed. Then hormone therapy.
He developed bitch tits because his testosterone was too high and his body
upped the estrogen. That was where my head fit -- into his sweating tits that hang
enormous, the way we think of God's as big.
Jack's masculinity has been reduced to superficial tears. But in these tears, he
finds "strength." Despite this temporary relief he feels from his crisis, Jack quickly
returns to his initial dilemma:
You are here because the world as you know it no longer makes sense.
You've been raised on television
To believe we'll all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars - but we won't.
You pray for a different life.
If Jack is not allowed to express his creativity as a "movie god" or "rock star," he
can create his own god in the theatre of his mind that will grant him permission to
feel in a more lasting way.
Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), a disciple of Sigmund Freud, believed that his
mentor had neglected the soul and religion in his understanding of human
psychology. For this reason, Jung left Freud and spent years of research in
religious iconography and mythical stories. His findings suggest that archetypal
stories exist cross-culturally and that each individual psyche has the potential for
two opposing personalities: ego and shadow. Ego controls the psyche, but when
ego is disrupted (through Tyler's cutting frames into the film) or weakened
through sleep loss or an emotional void (in Jack's case), the shadow creeps in to
take control. The ego is constructed around societal norms and the desire for
behaviour that "fits into society." However, postmodernity challenges these social
norms as simply one narrative or structure that is no better than any other
structured narrative. The destruction of Jack's ego also parallels the destruction
of American ideology.
Tyler Durden, Jack's alter-ego creation, forces Jack to create binary oppositions
(love/fear, ego/shadow, etc.) that perhaps necessitate postmodern "queering" for
any resolution.
What do you think about this perspective?
Do you agree or disagree?

Fight Club and
representations of
‘masculinity in crisis’
©bfiEducation2005
worksheet 10
Page 1 of 1 Men and Film
Traditional male role How are they emasculated?
Father
Muscleman
1
Look at Edward Norton’s unnamed character. The writer and
director have both said that he is an example of a modern man
who has lost touch with his traditional masculine side. List the
post-industrial, ‘modern’ male values and traits and compare
them to the traditional pre-industrial male traits upheld by
Robert Bly, following the example.
Task 1
1
The support group, Remaining Men Together, also has men
who have been emasculated, but ironically in pursuit of
traditional masculine roles: the Father and the Muscleman.
Task 2
Watch Fight Club (David Fincher, USA, 1999) from where the narrator
begins to explain his insomnia to just after his and Tyler’s first fight
(scenes 3 to 11 on the DVD).
Modern male traits Traditional male traits missing
Libido focused on consumer pleasure Libido focused on physical sex

Fight Club and
mytho-poetic
essentialism
©bfiEducation2005
worksheet 11
Getting started – research questions
● Who is Robert Bly and what is the ‘mytho-poetic’ model of
masculinity?
● What are his key ideas about what is ‘wrong’ with men in the
post-industrial society?
● What solutions does he offer?
Applying Bly to Fight Club
Look particularly at the following scenes: from the narrator discovering
his destroyed apartment to his dramatic final day at work (scenes 10 to
22 on the DVD).
Mytho-poetic solution Example
Rejection of
consumerist pleasures
Separation from
‘tender’ feminine world
Initiation through
enduring pain
Primitive self-
flagellation to prove
manhood to enemy

Fight Club and male
relationships
©bfiEducation2005
worksheet 12
1
Mentor/ Acolyte
Look at the first scenes where the narrator encounters Tyler. What examples of
traditional adolescent rebellion (or Bly’s ‘Wild Man’) can you see?
Task 1
1
Now think about the relationship between the characters as the film progresses.
To what extent is this a traditional Oedipal narrative?
Task 2
Rebel-mentor traits Example
Rejection of
authority figures
Rejection of
‘cleverness’
Trickster / joker
Rejection of status
and status symbols
Father/son traits Example
Separating ‘son’
from feminine ‘nest’
Teaching ‘son’ about
the ‘real world’
Through teaching, the
father reveals own
hypocrisies
Son ‘kills’ father to
enter adulthood

Fetishisation of
the male body in
Fight Club
©bfiEducation2005
worksheet 13
Though Tyler and the other Fight Club members reject current images
of male ‘beauty’, the style of the film has been criticised for doing
exactly what the characters hate: making their bodies conform to a
female idea of beauty.
1
● Collect a number of images from magazine advertisements which sexualise men or
male beauty (Men’s Health is a good choice.)
● Fill in the table below.
Task 1
Textual detail How does this sexualise the male?
Poise
Facial expression
Costume (or lack of) and hair
Other

Fetishisation of the male body in Fight Club
©bfiEducation2005
worksheet 13
1
Now look again at the fight scenes in the film.
● To what extent has a similar visual approach been taken? In what way is it different?
Task 2
Textual detail How does this sexualise the male?
Actions
Poise
Costume and hair
Use of camera

Philosophical/Cultural
Perspectives
Friedrich Nietzsche & the concept of ‘The Superman’
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher of the late 19th century
who challenged the foundations of Christianity and traditional morality. He was
interested in the enhancement of individual and cultural health, and believed in life,
creativity, power, and the realities of the world we live in, rather than those situated
in a world beyond. Central to his philosophy is the idea of “life-affirmation,” which
involves an honest questioning of all doctrines that drain life's expansive energies,
however socially prevalent those views might be. Often referred to as one of the first
existentialist philosophers he developed the concept of ‘the superman’ and
nihilism as a mode of existence. Nietzsche's revitalizing philosophy has inspired
leading figures in all walks of cultural life, including dancers, poets, novelists,
painters, psychologists, philosophers, sociologists and social revolutionaries.
Useful quotes: (These can be applied to situation or events within the narrative of
‘Fight Club’ to deepen your philosophical understanding)
1. At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not
cease to be insipid.
2. Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.
3. In heaven all the interesting people are missing.
4. Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations
and epochs, it is the rule.
5. Man is the cruelest animal.

6. No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
7. Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.
8. The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being
overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and
sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of
owning yourself.
9. The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a
condition of it.
10. The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.
11. To forget one's purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.
12. What else is love but understanding and rejoicing in the fact that another
person lives, acts, and experiences otherwise than we do…?
13. When you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back at you.
14. You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.
15. There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some
reason in madness.
16. God is dead.
17. He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a
monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into
you.
18. What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.
19. Become what you are.

List below the quotes that you think are the most useful
Nietzsche quotes to best explain the meanings embedded in
fight club
Quote # How it applies to fight club

Marx & Ideology
The fundamentals of Marxist analysis of media texts focuses upon:
 Discovering the Ideology (power relations) behind the production of
 texts and/or products.
 Determining the way that Ideology (reinforcement of those power
 relations) is conveyed within such a text. Who has power?
 A recognition of the state of false consciousness that retains those
 power relations. Who is not aware of their subordinate position?
These can be directly related to ‘Fight Club’ by discussing dominant
attitudes and beliefs principally in the interests of sustained control.
Questions to be answered after the powerpoint presentation
1. What is Marxism? (in your own words)
2. How are his ideas shown in the film? – give very specific details
3. How can we better understand the character of Tyler Durden by using this
theory. In what ways does he contradict this theory
4. What type of society does the film push for and how does this fit with the
ideas of Karl Marx?
5. What have you learnt from the other sources included at the end of the
powerpoint?
6. Is Fight Club a Marxist film? (350 word min)
DUE IN______________________________________________

Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a social and cultural concept that has dominated contemporary
theory since the 1950’s. It has been widely used in film theory as a critical
perspective that allows debate concerning social shifts in contemporary life and
artistic practices in the wake of the decline of modernism.
Characteristics of a postmodern text that can be seen within ‘Fight Club’:
o Intertextuality – the referencing of other cultural texts; either visually or
verbally within the content of the text
o Hybridity - the mixing and/or recycling of pre-existing genres and
narratives to construct new forms or a ‘hybrid’
o Simulation - a lack of any sense of reality to the real world
o Surface – a text that is more concerned with the superficial and/or devoid
of any depth of meaning
o Pastiche – paying ‘homage’ to older texts
o Bricolage - the collection of disparate or differing objects to help explain
the nature of the prevailing culture and society
o Irony – playfulness with the style, form and/or content of a text

List as many examples of ‘postmodernism’ in the film as you can and
consider what they may say about modern life.
Postmodern Trait Scenes? Meaning?
Strinati
Baudrillard
Jameson
Lyotard
Parody and
Pastiche
Self Reflective and
Self Aware
Intertexuality

Postmodern Trait Scenes? Meaning?
Key Media
Concepts
Hybridity
Bricolage
Irony
Simulation
Surface

Social/Cultural Theorists
Jean Baudrillard (July 29, 1929 – March 6, 2007) was a French cultural
theorist, sociologist, philosopher, political commentator, and photographer. His
work is frequently associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism.
The end of history and meaning:
The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are no
longer any dustbins for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values.
Where are we going to throw Marxism, which actually invented the dustbins of
history? (Yet there is some justice here since the very people who invented them
have fallen in.) Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history, this is
because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just
as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin.
Consider the mise-en-scene of ‘Fight Club’ with regard to this
theoretical perspective. Make comments below:

Slavoj Žižek (born 21 March, 1949) is a Lacanian Marxist sociologist,
psychoanalyst, philosopher, and cultural critic. Žižek is well known for his use of
the works of 20th-century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in a new reading
of popular culture. He writes on many topics including popular culture, the Iraq
War, fundamentalism, capitalism, tolerance, political correctness, globalization,
subjectivity, myth, cyberspace, postmodernism, multiculturalism and post-
Marxism. He has described himself as a "Marxist" and a "Communist.”
Zizek’s Postmodernism Traits:
 An over-proximity of the Real
 The void of subjectivity
 Present society is based upon the demise in the authority of the big Other
(God)
 Attachments to forms of subjection, paranoia and narcissism
 Žižek proposes the need for a political act or revolution - one that will alter
the conditions of possibility of postmodernity (which he identifies as
capitalism) and so give birth to a new type of Symbolic Order in which a
new breed of subject can exist
How far can this perspective be applied in respect of ‘Fight Club’?

Schizophrenia & ‘Fight Club’
R D Laing (7 October 1927 – 23 August 1989), was a Scottish psychiatrist who
wrote extensively on mental illness – in particular, the experience of psychosis.
Laing's views on the causes and treatment of serious mental dysfunction,
greatly influenced by existential philosophy, ran counter to the psychiatric
orthodoxy of the day by taking the expressed feelings of the individual patient or
client as valid descriptions of lived experiences.
On mental illness
Laing argued that the strange behavior and confused speech of people
undergoing a psychotic episode were understandable as an attempt to
communicate worries and concerns, often in situations where this was not
permitted. He argued that individuals can often be put in impossible situations,
where they are unable to conform to the conflicting expectations, leading to a
"lose-lose situation" and immense mental distress for the individuals concerned.
The symptoms of schizophrenia were therefore an expression of this distress,
and seen as a cathartic and transformative experience.
Laing was revolutionary in valuing the content of psychotic behavior and speech
as a valid expression of distress, albeit wrapped in an enigmatic language of
personal symbolism that is meaningful only from within their situation.
Laing expanded a view of the "double bind" hypothesis and came up with a new
concept to describe the highly complex situation that unfolds in the process of
"going mad" - an "incompatible knot". Laing compared this to a situation where
your right hand can exist but your left hand cannot. In this untenable position,
something has got to give, and more often than not, what gives is psychological
stability; a self-destruction sequence is set in motion.
Laing viewed mental illness in a radically different light from his contemporaries.
For Laing, mental illness could be a trans-formative episode whereby the process
of undergoing mental distress was compared to a shamanic journey. The traveler
could return from the journey with (supposedly) important insights, and may have
become a wiser and more grounded person as a result.
Key Work:
Laing, R.D. (1960) The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and
Madness. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
The
Divided
Self?

Critical Review
Fight Club
BY ROGER EBERT / October 15, 1999
"Fight Club" is the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since "Death Wish," a celebration of
violence in which the heroes write themselves a license to drink, smoke, screw and beat one another up.
Sometimes, for variety, they beat up themselves. It's macho porn -- the sex movie Hollywood has been
moving toward for years, in which eroticism between the sexes is replaced by all-guy locker-room fights.
Women, who have had a lifetime of practice at dealing with little-boy posturing, will instinctively see through
it; men may get off on the testosterone rush. The fact that it is very well made and has a great first act
certainly clouds the issue.
Edward Norton stars as a depressed urban loner filled up to here with angst. He describes his world in
dialogue of sardonic social satire. His life and job are driving him crazy. As a means of dealing with his pain,
he seeks out 12-step meetings, where he can hug those less fortunate than himself and find catharsis in
their suffering. It is not without irony that the first meeting he attends is for post-surgical victims of testicular
cancer, since the whole movie is about guys afraid of losing their cojones.
These early scenes have a nice sly tone; they're narrated by the Norton character in the kind of voice
Nathanael West used in Miss Lonelyhearts. He's known only as the Narrator, for reasons later made clear.
The meetings are working as a sedative, and his life is marginally manageable when tragedy strikes: He
begins to notice Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) at meetings. She's a "tourist" like himself--someone not
addicted to anything but meetings. She spoils it for him. He knows he's a faker, but wants to believe
everyone else's pain is real.
On an airplane, he has another key encounter, with Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a man whose manner cuts
through the fog. He seems able to see right into the Narrator's soul, and shortly after, when the Narrator's
high-rise apartment turns into a fireball, he turns to Tyler for shelter. He gets more than that. He gets in on
the ground floor of Fight Club, a secret society of men who meet in order to find freedom and self-realization
through beating one another into pulp.
It's at about this point that the movie stops being smart and savage and witty, and turns to some of the most
brutal, unremitting, nonstop violence ever filmed. Although sensible people know that if you hit someone with
an ungloved hand hard enough, you're going to end up with broken bones, the guys in "Fight Club" have
fists of steel, and hammer one another while the sound effects guys beat the hell out of Naugahyde sofas
with Ping-Pong paddles. Later, the movie takes still another turn. A lot of recent films seem unsatisfied
unless they can add final scenes that redefine the reality of everything that has gone before; call it the
Keyser Soze syndrome.
What is all this about? According to Durden, it is about freeing yourself from the shackles of modern life,
which imprisons and emasculates men. By being willing to give and receive pain and risk death, Fight Club
members find freedom. Movies like "Crash" must play like cartoons for Durden. He's a shadowy, charismatic
figure, able to inspire a legion of men in big cities to descend into the secret cellars of a Fight Club and beat
one another up.
Only gradually are the final outlines of his master plan revealed. Is Tyler Durden in fact a leader of men with
a useful philosophy? "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," he says, sounding
like a man who tripped over the Nietzsche display on his way to the coffee bar in Borders. In my opinion, he
has no useful truths. He's a bully--Werner Erhard plus S & M, a leather club operator without the decor.
None of the Fight Club members grows stronger or freer because of their membership; they're reduced to
pathetic cultists. Issue them black shirts and sign them up as skinheads. Whether Durden represents hidden
aspects of the male psyche is a question the movie uses as a loophole--but is not able to escape through,
because "Fight Club" is not about its ending but about its action.
Of course, "Fight Club" itself does not advocate Durden's philosophy. It is a warning against it, I guess; one
critic I like says it makes "a telling point about the bestial nature of man and what can happen when the
numbing effects of day-to-day drudgery cause people to go a little crazy." I think it's the numbing effects of
movies like this that cause people go to a little crazy. Although sophisticates will be able to rationalize the
movie as an argument against the behavior it shows, my guess is that audience will like the behavior but not
the argument. Certainly they'll buy tickets because they can see Pitt and Norton pounding on each other; a
lot more people will leave this movie and get in fights than will leave it discussing Tyler Durden's moral

philosophy. The images in movies like this argue for themselves, and it takes a lot of narration (or Narration)
to argue against them.
Lord knows the actors work hard enough. Norton and Pitt go through almost as much physical suffering in
this movie as Demi Moore endured in "G.I. Jane," and Helena Bonham Carter creates a feisty chain-
smoking hellcat who is probably so angry because none of the guys thinks having sex with her is as much
fun as a broken nose. When you see good actors in a project like this, you wonder if they signed up as an
alternative to canyoneering.
The movie was directed by David Fincher and written by Jim Uhls, who adapted the novel by Chuck
Palahniuk. In many ways, it's like Fincher's movie "The Game" (1997), with the violence cranked up for
teenage boys of all ages. That film was also about a testing process in which a man drowning in capitalism
(Michael Douglas) has the rug of his life pulled out from under him and has to learn to fight for survival. I
admired "The Game" much more than "Fight Club" because it was really about its theme, while the message
in "Fight Club" is like bleeding scraps of Socially Redeeming Content thrown to the howling mob.
Fincher is a good director (his work includes "Alien 3," one of the best-looking bad movies I have ever seen,
and "Seven," the grisly and intelligent thriller). With "Fight Club" he seems to be setting himself some kind of
a test--how far over the top can he go? The movie is visceral and hard-edged, with levels of irony and
commentary above and below the action. If it had all continued in the vein explored in the first act, it might
have become a great film. But the second act is pandering and the third is trickery, and whatever Fincher
thinks the message is, that's not what most audience members will get. "Fight Club" is a thrill ride
masquerading as philosophy--the kind of ride where some people puke and others can't wait to get on again
Make a comment on this review
1. How far do you agree / disagree with this review? Why?
2. How would you Fight Club in light of other media theories you have learnt about?
3. What key quotes are you going to remember from this review?
4. How does this review compare with others you have read?

Critical Review
"Fight Club" by Alexander Walker (1999)
Read Alexander Walker on the latest films every Thursday in the Evening
Standard
My verdict on Fight Club is already in: it is an inadmissible assault on personal
decency. And on society itself. At its Venice Film Festival world premiere in
September, it caused well-justified outrage as a movie phenomenon well in line
with the current tentative but threatening revival of Nazism. In particular, it
alarmed my Jewish film critic friends.
They saw its story - correctly, I think - as a paradigm of the Hitler state. Even
though it is set in contemporary America, it's not simply about young guys
beating the hell out of each other with bare fists in secret fight clubs. Its story may
be insane and septic, but it uncritically enshrines principles that once
underpinned the politics of fascism, and ultimately sent millions of Jews to the
death camps.
It echoes propaganda that gave licence to the brutal activities of the SA and the
SS. It resurrects the Fuhrer principle. It promotes pain and suffering as the
virtues of the strongest. It tramples every democratic decency underfoot. Like
Hitler, its characters elevate the halbstarken, the "middle children of history", the
underclass of outsiders who feel alienated and unvalued, and form them into
disciplined cells, giving them a purpose in life which is to inflict panic and anarchy
on the community.
Such a disreputable rebranding of Nazi goods is directed by David Fincher for
20th Century-Fox. Fincher made the cleverest and sickest of recent film noirs
with Seven, a movie that cynically avoided depicting violence by dwelling almost
entirely on autopsies and posthumous images of its dead and decomposing
victims of violence.

Fight Club is an even more toxic experience. It's set in some big but unnamed
American city where Edward Norton is a self-loathing nerd employed to see if
auto crashes justify recalling the cars his bosses make, or simply settling out of
court - whichever is the smaller cost to the company.
At first the film looks as if it's shaping up to be a laconic commentary on the
distorted values of US consumerism. I'd have settled for that. But its material gets
grosser and alienating. Norton, an insomniac wanderer, gate-crashes pathetic
"support groups" for those with diseases like testicular and bowel cancer, TB and
Aids, working off his own angsts on the realities of the terminally ill. Then he
meets Brad Pitt.
Pitt is an active sociopath, an articulate apprentice of random malice. Like Guy
Grand, the prankster-hero of Terry Southern's anarchic novel The Magic
Christian, he is a public enemy: sometimes he works as a waiter, peeing in the
soup, farting on the puddings; sometimes as a movie projectionist, splicing erect
penises subliminally into family films.
But once he and Norton form a homo-erotic alliance, cohabiting in a grungy
house built (but barely) on a waste dump, the two owners of the same
psychopathy set up a secret league of fight clubs where the maladjusted and the
macho slug it out nightly to get in touch with their diminished manhood by
demonstrating how much pain they can endure.
Some apologists for Fight Club say that's what - and that's all - it's about: men
proving they're men again. Even if this were true, which it's not, it's a malicious
film-maker who sees masculinity served by pulping each other into bloody
insensibility with bare knuckles. A year or two ago, David Cronenberg's Crash
suggested that people could top up their sexual libido by crashing their cars into
each other on the public highways. Fight Club promotes a perversion that's a
potentially more dangerous franchise.
This one requires only the weaponry we all possess (given the will) of bare fists
and the less costly allure of secret illegality and doing harm only to the body-work
of a human being, not an expensive automobile. Even with the cuts made in it by

our film censors, it's an irresponsible attraction to promote in a community like
ours, already over-stretched just to maintain the semblance of public safety.
Norton is soon going to the office with bleeding gums, black eyes, bruised
cheeks, damaged hearing and bloodstained clothes, and spitting out (along with
loose teeth) such bits of acquired wisdom as: "You can swallow a pint of blood
before getting sick." The fights themselves disgust and deafen eye and ear. They
are grotesquely explicit and pornographically amplified. They exceed the limits of
all screen violence I've seen in recent years. They are the apotheosis of the way
in which today's moronic American super-stars pump up their ego muscles in
public to exhibit themselves as Hollywood supremacists scornful of all values
save those of their own box-office.
The movie gradually makes its analogy with Nazi Germany even more overt. Pitt
and Norton raid liposuction waste dumpsters at night, retrieving "the richest
cream fat in the world", that's been siphoned out of the obese, and rendering it
into red soap tablets they then flog to exclusive boutiques. It's unbelievable any
film would dare use, even as such a sick gag, a sequence reminiscent of that
chapter of the Holocaust in which Nazi thoroughness rendered the Jews down
into similar, no doubt less pricy soap bars. But Fight Club has no reticence, no
memory, no shame.
Ultimately, the club membership expands into a nationwide secret army of proto-
Nazis who embark on what's grandly called Project Mayhem. They pick fights
with innocent passers-by, graffiti-spray buildings, befoul fountains, rob stores,
sabotage public works, set off bombs - do all, in short, that Hitler's Brown Shirts
did to destabilise the frightened society of their own time. One of Pitt's acolytes,
played by Meat Loaf as a hormonal freak with pecs like women's breasts, is shot
dead: he becomes an instant martyr-hero whose name is chanted in the same
sort of solidarity mantra as Horst Wessel's when that young SA man became the
first saint of the Nazi movement with an anthem to memorialise him.
It defies belief that such a film could have been conceived, shot and distributed
by a film company whose ultimate boss, Rupert Murdoch, is an arch-exponent of
the very capitalist system that Fight Club scorns. You sit there aghast at the

amorality and opportunism of the film business. Not for the first time, I admit. But
this time its impact is far more inflammatory. Even the metaphysical twist at the
end - which I am asked not to disclose, and which is so confusing that to describe
it would be a waste of time - cannot convert a film that is a summons to anarchy
into an anodyne screen fantasy.
In any well-adjusted society, its stars would feel a backlash of public indignation
well beyond the box-office. Edward Norton is one of America's most gifted actors;
Brad Pitt one of its most personable. Both, curiously, played Nazis in two earlier
films, American History X and Seven Years in Tibet. For their future good, they
should explore the world beyond Mein Kampf. As for Britain's own Helena
Bonham Carter, playing a sleazy, white-faced slut, on drugs, suicidal, servicing
the flesh and fantasies of both men, she shows the extent that actresses are
willing to go in order to trash their screen images and enjoy notoriety without
responsibility. It is not a pretty sight.
Make comments on this review
How far do you agree/disagree with its viewpoint?
How would you defend the ‘Fight Club’ in light of other theory’s?
What do you believe is the meaning of the film and why?

Critical Review
Sometimes it's hard to be a man
GILBERT ADAIR
Sunday 14 November 1999
David Fincher's Fight Club arrives on these shores trailing clouds of sulphur. It has already been
anathematised as the most violent movie ever made, a celebration of fascistic machismo and even,
if you please, anti-God. Despite favourable reviews for Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, it was
stillborn at the American box office, a failure interpreted by a few hopeful critics as a sign of
incipient maturity among the moviegoing public.
It's all nonsense. Fight Club is not the most violent movie ever made. It's no more fascistic than
pretty much any run-of-the-mill Hollywood action thriller. God has nothing to do with anything.
Pitt is as preeningly awful as he always has been, and he isn't even the pretty face that he's usually
nothing but. I kept wondering who he reminded me of until, halfway through the proceedings, I
got it: it was Bart Simpson. Norton is OK - nothing to write home about, but OK. The movie was
rejected by the American public, as it's incontestably going to be rejected by the British, not
because its violence is excessive but because it's monotonously unentertaining. The next time
plate-glass windows are enjoyably shattered and skulls are enjoyably crushed, then you can be
sure the same dopey queues will re-materialise outside cinemas in both countries.
If an ambitious film crashes (and Fight Club does actually have a sort of warped ambition), then
the first thing one should do, as with aeroplanes that fall out of the sky, is examine the black box.
Sometimes that black box is in the film itself, in its dialogue or mise- en-scene; sometimes it's to
be found in promotional interviews given by the writer or director. In the case of Fincher's film
(he was both) it's mostly the latter, since its basic premise is no worse than another and even once
had a certain (squandered) potential.
Norton plays Jack, a generic name for a generic guy. He's a mild-mannered corporate drone
whose complacently consumerist lifestyle is turned inside out when he encounters one Tyler
Durden. (The name sounds like an anagram and, given the film's idiotic and redundant last-
minute twist, probably is.) The punkishly anarchic Durden (Pitt) is everything Jack would like to
be but isn't, his own walking, talking id. Like Terry Southern's Magic Christian, Durden expresses
his repugnance of society's materialistic values in a series of actes gratuits of mischievous
subversion. Moonlighting as a cinema projectionist, he splices single, subliminally registered
frames from pornographic films into bland mainstream fare; moonlighting as a waiter in a
swanky restaurant, he pees into the oxtail soup. (Wow, that is subversive!)
Bare-knuckled and bare-chested (they really ought to be bare-assed as well, but that might be just
a teensy bit too homoerotic for comfort), the two of them start pummelling one another for thrills,
only gradually discovering that there's a whole world out there of emasculated American males
just waiting for an opportunity to let the sweat, blood and sperm pent up within them ooze out
from every pore.
Well, why not? It's a promising idea for a film, especially a satirical comedy, which is what Fight
Club unambiguously is for its first half-hour. Fincher is a vulgar, flashy film-maker (he directed
Seven and The Game) who doesn't so much make films as take them, the way we refer to a
photographer taking, rather than making, photographs: he's interested only in surfaces and he
likes even grunge to glitter. (The French, as usual, coined the perfect expression for this style: le
look.) He's a sharp scriptwriter, however, and Norton's omnipresent voice-off narration, coupled
with the subject's sociological relevance (cf Susan Faludi's new book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the
American Man), initially sucks one in.

Then, just when it's supposedly getting to grips with its theme, the movie goes utterly haywire and
becomes yet another brainless, humourless bone-cruncher. Why? It's time to consult the black
box of the director's own public statements. What about this, for starters: "It (Fight Club) is about
someone who says, `I've opened my desktop and it's not for me, I'm looking for some other
specific software that will make me feel alive. The stuff I was given, that came with the package,
just doesn't cut it.' " Or this, on the movie's reception: "I never thought it was scary at all. I turned
to the editor and said, `My God, what have we done? We've totally let people down in the f---ing
terror department; we need to go and shoot some dismembered bodies. Go and see if you can get
someone from a morgue and chop `em up.' " Or this, a specimen of Durden's philosophy as voiced
on the soundtrack of the film itself: "How much can you know yourself if you've never been in a
fight?"
Though Fincher is, I repeat, an agile scenarist, he is also, like almost every American film-maker
of his generation, totally incapable of articulating an idea. Fight Club aspires to be a movie of
ideas, but its creator's mindset is that of some smart-alecky teenager who has picked up on a
topical social phenomenon, invested it with a spurious nihilism which he clearly imagines to be
half-Nietzschean, half-Scorsesean, but still can't conceal the real energy behind his work, the
obscene and infantile energy of "go and shoot some dismembered bodies". Hollywood, as I've said
before on this page, is a kindergarten of prodigies.
6. How would you defend Fight Club in light of other media theories you have learnt about?
8. How does this review compare with others you have read

Critical Review
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY Movie Review
Fight Club (1999)
Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum | Oct 22, 1999
EW's GRADE D
The giant international furnishings chain IKEA is responsible for many consumer-based
phenomena, among them our docile acceptance of cheap, hinged desk lamps that droop like
spent lilies. But I hadn't realized that overexposure to IKEA results in limp penises, too, until I saw
Fight Club.
David Fincher's dumb and brutal shock show of a movie floats the winky, idiotic premise that a
modern-day onslaught of girly pop-cultural destinations (including but not limited to IKEA, support
groups, and the whole Starbucks-Gap-khakis brand-name axis) has resulted in a generation of
spongy young men unable to express themselves as fully erect males. And that the swiftest
remedy for the malaise lies in freely and mutually beating the crap out of each other — bleeding,
oozing, cracking, and groaning until pulped bodies crumple to the floor in a poetically lit heap.
Had I but world enough and time, I could construct a unified theory linking this grossly simplistic
notion to other recent entertainments depicting late-century American emasculation, from
American Beauty and Dilbert to Susan Faludi's new all-guy tome Stiffed. But Fincher's
contribution to the hubbub commands attention all its own, not least because the director's
twitchily art-directed obsession with filth, degradation, and sadism, previously on display in
Seven and The Game, puts his work on a path more extreme and disturbing than any theory
of male disenfranchisement dreamed up by Faludi or the writers of The Drew Carey Show.
In Fight Club, the always intense Edward Norton plays the nameless Narrator, who holds a dull
company job, leads a dull, materialistic life, and first tries to cure his anomie through compulsive
attendance at self-help sessions for problems he doesn't have; the weekly meeting for survivors
of testicular cancer (none too subtle a phallic message there) is a particular balm, and he
develops a dynamic love-loathe connection with Bob (Meat Loaf Aday), who has developed
gigantic breasts as the result of postop hormone therapy (none too subtle a bisexual muddle
there). Certainly, the Narrator's relationship with Bob is richer than anything he has with Marla
(Helena Bonham Carter), a chain-smoking, insatiable ball-buster with a bruised, smug face who,
as the only prominent female in the movie, apparently represents all of womanhood as a trash
receptacle for sex.
But with the appearance of the Narrator's mysterious buddy, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), everything
changes. Tyler is a truculent, reckless brute — he's all id, assuming the personification of id can
be costumed like a movie star on a pub crawl — and when he introduces his all-superego mirror
image to the catharsis of slugging and stomping, well, then, it's bye-bye IKEA. ''After Fight Club,
everything gets the volume turned down,'' the black-and-blue convert marvels, with blithe
indifference to the homoerotic subtext in Jim Uhls' declamatory script.

Pitt and Norton enthusiastically throw their all into their unattractive roles, yet an inextinguishable
flame of self-satisfaction burns in these vibrant young stars even when they're painted and
greased to look their worst. (Vanity be damned, Pitt revels in dental imperfections!) Meanwhile,
Fincher, more obsessed than ever with atmospheric ugliness, never settles for the suggestion of
pain when a loving, lingering display of it will do. I thought Seven pretty much enumerated all the
grotesque torture fantasies on the director's wish list, but that was before I watched Tyler initiate
his new friend into the porno-Zen of pain management by pouring corrosive lye on the poor jerk's
hand and watching the flesh bubble and curl.
The burnt-hand moment, by the way, does little to endear Tyler to us, who commands his growing
army of followers with fuhrer-like glee while continuing to manufacture soap made from human fat
(a Nazi specialty, remember?). ''I'm selling their fat asses back to them!'' he crows about the
women who purchase his wares. Well, buyer beware. If Fight Club means to encourage a
rejection of pathetic consumerism, the movie loses its potential customers midway through the
sales pitch. If, with the Game-like mind-bends it lays on at the end, it means to suggest that
anarchic destruction is not the answer to male rage, the fancy care lavished on repellent activities
belies the avowal. If, as Fincher has said, this movie is supposed to be funny, then the joke's on
us.

Critical Review
Fight Club
Nov 12th 1999 By Total Film
Fight Club stands to be the most talked-about film of the year simply because there's so
much that can be said about it. Wildly inventive, exceptionally cast and undeniably
controversial, there's an endless list of subtexts and viewpoints which will fuel student pub
debates for years. It might be about the soullessness of corporate America or the moral
vacuum of consumerism. There's enough obvious Nazi imagery in it to argue that it's a
metaphor for the rise of National Socialism. But there are also enough unexpected laughs to
make it a satire on modern society. Of course, maybe it's just an impressive movie about
nothing more than a bunch of frustrated guys who realise they enjoy beating each other up to
prove they're not turning into a bunch of lily-livered quiche-eaters.
This smart, genre-splintering movie courts controversy not just by suggesting that men might
want to do this, but also by pulling no punches in showing that none of the participants are
pulling their punches. Every skull slamming into concrete, choking blue-lipped face and
knee-shattering kick comes complete with splattering blood and meaty wet sound effects.
Does it glamourise the gladiatorial ideal? Only in the same way that Trainspotting initially
made heroin look like a blast. As Norton's character admits: "With a long enough timeline,
the probability of survival is zero."
Surprisingly, though, the nightly gatherings of Fight Club form only part of a sprawling story
which encompasses America's obsession with militias, a Pitt/ Carter/Norton love triangle and
the role of friendship in the modern world. Most of this stuff is extraordinarily clever and
unexpected - it will smack you in the face with alternate shocks of revulsion and humour, and
we're skipping over it now only to allow you the pleasure of finding it all out for yourself. Be
warned though: several magazines and newspapers have already printed complete plot
breakdowns, so be very wary of what you read between now and seeing the film.
Any lingering doubts that Alien 3's lameness was despite David Fincher's involvement rather
than because of it will finally be dispelled with this textbook example of the director stamping
his style all over a movie and improving it immeasurably in the process. The opening shot is
a zoom-out which starts on a synapse within a brain and pulls back through the head, out of
a sweat gland and ends with the audience looking down the barrel of a gun in Norton's
mouth. That's got to impress.
Amazingly, this level of invention pervades the entire movie. Fincher not only shakes the
camera and downplays the lighting, he distresses and wobbles the fabric of the film itself,
adding scratches and bubbles to the print and even rattling the frame so hard that sprocket
holes appear onscreen. He combines furious location-jumping, manic fight sequences and a
multi-strand story to propel you through the movie with rarely an idea of what the next scene
will be like, let alone the conclusion.
With only a single female lead and a plot driven by the millennial male fear of gender
redundancy, Fight Club's surely going to become a hugely influential film for the same set of
people it portrays, doing for disenfranchised twentysomething males what The Breakfast
Club once did for moody teenagers. And while The Daily Mail's inevitable middle-aged,
middle-class outrage story has already blasted it with the headline ""This monstrous film
brutalises men everywhere"," they've overlooked the fact that it's actually very funny.

At the end of the day, you could argue that Fight Club is a celebration of corrupted
masculinity as vehemently as the opposing view that it's a parody of these ideals. It won't
make any difference though because, either way, this is a thrilling, intelligent and shocking
blasterpiece.
Verdict:
An incredible, subversive slice of troubled youth and counterculture which grabs you by the
collar and rattles your teeth for two-and-a-half gone-too-quick hours before dumping you
back in your seat. Don't you dare leave the century without seeing this

Critical Review
"Fight Club" by Alexander Walker (1999)
Read Alexander Walker on the latest films every Thursday in the Evening
Standard
My verdict on Fight Club is already in: it is an inadmissible assault on personal
decency. And on society itself. At its Venice Film Festival world premiere in
September, it caused well-justified outrage as a movie phenomenon well in line
with the current tentative but threatening revival of Nazism. In particular, it
alarmed my Jewish film critic friends.
They saw its story - correctly, I think - as a paradigm of the Hitler state. Even
though it is set in contemporary America, it's not simply about young guys
beating the hell out of each other with bare fists in secret fight clubs. Its story may
be insane and septic, but it uncritically enshrines principles that once
underpinned the politics of fascism, and ultimately sent millions of Jews to the
death camps.
It echoes propaganda that gave licence to the brutal activities of the SA and the
SS. It resurrects the Fuhrer principle. It promotes pain and suffering as the
virtues of the strongest. It tramples every democratic decency underfoot. Like
Hitler, its characters elevate the halbstarken, the "middle children of history", the
underclass of outsiders who feel alienated and unvalued, and form them into
disciplined cells, giving them a purpose in life which is to inflict panic and anarchy
on the community.
Such a disreputable rebranding of Nazi goods is directed by David Fincher for
20th Century-Fox. Fincher made the cleverest and sickest of recent film noirs
with Seven, a movie that cynically avoided depicting violence by dwelling almost
entirely on autopsies and posthumous images of its dead and decomposing
victims of violence.
Fight Club is an even more toxic experience. It's set in some big but unnamed
American city where Edward Norton is a self-loathing nerd employed to see if
auto crashes justify recalling the cars his bosses make, or simply settling out of
court - whichever is the smaller cost to the company.
At first the film looks as if it's shaping up to be a laconic commentary on the
distorted values of US consumerism. I'd have settled for that. But its material gets
grosser and alienating. Norton, an insomniac wanderer, gate-crashes pathetic
"support groups" for those with diseases like testicular and bowel cancer, TB and
Aids, working off his own angsts on the realities of the terminally ill. Then he
meets Brad Pitt.
Pitt is an active sociopath, an articulate apprentice of random malice. Like Guy
Grand, the prankster-hero of Terry Southern's anarchic novel The Magic
Christian, he is a public enemy: sometimes he works as a waiter, peeing in the
soup, farting on the puddings; sometimes as a movie projectionist, splicing erect
penises subliminally into family films.
But once he and Norton form a homo-erotic alliance, cohabiting in a grungy
house built (but barely) on a waste dump, the two owners of the same
psychopathy set up a secret league of fight clubs where the maladjusted and the
macho slug it out nightly to get in touch with their diminished manhood by
demonstrating how much pain they can endure.

Some apologists for Fight Club say that's what - and that's all - it's about: men
proving they're men again. Even if this were true, which it's not, it's a malicious
film-maker who sees masculinity served by pulping each other into bloody
insensibility with bare knuckles. A year or two ago, David Cronenberg's Crash
suggested that people could top up their sexual libido by crashing their cars into
each other on the public highways. Fight Club promotes a perversion that's a
potentially more dangerous franchise.
This one requires only the weaponry we all possess (given the will) of bare fists
and the less costly allure of secret illegality and doing harm only to the body-work
of a human being, not an expensive automobile. Even with the cuts made in it by
our film censors, it's an irresponsible attraction to promote in a community like
ours, already over-stretched just to maintain the semblance of public safety.
Norton is soon going to the office with bleeding gums, black eyes, bruised
cheeks, damaged hearing and bloodstained clothes, and spitting out (along with
loose teeth) such bits of acquired wisdom as: "You can swallow a pint of blood
before getting sick." The fights themselves disgust and deafen eye and ear. They
are grotesquely explicit and pornographically amplified. They exceed the limits of
all screen violence I've seen in recent years. They are the apotheosis of the way
in which today's moronic American super-stars pump up their ego muscles in
public to exhibit themselves as Hollywood supremacists scornful of all values
save those of their own box-office.
The movie gradually makes its analogy with Nazi Germany even more overt. Pitt
and Norton raid liposuction waste dumpsters at night, retrieving "the richest
cream fat in the world", that's been siphoned out of the obese, and rendering it
into red soap tablets they then flog to exclusive boutiques. It's unbelievable any
film would dare use, even as such a sick gag, a sequence reminiscent of that
chapter of the Holocaust in which Nazi thoroughness rendered the Jews down
into similar, no doubt less pricy soap bars. But Fight Club has no reticence, no
memory, no shame.
Ultimately, the club membership expands into a nationwide secret army of proto-
Nazis who embark on what's grandly called Project Mayhem. They pick fights
with innocent passers-by, graffiti-spray buildings, befoul fountains, rob stores,
sabotage public works, set off bombs - do all, in short, that Hitler's Brown Shirts
did to destabilise the frightened society of their own time. One of Pitt's acolytes,
played by Meat Loaf as a hormonal freak with pecs like women's breasts, is shot
dead: he becomes an instant martyr-hero whose name is chanted in the same
sort of solidarity mantra as Horst Wessel's when that young SA man became the
first saint of the Nazi movement with an anthem to memorialise him.
It defies belief that such a film could have been conceived, shot and distributed
by a film company whose ultimate boss, Rupert Murdoch, is an arch-exponent of
the very capitalist system that Fight Club scorns. You sit there aghast at the
amorality and opportunism of the film business. Not for the first time, I admit. But
this time its impact is far more inflammatory. Even the metaphysical twist at the
end - which I am asked not to disclose, and which is so confusing that to describe
it would be a waste of time - cannot convert a film that is a summons to anarchy
into an anodyne screen fantasy.
In any well-adjusted society, its stars would feel a backlash of public indignation
well beyond the box-office. Edward Norton is one of America's most gifted actors;
Brad Pitt one of its most personable. Both, curiously, played Nazis in two earlier
films, American History X and Seven Years in Tibet. For their future good, they

should explore the world beyond Mein Kampf. As for Britain's own Helena
Bonham Carter, playing a sleazy, white-faced slut, on drugs, suicidal, servicing
the flesh and fantasies of both men, she shows the extent that actresses are
willing to go in order to trash their screen images and enjoy notoriety without
responsibility. It is not a pretty sight.

Critical Review
Fight Club Review
by Serdar Yegulalp (serdar AT thegline DOT com)
May 1st, 2000
Fight Club (1999)
* *
Few movies in 1999 polarized audiences like "Fight Club", which showed Gen-X men beating on
each other as a way of attempting to reclaim their masculinity, or something. Three camps seem
to have sprung up around the film: hose who love it, those who hate it, and those who find the
other two camps wasting their time with a red herring. I'm in the third camp.
"Fight Club", at the very least, opens brilliantly, with an unnamed narrator (Edward Norton) going
stir crazy in a homogenized job. The film gets a lot of good mileage out of Norton's disgust with
his brand-name existence; I was reminded of Willy Loman ranting, "How can they whip cheese?".
In this film, Norton paces through his apartment, obssing over housewares catalogues, while his
Ikea-bought furniture all handily display closed-captioned pricetags and manufacturer's
descriptions.
Norton is an insomniac, and winds up going to terminal-disease support groups as a coping
mechanism. For what, we may ask? For the fact that his life is terminally pallid? How bad can his
life be when there are people dying of brain cancer? That's the way he thinks about it, anyway,
and for a while it works, until he meets another faker, Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter).
Marla and the Norton character wind up involved in a tempestuous relationship, which in this
movie is a little like saying the Eiffel Tower is tall and pointy.
Things get complicated further by the presence of the handsome and engimatic soap salesman
Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), whom Norton meets on one of his unending business trips. Durden
seems to have a knack for telling people what they've always wanted to hear but could never find
anyone else to say. This is exactly what Norton thinks he needs, and when he comes back one
day to find his apartment blown up, he shacks up with Durden in a house that could only remain
standing in the movies and starts plowing through his back copies of "Reader's Digest".
So far the film has been funny and knowing, and made with great skill. Then it takes a left turn
that sends everything barrelling over the cliff. Durden, as it turns out, is the mastermind of an
underground boxing circle known as Fight Club, where the male disenfranchised can come and
feel like gods while beating the tar out of each other. The logic of this will be lost on anyone who
has actually been in a fistfight, of course, but the movie is not about logic. "Fight Club" has the
peculiar, subterranean arrogance of a precocious writer's first draft, where screwy little details are
defended to death over massive plot holes.
Before long Fight Club is running completely out of control, and Durden and Norton are at each
other's throats when they're not raiding liposuction clinics for human fat. The parallels with the
Nazis are of course not going to be lost on a knowing audience, but by the time we get to such
things, they no longer matter.
I suspect "Fight Club" worked better on paper, because what's on film veers between the
nauseating and the ridiculous. It's one thing to write about how great it felt to smash your fists into
the concrete over and over again, and quite another to actually SEE it. Film has a way of
literalizing everything, even things that are designed to be fanciful, and perhaps this story (from a
novel by Chuck Palahniuk) just didn't survive the translation intact.
People will say (and have said) that the film is actually "about the nature of violence", but that is
approximately as honest as saying that "ID4" was "about" the value of raising funding for SETI.
The movie isn't genuinely smart enough to be ABOUT that stuff -- it uses Tyler Durden and his
nihilistic burpings as an excuse to show things that are by turns shocking, funny, outrageous,
repellent, stupid, and then finally just tiresome. By the time we get to the "about" part, the movie's
already betrayed itself, and smirks at us with its trick third act that doesn't even really explain
anything. What's worse, a movie that deals ineptly with a good subject, or one which uses flashy
plot mechanisms to tapdance around really dealing with it at all?
The problem isn't with David ("Seven") Fincher's extraordinary direction or the above-average
performances by the cast. Let's face it, there are good people at work here: Norton's splendid; Pitt
is funny when not being jerked around by the plot; Carter is unexpectedly brassy and scene-

stealing. Her weirdo monologues could have been torn out and used as the centerpiece for
another, better movie all by themselves.
I wanted to like "Fight Club", or at least appreciate its sardonic flashes of wit, but I could not. It's a
cold, crass joke at the expense of its audience; a two-and-a-half-hour red herring that winds up
being nothing at all by pretending to be about a lot of things it doesn't really understand.

Critical Review
Fight Club
Directed by: David Fincher
Written by: Jim Uhls (screenplay), Chuck Palahniuk (novel)
Posted on April 12, 2010 by matterspamer
Starring: Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham Carter, and Meatloaf
Beloved the world over by high school and college males of all ages as a philosophical
masterpiece, David Fincher’s Fight Club has continuously stayed on cinema’s cerebrum
ever since it became a cult hit on DVD. Do I dare challenge the consensus that this film
isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? I almost feel obligated to.
For starters, these so-called philosophical musings. Is a movie that promotes fighting
back against a society that questions your manhood really something we should be
promoting? Isn’t that what has gotten us involved in every single conflict since the dawn
of time? What most consider unique in this film is actually just the same old masculinity
complex American males are expected to suffer from.
As critic Lisa Schwarzbaum put it in her initial negative review of the film,
The giant international furnishings chain IKEA is responsible for many consumer-based
phenomena, among them our docile acceptance of cheap, hinged desk lamps that droop
like spent lilies. But I hadn’t realized that overexposure to IKEA results in limp penises,
too, until I saw Fight Club.
This is just the first of a number of problems in this film. What initially passes as
intelligence is really just stupidity worded smartly. “We have no Great War. No Great
Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives,” says
Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden. It really translates to “I don’t have an outlet for my aggression,
so I must pout and then explode.” Football is apparently not an option, and not being
involved in World War III is a negative.
Another problem I have with this brute is its take on women. Marla (Helena Bonham
Carter) is the only female in the entire movie, and exists, as Schwarzbaum puts it, “as a
trash receptacle for sex.”
I understand that the film focuses on a man’s struggle and ultimate failure to achieve his
identity in any normal way, but if you’re going to incorporate a female into the narrative,
does it have to be one that exists purely to spread her legs in between spouts of
emasculating dialogue?
Enough about the philosophy of the film. How does it stack up in terms of direction and
acting? Not as bad, but that isn’t saying much. Fincher is an indisputably good director,
watch Zodiac for proof of that. But here he seems obsessed with making this some kind
of unique art-house thing. He takes the grimy tone to the extreme, and sometimes it’s too
much.

There’s nothing out of place on the acting front. Edward Norton is almost always
serious, and here he gets to be just that. He doesn’t show the prowess he does in films
like American History X or The Illusionist, but he’s a tolerable lead character.
Most of the hype surrounding this film revolves around Tyler Durden (Pitt). This was
important for the actor in many ways. It gave him an image, and it gave him a signature
role. Sadly, he has to spout off a lot of the idealistic bullshit in the script. It’s not a bad
piece of acting, but it is by no means his best work. Any renown his performance garners
is based on the lines he gets to deliver, a common misconception by many movie viewers.
As a whole, this film can best be described as many talented people doing something
mundane with insulting source material. It’s absurd to think IKEA is castrating the
American male; it’s even more absurd that so many take the notion to heart.
Grade: D+
http://cynicritics.com/2010/04/12/archive-review-fight-club/

Fight Club – Past Questions
Explore some of the ways in which placing your chosen film within a broader critical
framework has helped to develop your appreciation and understanding of specific
sequences.
How far has critical debate about your chosen film shaped and altered your response?
Discuss critically some of the characteristics of Fight Club that have given it cult status as
a film
How useful has a particular critical approach been in gaining a deeper understanding and
appreciation of your chosen film?
Explain how your understanding of your chosen film has been influenced by critical
debates?
What does your chosen film reveal about the usefulness of one or more critical
approaches you have applied?
Consider debates that have arisen in the critical reception of your chosen film, either at
the time of its initial release or now or both.
‘Despite the gesture of destroying symbols of corporate power at the end, Fight Club is a
film about power and control, not liberation.’ How far do you agree?
How far has an awareness of the filmmaker as auteur influenced your response to you
chosen film?
How far has particular writing by critics been important in developing your
understanding and appreciation of your chosen film?
As a result of your close critical study, to what extent does Fight Club become either a
more or less complex film?

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