1. Fight club study Pack

2. Fight Club is about the monstrous thrill of violence and the fragility of men - and that's
not all, argues Amy Taubin
David Fincher's Fight Club opens inside the fear centre of its protagonist's brain, although we don't
realise that's where we are until we're no longer there. What we see is a semi-dark space that
seems both confined and limitless, its details vaguely biomorphic. We are moving through the
space at a smooth, regular clip. Our journey is enlivened by flashes of light, pumping music and
the film's titles, which are superimposed on the brainscape. Just when we might start wondering
about what kind of place we're in, we're expelled in a rush and hurtled alongside the body of a
gun that's half-way jammed inside someone's mouth.
What's exciting about Fight Club is that it "screws around with your bio-rhythms" - to borrow a
phrase from the Chuck Palahniuk novel of the same name which has been adapted with
considerable fidelity by Fincher and screenwriter Jim Uhls. Like the novel, the film disrupts
narrative sequencing and expresses some pretty subversive, right-on-the-zeitgeist ideas about
masculinity and our name-brand, bottom-line society - ideas you're unlikely to find so openly
broadcast in any other Hollywood movie.
"Self-improvement is masturbation. Self-destruction might be the answer" is the slogan of Tyler
Durden, who is not Fight Club's protagonist but rather the protagonist's significant other,
doppelgänger, alter-ego - all that and more. Tyler is the embodiment of pure id with just enough
Nietzsche thrown in to make him articulate. (In the film Tyler's voice trails off after the word
"destruction", which he delivers with a pregnant, upward inflection and Cheshire-cat grin. The
alteration to the line is, I suspect, a concession to the MPAA ratings board, which probably gave
Fight Club an 'R' because its members didn't understand its 'unamerican' social critique.)
Tyler (Brad Pitt) has invaded the life of our protagonist and narrator (Edward Norton) who is
nameless in the novel but referred to as Jack in the film, though only when it's absolutely
unavoidable. Jack is a depressed wage-slave with terrible insomnia, a corrosive wit and a
disassociated perspective on his sterile Ikea life. Tyler encourages him to turn his frustration and
bottled-up rage into action. After Jack and Tyler have their first heart-to-heart, Tyler asks Jack to
hit him. Jack obliges and Tyler returns the favour. They discover that they are exhilarated by this
brute interaction. This is the beginning of Fight Club, a secret society open to anyone who's male
and for which Tyler (the self-styled anarchist) lays down the rules. "The first rule of Fight Club is
that you don't talk about Fight Club."
In Fight Club men strip off their shirts and shoes and go one-on-one with bare knuckles.
Everything is allowed short of killing your partner. Fight Club is so seductive as an idea and
experience it takes on a life of its own - independent of Tyler and Jack - and soon there are Fight
Clubs springing up in basements and parking lots all over the city and then in other cities across
the country.
Jack moves into Tyler's house after his perfectly appointed condo is destroyed in a mysterious
explosion. Tyler inhabits a dilapidated, decaying mansion on the edge of a toxic-waste dump.
Except on Fight Club nights, says Jack, they're Ozzie and Harriet. Which isn't quite true because
Tyler has many other ways of disrupting the social contract. A terrorist of the food industry, he
works as a waiter in pricey restaurants where he pees in the soup. Moonlighting as a projectionist,
he splices single frames of pornography into squeaky-clean family films.
Tyler also sells his own brand of soap to upscale department stores; its secret ingredient is human
fat which he scavenges from the medical-waste bags of liposuction clinics. (This last transgression
has brought accusations of anti-Semitism on the film, but if you've ever lived in LA, where women

3. have fat suctioned out of their bodies as casually as they go to the hairdresser, your first
association would not be with Nazi concentration camps. Misogyny, maybe; anti-Semitism, no.)
One night as they're making soap Tyler kisses Jack's hand and then burns the imprint of his lips
into Jack's skin with pure lye.
If pain is the most expedient route to feeling alive, then the flirtation with self-destruction is what
bonds Tyler and Jack - a bond no woman can set asunder, not even Marla (Helena Bonham
Carter), a Goth queen with the opalescent skin of a heroin addict and the belligerent manner of
Judy Garland at the start of a bender. Marla is after Jack but she fucks Tyler while Jack lurks
outside the door as if he's a child spying on the primal scene.
It's not Marla who causes Jack to have second thoughts about Tyler; rather, it's that Tyler's
tendency to megalomania spins out of control. Without Jack registering what's happening, Tyler
transforms Fight Club into Project Mayhem, a guerrilla network that blows up buildings in order to
undermine the economic foundations of our credit-card society. When a soldier in Project Mayhem
is killed, Jack realises he must break up with the person he's as close to as he is to himself. But
Tyler is not easy to get rid of. Which is how Jack winds up where we came in - with a gun in his
mouth in an office building that has been targeted for demolition by Project Mayhem. Since Tyler's
bombs are as reliable as Jack is as a narrator, this is what you might call, if you think about it
carefully, an open ending.
There's a twist in the climax of Fight Club that I haven't revealed. No one I've spoken to saw it
coming, and the experience of the film is quite different when you know it in advance. Since the
twist subverts what for 100 years has been an essential premise of cinema - that it is an index of
the physical world - to leave it out of this analysis does the film an injustice. Especially since this
premise will become part of ancient history when film is transformed from a photographic medium
to a digital electronic medium - and Fight Club is nothing if not a glimpse of that future.
Like all Fincher's previous films (Alien 3, Se7en, The Game) Fight Club sets up a conflict with a
violent, potentially murderous being who is, as the id is to the ego, the doppelgänger of the
protagonist. Weakened by a toxic and perverse society, the protagonist is barely able to hold on
to some shred of moral consciousness in the face of this anarchic force. (The Game, Fincher's
least convincing film, doesn't quite fit this pattern.) Thus Tyler's nihilism and incipient fascism are
not the values Fight Club espouses, though Fincher complicates the issue by making Tyler so
alluring and charismatic. Tyler is posed as an object of desire and of identification - and Pitt, who
has never been as exquisite as he is with a broken nose and blood streaming down his cut body,
emerges as an actor of economy and control who can rivet attention merely by turning his head.
For the protagonist, who feels emasculated by his buttoned-down, consumerist life, Tyler
represents some ideal of free-wheeling male power. He wants to become Tyler or to be taken over
by Tyler. There's a blatant homoerotic charge to this identification which the film doesn't shy away
from. As in Scorsese's films, the male body is feminised through masochism. You prove your
masculinity not by how much pain you can inflict, but by how much you can endure. Shot in a
wet-dream half light that gilds the men's bodies as they pound each other's heads into the
cement, the Fight Club sequences are such a perfect balance of aesthetics and adrenaline they
feel like a solution to the mind/body split.
But what's most innovative about Fight Club is the way, at moments, it seems like the projection
of an extremely agile, associative train of thought that can back up and hurtle forward and switch
tracks in an instant. The effect is partly the result of a voiceover which is strikingly separated from
the rest of the sound and strangely muffled, as if there were a mike inside Jack's head. Fincher
has retained the savage humour and manic prose style of Palahniuk's novel, and Norton delivers
this interior monologue as if he were making it up on the fly.

4. In the opening scene, seconds after being ejected from Jack's brain, we hear something about a
bomb in the basement and suddenly we're plunged through the window, down 30 storeys,
through the sidewalk into the basement, through a bullet hole in the van with the explosives and
then out the other side. The sequence, which is digitally created from a series of still photographs,
is both astonishing and oddly mundane in the sense that it's a fair representation of the visual
component of everyday thought processes. Still, one needs a new vocabulary to describe the
vertiginous depiction of space and time in Fight Club. Pans and tilts and tracks just won't do.
Fight Club is an action film that's all about interiority. It pushes the concepts of subjectivity and
identification to extremes to suggest a male identity that's not only fragile but frangible. Jack is so
filled with self-loathing and repressed rage he's desperate to get out of his own skin and into
someone else's. And Fight Club is not the only recent Hollywood movie to place us inside
someone's brain. Being John Malkovich, in which the sad-sack protagonist discovers a secret
tunnel that leads into Malkovich's brain, is a comic, gender-bent spin on Fight Club, though its
creepy denouement is more grim than anything Fincher envisions. You also don't have to be a
psychoanalyst to deduce from the depiction that the route into Malkovich's brain is through his
asshole.F
Fincher and Spike Jonze, who directed Malkovich, are colleagues in the production company
Propaganda Films, so it's not surprising they share an idea or two. And perhaps these films are no
more than another turn of the screw in Frankenstein or heady variations on Face Off. But it does
seem transgressive to put a brain on the screen as an exhibit - especially when the exhibit is
connected to the loss of self, in particular the loss of the masculine self. Fincher ends Fight Club
with the Pixies' recording of 'Where Is My Mind'. That's not all that's gone missing.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Hollywood Will Take It On The Chin For Fox's Morally Repulsive 'Fight Club', says Editor
Anita M. Busch
The ultra-graphic violence of Fox 2000's "Fight Club" has drawn more gut anger from
the industry than I've ever heard. And for good reason.
The ultra-graphic violence of Fox 2000's "Fight Club" has drawn more gut anger from the industry
than I've ever heard. And for good reason.
The film, starring Brad PItt and Edward Norton, Is David Fincher's big-budget tirade about bare-
knuckled fighters who form a national network of sociopathio terrorists. No one's faulting the
film's top-notch production values or per-formances, but many are outraged by its content.
In scene after blood-soaked scene, it preaches personal growth through acts of calculated
violence.
Pttfs character orders dub members to go out and pick a fight with someone they don't know.
Later, Prtt plows into a car on the highway, resulting in a horrific accident, and then explains to a
limp, bleeding Norton that he's had a new life experience. When asked why he beat one of his
colleagues to a
lifeless pulp, Norton says, "I wanted to destroy something beautiful." When Prtt pours lye on
Norton's hand, audiences not only hear flesh burning but see it bubbling in an oozing sore.
"Fight Club," no doubt, will become Washington's poster child for what's wrong with Hollywood.

5. And Washington, for once, will be right The film is exactly the kind of product that lawmakers
should target for being socially irresponsible in a nation that has deteriorated to the point of
Columbine.
But the movie also is the kind of product that should have been self-policed by Fox and the MPAA
ratings board. Why the film was given an R rating Instead of an NC-17 is beyond logic.
After giving "Fight Club" an R, the ratings board should apologize for forcing changes to Stanley
Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut' to digitally cover nude bodies. Why is the board OK with Fincher's
closing shot of a penis that fills half the screen?
When Washington immediately pointed its finger at Hollywood after Columbine, it grasped at
straws. Entertainment does influence society, but so do images from real life, the evening news
and magazines. To blame one source is myopic.
In our ridiculously politically correct society, many in Hollywood would be reluctant to greenlight a
story about a 10-year-old gin who smokes cigarettes and cons her way across the country. "Paper
Moon" would be shot down as
socially irresponsible.
Yet, "Fight Club" lives?
Just because a project gets the attention of A-list talent doesn't mean you have to indulge them.
Those responsible for bringing "Fight Club" to the screen — agents, financiers, studio executives
— should hang their heads for setting fine entire industry back.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
NOTE: The following is not a review of the Fight Club DVD per se, but rather a compilation of
posts from DVDTalk and elsewhere that discuss Fight Club from a few different viewpoints. Accept
them, challenge them, or disregard them as pretentious bunk, but here they are. Wrote between
June 8, and June 22, 2000.
Fight Club Clearly Fight Club has had a polarizing effect on its audience and I don't want to take
away from the fact that some people simply don't like it because of personal preference, but I also
feel that that's part of the design of the film.
Fight Club is an extremely complex film, in a way that we haven't seen in a long time (or maybe
ever). In films that are actually about something and that have a lead character with whom we
are supposed to identify, there are several key changes in attitude that you can chart from the
beginning to the end. The character learns the lessons put before him and becomes a different
person. Like the various epiphanies that Travis has in Taxi Driver or Max in Rushmore.
Sometimes, like in American Psycho the lesson is that there are no lessons. There is some
element of this in Taxi Driver as well. The movie follows these characters and gives us external
clues to their internal changes (Max and Travis both make dramatic wardrobe changes at key
moments in their developments) but the movie usually remains consistent in its storytelling style.
(In films that are not about anything at all, like Bond films, the character learns nothing at all and
doesn't ever change)
In Fight Club the narrator goes through countless major changes and the film is divided up into so
many little emotional turns and cues that it boggles the mind. Everything in the film (everything!)
is a clue to the character's inner struggle. The entire movie happens in this constantly evolving

6. state. It seems to be about dozens of different things at any given moment only to flip it's entire
meaning the next. If you hang in until the end the payoff is extraordinary. But if you get stuck
along the way or lose interest it all seems to be pointless. People who say it is a critique /
glorification of violence, of capitalism, of men, of women, of whatever are getting little bits that
are dropped along the way, like bread crumbs in a dense forest. The ads made it out to be an
anti-consumerist film (a little irony all its own) but that is only a small part of the movie and not,
ultimately, the crucial one anyway.
The way that the film changes point of view is excellent. Director David Fincher indicates that he is
going to do this early on when we first see Remaining Men Together. The meeting is portrayed for
maximum comic effect and the narrator smirks at the prospect of crying on Bob's bitch tits. That's
because we haven't gone through enough yet to appreciate the weight of this situation and are
seeing it as if we had walked in cold. Then he takes us back further and we see the desperation in
his life. When he comes back around to Remaining Men Together there is nothing funny about it;
From the first man's incredibly sad story to the narrator's complete and total abandon on Bob's
chest, the scene takes on a totally different tone. Unlike something like The Sixth Sense which
invites you to look at all the ways the trick ending "works" on repeat viewing, Fight Club changes
tone with the lead character and as he sees things differently the entire film becomes different.
What you see in the beginning may not necessarily still be true by the end.
People will be writing dissertations on Fight Club for years to come. That is not to say that
academia is all-important, but rather that the film may grow to be a touchstone of our culture, like
Taxi Driver, Warhol, and Elvis. Something that you have to have an opinion on, that you can
disagree with and still find endlessly interesting. To misinterpret it as a film saying that fighting in
basements is good or that we should do public destruction is tragic, but inevitable. The kind of
mindset in the movie is real. Leaders are tormented, confused people and that dynamic draws
attention. Is Project Mayhem unrealistic? Hardly.
Is Fight Club misogynistic? Is the movie misogynistic? Not at all. In fact, like Chuck
Palahniuk's "Invisible Monsters", the story dissects what it is that makes us men and women.
Marla is an extremely sympathetic character caught up in the life of someone who doesn't
understand what she means to him. The entire movie is clouded by his misperceptions and she
seems unstable. Of course, we come to realize that she's not the one that's unstable. The narrator
rejects her ("I don't think another woman is what we really need.") because he is exploring what
he thinks his male needs are. Tyler represents his male ideal and he is in love with that. There is a
reason why the domestic scenes with Tyler and the narrator have such strong homoerotic
overtones. The narrator is not able to process the masculine and feminine sides of his soul and
mind and has split in two. At the beginning he is, while not happy, maintaining in his consumerist,
wage-slave, "feminine" (not female, but feminine) life, accepting that that is right. It is not right
and Tyler shows him a much more aggressive masculine side and at first that seems right. That is
why fight club initially seems so cool and sexy. The movie shows it to you through his eyes. That
is not enough and Tyler creates Project Mayhem. Eventually, as the character changes, fight club
does not seem so right anymore. The intense beating he gives the blonde angel is a turning point
in fight club. Project Mayhem now seems to be the answer. With the silly music, the homework
assignments, and the perfect targets like Starbucks it's hard to argue with the goals of Project
Mayhem. That, of course, is eventually shown to be wrong too. It is not liberating, although it
initially seems like it is. It is just more fascist BS. The narrator is disillusioned with that and with
Tyler. Then the truth about Tyler is revealed and the narrator realizes how he has wronged Marla.
He tries to undo some of the damage that he now realizes that he has done. Marla has accused
him of being sensitive one minute and a jerk the next. He didn't realize that he had been any of
those things, but the two sides now make sense and he feels the need to balance them. When he
"kills" Tyler he is not banishing his masculine traits, but rather reabsorbing them and finding the

7. balance that he needs. The movie ends with the linking of the man and the woman as they watch
the apocalypse, basically Adam and Eve starting over and unmaking all the mistakes they have
made, getting it finally right.
So ultimately this is the opposite of misogynistic. In fact, it explores what the masculine and
feminine sides of human nature are with an openness that you won't find in any number of cynical
films like Anywhere But Here that pander to women by assuming that they want uncomplicated
weepies. Fight Club dares to ask questions and try out different theories. It makes arguments and
then disproves them.
Fight Club deserves concentration and actually demands it. You can watch it purely as
entertainment, but that would be an emotionally and physically draining experience. It is so
uncompromising in its tone and themes that you have to see the thought process behind the
razzle-dazzle. That there even is one is already remarkable, but that it is so complex is
astounding. So many films, like Boogie Nights seem to be going somewhere and then go off track
and end up achieving nothing. When I first saw Fight Club opening night I wasn't sure that I knew
where it was going and felt myself being jerked into a million different directions. It was
exhausting and I wasn't really sure what I thought afterwards. But after hours and hours of
discussion and thought I felt like I had figured it out and now that I am confident that it leads
somewhere worthwhile I can watch it and completely give myself over to it. Even having seen it
already it constantly surprises. I don't think there has ever been a film like this before.
Interpretations Fight Club is clearly about something, although it takes hard work and thought
to figure out exactly what. And even then what you take away may be different from others.
That's the beauty of it. You don't NEED to look for messages and themes in film. That's fine. But
don't say they're not there. A lot of films make statements on surprising topics (Fincher's own
much maligned Alien 3 was supposed to be an allegory for the then-rampant AIDS virus; John
Ford's iconic Western The Searchers, which on the surface seems to utilize every genre cliche in
the book, is actually a searing look at racism; Fight Club happens, in my opinion, to be about
masculine and feminine identities and how they fuse to create our psychological makeup more
than anything else) but they're only important if you care. If you don't, just enjoy the eye candy.
Fight Club certainly excels on that level as well.
To those that think the message is something like "Get out and live": Glad to see you're thinking
about the movie beyond a knee-jerk "It's stupid / it's fascist / it's kick-ass!" reaction. Now watch
again and look closer. It is so much more than that.
To those that think it is an anti-capitalism movie: It's not. That was the ad campaign and it was
geared to get you in. Ultimately it is about a lot more than that.
To those searching for answers: Yes this movie is complex. But it is consistent. The points it tries
to make it makes. It doesn't fall apart at the end. If you read the book you'll find a less
meaningful, more standard ending. The movie has a sort of happy ending that combines all of the
themes from the film: hitting bottom, self destruction, gender issues, control issues...
Ultimately, you should just watch it and decide for yourself what it is about!
The Ending Like The Game, Fight Club has a defiantly "happy" ending where the
character experiences a redemption. It is appropriate and necessary, not Hollywood.
Sometimes overly dark endings are not what the film needs and Fight Club would have
been useless if the narrator didn't learn from his experiences.
The suicide attempt is not to excise "evil". If anything, we have learned that the ideals that

8. Tyler stands for are within the narrator (after all, he set up the bomb in his apartment
BEFORE he "met" Tyler on the plane). Rather, the suicide is about absorbing Tyler back
into his own consciousness and becoming a whole person. As I see it the movie ultimately
is not about any of the external factors like consumerism or fascism. It tells us that before
we can make the rash social changes that Tyler suggests we need to find balance in
ourselves. The film is about the differences in gender identities, what is masculine and
feminine and how we all have both these within ourselves, regardless off our gender (I
discussed my take on this in these very pages back when Fight Club was in theaters). The
narrator has a violent reaction to the feminine side of his life. He is unbalanced. He is living
by what is simply described as feminine in our society: Consumerism, subservience, and
other such traits. This is identified in a number of ways: The men without testicles being
one of the most unusual ways. When Marla is introduced she threatens his identity and
drives him to create a new identity, this time an overly masculine one. Ultimately when he
accepts Marla as someone that he cares deeply about he finds a balance between
masculine and feminine and that balance allows him to start over.
While not a happy ending in the usual sense, the ending of Fight Club is very hopeful.
You're not supposed to think "Oh, the space monkeys are still out there." You should look
at it as the lead having worked out some extremely complicated crap in his life and can
now start over with someone he really cares about. It is actually very romantic, like
watching fireworks and knowing that your life is about to get a whole lot better, not for any
easy, lame reason, but because you now understand what's important. The logistics of it
are inconsequential (like him not having a home or a job) Those things are small in
comparison to the emotional journey he's made and he knows it.
I thought long about the idea that Project Mayhem is "bad" but the ending (with the
buildings blowing up) is "good". When the movie disproves an idea, like Project Mayhem or
Fight Club it doesn't negate them. That is, when Project Mayhem is proven wrong it doesn't
mean that capitalist institutions like credit card companies and Ikea are good. Notice the
movie makes a point of not saying that killing people is right. That is not because it wants
to avoid gratuitous violence but rather because the point is not to kill the bad guys but to
erase the institutions that are compromising us all. By blowing up the buildings at the end
the goal ultimately is not to cause grievous public damage but rather to erase the financial
debt that enslaves us. This symbolically is the same as the narrator wiping the slate clean
and starting over with Marla.
The Commentary Tracks You gotta get your interpretations from your viewings and not
from the commentary. I mean, how many of you noticed that "Jack" was in the passenger
side of the car after it flipped without being told by Fincher? With the car all flipped over it
is impossible to tell one side from another. It's a nice touch, but it is practically invisible.
Yet everyone mentions it like they discovered it. My reading of the ending is that the film
starts inside Jack's brain and leaves (during the opening credits) at which point his brain
has basically exploded, hence Tyler/Jack. Then the entire film spends its time working back
into Jack's personal drama and ultimately it becomes a very personal look into one man.
The Space Moneys are still out there, true, but what the explosions indicate are a starting
over for Jack and Marla, a personal revelation. It's not just that he gets the girl. It's the
final gigantic synaptic impulse that triggers the rest of Jack's life. The notion of him running
around trying to stop Space Monkeys after that kind of huge turn is simply boring. I mean,
you could ALMOST make an argument that Fincher is creating something similar to
American Psycho where all of the crimes and craziness could be in his Jack's head, making
the whole Space Monkey thing irrelevant.. I don't think that would necessarily be helpful,
but you could try that.

9. One good example of why commentary tracks can be misleading is the issue of whether
Jack and Marla die in an explosion in the end. In the beginning, when the camera shows
the bomb in the basement, the bomb is clearly in the building with Jack and Tyler. So on a
practical level, that building does blow up as the final image flickers out. Whether or not
Marla and Jack die in the end is kind of unimportant since the movie is more about the way
that Jack develops emotionally than it is about any given plot point. And whether or not
Tyler plans to kill them is not hugely important, even though it speaks to his motivations.
What is important is that screenwriter Jim Uhls gives a half-assed explanation of how some
lame logistical situation prevented them from dying. That's a kind of cheap excuse that you
wouldn't expect from the writer of such an intelligent and complex script. After seeing the
film I argued that Jack and Marla died and that that represented a cleansing and renewal,
sort of a rebirth where they started fresh, linked together, made whole, symbolic of the
joining of the masculine and the feminine, rather than Jack's confused Jack-Tyler split
which was wrong. I was wondering if they would address that at all on the commentary
tracks but instead got an incorrect and inconsistent excuse. It doesn't matter ultimately,
since I stand by my conclusions. I've now seen it a bunch of times and each time I watch it
I discover something new. I like the idea of commentary tracks, but when it was on LD I
think they were treated more as a historical record. Hearing Scorsese talk about Raging
Bull in a cultural context makes sense. Now every movie it seems has commentary and
people are practically only getting their ideas from listening to the commentary. I like a
good commentary but I also applaud filmmakers like Woody Allen who refuse to do them.
He basically says "When I'm done with the movie there is nothing else to say. Obviously
everything I wanted to tell you is in the movie so just watch that and you'll get it." There
are good reasons for Fight Club to have commentary but people are not having the full
moviegoing experience of figuring things out for yourself. Trust me, with this particular
movie you are cheating yourself if you think you got it all the first time around.
Final Thoughts You are doing yourself a disservice if you discount this as a dumb
testosterone movie. True, it does come from Hollywood, but so did Dog Day Afternoon and
Taxi Driver, both raw and independently minded films (that's independent in the classic
sense of the word, not "indie"). One day people will be talking about how it was a defining
masterpiece of its moment like Taxi Driver, A Clockwork Orange, and The Manchurian
Candidate.
The ideas and images created in Fight Club are original and feverishly intense. This is a film
that requires at least three viewings. Give yourself a chance to develop your own ideas and
theories and decide that everything that I've said is wrong. The only real message of the
movie that everyone can agree on is that all people should be able to think for themselves
and not follow the norm blindly. That outlook can easily be applied back to the film itself
and you should give it the attention it deserves.
Peter Bradshaw
Friday 12 November 1999
The Guardian
The trajectory of Fight Club is baffling. In its first hour or so, this picture appears to be a gloriously
spiteful and well-acted satire of our bogus contemporary "crisis of masculinity": self-pitying guys hugging
in groups and claiming victim status - modern consumer society having allegedly rendered the poor
dears' hunter-gathering instincts obsolete.
But, by the end, it has unravelled catastrophically into a strident, shallow, pretentious bore with a "twist"
ending that doesn't work. And it is a film which smugly flirts, oh-so-very-controversially, with some of the

10. intellectual and cultural paraphernalia of fascism - but does not have anything like the nerve, still less the
cerebral equipment, to back this pose up.
Edward Norton gives a compulsively twitchy, nerdy, hollow-eyed performance as Fight Club's Narrator: a
30-year-old single guy with a white collar job in the automotive industry and a secret addiction; he loves
attending support groups posing as a sufferer. Hilariously, this is the only thing that gives him an
emotional high.
Fight Club has a classic scene where he turns up at a testicular cancer victims' group and the
participants have to pair off, hugging, sobbing and letting it all out. He teams up with Robert - a cracking
performance from the singer Meat Loaf (no kidding) - who has grown tits after his balls have been cut off.
How pathetic is that? How metaphorical is that?
Into this ghastly and frankly dysfunctional existence steps the super-cool and way charismatic Tyler
Durden, a travelling soap salesman in a cerise leather jacket and funky, Elvis-ish shades: a witty and
seductive performance from Brad Pitt, who has never been better. Tyler introduces Ed to the Fight Club:
secret bare-knuckle brawls where nerdy wimps such as Norton get to reconnect life-changingly with their
inner macho men.
So far, so cool. There's stylish rollercoaster direction from David Fincher, terrific performances from Brad
and Ed, and also a sexy, gravelly-voiced, cynical Helena Bonham Carter as Marla, the girl they both
want to screw. And Jim Uhls' screenplay gets roof-raising laughs with the pair's fantasy about which
celebrity and historical figure they'd most like to fight (respectively, Gandhi and William Shatner).
Where it all comes apart is where Tyler tries to use the fight club as the basis for a kind of anarcho-
terrorist gang, subverting and blowing up the symbols of bullshit corporate America that have taken their
testicles away. Tyler brands Ed Norton's arm with a "kiss" mark in acid, laying down a sub-
Sadeian/Nietzschean riff about how it is only in pain that you can forget about the fatuity of God and
become yourself. He reveals that the soap he sells is made of human fat, stolen from liposuction clinics -
and later we hear his followers will have to provide their own black shirts.
Pretty unsubtle. We know which associations and images Brad and Ed are fooling around with. But do
they? The implications are never followed through, and the movie never has the balls really to take
responsibility for the nihilism, rage and despair it appears to be gesturing towards.
Indeed, there is a scene in which Tyler, in full existential/Zarathustra mode, terrifies a Korean student
dropout working in a convenience store into restarting his biology classes because a veterinarian is what
he really wanted to be. So, there is, like, a good side to the whole human-fat-soap, blackshirt thing! Fight
Club is a dumbed-down extremism, Extremism Lite, no-brainer extremism for the Rush Limbaugh
generation, an audience that thinks the "diceman" is a really challenging philosophy.
Moreover, those much-lauded, much-censored fight scenes, for all their crunchy, nose-popping verité,
are as free from genuine consequence as Itchy and Scratchy. The Fight Club never gets out of control;
scrappers seem to know when to stop, like Judo contestants in the Commonwealth Games; and the
thing never escalates or has to be policed by bigger guys with tyre irons - what a dashed sporting,
chivalrous Fight Club!
Brad mixes it up loads without his lovely features getting a scratch (Ed bears his bruises as a mark of
macho courage). Frankly, as Brad ponces about the place with his trousers hitched down to his hips, to
show off as much pert musculature as possible, he looks like he couldn't fight his way out of a pair of
Calvin Klein boxer briefs. Has anyone connected with this film ever actually been in any fights?
The awful truth is that Fight Club jettisons its sense of humour 60 minutes in, and, so far from satirising
the tiresome "crisis of masculinity" stuff sloshing around the airwaves either side of the Atlantic, the film
simply endorses it, with Tyler presented as a deeply interesting Zeitgeist anti-hero. And, in the end, this
just doesn't pack much of a punch.