It's been denounced as fascist and unhealthily fascinated with male violence. Jonathan Romney confronts Fight Club, the year's most provocative film
David Fincher's grisly conceptual thriller Seven came as a shock; his new film Fight Club is nothing short of a scandal. That alone should make you want to see it - how many Hollywood films even dare to be contentious? Hollywood has had its cause celebre follies in recent years - most notably and embarrassingly, Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers - but it's rare for it to produce a film like this, that can startle, exhilarate, offend and keep you thinking long after you've left the cinema.
Fight Club is not the film you probably think it is. The pre-publicity (shots of Brad Pitt's chest) suggested an extreme variant on the continuing strain of masculinity-in-crisis films: its story is of white-collar males venting their repressed rage by beating each other senseless in a bare-knuckle boxing cult. But that's only part of the story, and hardly enough to elicit the furious responses the film received at the Venice Festival, where, amid much excitement, it was also denounced as an implicitly fascistic glorification of violence.
Fight Club doesn't revel in brutality, but it is fascinated by the strangeness and perversity of male-on-male violence. It is less about violence to others than to oneself: in an extremely unsettling scene, Edward Norton's narrator-hero ostentatiously beats himself to a pulp. The film's protagonists are men who choose to take body blows in order - as Pitt's charismatic fighter-philosopher Tyler explains - better to handle social blows. Just as Tyler takes his "no pain, no gain" ethos to parodic extremes, so Fincher and the screenwriter, Jim Uhls, use stylistic extremes to similar effect. Visually, emotionally and sonically, the film assaults us with an armoury of virtuoso devices, an informational overload. It's only when all certainties are thoroughly pulped that we can again start to piece the information together and make critical sense of what we're seeing.
The story, based on Chuck Palahniuk's novel, is narrated in dizzyingly prolix fashion by Norton's nameless (but let's call him "Jack") low-level executive. An insomniac plagued by a sleek, vapid existence, he realises he has become "a slave to the Ikea nesting instinct": in a brilliant sequence, the screen turns into a walk-through furniture catalogue. His doctor suggests he expose himself to real suffering and visit a cancer support group; the minute he does, he's hooked. At a testicular cancer meeting, he's hugged by bodybuilder Bob (Meat Loaf), whose treatment has left him with female breasts. It's the start of a new addiction - Jack becomes a tenderness junkie.
But there's another emotional tourist on the circuit, Marla (played in dead skin and inch-thick mascara, astonishingly out of character, by Helena Bonham-Carter), and the rivalrous pair are obliged to divvy up the groups: "I'll take the blood parasites"; "I want bowel cancer". The film then takes a sideways step, as Jack encounters the enigmatic Tyler, who embodies an MTV/Fashion Channel fantasy of bohemian rebellion. Played by Brad Pitt, parodying his own narcissistic image to perfection, Tyler lures Jack away from hugging, and into the more drastic, and overtly homoerotic, pleasures of flesh-and-bone catharsis. As one of Tyler's eminently quotable thought-bites goes, "Self-improvement is masturbation. Now, self-destruction . . . " Setting up house together, the pair recruit disciples, and Tyler starts to issue hectoring slogans: "You are not," he yells at each acolyte, "a beautiful and unique snowflake."
Fight Club's narrative is daringly over-charged - there's a remarkable amount of event crammed into its 135 minutes, much of it intensely confusing. The film is also packed with a phenomenal density of pure Zeitgeist. If much of Fight Club seems familiar, it's not because we've been here before in any other film, but because no other film has taken in so many different sites of current cultural interest. First, Fight Club imagines a hysterical male response to the perceived emasculation in contemporary corporate society: it's bound to be quoted in endless articles, cross-referenced against Susan Faludi's recent book on the male condition, Stiffed. Concomitantly, it's a satiric response to compassion culture and the faith in emotional openness as an adequate response to tragedy. It's certainly the first film to make brutal, borderline callous (yet ultimately, morally serious) satiric use of support-group piety.
The film also addresses the corporate universe, its depersonalisation of the workforce (which is hardly a novel topic), and its complicity in murder (which is where the topic takes a novel turn). Jack's job is to quantify lethal accidents for a car manufacturer: a little chill of deja vu sets in here, as the film pays all but explicit homage to J G Ballard's Crash and its thematic collision of death and eroticism, hard machines and fragile bodies. Fight Club is partly a 1990s response to Ballard's 1960s mechanical death-dreams, and a far more commanding response, in its vaulting, pumped-up hysteria, than the cool, detached glide of David Cronenberg's recent adaptation.
In its later stages, the film takes on a hue of conspiracy theory, to address cultism and underground fascism. Tyler's hardbody movement begins as an anti-therapy for belea-guered males; becomes an anarchist social cure-all, operating by means of radical pranksterism; and finally evolves into a scorched-earth nihilist faction. It's remarkable that anyone could read the film as fascist, as Tyler's hyper-cool charisma blossoms into a terrifying example of personality cult, his mottoes parroted by meat-headed recruits.
Here we're at the heart of late-1990s American Zeitgeist: starting with the ironic glamour of Generation X disenfranchisement, the film progresses to a picture of the resentment that fuels survivalists and lethal outsider enclaves like the Trenchcoat Mafia of Littleton, Colorado. Yet this uncomfortably non-liberal film refuses to let us feel we're comfortably on the right side of things: it never lets us be sure exactly where we stand. Stylistically and thematically, we're shuttled from one angle to another - from ad-pastiche cool to pop-video frenzy, from sombre-toned realism to savage farce. Constantly breaking its own formal moulds, Fight Club is a relentless bad trip: the credit sequence sends us whizzing through Jack's brain, in and out of his synapses; the camera plummets several floors in a single shot. In Jack's paranoid warp-speed narration, words and thoughts become images instantaneously: if he dreams of a mid-air plane collision, it happens, boom.
Most audaciously of all, Fincher subverts film language to remind us that what we're watching is a satiric discourse, a fugue in celluloid: he actually makes the sprocket holes jump on the film. He even baits us with that supposedly apocryphal object of moral panic, the inserted subliminal, and then nudges us into realising what he's up to: Tyler, among his other terrorist guises, is a film projectionist of a very hands-on variety.
Just when you think the film has pushed it as far as things can go, it throws you with an 11th-hour twist that flouts its own outrageous impossibility, then caps that with the double whammy of an apocalypse and a throwaway punchline. Fight Club is an extraordinary gesture of provocation, both to the audience and to the Hollywood mainstream. Not so much a tossed gauntlet as a whack in the face, it demands to be seen and argued over. But any beautiful snowflakes among you, be warned.
"Fight Club" (18) is on general release
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