Sparring match

Pitt and Norton are on bruise control

by Peter Keough

On the surface, David Fincher is the master of puerile profundity, of superficial weightiness, of dank grotesquerie signifying nothing. But I think there's more to his four-movie oeuvre than just an MTV punk with a Nietzsche reader showing off. Like his previous film, The Game, Fight Club is not so much a product of the exploitative, hitmaking process of the Hollywood film industry as it is a reflection of that process. It's trashy, sensationalistic, amoral, pretentious, and bound to rouse the outrage of those who believe that movies corrupt society and cause violent behavior. Which may be the point: Fight Club is a mirror distorting the faces of those most eager to condemn it.

Or maybe it's no more than a slick, overstylized adaptation of a sophomoric first novel. The slender volume by Chuck Palahniuk reads like a workshop effort by a writer overly impressed with Bret Easton Ellis; it's shallow, hip nihilism with a few good lines. Most of those lines have made it into the screenplay, where they're recited in the voiceover intoned by the film's unnamed narrator and hero (Edward Norton, attempting a second, less pumped-up take on American History X). "That old saying," he says at the beginning, a gun shoved into his mouth, "that you kill the one you love, it works both ways." That's especially true in a movie that revels in and reviles the culture of sado-masochistic narcissism that is Fight Club's target and audience.

Norton is a Generation X Everyman, a corporate drone engaged in a job even more soul-destroying than that of Kevin Spacey in American Beauty -- he investigates accidents for an auto company and decides whether the defect responsible warrants a product recall. His reward is a designer-catalogue-furnished apartment and insomnia; the latter he tries to cure by attending self-help meetings for victims of incurable diseases. At a testicular-cancer group he encounters Bob (Meat Loaf Aday), who presses him to his enormous breasts and gets him to weep. There he also meets Marla (Helena Bonham Carter, looking more used than she did in Frankenstein), a chain-smoking, death-seeking revenant whom Norton denounces as a "tourist." Her presence at the meetings, a reminder of his own phoniness, destroys whatever peace they provide him.

If Marla is Fight Club's version of American beauty, what the hero is really looking for is the American beast. He finds it in Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt in a less cross-eyed version of his 12 Monkeys character). A prankster dilettante, Durden works part-time as a movie projectionist, where he inserts pornographic frames into G-rated movies (it would probably be more subversive if he did the opposite), and as a caterer, where his vandalism is even less wholesome (let's just say that this movie will make you less likely to order the lobster bisque). In his spare time he makes soap out of fat purloined from liposuction clinics, a clever satirical idea that provides one truly disgusting scene but otherwise goes nowhere.

In short order, Norton's apartment blows up mysteriously, he and Tyler engage in a bonding fistfight outside a bar, and he moves into Tyler's squalid house/soap factory (ample opportunities for Fincher to indulge in the dripping dankness obsessed over in Seven). And by chance Tyler and Marla meet and become lovers, evoking Norton's latent homoerotic fury. But she proves just a nagging aside to the two boys' ongoing pugilistic relationship, and over a montaged period of time the pair draw other disenfranchised losers into their after-hours bare-knuckle bouts, organizing it into "Fight Club," a grassroots movement transforming anti-establishment rage into self-flagellation and cuts and bruises to impress the people at the office the next day. Inevitably "Fight Club" branches out into the escalating terrorism of "Project Mayhem," Tyler's scheme to overthrow the civilized world as we know it.

Mostly, though, "Fight Club" is an opportunity for Norton's unreliable narrator and passive/aggressive voyeur to indulge his own antisocial dark side, along with those who pay $8 to see films like this or any other big-screen vicarious thrill ride of bad behavior. And like those same movie patrons, when the going gets too rough, when the funny sabotage degenerates into genuine mayhem, Norton's alter ego Tyler becomes a scapegoat of his own taboo desires. At that point Fight Club, perhaps unintentionally, becomes a critique of on-screen violence even as it capitalizes on it.

In the meantime, Fincher indulges himself in the spectacle of pretty faces and torsos beaten to a pulp (one colleague has called the film Raging Bullshit), or in attention-getting arty shots, like the way the camera zooms through the step-by-step process of a devastating explosion, and hip self-reflexivity, like the distractingly frequent direct addresses to the camera. Although Fight Club spars with issues of alienation, repression, self-destruction, the future of civilization, and the nature of the cinema, they're glancing blows -- it's all just shadow boxing.