Fight Club, starring Brad Pitt, is one of the most violent films ever made. It has shocked audiences, but director David Fincher feels misunderstood, writes Damon Wise
There’s a scene in Fight Club where Tyler Durden, the evil genius played by Brad Pitt, is working as a projectionist in a downtown multiplex. He’s working frantically, splicing an image of a flaccid penis into the next reel of an animated family film. A single frame like this will be on screen for just one-sixtieth of a second. Down in the darkened theatre, parents exchange worried looks. They don’t know what they’ve seen but they know they’ve seen something – and whatever it is, they don’t like it. On cue, a little girl starts crying into her popcorn …
It felt a little like this at the Venice Film Festival in September, when Fight Club had its European premiere. The 9.30am preview screening divided critics, and at a lunchtime press conference the cast and crew faced a barrage of emotional questions about social and moral responsibility. It came to a head at the film’s official midnight screening, when director David Fincher (Seven) finally made it up the white ramp outside the Palazzo del Cinema, past the girls screaming, “Brad! Brad!”, and into the mustard-yellow auditorium where ticket- holders were waving their disposable cameras. “I’m looking at the crowd,” he recalls, “and I’m thinking, `Uh-oh’. These are not our people.”
Sure enough, they sat bolted to their seats, and laughter, if it came, was sporadic and nervous. Inevitably, there were walkouts that night – not just a few – which only added to the growing controversy. Much of it centres on the fight club of the title, where men, played by Pitt and Ed Norton, queue up to beat each other senseless.
Back in Britain, Alexander Walker had written a scathing article for the London Evening Standard, despairing for humanity, that echoed the controversy surrounding the release of David Cronenberg’s Crash. He claimed that the film flirted with fascist imagery, that the growing popularity of the fight club of the title – an underground bare-knuckle boxing society – bore comparison with Adolf Hitler’s rise, that the film’s “recipes” for homemade explosives were irresponsibly authentic, and that a scene involving human fat being used to make soap was a sickening echo of Nazi atrocities.
Less than two weeks ago, the film received its Hollywood premiere, at the Westwood Theatre in Los Angeles. Fincher and his stars – Pitt, Norton and Helena Bonham Carter – turned out for a star-studded bash attended by the likes of Kevin Spacey, Kevin Bacon and Ed Harris. There were few, if any, walkouts this time. In fact, people applauded and laughed loudly at the film’s knowing black humour, especially in the closing scenes, when the film appears to physically “slip in the gate” and the image of a flaccid penis – the one shown in the earlier scene – fills the screen for slightly longer than a sixtieth of a second. What had changed to merit this U- turn? Nothing. This was the exact same film.
“Excuse me, I have to turn Brad Pitt down,” says Chuck Palahniuk, the 37-year-old novelist from Portland, Oregon, who wrote the novel on which Fight Club is based. He turns down the stereo. In the latest touch of media pranksterism that accompanies the film, Pitt has recorded a single to accompany the movie: over the top of a grinding Dust Brothers’ techno groove, Pitt bellows lines from Fight Club, the novel. The lines are tongue-in-cheek mantras, railing against consumer society: “Deliver me from Swedish furniture. Deliver me from clever art. Deliver me from perfect teeth.”
“It’s pretty wild,” says Palahniuk, who wrote Fight Club almost as a kind of literary black joke, thinking, `This will never be published, so why censor myself?” It’s written from the viewpoint of a jaded product recall co-ordinator (played by Norton), who cynically calculates damage limitation for a major car company. He can’t sleep, his life is emotionless and meaningless, so he takes to dropping in on support groups for the terminally ill and bonding with fellow sufferers. Once his cover is blown, he looks for a new way to get his kicks. Hence the fight club.
Palahniuk finds the film astonishingly faithful to his novel. He thinks the press reaction has backfired, that people daunted by the film’s notoriety are relieved by its strong, surreal sense of humour.
The aura of “evil” surrounding the film has dulled. In fact, all the points raised by Fight Club’s opponents can easily be rebutted. If the film promotes fascism, why are Tyler’s methods so anarchic? If the explosive recipes are so authentic, why are they made with napalm, gasoline and cat litter? And if the violence is so ugly, well, shouldn’t it be?
“It’s supposed to be ugly,” says Fincher. “That’s the point. They wanted us to cut a scene where Tyler has blood dribbling down his neck, and I said, `This is the problem with violence in the movies – the fact that there are no actual repercussions.’ They wanted me to cut all the stuff that makes violence ugly and horrible, and I would argue that that’s exactly what you shouldn’t cut.”
Fincher laughs when it’s suggested to him that Fight Club, like the book, is a dark, elaborate prank, a whoopee cushion of a movie. You could even go further and say it’s a satire on the whole concept of “dangerous” movies: the threat of copycat violence mingled with a brutal disregard for the whole structure of society is bound to push every possible button. It points up the obsession that film critics have with predicting the next outrage. After Natural Born Killers, what next? After Reservoir Dogs, what next? After Crash, what next?
But, just like hanging around in terminal illness support groups, going to the movies is a vicarious thrill. Anyone fool enough to start their own fight club will think again after the first punch on the nose. And anyone who carries on fighting, simply enjoys it, and is going to do it anyway. Fight Club is a subversive movie because it seems to be more dangerous than it really is, while slipping in some rather more complex ideas about the changing face of masculinity in a politically correct consumer society.
“That’s what Tyler’s saying,” agrees Fincher. “How can you exist if you’ve never had these experiences? You’re not really existing, you’re just buying all this stuff so that it looks like you have a life. So that when people come over to your house for a glass of Chardonnay, they can go, `Wow, this guy’s got it all together.'”
If Fight Club affects us that deeply, doesn’t that prove how far our culture is removed from real experience? Put it this way, the penis that flickers briefly in one scene is actually a prosthetic. In order that the film could get an R rating, claims Palahniuk, the penis could not be erect or have a hand, mouth or any other body part in the frame, and it had to feature black pubic hair “so no one would think it was Brad’s”. So the perfect penis had to be fabricated – the film’s one, crowning moment of anarchy is just an expensive fake.
In Venice, few seemed to understand why a massive consumer corporation like 20th Century Fox would release Fight Club. Wasn’t it attacking its own values? Wasn’t it unwitting self-sabotage? Why would Hollywood do such a thing? “Hollywood’s just trying to sell tickets,” says Fincher bluntly. “If people want to see Julia Roberts in a particular way, then there we go. Dress her up another way. They’re just trying to make money. They’re not interested in the way we live our lives.”
Fight Club opens at cinemas nationwide on January 28