/ 28 January 2000

Fight it with your mind

Movie of the week

It is rather strange to see Brad Pitt, who has a body immaculately toned down to the last sinew, scoffing at the male models in Gucci ads. Is the irony deliberate? In Fight Club it is often hard to tell. This is a film that derides consumerism, but it is made by a director, David Fincher, who worked in advertising very successfully before he started making movies. His bravura visual style clearly owes something to commercials, even as he expresses distaste for their content and effects.

Presumably it is an intentional irony that Pitt, that icon of picture-perfect masculinity, is cast as a kind of freelance agent provocateur drawing on and possibly inflaming the frustrations of what the film presents as modern manhood in crisis. It’s an irony that works, allowing Pitt to counter the himbo-heart-throb image with a complex, ambivalent role – but irony cuts both ways. You can only cast against type when there’s a type to cast against. Does Brad’s beauty (on spectacular show in Fight Club, in however battered or bloody a form) reinforce or undermine the movie’s critique of a soulless society in thrall to pretty surfaces?

That Fight Club throws up such questions is a measure of how interesting a film it is, and it is perhaps unfair to expect it to resolve all the issues it raises when it is obviously designed to avoid your standard Hollywood join-the-dots moralism. It provokes more than it satisfies, and it bravely and imaginatively inhabits a space that is both tonally and morally uncertain. Still, one gets the feeling on more than one occasion that this may simply be because it has thematically bitten off more than it can chew.

The excellent Edward Norton plays the (mostly) unnamed narrator, a man whose job it is to investigate the damage and suffering caused by badly manufactured cars – and then help his company deflect responsibility for such awful accidents. He is the very model of a modern American consumer, whose sacred codex is the catalogue and whose catechism is represented by questions like “What kind of dining set defines me as a person?”

Happy, however, he is not. He haunts support groups for people suffering the woes of disease and addiction: there he can experience outpourings of emotion and grapplings with pain in a way apparently not offered in any of his catalogues. Maybe he just has the wrong catalogues. What the film is saying, though, and very obviously, is that hyper-consumerism pretends to provide meaning when it can’t and doesn’t.

But what kind of meaning is our narrator – and men like him – looking for? After meeting Tyler Durden (Pitt) on a plane, he finds himself offered a solution to his problems of significance. In the elective brutality of the subterranean fight club, where men can freely beat each other to a pulp, the discontents of modern masculinity temporarily dissolve. As Tyler puts it, the men who are drawn to this secret thumping society are men who had “no Great War, no Great Depression” in which to test or assert their manhood. He seems to be saying that advanced capitalist civilisation doesn’t satisfy men’s inherently violent needs. One might argue, however, that civilisation is at least in part the product of male violence (after all, it requires armies, policemen, rulers) and the real problem might be that, by restricting the ways men can feel and act, it fails to answer their need for love.

At any rate, these are the kinds of issues Fight Club plays with; how profound a meditation it is on such questions is open to doubt. Some have felt the movie falls apart towards the end, making a nonsense of what has gone before. I didn’t, but the concluding half-hour did make me wonder whether it wasn’t really just a superior and somewhat pretentious thriller with a surreal edge. Its questions, nonetheless, are important questions, and, if nothing else, the film (scripted by Jim Uhls from Chuck Palahniuk’s novel) makes a pretty riveting stab at turning them into a narrative.

Fincher’s facility for a striking image, demonstrated so powerfully in his first feature, Seven, is on lavish display here, from the credit titles (flying through a brain’s tangled neurons) to the gory choreography of the fight sequences. The anonymous city in which Fight Club takes place is perhaps the same as that of Seven – it is certainly as impressive a portrait of opulent decay. Fincher loves a really grungy, ugly-beautiful setting, and that’s what he’s superbly good at. The moral issues we must disentangle for ourselves.