FIGHTING DOWN TO THE ZERO

by Thomas Burchfield

Fight Club

FIGHT CLUB. Black comedy. Starring Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham Carter, and Meatloaf Aday. Screenplay by Jim Uhls.  From a Chuck Palahniuk novel. Directed by David Fincher.  Rated R.  Now Playing at Bay Area Theaters.

POSTHOC RATING:  **1/2

A few years back, I was in line with a friend at the Cinema 21 in the Marina District, what we call the neighborhood for Yuppies, blue-haired ladies and the BMWs they love.

My friend, a self-described anarcho-nihilist, gazed disdainfully around the well-trimmed neighborhood and said, “I’d like to drop a bomb on all of them.  Blow them all up.”

Several thoughts occurred to me.  Like how many of the people he wanted to blow to bits might be already suffering from AIDS or any other variety of diseases lurking out there. And if they weren’t, suffering and death would eventually come to them (as it does to us all) if only he’d show a little patience.  I’ve met my share of shallow people and some even wear beards, long hair, berets and write poetry in Mission coffeehouses.  They may wade in a less fancy pool, but it’s still shallow.

These thoughts rattled in me again while watching Fight Club a presumptuously daring film that I was initially looking forward to, but having seen, can just as soon forget without much effort. Though it promises to be controversial (and it is), it also turns out flat, unaffecting and naively wrong-headed.

The always-excellent Edward Norton plays the Narrator, a nameless Yuppie in a nameless mega-city who slaves for a multinational high-tech company. The System has so atomized him he’s turned into a Support Group junkie in a desperate search for community.  In a hilarious sequence he joins such groups as Remaining Men Together (testicular cancer), Weeping Women – Onward and Upward and Partners in Positivity.  

He’s not suffering from any of the ailments plaguing the other participants, but wants to suffer both to cure his loneliness and in the belief (which seems to be unique to certain upper class intellectuals) that only suffering is a meaningful ennobling state.  But his charade crumbles when he meets slutty and cynical Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) another Support Group junkie. Her presence, which mirrors his phoniness, only pushes him off the deep end.

Out past that deep end, he meets the mysterious Tyler Darden (Brad Pitt), a peripatetic soap manufacturer and devilish, dynamic nihilist-rebel who is everything the Narrator is not. Charismatic like dynamite, he’s a Susan Faludi and Robert Bly fantasy (with a shot of San Francisco’s own Yuppie Eradication Project founder/hero Nestor Makhno) all wrapped up into one.

Tyler is a fountain of Nietzschean wisdom, spouting such ideas as “The things you own wind up owning you” and “Losing all hope is freedom” with the glib energy of a carny barker.

After he finds his apartment mysteriously blown-up, the Narrator moves into Tyler’s ruined, leaky empty mansion in an abandoned industrial park. It’s here that the fun really gets rolling. The Narrator and Tyler form Fight Club, an ultra-secret organization where lonely disaffected men gather not to weep, but to punch each other’s lights out and so get in touch with what it means to be a real man who’s truly alive.  It’s a flipped out nightmare of a community whose goal is not self-improvement, but self-destruction.

Soon Tyler molds Fight Club into something even more radical: the Mayhem Project. From punching each other they turn to jabbing at Society with a series of pranks that start out hilarious (like picking fights with strangers) and mostly harmless, but eventually turn deadly.  Like all radicals, right and left, up and down, Tyler, Fight Club’s Führer has no sense of proportion, no sense of when to stop.  He can’t quit, because the pursuit of the Absolute is the only thing there is for him. He’s like New York’s Rudolph Giuliani, but with no electoral mandate to back him up or (blessedly) vote him out. We’re going whether we like it or not. His idea of stripping everyone of their material possessions in order to achieve true freedom is a crock when, in its place, it’s clear he intends to build a fascist state (and we all know how fascists feel about freedom).

You may think the Narrator realizes the ultimate horror of what they’re perpetrating and puts a stop to it, but no.  Despite some attempts to satirize the fascist underpinnings of this group of Unmerry Pranksters, the film ultimately embraces its ideals, with only a trace of real world ambivalence or ambiguity.  It’s a thesis film and thesis films can’t deal with messy facts like when you blow up giant skyscrapers, there’s no way you’re not going to kill innocent bystanders.

Fight Club’s romantic pretensions only draw attention to its shallowness. Tyler’s assertion that self-improvement is masturbation only begs the question as to whether self-destruction is the same.  Perhaps existence is only a cradle-to-grave jerkoff.  But Fight Club is as glib as the capitalist ideology it rails against.  It’s likely true that in order to fight your enemy, you must become as shallow as he is. That may be the inevitable business of politics.

There’s much to enjoy in Fight Club.  It knocks itself out to be entertaining. Besides Norton, Brad Pitt makes quite an explosion as Tyler, somewhat altering my view of him as a pretty dullard. Meatloaf Aday is hilarious as David, whose testicular cancer treatments have given him a spectacular pair of breasts. And director David Fincher has a great eye for spectacular, surreal imagery and a deft touch with comedy.  Helena Bonham Carter, on the other hand, does the best she can with what is really a thankless role. Her Marla exists solely to push the Narrator to meet Tyler and then redeem him. By extension, this would apply to all women in Fight Club’s brave new world.

Towards the end, the film takes a turn alá The Sixth Sense and goes flat. Though the phallic symbols of Millennial Capitalism topple, there’s no feeling of triumph, satisfaction or real hope for a new beginning (even though Marla is there to hold the Narrator’s hand . . . and that’s all she’s there for). We already sense that what’s coming in its place will be just as bad and we’ll all get fooled again.

It’s a funny place to bring up a Charles Bronson movie, but I will here.  Twenty years ago, he made, with director Walter Hill, a film called Hard Times, a very good drama about Great Depression hoboes who eke out a living by bare-knuckled street boxing, a world as secret and unknown as Fight Club’s. But Bronson’s character was sympathetic, because he wasn’t acting on self-indulgent bourgeois notions of “spiritual malaise” but for his own basic survival.  He was a limited man acting in a set of circumstances over which he had few choices, none of which were good.

But the characters in Fight Club are only whiners who exist to score ideological points.  To me their emptiness springs from a lack of imagination and sense of responsibility for their own souls. The film’s thesis allows them no choice but to follow Tyler the Pied Piper on his madly righteous goose step into the embrace of the Big Icy Zero. Nothing in this film makes me want to follow. At best, its brutal violence will only inspire a few groups of knuckleheads to form their own pugilistic self-help groups. I hope they’re happy, but don’t look for Fight Club to knock down the System anytime soon.

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