Just don't talk about it.

Rating: Null/10 (17 January 2002)

Edward Norton plays Jack, a man who has been pushed over the edge by a mundane job, a mundane life, and a mundane world. His mundane job is a car sales rep, which means he has to travel from place to place on single serving' flights to distribute his (anonymous) car company, which is revealed to have more than a couple of corrupted tricks up their sleeve in an attempt to boost their over inflated salaries. Jack, who appears as a man smart enough to realise the emotionally unrewarding life he has entailed, attends self help groups as an attempt at catharsis, in which he gradually encounters Marla Singer (a cast against type Helena Bonham Carter) at groups that specialise in the emotional recovery of Testicular Cancer (she has no right to be there, but then again, neither does he) as the depression he suffers from this mundane lifestyle causes him to suffer great depression which results in insomnia. He then meets the charismatic Tyler Durden (played with real grittiness by Brad Pitt, who revels himself in the films' subject matter) and Jacks' condo, on his return, is (mysteriousley) blown to pieces. He calls Tyler for a place to stay, the two develop a strange bond with a fisticuffs match, and- deciding how therapeutic it has proved for them, decide to organise an underground fight club' in which men forget about their emotional pain by experiencing it in the physical sense. But loss of physical control leads to loss of mental control, and the group soon becomes an all out product of destructive vandalism as they attack big, corporate money makers that distort the purity of a good honest lifestyle with this is how you should live' ideals- which they promote shamelessly to fulfill their own sense of greed (similar to Jacks' position as a car rep) that were responcible for contributing to Jacks' isolation and depression in the first place and from his natural instincts and masculinity.
To say that Fight Club is a Taxi Driver of these times is a fitting comparison yet is also a disregard for its' unique, subversive power. It is a film that is every bit a study on how men have lost their sense of masculinity as materialistic society deprives them of their primal instincts by blurring the line that seperates men from the materialistic desires of the average (and idealistic) woman. As such, it is quite simply a mans' film (girls who claim to like it probably only do so because it stars Brad Pitt) as it has a degrading perspective towards women- Marla Singer is treated as a rough sex object that obscures Jacks' recovery from his rebirth as a real man'. What prevents this film from being an offensive assault on the senses is it's stream of black comedy that buries itself beneath the chaos and disorder like a creeping disease- a fittingly ironic happy ending' sums the film up perfectly, and the twist, although at first incomprehensible, sums up the conditions of modern life's attributes of destroying a mans ethics; existential confusion of moral masculine instincts and self identity quite brilliantly 10/10.