Stylish pitch-black comedy keeps winning die-hard sham-rager fans but is no answer to what ails them.

Rating: 7/10 (15 September 2006)

"How many nihilists does it take to change a light-bulb?" "-Half." (Gettit?)
Fight Club(1999) is a highly stylised hybrid--a pitch-black comedy that's hard to like unless you're male, and (possibly) clawing your way BACK from the edge of abyss.
It opens with a CGI-fly-past of firing neurons under the credits, suggesting what follows is caused by misfires in the protagonist's brain. But you miss that at first for all the uncharted territory.
James Uhls' impressive screen adaptation continues Chuck Palahniuk's novel attempts to revolutionize men's views of their place in first-world-societies where caveman sensibilities are literally no longer required.
Tyler Durden(Brad Pitt) characterizes our generation in one of his early Fight Club welcome speeches: "We're the middle children of history--we have no Great War", meaning that men raised without brutality still crave it--and why so many of them eagerly join up. But Club(1999) delineates its message for just one gender, never pretending to speak for women: the narrator observes that before becoming yuppies, "we used to read pornography": young girls were never so inclined.
Nevertheless, it's frightening how many people the film appeals to. Fans over-enthuse, saying "this is the BEST movie EVER". Professional critics aren't so impressed. One courageous video & DVD guide claims that "...this appalling, grotesque, and interminable endurance-test is fairytale fiction for serial killers, imbeciles who succumb to road rage, and frustrated white guys--all the morons who seek excuses for their increasingly bad behavior and hair-trigger tempers".
This temper-thing in the psych business is called "sham-rage" (or "decortication" after the severing of the neocortex in 1948 experiments on pussycats)- www.emotion.caltech.edu/courses/ss140/April17-1.pdf. The "misfire" in Jack's brain depicts such a neurochemical break.
But maybe Jack(Ed Norton) and Tyler(Brad Pitt) have a point. To me, the movie is saying that "frustrated" guys are really no good for women, because, frankly, they just don't want what women have to give. Such men might now want to bond only with each other, to satisfy ancient caveman instincts, which civilisation--and women--are trying to breed out of them.
That's why Jack & Tyler's fight clubs quickly evolve into organised anarchism, and eventually nihilism--the wish to destroy all moral and social edifices: males are getting back to their roots.
Having "said" that, Fight Club(1999) tries to throw a lifeline to the seriously disaffected; but that lifeline falls on deaf ears. (*****Spoiler: The ending depicts Jack's retaking control from his "teacher" by redefining his personal limits regarding violence. The protagonist successfully battles his delusion to finally regain himself. He has learnt better.*****) The "nasty" existentialism of anarchism/nihilism still tends to appeal to young men, despite its dead-end logic. A recent email asked me whether I thought this "philosophy of unreason" was a mental deficiency or a choice. I call it a deficiency, as Fight Club(1999) does; the question is only how permanent that is. It can be considered foolishness--which is unlearnable; or sociopathy--which isn't.
It's nice to know even its proponents (like my email friend) think this "unreason" is subject to cognitive override--choice--but why would anyone choose it unless their unreason validates some physiological syndrome? Anti-establishment anarchism was last big in the 19thC, having FIRST given rise to Machiavelli. During both periods it was a might-makes-right power struggle against ruling elites. We now think of these periods as callous, brutal and primitive, certainly not part of civilisation today. We expect "civilians" to abide by higher universal standards of humanism. Clearly, blowing up buildings and bashing each other half to death is antithetical to that social contract.
However, I do like the film's position that male bonding, with/without a sexual component, might be just what they need. During a bonding session with Tyler, as they consider Jack's heterosexual relationship, Jack admits, "I can't get married; I'm a 30yr-old boy"--to which Tyler adds, "We're a generation of men raised by women. I'm wondering if another woman is the answer we need".
This is gender politics; and Norton goes to great lengths on the commentary track to explain Jack's mistreatment of Marla (Helena Bonham-Carter) as symptomatic of Jack's social and mental incompetence. Misogyny itself, the male hatred of women, may be physiologically inspired in such boy-men struggling to behave civilly. Ancient reptilian brain-structures produce the primal urge to violence (ie just to feel alive), so fight-club violence might not be caused by "social malaise" at all.
I suspect this is the movie's--and novel's--most unpalatable basis, making Fight Club(1999) seem "irresponsible" to its critics.
We usually call reptilian brain-structures "primitive" because except in lizards (hence "lizard-logic"), they're buried deep in the brain, overlain by "higher", mammalian brain-structures. Lifelong learning encapsulated in the neocortex of, say, pussycats, inhibits/overrides this reptilian dominance, but in some ("decorticated" pussycats or people) the process may be faulty, or just take too long. However if graduating beyond such lizard-logic (anarchist idiocy) takes "fight-clubbers" most of their lifetime, then so be it--until then, such men are welcome to have s*x with each other.
Fight Club(1999)'s main problem is that it stirs up the powerful philosophical issue of anarchism/nihilism, but leaves it unresolved, notably with its ending. The entire closing scene, including the bombing, is visually nebulous. Did all that happen, or was it just Jack's imagination? Comprehension is deliberately muddied by Jack's speedy recovery(!) from a fatal gunshot wound. Like many, I laughed at its absurdity.
Yet the film's showmanship still wins new converts. It seems to set the benchmark for neocinema by demanding freeze-frame plus several viewings to build its enjoyment. Like Sixth Sense(1999), Club(1999) employs perception-shift for the lead character, but here it's integrated linearly to unfold the story. (In Sense(1999) the perception-shift is recursive- cf. www.cse.nd.edu/courses/cse233/www/lectures/ri.pdf OR http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/sicp/book/node15.html.)
Club(1999) further winks at us with single-frame interjections of--supposedly--Tyler's full frontals throughout Jack's narration. They serve both as alerts to Jack's insanity, and as visual "easter-eggs".
Other clever concepts are borrowed from social philosophy, eg the politics of rich women's fat-paranoia (soapmaking): true recycling, trés Soylent Green(1973).---END_OF_PART1---