Essential Viewing

Rating: 10/10 (11 June 2005)

There's a certain poetic nobility in Fight Club's disappointing box-office performance. After all, here's a movie that attacks product, profit and the capitalist doctrine and fails to be consumed - not what anyone intended but would it really do for the people involved to make an enormous windfall on the back of its release? It hardly matters anyway because anyone involved in Fight Club must have known that they'd made something so good that it would be adequate reward just to be associated with it. It's a seminal piece of work - a perfect conflation of visual and conceptual imagination that's as deceptive as one of Tyler's bars of soap. You may have thought you were going to see a movie about men beating each other up and the delicious truth is that that's just what many Americans DID think only to be confronted by a film that challenged the most basic assumptions upon which the western world functions - namely that unrestrained, free market commercial enterprise increases wealth and subsequently the quality of life. But Planet Starbucks isn't a paradise, it's nothingness and here's a film that says so more directly than most. Ed Norton's narrator is the emptiness at the heart of the system, emasculated by modernism, numbed by consumption - his life is a corporate by-product and the need to feel some kind of quantifiable human emotion creates Tyler Durden, an unrestrained force for personal liberation. Tyler's destructive counter-cultural revolution is an unflinching satirical knife to the throat of the thinking that blunts so many of us and it's astonishing to see this level of angry denunciation in a mainstream Hollywood movie. Fincher's movie is punk rock film-making, indifferent to the generic considerations that shape most American cinema and one which forces you to think about yourself and the forces that control your life. Freedom is an illusion Tyler shows us and Fincher reinforces this notion by drawing attention to the medium's illusionary potential in a series of virtuoso sequences which shatter that so-called forth wall just as the characters try and break free from the all-consuming commercial blandification of the modern world. A great film the first time you see it, a different film the second time and even better - Fight Club is a perfectly composed reaction to the modern age and its false promises. This movie really does have something important to say, whether you're ready to hear it or not is a different matter. Liberation starts here kids.