I am Jack's entire satisfaction

Rating: 9/10 (17 May 2006)

Each time that somebody has just watched "Fight Club", this person must have something to say on it. It could be something good, something bad or simply something anecdotal.
In my case, it's something anecdotal. I was watching the film live on television. That means commercials which include big sales, promotions on varied products and reality TV shows where we are supposed to watch poor fools kissing each other or accomplishing their dreams. This is called wasting our own lives watching somebody else living his/her own.
If you think that what I've just said is a little bit hard, then you're right. It's just that "Fight Club" strikes so hard when you see it that it automatically leaves its mark on you and never let you go. After seeing it, our visions totally change, our beliefs are seriously challenged and the name of Tyler Durden cannot be forgotten anymore.
Directed by David Fincher and starring Edward Norton, Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter, "Fight Club" is a masterpiece that succeeds on almost every level evaluated by the film industry. Its greatest success is undoubtedly its capacity to disturb us and provoke thoughts. A half-anarchist, half-communist propaganda work, the movie is also fairly funny and transforms strange situations into banal situations and shocking acts into suddenly full-of-sense situations.
Norton plays the Narrator, an insomniac bureaucrat who works as an outside consultant for an automobile company ("a major one" does he assert). His real name remains unknown, even if many film buffs incorrectly refer him as Jack. In fact, it's one of the movie's many goals. The only thing that is important about him is precisely nothing. Beginning by his very identity...
Back to the story, the Narrator meets Tyler Durden (Pitt). Tyler is a misfit who sells soap and lives in a house that is so rotten that it could chase the ghosts who'd like to squat it. Tyler is the messenger of the ideas carried out during the film and his philosophies turn around chaos, violence and misfortune.
Together, they start the Fight Club, strictly reserved to men, whose goal is to give to its members the occasion to make roar their bestial instincts without any fear. But when the number of members begins to grow up, the Fight Club progressively changes its status until it becomes something that is really dangerous.
Carter plays Marla Singer who acts as the finger between the tree and the bark. She is a misfit too, but she lives her own ordinary existence.
The three main actors are quite superb. Norton is over-the-top, while Pitt is incredible and might find friends among those who hate his playboy image. Carter is convincing and adequately dreadful. Another highlight is rock singer Meat Loaf who plays a cancer patient with "bitch tits".
The biggest irony about "Fight Club" is the fact that it cost $63 million to produce when its lead wire indicates that one single cent is a cent too much. According to Tyler, man has evolved terribly wrong and his actual lifestyle might have deprived him from the most essential characteristics that make him a man. He privileges a return to the caveman status.
Obviously, I don't need to mention that it's our insatiable need to consume that is attacked. You can do whatever you want with that philosophy. You can attack it, which is, for many viewers, very easy and very tempting. You can criticize it for being macho, too violent to deliver the ideas it wants to share and uselessly filled with sexual scenes.
However, those three elements have all something to do with our natural instincts. Our instincts, that's what the movie wants to bring out. It's disturbing, it's shocking, but it's wanted this way.
But to balance those intense moments, "Fight Club" also includes funny and grotesque scenes. There's something I've remarked about the Narrator and Tyler: they seem to be the only ones to know that their story isn't real and that they are in a movie. It happens that they break the fourth wall and talk directly to the viewer and we can even see Tyler make appear a "cigarette burn" in the top right corner of the screen.
Besides, many people often forget it, but the film's cinematography and special effects are exceptional. Overflowed with more-or-less obvious subliminal images, domestic rooms transforming into life-sized 3D IKEA labels and elaborate, even darkly comic explosion sequences, "Fight Club" becomes a feast for the eyes, as much as it is for the mind.
There's no doubt that the movie is a novel adaptation (from Chuck Palahniuk, to be more precise). The constant, almost overabundant narration from Norton's character is a good indicator, as are the impressing quantity of quotes and lines that have become early classics, such as "The first rule of the Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club."
It would also be a sin to forget the titanic plot twist of the end that astounds as much, if not more than the one from "Se7en", also directed by Fincher. The twist renders full of sense some previously unintelligible sentences and allows to contemplate previous situations from a different eye.
"Fight Club" is so overheated that it becomes burning by moments (I think about the car accident episode). But nobody complains about it, if they ever notice it. Because the only thing that is essential to know is that "Fight Club" is a philosophical must on the same level than "The Matrix" and its true place is in philosophy classrooms. The problem is that few people could bear watching such hallucinating pictures.
Too bad... These are superb pictures...