Brutal and raw

Rating: 9/10 (10 June 2000)

Fight Club' is a superb filmmaking achievement. It is brutal, innovative, raw, realistic, and extremely powerful. You could not ask more from the actors. Edward Norton once again portrays a psyche in delicate imbalance with potent and believable intensity. Brad Pitt moves to the far side of diabolical and excels in making his character both warped and charismatic. Helena Bonham Carter also shines as the Tyler's pathetic and parasitic girl friend.
Fight Club' takes some of the most pernicious elements of societal dysfunction and wraps them up into a single imaginative well crafted and entertaining film. We have elements of gang behavior, cultism, anarchy, terrorism and debauchery all glorified in the name of iconoclasm. Exciting, seductive and subversive. How utterly cool and hip!
So now comes the twist. I hated this film. It is a monument to everything that is wrong with filmmaking today. It is clever and technically superb but philosophically and socially bereft. Its attempt at social satire, while effective and visceral, was destructive and noxious. I also can't help but notice the extreme irony of using satire against consumerism as the theme for inducing the masses to buy tickets to consume your film.
At what point does a film cross the line between art and depravity? Fight Club' is a brilliant but dangerous film that begs the question. If art is a reflection of a society's culture and values, then when I look at this film I have to be frightened at what is staring back at me. When I reflect on some of the most popular films of the last five years, I can't help but notice the accelerating celebration of random and impulsive violence, depravity, decadence, and pure bad taste. Fight Club' has pushed the envelope once again to find a new pinnacle (or should I say nadir) in the portrayal of these corrosive elements of societal dissolution.
It's comical how many people think it is avant-guard to attack the establishment, as if this is a concept only recently conceived. Fight Club' is just the latest rallying cry to anarchy in a long line of such cries that have plagued society throughout human history. It always seems to be a romantic notion for everyone to be totally free and just live `naturally' (like animals) until one of those animals decides that it is you whom it might be fun to kill today. It doesn't seem to occur to those who extol the sardonic message of such films, that they simultaneously promote and lionize societal destabilization, and that anarchy and mayhem are much less fun in real life than when you are watching them in the air conditioned comfort of your local movie house. Just ask the kids at Columbine High School.
I like dark movies as much or more than the next guy, but this film simply goes too far. There is nothing wrong with criticizing the establishment. Constructive criticism is the only way to bring about progressive change. But this film is merely vulgar cynicism that suggests that mayhem is preferable to imperfect culture. That is grossly irresponsible.

So I am placed in the paradoxical position of admiring this film while I must condemn it. As a flickjunkie I must stand in awe of it as a filmmaking accomplishment. But as a human being concerned with the greater good of the species, I must cry out against it. How far are we willing to go in the name of entertainment? Are we so myopic as to demand entertainment at any cost? I guess we will see when someone raises the ante and the next shock treatment comes to a theater near you.