This film should be compulsory for all psychology students...

Rating: 10/10 (5 November 2000)

It is not often that a film captures Christian America's need to define itself through arbitrary means so well, but Fight Club succeeds admirably. As anyone with a basic understanding of human psychology knows, there are a few basic drives that all humans feel a biological and psychological need to satisfy: food, sleep, and sex. None of these drives can be denied, and Army experiments to see the results of depriving the first two turned up some interesting results. Soldiers placed on low sustenance diets became obsessed with food to the point where they began hanging pictures of food items in their lockers. Soldiers deprived of sleep became obsessed with resting to the point where some attempts to deny them rest resulted in violence.
Similarly, it is no coincidence that America is both the most sexually repressed and most overweight nation in the First World. Many young adults in America who are denied an outlet for their sex drive due to religious or societal considerations try to satiate this drive by the arbitrary method of stuffing oneself (no pun intended) with junk food. Fight Club simply took these three observations about how screwed up our society really is and translated them into real-world terms.
This, in a nutshell, is the basis of Fight Club. A man who has become the definition of modern homo sapien's need to define itself by arbitrary means meets a man who has found a way to shed those things and bring his life back to a point where it satisfies only the three basic drives of all sentient animals. I experienced this in some form last year during a holiday. I could live without my DVD player and all my toys that I don't really need. What I can't live without is a sense that I am a free man with direct control over the direction of my life.
It's amazing that this film works so well, because it is only a series of interactions between three principal characters: Jack, Tyler, and Marla. Everyone else is pretty much inconsequential to the plot, even Bob or Angel Face, in spite of how well they are played. The novel might as well have only had those three characters, in fact, so it is a real credit to the director and screenwriter that the latter two characters make any impression at all. Edward Norton is mesmerising as Jack, playing a role that would tie a lesser actor up in knots, all without skipping so much as a beat. Brad Pitt is excellent, and it looks as if Tyler Durden is a role designed to make us feel that we've finally found something he does well.
The real surprise here, however, is Helena Bonham Carter as Marla Singer. This is a character that could have easily dissolved into an insult to all those in our arbitrary society for whom television and digital audio are simply not enough. Instead, Helena brings a depth and sympathy to the character that is completely absent from the story in its written form. Angelina Jolie be damned, Helena was really the most deserving recipient of a best supporting actress award here.
If I had to pick any flaws with the film, it's that the story is a major contradiction of real cases of Dissociative Identity Disorder. It is rare for sufferers of DID to have only one alternate who is so similar to them, and don't blast me about that because I know real sufferers of the disorder. Compared to some real alternates I've seen and heard, Tyler and Jack might as well be twin brothers. Another contradiction is that those with DID cannot simply switch into an alternate personality and do what they wouldn't normally do as themselves. Hence, if Jack has moral objections to stealing fat from a liposuction clinic, so too will Tyler.
However, these minor plot problems, which are necessary to plot movement anyway, are carried over from the book and are quickly overshadowed by the virtues of the film. All in all, I believe Fight Club is worthy of ten out of ten. One of the best films it has been my pleasure to review on DVD (and I pity anyone who tries to watch it on VHS). A definite ten out of ten film.