It's the end of the world as we know it....& i feel fine

Rating: Null/10 (23 November 2012)

Here is THE MATRIX's running mate in the subversive movie sweep of '99 (see also EYES WIDE SHUT, eXistenZ) as perfect a forecast from the front lines as a major studio would dare release. FIGHT CLUB has been dissected on every possible level by better than me, but I can't resist adding a few words; it's still one of my favorites.
It's all here ladies and gents (minus the techno Gnostic bent of the Wachowski bros): the epic decay, the yearning for rebirth- an up close and personal look at postmodern drive thru existence branding our souls with a catchy jingle. And of course the violent chic, a delight in cleansing destruction backed up with a philosophical bent that makes a scary sense to a lot of droogies out there. No wonder old man Ebert was put off. This is a dangerous film (and yet no more than the million other fascist entertainments Hollyweird cranks out). It's only different in how it proudly wears its credentials on its sleeve and then savages them, a distinction that separates the mouth breathers Ebert fears and those this flick was made for. Going by his review, it seemed he deeply distrusted and underestimated the audience.
A side splitting tale of urban terrorism for dummies, of finding yourself in a culture that markets finding yourself like a product, FIGHT CLUB starts with Jack (Ed Norton) stuck in a serious funk. Jack 's an upwardly mobile young professional, a true fulfillment of the American Dream who should by all rights feel dandy, only he can't sleep, he's addicted to shopping, he abuses tranquilizers and he tours disease support groups just to feel authenticity. Jack is one alienated dude, another 21st century schizoid man; all work and no play. It takes another nowhere man, one Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) – soap salesman and cigarette burn specialist- to release his inner anarchist. They establish FIGHT CLUB, an underground therapy craze that liberates worker drones with bare knuckle brawling, beating each other senseless in a supportive atmosphere. Freed of baggage and re-masculinized these new converts set their sights on wider society, determined to liberate every last wage slave like kamikaze Bodhisattvas slashing and burning to the Promised land.
FIGHT CLUB addresses just how broken this sham society is and does so with an irreverent wink and gnarled bar of soap in its hand. It's the jester piping notes under a mushroom cloud, the child skipping through ash clogged gutters. It doesn't even stop laughing when the towers are plummeting at the end. In Tarot the Tower card presages great tumultuous change, a new birth from stagnant ways and make no mistake -this is an apocalyptic movie, demonstrating with its September 11th style conclusion just how much the outer landscape mirrors the inner. Just like THE MATRIX with its secret underground of devotees pledging sexycool jihad, its brash 'chosen one', its two seemingly ephemeral yet vital female leads- FIGHT CLUB prophesizes 9/11, the War on Terror and the turbulent times in which we live with an audacity that with more than ten years time is startling. Both films so accurately surf the Zeitgeist that it's easy to grok their cult status as well as the legions of conspiracy theorists who cite them as prime examples of 'predictive programming'. Art and life can intertwine so completely that it's difficult to spot where one ends and the other begins.
Nine Years on Tyler Durden would don runny make up and a Glasgow kiss to become the Joker, a trickster archetype harshened and calcified into something genuinely terrifying by the intervening years. His brand of enlightenment was even more gloves off, in direct proportion to the zombification of the populace following Ground Zero. There was no denying the writing on the wall by the time DARK KNIGHT hit the streets. The laughs are few and far between now, just the pounding night sweats of a world in the middle of a nervous breakdown. No more Mr. Nice guy.