A twist of terms

Rating: Null/10 (31 August 2004)

I beseech you, noble reader, to name me a postmodern film. It's certainly not easy, because Postmodernism is not only a difficult term to define, but also a difficult term to set into a category. This is because Postmodernism in itself rejects catagorisation. The simple definition is "Of or Relating to art which reacts against modernist principles." This means it rejects genre boundaries and employs irony, parody, playfulness and ambiguity. Lots of big words eh? But to truly understand the genius of Director David Fincher, you have to understand, or at least have an idea of, how complicated Postmodernism really is. It's difficult enough to write down on paper, especially difficult to draw or create a piece of art out of, and [I would expect] incredibly difficult to create a film out of. Yet Fincher managed this with Fight Club.
Fight Club is a truly terrific piece of art. It's about psychology, it's about conformity, it's about fascism, it's about communism [!], it's about free speech, it's about enlightenment, it's about self improvement via self destruction, it's about the nature of violence; All these themes rolled up into one two-hour long assault on your senses. It's multi-genre structure gives this film a very clever intellectual twist while staying incredibly entertaining throughout it's length.
Many people complain that the film is too violent. I disagree; the violence, while being quite strong when on screen, is artistic in it's own context. The abuse of one's self for one's personal enlightenment. It is funny at the same time as being cynical, it is religious at the same time as being political, it is revolutionary at the same time as employing millennia-old philosophy. While the twist at the end takes some considerable thought to truly understand, it is nonetheless an incredibly feat of misdirection. A truly beautiful mix of Intellectualism and Brutality; one of my favourite films of all time.
[By the Way; If you haven't seen this film yet I'm not going to give you a synopsis of the storyline; you don't need one. Go and buy it, NOW!]