Rebels without a cause.

Rating: 5/10 (1 October 2007)

It's very impressive visually, nicely directed, well acted, scripted in a literate way, and immeasurably depressing.
I suppose the plot has been covered in detail elsewhere so I'll keep it brief. The narrator (Edward Norton)is a bored, anomic insomniac who doesn't know why he's alive. He runs into a creepy and insulting babe (Helena Bonham Carter) who seems to care about nothing. Then he meets a brutally honest Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) who seems to see through everything and everyone, who actively hates and engages in combat against modern ennui and phoniness, and things start to pop. Pitt and the narrator found Fight Club in which men who would otherwise be leading lives of quiet desperation get to pound the crap out of one another. Fight Club franchises spring up everywhere as men search for their lost cojones. Pitt becomes a cult leader and wages war against corporate art with homemade explosives. The upshot of all this, I won't reveal.
I didn't like it at all. At first I thought it was going to turn into one of those Gallic philosophical conundrums with a lot of pointless non sequiturs in the foreground. (Narrator: Is Tyler Durden in my dream? Or am I in his?") Then it appeared to morph into an excuse for more bloodshed and violence. And then it got really twisted. I never realized a guy could shoot off a large-caliber pistol in his mouth and carry on a normal conversation five minutes later.
It will, I suppose, be claimed that this is an original -- in contrast to the formulaic rubbish ground out by Hollywood these days. True enough, but it's not all THAT original. Proving your masculinity by enduring punishment? Is there a Rambo movie in which Stallone doesn't bleed, or get himself dipped in pig excrement, or electrocuted half to death, without flinching? In the stockade, in James Jones' "From Here to Eternity," the guards treat the inmates with unspeakable brutality. So what do the prisoners do to prove their transcendance of authority? They beat hell out of each other, in games, in ways that the guards wouldn't have the imagination to dream up. Not to mention a hundred movies about The Big House and POWs and slaves biting their tongues during whippings.
The punishment within the group is only part of the story, of course. It leads to a consideration of secret cults and their desire to rid the world of credit cards. We've had that before too, with Charlie Manson and the Reverend Jim Jones. And if Tyler Durden is going to insult the narrator by calling him "Ikea Boy", and if the group is going to assault society by demolishing icons like Starbucks, don't they have some kind of obligation to provide more constructive icons? Shouldn't they have some sense of beauty, truth, and logic that takes them beyond moral nihilism? Or is the movie actually saying that Western civilization SHOULD be destroyed?
The film is ugly to watch, partly because the message itself is so banal, and partly because the imagery is so repulsive. The back of somebody's head is blown off. Human fat is boiled down to make soap. Fight Club members lives in an abandoned house near a toxic waste dump amid unutterable squalor. They don't seem to change clothes. (The narrator shows up for work at his office with his own blood on his shirt.) They don't bathe. Brad Pitt shuffles around in a filthy bathrobe wearing a pair of lady's slippers with clotted fur around the tops, as Doris Day might appear during a trip on battery acid. It isn't that I find such voluntarism necessarily bad. I'm sitting here writing this, wearing only a sarong and a pair of eyeglasses in the middle of the desert. But doesn't bodily filth reach a point at which it becomes intolerable to the self, never mind the person you're trying to sell your homemade soap to? Mostly, though, what a beastly message. If you want to swagger around, a member of a cult, dealing out summary punishment to those whose values aren't your own, why not join Blackwater or some other mercenary group and at least get paid more than one thousand dollars a day. Or if you really want to get in your face with respect to bourgeois verities, give away everything you have and serve soup to the homeless at St. Anthony's Dining Room. Or vote Libertarian? Or become a Theravada Buddhist monk, earning merit and living on alms? I guess, though, that nothing like that is going to get your testosterone pumping and that's what concerns this movie. Know when blood testosterone levels peak in men? During late adolescence, when our fantasies are even more limited than our brain power.