Soap for the soul

Rating: Null/10 (17 May 2002)

There are movies that tell a great story, and movies that are fun to watch; and then, there are totally transcendent films that give the viewer a distinct out-of-body experience. It's these sorts of films that carry the filmmaking industry into what Joseph Campbell might call creative mythology. They tap deep currents in the collective unconscious, and let us leave the theater with a new level of self-awareness. Fight Club is, without doubt, a great movie of this ilk. It's brilliant.
Fight Club cuts to the very core of the contemporary male's struggle to pass into adulthood without the aid of initiation rituals. It shows what we have lost, and what we might possibly gain, from traditional societies and their seemingly brutal rites of passage.
Fight Club follows the life of your typical young urban professional, spiritually etiolated from his pursuit of career, designer clothes, and the right circle of friends. Inside, he's dead, cut off from his primal instincts, which he has totally lost by virtue of his complete socialization into the norms of American commercial culture. And yet, as he comes to grips with that part of himself that he attempted to destroy -- his true, mythical self -- he creates an initiation rite and ritual, which isn't an awkward, slavish copy of other cultures. It's right for himself, and his peculiar little society. It works.
One might think that the fighting in Fight Club is about dominance and brutality. It isn't. It's about discovering one's limitations, and learning humility. In some traditional cultures, men can't become warriors until they've first learned to dance. The Fight Club initiation is about learning how to dance. It's brutal, but it's also compassionate. It's soap for the soul.
Although the destructive ending is meant to be understood allegorically, and not literally, you'll love this movie.