Shocking the burghers; energizing the proles

Rating: 8/10 (28 August 2003)

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)
Director David Fincher, who brought us into the extraordinarily depraved serial-killer world of Se7en (1995), fires up the shock cauldron again with this high testosterone examination of our primal need to seek adrenaline highs through physical violence. Indeed, the message is we are not really alive unless we are involved in something extreme.
Ed Norton plays the Narrator, a corporate structure clog with insomnia who gets off (and finds the arms of Morpheus) by going to therapy groups for people with cancer, disfigurement, drug addiction, etc. The idea is that seeing the acute and terrible misery of others affords him a catharsis that clears the neuro-emotional blockage and allows him to relax enough to get some sleep.
But after a while he begins to notice Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter--no relation to Hillary Rodham Clinton) hanging out at some of the meetings. Her hair and eyes are black widow black, all the better to set off her pasty white skin, giving her a witchy/sexy allure that really in itself ought to excite Norton's deadened neurons. (I know she excited mine.) But instead what her presence at the talk-therapy sessions does is remind him that he isn't really suffering like the others, and once again he has insomnia.
Meanwhile he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) a handsome and virile beauty soap salesman who is quick with the banter and has the confidence of a demi-god, something Norton's character lacks. They become best buds (and a bit more) after Durden introduces him to the full-out adrenaline rush of getting your face pounded in. As the fight club scenes unfold, getting more and more ridiculous with each bone-crunching punch and each darkening pool of blood, more and more young men join the club allowing Tyler Durden to become an underground hero and charismatic leader of human sheep dressed in black. By the way, the real truth of the postmodern cowboy fisticuffs is that the participants couldn't even stand the injury to their hands from one punch, let alone the repeated blows to face, head and body.
But never mind. There's a lot more to this movie than phony fight scenes. The strange thing is a lot of the scenes are funny! Somehow an aura of humor adheres to Fincher's street mayhem, rock-the-house sex, and body-slamming/bone-cracking absurdities. Not only that but the acting by the principals and Meat Loaf's massively-breasted Bob Paulson is excellent. Norton's confused and determined whimsy is nicely off-set by Pitt's brazen pathology. The story plays out well with some nice surprises and some good tension. You will not be bored.
Philosophically speaking too there is more than a grain of truth in the thesis: we really are divorced to some extent from our primal nature. We are animals who have domesticated ourselves. A return to the jungle (for example, by watching this film) energizes us and reminds us that part of our nature is largely incompatible with civilization.
Be forewarned however that this is a grossly violent movie that is difficult to watch at times. Fincher's primary intent is to shock, and he works hard at that. The scene at the back alley of a liposuction clinic as our boys are dumpster-diving for soap ingredients is particularly grossitating. When one of the bags holding human fat gets snagged on a barbed wire fence, it bursts, dripping it contents onto the Narrator.
If you can stand this sort of thing, watch and be beguiled or revolted, but first, please send the kiddies to bed.