And so it may be. At our Cineplex, the testosterone saturated, graphic fight scenes drew crowd cheers. This is, after all, a movie about young men bare knuckling each other into oblivion as a form of catharsis and recreation. The danger comes at the end when the film switches from cinematic wrestle mania on a personal level to loud applause accompanying the collapse of skyscrapers in explosive flames. We all benefit from exploring and purging our darker impulses from the comfort of an imaginary exploit in a well wrought story.
Movies often amass power from an exploration of tortured, mad psyches.
They usually fascinate and often enlighten us about how it all works. However, when violence or sexual exploitation are presented without consequences or are too attractively packaged, some of us are susceptible to copying in real life that which we have experienced from the screen. We worry about Fight Club having opened the doors to the blood lust of the figurative Coliseum in the troubled psyches of some individuals. As an exploration of the disturbed mental state of a late twenties, early thirties corporate drone who seeks over the edge experiences to give substance to his insomnia blighted, shopping network driven, isolated existence, the film has tremendous emotional punch and insight. However, Fight Club disintegrates into mayhem and mania as the thrill seeking devolves into the rationale for nihilism and truly murderous vengeance against the amorphous corporate enemy.