Ill-Informed Gadfly

How strange and fascinating to return to this movie now, outside the cultural context that spawned it. Because it captures the late-90s zeitgeist so precisely, it now feels dated, and brilliantly so. “Fight Club,” released in 1999, could only have been made in a time of prosperity; after 9/11 and Iraq it would have been unthinkable. Imagine the reaction now to a movie about young men who, benumbed by consumer culture, turn to bare-knuckle fisticuffs and, ultimately, terrorism. Feeling lost, empty, coddled, complacent? Want to confront your mortality, if only to feel something? You don’t need to start a Fight Club now; you can join the Army and test your manhood by fighting a hopeless, morally bankrupt battle.

I recall there was hand-wringing at the time about whether “Fight Club” endorses terrorism, and of course it doesn’t. The escalation of Fight Club, in which men gather to pummel each other in the basements of bars, into Project Mayhem, in which they take their whimsical, violent revenge on sanitized corporate America, is a brazen satirical stroke. If you can’t look past the terrorism itself, you won’t see what the movie is up to. Fighting is a way of breaking the mold, but in becoming terrorists, the fighters simply exchange one mode of unthinking conformity for another. They shave their heads, abandon their names and repeat toothless mantras. They’re indoctrinated all over again, and they lose the independence of thought that first made them question corporate hegemony. The death of Bob (Meat Loaf) crystallizes the movie’s sophisticated satire. He gets shot in the head while carrying out a Project Mayhem assignment. The narrator (Edward Norton), who’s increasingly been left in the dark by his best buddy Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) about the project’s direction, is horrified, and insists that Bob is not mere collateral damage, but is a person with a name. “His name is Robert Paulson,” he says, and the drones begin repeating the phrase, over and over, completely missing the point.

Cultural resonance aside, “Fight Club” is a beautiful work of cinema: daring, complex and alive. It is, of course, legendary for the split personality/imaginary friend gimmick, which it pulls off exceedingly well and which lesser movies (most egregiously, “A Beautiful Mind”) have tried to copy. But the Brad’s-not-real twist isn’t the foundation of the piece; it’s more like the cherry on top. “Fight Club” works beautifully whether you know what’s coming or not, although I found the scenes between the narrator and Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) tiresome the first time I saw it, when the source of her frustration with him was a mystery.

David Fincher’s direction is vast in scale but efficient and relentless. He assaults you with visual and aural detail, and the story careens and pinwheels along with breathless urgency, but you’re never lost. It moves along with such thrilling confidence. Think back during the Project Mayhem third act to the beginning, when the narrator is frequenting support groups for chronic diseases in an attempt to cure his insomnia. Think about how much ground the movie has covered thanks to Fincher’s fluid, bravura filmmaking. There’s so much invention here, so much wit, so much spontaneity in the performances despite the carefully controlled texture. Pitt has never been more charismatic or unhinged; Norton makes an empathetic and paradoxically one-of-a-kind Everyman.

The finale, in which ten empty credit-card company headquarters are blown to smithereens, may be unintentionally horrifying now, but if you remember that the buildings are empty and appreciate the way Fincher constructs the scene, accented by the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?”, the weirdly hopeful feeling he was aiming for is still accessible, even now, when rebellion against the rampant consumerism and hollow self-satisfaction of a peaceful, prosperous nation seems quaint. “Fight Club” has aged well.