Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Fight Club Movie Review

Most dramas tend to center around philosophical discussion about life and what it means to be human, and feature characters displaying emotional depth. Good dramas are great, but generally don’t appeal much to masculine viewers who revel in violence and explosions. Yet all of that is present in David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999); it’s a drama for men.
Edward Norton stars as a depressed insomniac (named in the credits only as “Narrator”) who is just another cog in the world of big business. He hates his job and receives no sense of accomplishment from it. He tries to find fulfillment in creating the “perfect” apartment. His doctor refuses to give him medication for depression or insomnia, and the Narrator seeks out support group meetings for conditions that he doesn’t have. Here he is able to find a level of emotional release that allows him to sleep and function normally. One day on a business trip he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a charming but rebellious soul who sells soap. Tyler puts no stock in the materialistic world, and believes that one can learn a great deal through pain, misfortune, and chaos. Later, Tyler challenges the Narrator to a fist fight and the Narrator finds that the the bare-knuckle brawling makes him feel more alive than he has in years. This ultimately leads to the two becoming friends and roommates who engage in informal fights once a week. More men join in the “fight club” and it becomes an underground sensation and a closely guarded secret among the participants. As the Narrator and Tyler bond through violence, things become strange when Tyler becomes involved with Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) whom the Narrator met in the support groups and developed a love-hate relationship. Things get even stranger as the Narrator sees Tyler’s anti-establishment views become more and more extreme, eventually leading to vandalism and worse.
The premise in Fight Club is compelling. When we feel lost and dissatisfied with our job, the world, and the system society has set up, we feel dead inside. The idea of violence leading to personal fulfillment is unconventional, but interesting. The violence in the fight club doesn’t serve to promote or glorify physical combat, but for the participant to experience feeling in a society where they are otherwise numb. The fighting between these men strips away their fear of pain and their reliance on material signifiers of self-worth. Fight Club almost makes you want to get in a good fist fight so you can feel better about the world and your place in it.
Making a broad generalization about sex scenes in movies, they are typically included to develop the characters and a connection they are forming. There are plenty of scenes in Fight Club that achieve this sort of development between the characters; raw, naked emotions being exchanged, and connections and relationship are forming between men. But it’s done through brawl fighting, not sex. These fights are achieving the same thing that sex scenes normally achieve, but in a much more “masculine” way of bonding and showing emotion. Once again, it’s a drama for men.
Tyler Durden is such a unique character. He bucks the system, he has atypical values, and extremely different methods of finding enlightenment. He’s also a dangerous maniac whom you would dread to meet in real life. In one scene Tyler has a convenience store worker on his knees at gun point. After going through the man’s wallet and finding an expired college ID, Tyler asks what the man was attending college for and what he had dreamed of doing. Once Tyler gets an answer, he commands the man to go home, and threatens to kill the man in six weeks if he has not doing everything in his power to work towards his dream of becoming a veterinarian. Once the man is gone, Tyler says to the Narrator “Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessel's life. His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever tasted.” Tyler is sort of a likeable psychopath, along the same vein as the character Rorschach in Watchmen (2009).
Fight Club is a good movie with complex and interesting characters, some thought-provoking ideas, and some philosophical concepts dropped in unpredictable ways. As you may have guessed, there’s quite a bit of violence in this movie. There’s also some language and sex scenes (though not between men, as this review may have been unintentionally insinuated). It’s a drama for men; most women viewers probably wouldn’t enjoying it, and it’s too graphic for younger viewers. It’s still good and if you aren’t too put off by this kind of material, it worth seeing twice.

Can you think of another “manly” drama like Fight Club? What was it and what did you think about it? Comment below and tell me why.

3 comments:

  1. I thought the philosophical, intangible messages in Fight Club were most intriguing. What stands out most to me is the similarities between Fight Club and it's regulations, and "hacktivist" organizations like Anonymous, associated with 4chan.

    My favorite scene in this movie was one that you mentioned; motivating a convenience store worker to pursue his dreams though unconventional means.

    Excellent review. I agree wholeheartedly with the points you have made.

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    1. Why thank you!
      There was more I wanted to talk about, but I only have so much space. Another quote from Tyler Durden I wanted to share was this one:
      "Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."
      But that took up a lot of space, so I didn't include it. Tyler was such a neat character! So was The Narrator, he was easier to relate to, and was rather unique. There are great characters in this movie!

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  2. Some think Tyler Durden is cool, he's not!

    Tyler is a terryfiying maniac dirtbag who existed only in a crazy man's head due to anger!'

    Some think his "i don't give a fuck attitude" is cool like some people say even with his intelligence and being free minded from society even having a job of his own without having to work for someone is cool as well especially the idea of "think for yourself and be don't told what others tell you" philosophy and "don't be materialistic".

    But later on he is such a terrorist, liar, contradictory, and personifies everything we shouldn't want to be and was created from pent up rage and fraustrations especially when he was blowing up credit card buildings to have everyone "free of debt" was a total bullshit idea eh when he was hurting other people even that blonde guy being hurt by him was no accident?

    Tyler isn't cool. Tyler is a complete monster. He sounds cool. He looks cool. You might think he acts cool, until you see what's going on underneath. Tyler represents every bad instinct, every hurtful thought, every violent impulse. His "cool" is a sound byte meant to distract you from the awful things he means to do for no better reason than because he can. He's a sociopath. Ego unleashed.

    I think he represents selfishness, and violence. He's anger and chaos and Fuck the world. He isn't about lashing out at authority, or trying to forge your own identity. He's about destructively acting out at everything you've labelled as hurtful, at everything that makes you a "victim", just so that you don't have to take real responsibility. Tyler isn't working from home because he's responsible, he's working from home because he's a terrorist bomber. Tyler isn't anti-materialistic because it's hip, or because he cares about workers or consumers, he's anti-materialistic because it justifies him blowing shit up. Tyler has no interest in you "thinking for yourself", he just wants to be the one telling you how to think. He's not anti-authoritarian, he's jealous that he's not the authority.

    Tyler is literally the worst of modern humanity, rolled up in the grizzled, media fed vision of what a man "should" look like.
    He gets carried away by impeding on other people's freedoms to justify his own ideals. He forces a store clerk to have a renewed appreciation for life, but completely ignores the possibility that he could have induced some serious PTSD that could negatively affect this man for life.

    do you see FC as a coming of age story as the narrator loved his material possessions as he was like a kid, Tyler represented teen angst/rebeliion and juvenile deliquency in aspects and that at the end once the narrator realized Tyler is a monster and finally learned to grow up when he got rid of him to outgrow him and move on with his life to chose the life he want to be and become a mature person? is that the point of the movie right? the point is "grow up and take responsibility for your life" right?

    Is that the point? find a balance?

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