On Further Viewing...Fight Club

With the end of the decade rapidly approaching, I've been thinking more and more about how the last ten years have affected my outlook and taste. Since I've amassed a pretty decent collection of DVDs dating from the early 2000s, I've decided that it would be fun to revisit the movies that I liked back around the beginning of the decade to get a critical look at how well they've held up. This is the second of the series.

The movie: Despite being a money loser theatrically, Fight Club achieved a sort of instant cultural ubiquity among my early 2000s demographic of late-adolescent college males. Fight Club's reception and cultural legacy, which I'll discuss it more below, is at least as interesting as the film itself.

My reaction at the time: When I saw Fight Club in the theater, I liked it quite a bit but had mixed feelings about the third-act twist (again, more below). By the time it came out on home video, though, I had become a full-fledged member of the cult of Fight Club. It was one of the first movies I bought on DVD (by the way, early '00s DVDs look terrible on modern HDTVs), and I've seen it who-knows-how many times, although when I watched it this evening, I hadn't viewed it since probably 2004.

On further viewing: Fight Club is one of the best movies of the 1990s, and from an artistic and thematic standpoint, is one of the most singular American films ever made. After re-watching it, I'm fairly convinced that the late 90s is the only historical period that could have produced Fight Club; the violence and subtle thematic complexity would have been toned way down if it were made five or ten years prior, and no post-9/11 studio movie would ever end with the protagonist watching a landscape of collapsing skyscrapers.

Beyond the content concerns, a good deal of Fight Club's themes are difficult to separate from the cultural context of the late 1990s. Fight Club was made in the late-Clinton years, when the Dow Jones was valued at roughly 90 trillion points, the national unemployment rate was at 4%, and the most pressing political issue of the era was the president copping a blowjob on the side and then lying about it. As a result, Fight Club deals largely with the ennui the characters experience as a result of the fact that they live in a culture that is unprecedentedly safe, predictable, and homogenous, which was for the most part, the way life was in that era.

Ten years on, that's not the culture we live in anymore. When a significant portion of young America is serving in one of two foreign wars (or dealing with the aftermath), the angst and displacement of the comfortable are necessarily far less pressing issues. Even for those not in the military, American culture in the last seven or eight years has been defined far less by safety and comfort and far more by combativeness and stridency, to the point where the president of the United States can't give a boilerplate speech about responsibility to schoolkids without sparking a political firestorm. I don't know if 18 year old kids today connect with Fight Club the way they did in 1999 (maybe they do -the fact that it's #19 on the user-rated imdb top 250 has to mean something), but I think that a big part of the immediacy Fight Club held then has been lost in the post-9/11 shift.

This isn't to imply that Fight Club can't be appreciated by first time viewers today. I love Citizen Kane, and I wasn't born until more than 40 years after William Randolph Hearst's stranglehold on American print media ended. (And yes, I did just compare Fight Club to Citizen Kane, and I'll do it again in a couple paragraph's time.) Fight Club's exploration of heady topics like radicalism and masculinity don't come with an expiration date. Beyond that, the movie's plain fun to watch; it's got a wicked, sly sense of humor, a distinct visual style, and two great lead performances by Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. Pitt's iconic Tyler Durden gets the lion's share of the attention, but Norton is the linchpin of the movie; he has to serve as the audience's surrogate for the experience of being involved with Tyler Durden without coming across as a bland or blank character, and he pulls it off so masterfully that one can almost miss the fact that his character in the movie doesn't even have a name.

It's impossible to engage in a discussion of Fight Club without noting that it's one of the most widely misinterpreted movies ever made. A substantial proportion of Fight Club viewers, including both detractors and many of the film's most devoted fans, see the movie as being on some levels an endorsement or approval of Tyler Durden's pseudo-anarchist philosophy. Roger Ebert's 1999 negative review, which underrates the film substantially in my opinion, is nonetheless extremely prescient in predicting this. The most amazing thing about how widespread this point of view is that it requires one to literally disregard the entire third act of the film after it's revealed that (spoiler alert, but come the fuck on, you've seen this movie) Tyler Durden is actually the narrator's alternate personality and the narrator embarks on a frantic quest to undo everything that he's spent the entire movie setting up.

The fact that Fight Club will probably be forever tarred with inspiring the kind of nihilistic idiocy and pedantic radicalism it critiques is unfortunate, but it serves to highlight one of the film's greatest strengths. Fight Club understands that Tyler Durden's "fuck society" mentality is tremendously seductive, particularly for young men still in the process of establishing their social identity. Rather than watering this fact down to set up the narrator's eventual enlightenment for the easy win, the film goes for broke in ensuring that the audience has the same reaction to Tyler Durden that the narrator does. The fact that Tyler is played by a notorious Hollywood hunk at his absolute physical peak is not a minor detail, and thematically speaking, the character-reversing twist is completely necessary. Maintaining Tyler Durden as a separate character would turn Fight Club a movie about peer pressure, rather than one about responsibility and moral identity.

The unfortunate side effect of the character split is that it makes for a jarring shift in tone that leads to somewhat of a dip in the initial experience of watching the film's climax. Even though the Tyler-narrator duel is thematically resonant, it's admittedly pretty goofy to watch Edward Norton beat himself up from the perspective of a parking garage security camera. By the time the narrator finally defeats Tyler Durden by shooting himself in the mouth (and surviving), someone less favorably disposed to the film than I am could credibly claim that Fight Club has ditched narrative coherency in favor of psychoanalytic fuckery. It's here that I bring in Citizen Kane for the second time to point out that one could make the same argument about 'Rosebud' being a sled, with the obvious caveat that this reveal in Kane came five seconds before the credits rather than thirty minutes.

If a central message of Fight Club can be identified, it's this: if you want to make radical choices, be careful that the alternative isn't the same thing or worse. This point is hammered home again and again over the course of the movie: Tyler Durden's individuality-seeking disciples become drone-like "space monkeys", the fight club is conceived as a rejection of touchy-feely support groups and winds up with the same hugging and crying, and the narrator's alternating attempts to reject and attract Marla Singer always wind up having the opposite effect. It's a message that in some respects, one needs to grow into; I have to confess that when I first saw Fight Club as a senior in high school, I thought Tyler Durden was awesome and that the ending of the movie was sort of confusing and disappointing. Looking back now, I find it somewhat comforting that the Tyler Durden-quoting campus radical might one day revisit his (you know that this person will invariably be male) favorite movie and find that there's more to it than initially met the eye.

Still worth seeing? Most definitely. Just please don't start beating on your friends or vandalizing Starbucks stores afterwards.