‘Fight Club’ is a blistering experience. Twice before we actually meet the
mythical Tyler Durden (Pitt), images of him are flashed to us, subliminally
between the frames of the film. Later the connection comes to us when Jack
(Norton) tells us of Tyler’s employement as a projectionist in a movie theater.
When Tyler isn’t changing reels, he’s splicing explicit frames of pornography
into family films. Is that what director David Fincher is doing to us? Is he
further subverting his bleak vision of Jack finding himself through
exasperating means by implanting the idea of Tyler into the audience long
before Jack realizes what Tyler is? No. Fincher has already defined
subversion. It would be meaningless to toy with the audience directly. He
takes more pleasure in toying with the audience’s subliminal. Watching ‘Fight
Club’ is much like this type of filmmaking. It’s a film that layered heavily
with excessive material, but is preoccupied with subconsciously creating even
more than what’s actually there. Even after you’ve abandoned the idea that
the film is utterly brilliant and succeeded to the reality that it’s second half is
far too drawn out, you’re thinking about it. And thinking about it. And
thinking about it. In fact, as much as I loved being engaged in it, I loved
thinking about it even more. And think I did, all day after I saw it. And all
the next day. And probably even more. It’s a grand example of films that
make you think based on what’s underneath, rather than what they’re
actually saying. These films are few and far between in the market these days.

Jack is a corporate hog. He has money, but his insomnia and his addiction to
purchasing a trend makes him uneasy with himself. So uneasy, in fact, that
he decides to seek help by patrolling the daily support groups around the
city. First, he invades a "testicular cancer" group, then he moves on to
"coping with death" and pretty soon, he’s involved with one every night,
ranging from "tiberculosis awareness" on to pretty much anything he can get
away with. When he finds another straggler, Marla (Bonham Carter),
obsessed with the idea that she could die any second and honing in on his
racket, he becomes annoyed. Why? Because he can’t seem to get anything
out of his fradulent self-help therapy when she’s around. He’s like a man
who can’t get an erection when a woman is present. How’s that for
subverted? When, by chance, he meets Tyler Durden on a business flight,
he’s enamored with how easily Tyler can see things and how carefree he is.
After Jack’s apartment suffers a fire, he shacks up with Tyler who changes
Jack’s whole perception of life. Pretty far from the trailer we’ve all watched,
eh?

It’s only then that Tyler and Jack initiate the idea of "Fight Club", a
gentleman’s club, operating in the basement of a bar, where ordinary men
working ordinary jobs can pound on each other to vent their frustrations and
learn things about themselves. The take on this type of activity is that it can
only escalate into something more, which it does. It gets out of hand and
becomes what all Americans fear : organized. What follows is violent, sour
satire at it’s best.

The film really moves. The first half of it is over before you’ve realized it.
From the special effects shots that are rendered so precisely to fit a
point-of-view that’s deep below the surface to the catastrophic themes that
render themselves in the dark recesses of Jack’s mind - the film is a real
kicker, still working, as I’ve stated, on our interior. It’s funny in that
hard-to-swallow sort of way, but also chalks up some really good points
about a society obsessed with itself and how it’s imploding upon itself. The
stuff we own starts owning us and so forth.

Tyler is a wonderfully realized character and Pitt, with his edgy energy brings
him to life in a chaotic and truly masterful motion. Norton is a wonderful
actor, capable of so much. In ‘Fight Club’, he gives us a low hum that
continually perks us, playing inferior and superior like they were the only
two sides to a human being. He keeps peaking our imagination and asking us
- Why is the world so tiresome? Why do we continue to serve it as if it were
our master? And of course, Helena Bonham Carter, playing the darkling
here, the femme fatale in this boys-own film noir of sorts, is rapturous. She’s
the sexual danger to the solidarity of "Fight Club" and she wears it like a
badge on her Salvation Army dress sleeve.

Surreality is not a difficult thing to create. It’s fairly simple to make reality a
fairy tale and make fantasy seem real and twisted. Fincher succeeds here,
splintering his world to create two different and very powerful types of
surreality. First, he’s given us a life that drastically changes and a film that
projects that - he gives it to us in a classic multimedia as acid way - using all
sorts of means to create poppish and vibrant-looking eye candy. Second,
underneath, the film is so realistic in it’s creation of a legion of men who
enjoy the violence of society that we almost don’t recongnize their shameful
joy. I had to think about it for awhile, but it reflects a society so in need of
change and so far in denial that it almost doesn’t seem real. It feels like
fabrication. What works about this is it’s emphasis, the very idea that’s far
too ambitious for it’s own good. This doesn’t bother us, but it should.
Fincher has created his own little changeoever - the audience doesn’t know
the difference while they’re caught up in it - but when they start to examine
what was going on, they realize what they’ve become totally encompassed by
it. Just like Jack, realizing the magnitude of his actions, we wonder if we’d
had the chance to realize things in time, if we would of perceived them
differently. Something to think about.

That said, the film does have a princely flaw. The last act bogs the film down
significantly. We can feel the movie advancing slower and slower, which
becomes very irritating as we’ve been rooting for it since frame one. The
prematurity of the film’s ending doesn’t feel right after we’ve been forced to
swallow a serious change too late in the movie. While that doesn’t hinder
what goes on after you leave the theater (the constant psycho babble in your
mind) it does bother you as you try to ride out what was a fairly complete
and satisfying narrative.

Maybe the problem is there and maybe it’s not. It’s tough to keep a cool
head under the pressure of passion - which the film incited in me. It’s tough
to throw it away as if it was just another bout of celluloid testosterone -
which it’s not. And finally, it’s tough to wonder if Fincher has burned out his
candle after releasing three entirely productive additions to the cinema of this
past decade (‘Alien 3’, ‘Se7en’ and ‘The Game’). It just seemed too simple a
mistake to exist in such a seemingly seamless operation as ‘Fight Club’. That,
and I’m just now realizing I’ve broken some rules.