I guess Fight Club isn't a film you'd expect me to like- mainly 'cause I'm female, I suppose. But I do; and you know why? Because the layers of the film fascinate me. Never have I seen a film with so much meaning crammed into it. The basic theme of schizophrenia; the homoerotic overtones; the Nietzchean philosophies; the concept of self destruction as self imporvement; everything.I think the film is one of the most notorious for symbolism, and foreshadowing, and thematic devices: all these interesting insights into what is going to happen. But it somehow manages to do it without giving it all away; I wasn't expecting the twist ending at all. It's so dark.
Well, the narrator is severely, for want of a better word, fucked up. You can tell that from the beginning, even before you discover his split personality. A philosophical insomniac obsessed with Ikea, he spends all his time of business trips talking to 'single serving friends' on airplanes and going to support groups for diseases he doesn't have. Then he meets Tyler Durden- and suddenly, his Scandinavian furniture is lost in a fire and they move in together. Slowly, the narrator (who is nameless) develops the same views as Tyler, feeling disdain towards capitalism and hatred for being 'by-products of a lifestyle obsession'. Some of Tyler's world views are the deepest things I've ever heard:
"Fuck off with your sofa units and strine green stripe patterns, I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let... lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may."
"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."
"You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world."
And it's this loathing for a consumer culture that fuels the events of the entire film; first, going back to primitive means in fight club, and then by taking a step further and trying to pull the economy apart. These men believe in hurting each other, not as a solution, but as a means to numb everything else. They only feel alive when the punches are flying.
I've always been fascinated by mental illness of any kind, so the insights to schizophrenia in this film were amazing. It poses so many questions: how do two people co-exist within one mind? Are they seperate entities within the same entity? Can one act without permission of the other? The film, rather than necessarily answering these question, simply makes the mind boggle even more; but I didn't mind this fact at all. I can't imagine anyone walking out of the cinema after watching this film not having a debate with themselves about it. The scariest part is that the narrator is such an everyman; sure, you imagine crazy people screaming and rubbing shit on the walls, but what about the other type of craziness? The much scarier kind? The more common kind?
I loved the effects in the film. It's so loaded with symbolism and implications. For example, the dingy colour palette served to reinforce the themes of primitive behaviour and disdain for the brightness of modern enterprise. The contrast was adjusted on purpose to make people look uglier than they were, because they wanted us to know that everyone's ugly in their own way. And my favourite part is the cue mark: the part where Tyler points out a 'cigarette burn' in the corner of the film. This represents the turning point; it signals the departure from reality and into the psychosis of the narrator. Man, I love symbolism.
Ad the homoerotuc overtones. How genius is Fincher? With a film like Fight Club- where the twist ending is pivotal- there had to be some kind of distraction. Something to make the audience squirm and ease them off the foreshadowing. And the answer was to subtly imply homosexuality! Like the infamous bathtub scene- while nothing in the film is overtly gay, the nudity (although not seen) and intimacy between the two men was intended to unsettle audiences. God, I wish I could think of something so intelligent. But then, the whole of Fight Club is intelligent- that's why i love it so much.
And, I'm sorry, but I have to add in typical teenage girl style: how hot is Brad Pitt, even when he's playing a figment of someones imagination? Answer: VERY.
