I have better things to do with my life than to watch the story of disaffected corporate drones who decide to process their angst by pummeling one another in warehouses. There was absolutely no way that I was going to be the least bit entertained by any film glistening with as much phony machismo as Fight Club. For I, you see, am a grown up.
I say let Brad Pitt and Edward Norton prove their manhood to one another by slugging it out for no good reason. But they can leave me out of it, thank you very much.
I've had endless opportunities to watch Fight Club; it airs almost nightly on HBO. I have avoided it because of the title. I might have been able to put aside my objections to the plot if it hadn't encrypted itself into the title of the film. But to make a movie about guys who form a club for fighting one another and then to title the movie in such a way as to announce that it is about guys who form a club for fighting one another is like rubbing salt on a wound (or perhaps it is more like pouring a corrosive chemical powder across the back of one's hand).
Oddly, one person after another kept telling me that Fight Club was worth seeing, that I would enjoy the movie if I just gave it a chance. They had said the same thing about Ghost; I was wary.
Tonight, at long last, I succumbed. I decided to give the first fifteen minutes of Fight Club a chance. I'm glad I did. I don't remember being so completely taken in by an opening sequence since Being John Malkovich. From the beginning, we are confronted by a psychotically precise kind of consciousness, a consciousness that wants to tell its own story correctly, not sympathetically.
The unnamed narrator (Edward Norton) does not want us to like him; he merely asks that we listen to him attentively, as we would to anyone on the verge of death. He and his love interest Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) explain that auditors become qualitatively different in the presence of those who are about to die.
Narrator: They actually listen to you . . .
Marla: Instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.
The closest our narrator ever comes to a moniker is when his alter-ego Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) calls him 'Ikea-boy.' By his own admission, the narrator deserves such an epithet. He suspects that there is something wrong with a person who tries to find a dining room set that says 'ME,' but he searches for such a set nevertheless. He parodies his own shallowness beautifully and mercilessly. But still we don't like him.
We know better than to like him. He's crazy.
He sees the world as through a glass insomniacally and finds himself hallucinating. It's not our sleep that we need so much as our dreams; and when we go without sleep for too long, our dreams will visit us in life. That's what a guy who called himself a sleep therapist told me once. It sounds reasonable to me.
The narrator's quest for sleep takes him to support groups, where he seeks out needy people who seek only to be heard and to listen. But he begins to be stalked at these meetings by the mysterious, morbid Marla. I'm really not sure whether she actually exists. She's two-dimensional enough to be a hallucination. She's a caricature of all the sitcom women that we are offered on television: She knows only how to 1) have sex or to 2) squabble with her lover about nothing. She fits the narrator's consciousness like a cortex. She serves no real purpose in the movie except to justify a narrative frame that is worthless except for a single moment of 'flashback humor' in which the characters comment on the stupid narrative frame in which they find themselves.
I'll admit it; I have a real softspot for stuff like that.
The important thing about Fight Club is that we don't actually get to the actual founding of the fight club until we already know our main character. It doesn't bother us at all when he founds the club. We don't have to like it because we don't have to like him. He's merely the nutty ambassador of our own desperate frustration running around trying to find some way to knock himself out so he can sleep. People do crazy things when they're tired. They'll fight each other. They'll fight figments of their imagination. They'll even fight themselves. Who among the sleep deprived can fault the narrator for concluding that the answer to his problems is to get together with a bunch of other desperately frustrated corporate drones and punch at them?
They can say that they're frustrated because they grew up watching television shows that promised them they would be rock stars and millionaires. They can say that it's up to them to seek their masculinity together as men because they're the first and only generation of a great nation to have been raised entirely by women, with no father figures to speak of. They can equate their absent fathers with an absent God. They can call themselves God's unwanted children. They can even howl "So be it!" in response to the idea that they are God's unwanted children.
But the important thing to remember is that they're tired. We're watching the people who work shifts that are constantly changing, people who fly from one 'major city' to the next for another meeting and yet another meeting. The men in these clubs never come across as self-important or contemptible. They're just lost, the way we all know we would be lost if we had the truly rotten job of that one guy in our circle of friends.
They spend their lives wandering between meaningless landmarks. There is college and then marriage and then kids and then a promotion to help put the kids through college and then retirement. But the men notice that the more of these landmarks they set up for themselves, the less well they sleep. They're walking around in their own lives without knowing where they're headed or why.
And so we watch, wondering what they will try next to get to sleep.
The answer is obvious in the way that all solutions seem obvious when we're tired. They will sabotage 'corporate art.' They will destroy Starbuck's Coffee. They will blow up all the credit card companies and establish economic equilibrium. We will all start anew, with a zero balance.
It sounds like a fine idea if you're sleepy enough. Not the kind of idea to get excited about, mind you. Nobody ever gets excited in Fight Club. The most exciting thing they know how to do is to launch themselves into a zombified chant upon the death of a character named Bob played by Meat Loaf.
Fight Club actually does a remarkable job of taking us into a consciousness that hasn't slept in days, weeks, months--a consciousness that hallucinates and blacks out and struggles to understand itself from time to time but loses focus quickly and is distracted by new stimuli that reach it through a haze.
But there is a clarity in all that haze. When the narrator follows the advice of one of the support group counselors and goes into his private cave in search of his 'power animal,' his totem turns out to be a penguin. When his alter-ego asks him which celebrity he would most like to fight, he names William Shatner.
There is a befuddling honesty that comes with sleeplessness. Our 'power animals' turn out not to be mythical (unicorns) or intimidating (grizzly bears) or even deeply symbolic (foxes, chameleons, butterflies, etc.). When we venture into our own minds for comfort, we can take solace in the companionship of a bird that looks like it's wearing a tuxedo as we luxuriate in the thought of kicking in the teeth of no less a man that Captain James T. Kirk.
The great symbols of myth have been endlessly watered down ("copies of copies of copies" to quote the film), but their endless repetition in bad films and awful television shows has given Star Trek heroes and the antarctic zoological subjects of Discovery Channel specials greater currency in our minds than the unknowable ideas for which they might stand.
We don't have to like the narrator because we already know the narrator. And we don't have to learn how sleepy people think because we already know that too. Sure it's annoying to have to put up with a clumsy message about the stupidity of working in jobs we hate in order to buy things we don't want. And I'm not really sure why the characters had to spend the whole film delivering that message to one another just so that Brad Pitt could face the camera at one point and deliver it directly to the audience. But even that tiresome undercurrent has its place a film about insomnia. I enjoyed Fight Club far more than I imagined I could. Don't overlook this one because of the title.
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