I know you. You're a young guy with clear skin and perfect teeth and the kind of job you're proud to write the alumni association about. You're too young to have fought in any wars and if your parents weren't divorced, then your father was probably never at home. Maybe you really are thinking about some pain-free free-range potluck you went to last weekend or the Earth's depleted O-Zone or the desperate need to stop cruel product testing on animals, but probably not.
Oh, Tyler, rescue me. Deliver me. Deliver me from Swedish furniture. Deliver me from clever art. Deliver me from clear skin and perfect teeth. May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect. I want you to hit me as hard as you can.
You were looking for a way to change your life. You could not do this on your own. All the ways you wish you could be, that's me. I look like you want to look. I f--- like you want to f--k. I am smart. I am capable. And most of all, I am free in all the ways that you are not.
Fight Club is not football on television. You aren't watching a bunch of guys you don't know beating on each other halfway around the world via satellite with a two minute delay, commercials pitching beer every three minutes and a pause now and then for station identification. After fight club, watching football on television was like watching pornography when you could be having great sex.
If you could be either God's worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose? We're the middle children of history, we have no special purpose or place, and unless we get God's attention, we have no hope of damnation or redemption. Which is worse, hell or nothing? Burn the museums, wipe your ass with the Mona Lisa, this way, at least God will know your name.
- "Fight Club" Internet Spots
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Creates A Thick Rich Lather. Like Rabies.
You'll Never Guess Where The Best Fat For Making Soap Comes From.
Works Great On Blood Stains.
Wash Your Feminine Side Clean Off.
- "Fight Club" Soap Posters
David Fincher's 1999 cold, bleak, depressing masterpiece is a 139-minute adrenaline rush. It's a film that stabs you in the heart with a rusty knife and then pours moonshine on it. It's a film that goes straight for the jugular and leaves you gasping for its entire run. It's a film with a message that Roger Ebert and his imitators just didn't get. Fight Club is a film based on Chuck Palahniuk's intensely provocative first novel of the same name. It's armed with the most innovative visual techniques, ballsy performances from its stars that will drop your jaw, and a darkly satirical & original screenplay. Fight Club proved to be the best film of 1999, a Gen-X Clockwork Orange that although failed at the box office, garnered an impressive cult following much like the novel it was based on.
According to iF Magazine, "A big fan of the 1996 novel, Norton eagerly jumped on board in a film where the internal monologues are transferred from page to screen in the form of narration. "Fincher had us do those over and over," he says without a trace of weariness. "He was very attentive to what images and tone they would accompany. And it's such an integral part of the book, this interior monologue. The book is so dense with both ideas and complaints it's almost like this weird millennial Catcher in the Rye."
Having read the novel myself, I can honestly say that the movie Fight Club is as good, if not better, than the book itself. The brilliant wordplay, the almost complacent narration, and the very spirit of the novel were all brought to life and Fincher took them to the next level after that. Sure, there are certain things I wish had made the transition from the pages of the book to the silver screen, but I'm here to opine why the film is superior.
There are givens, such as Michael Kaplan conceiving of Tyler Durden's attire, in John Waters bad taste, as consisting of rust-colored polyester pants, tan Gucci loafers, and a bright red leather jacket. Those who were awestruck by the "Charles Foster Kane meets the Munsters" house in The Haunting should be tickled pink by the dank lair that is Tyler's humble home. If the National Society of Film Critics gave an acting award to Eddie Murphy in a fat suit for portraying Professor Sherman Klump in The Nutty Professor, why didn't they give one to Meatloaf in a fat suit for portraying an empathetic character like Robert Paulsen here? There are also nine visual effect scenes in the film that completely overshadow whatever expectations you might have had of them from the book. Kevin Haug, Kevin Mack, Cliff Wenger, and "Doc" Bailey all deliver some extremely detailed, absolutely fascinating commentary on the DVD on how they were created and executed.
David Fincher's career hit a peak with Fight Club. With this film, the invisible torch for best director at combining style and substance was taken from Scorsese and given to Fincher, a filmmaker who has one of the most incredible visual senses that anyone can bare witness to. Those who have seen David's three films previous to Fight Club (Alien³, Se7en, and The Game) know that one thing has remained a constant throughout his directorial filmography and that his vivid imagination runs wild on the silver screen. Here is no exception.
According to DesignInMotion, "To make the "Fight Club" opening sequence as realistic as possible, Fincher called on medical illustrator Katherine Jones and Digital Domain's Matthew Butler to take part in the pre-production process. Digital Domain's David Prescott supervised the R&D and planning the technical logistics for the voyage inside a human brain, informed by input from Fincher, medical illustrators and visual effects artists."
Now while the trip through Narrator Norton's brain is a dazzling journey, I have another minor quibble with the film regarding it. What is seen everywhere now is the opening sequence set to a hard-hitting, abrasive Dust Brothers score, something that in retrospect doesn't really fit the overall tone of Fight Club. In my humble opinion, they should have stuck with what they originally had, Foo Fighters' Everlong. The lyrics to that song effectively sum up and truly drive home one of the main themes of the film, one regarding the relationship between the Narrator and Tyler Durden. As the final exchanges of words occur between the two before the film's superbly apocalyptic conclusion, you will understand what this verse means:
Hello…
I've waited here for you
Everlong
Tonight, I throw myself in two
Out of the red
Out of her head she sang
Come down and waste away with me
Down with me
Slow, how you wanted it to be
I'm over my head
Out of her head she sang
And I wonder
When I sing along with you
If everything could ever be this real forever
If anything could ever be this good again
The only thing I'll ever ask of you
You've got to promise not to stop when I say when…
Now, on top of the dazzling images blazing the screen, David Fincher also gets some of the best performances out of his players. Two-time Oscar nominee Edward Norton (Primal Fear, American History X) delivered another phenomenal performance as the everyman Narrator, my generation’s Holden Caulfield, all grown up. Norton also once again proved that he was one of the most intense and most versatile actors working in Hollywood today. Brad Pitt returned from the bowels of hell (Seven Years in Tibet, Meet Joe Black) and went back to his dark roots (Se7en, Twelve Monkeys) here. He goes all out in anti-mainstream consumerism mode delivering his best performance to date as the mysterious and extremely knowledgeable Tyler Durden. He's Nietzsche meets Tony Robbins meets Alex DeLarge. Pitt was truly dedicated to the role, going as far as to have his caps removed to "give his mouth a more non-Hollywood grin." His love interest here was Marla Singer, a sardonic character portrayed by Helena Bonham Carter with deadpan panache, that is the kind of girl you want to take home to mom. She’s the kind of girl who after sex says, "I haven't been f---ed like that since grade school." And finally, Meatloaf deserved some deserves some kind of commendation for playing Robert Paulsen, a testicular cancer victim with bitch tits, a character envisioned by David Fincher as a Cirque du Soleil clown. The Bat Out of Hell perfectly brings to life and embodies the role of the big moosey.
"Bringing Out the Dead" is an antidote to the immature intoxication with violence in a film like "Fight Club." It is not fun to get hit, it is not redeeming to cause pain, it does not make you a man when you fight, because fights are an admission that you are not smart enough to survive by your wits. "Fight Club" makes a cartoon of the mean streets that Scorsese sees unblinkingly.
- Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert doesn't understand Fight Club, he's ignorant of the film's message because he's not in touch with the times. If Ebert had a clue about what it's like to be part of Generation X or Y, he wouldn't be describing this film as "macho porn--the sex movie Hollywood has been moving toward for years, in which eroticism between the sexes is replaced by all-guy locker-room fights." Fight Club begs the question, what do yuppies do when being an everyday workplace drone makes them feel dead on the inside? What do they do when they realize their homes are decorated the way Martha Stewart would have done and they're trying as hard as possible to be the guy on the cover of this month's GQ? What do they do when they realize they've become victims of mass conformity in the worst way and are depressed to the point of insomnia because of it? The answer is Fight Club. That's the place to go each week to take your aggressions out on the pretty boy and be seen as a God for it. That's the place where even if you don't have balls, you can still prove you have them spiritually. To quote the film, "Self-improvement is masturbation, self-destruction is the answer."
However, that's only the beginning. Tyler takes Fight Club up a notch with Project Mayhem, an anarchist group like no other. The Space Monkeys of Project Mayhem are the film's answer to the Droogs of A Clockwork Orange's. Their mission is to change the world by way of antics that get more and more extreme, leading up to the film's tremendous first-rate climax. Unlike other releases in 1999, Fight Club's finale is very satisfying. It doesn't end abruptly without a real conclusion, it doesn't end with a predictable twist, Fight Club ends with a nice and twisted, black denouement.
Much has been said about Fight Club's controversial fights scenes that are so brutally realistic, it’s more than obvious that they weren't made for those with weak stomachs. One could argue that the Ultimate Fighting Championship-inspired ultra-violence is condoned by those involved because of the stylized manner in which it is presented. Nothing could be further from the truth though. David Fincher's graphic details of these barbaric acts serve a purpose that people like Roger Ebert fail to realize. Fincher is illustrating a point with these scenes that is most palpable during Angel Face's belaboring. It’s a point that one must witness the film to fully comprehend. Plus seeing the bloodied prosthetics and hearing the smack laid down on candy asses in grandioso style (Richard Hymns and Ren Klyce's Sound Effects Editing was Academy Award nominated) was really cool.
Fight Club is my generation’s landmark film, my generation’s A Clockwork Orange, my generation’s Catcher in the Rye. Fight Club is my generation’s kick in the nuts, reality check, simply put, my generation’s wake-up call to humdrum of everyday life.
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