Continuing our look back to the Class of ’99, here’s something that still unquestionably holds relevance 25 years later, perhaps even more so. We all know how it is—the first rule of Fight Club is that you absolutely must talk about Fight Club at some point whenever you can.
This is probably David Fincher’s most iconic film—moreso than Alien 3 for sure, and more than Zodiac even if I enjoy that one just as much in different respects. In many ways this is firmly rooted around the turn of the millennium—the iconic intro zooming straight into brain neuron’s is pulsing with nineties techno, to say nothing of Brad Pitt’s spiky haircut. Like other films around this time that hold up such as Trainspotting, and are just bleh like American Beauty, there’s a lot of talk touching on that post Cold-War pre-9/11 malaise of seemingly nothing to do at the end of history.
Perhaps I’m getting too far ahead—our focus starts on an unnamed young man played by Edward Norton, trapped in an emotional spiral of purposelessness exacerbated by insomnia. Bouncing around to whatever random help groups he can, he stumbles on a woman played by Helena Bonham Carter (amazingly, in a film not directed by Tim Burton) with whom he forms some connection—and then he seemingly bumps into a soap salesman named Tyler Durden on a plane, with things very much changing from there.
It’s probably the earlier parts of the film, before the fight clubbing really kicks in, that I like the most—Fincher does a good job conveying that discombobulated dreaming-but-not-dreaming sensation of sleeplessness, only half-processing what’s around you as you try to grab hold of something to keep your sanity. Even if someone’s not clinically suffering from that, it still feels true to that sensation of mindlessly going through a daily grind as days and existence blurs together. Today, with ‘grindset culture’, with the commercialism the film jabs at even more pervasive now as we scroll through so many mindless ads on phones and more? Hell, it hits worryingly harder now.
Then of course there’s the fight club itself—set up as a way to ‘express masculinity’ or something along those lines. It is by now kind of an inescapable fact that there are many with rather weird insecure issues over masculinity—and while at first Project Mayhem that Durden seemingly sets up might seem like a reach, it’s also eerily prophetic of all the nonsense sucking in young men over an interconnected age. Hell, all you really do need is someone fast-talking with some superficial charisma and more. There is of course the twist complicating this, but we’ll get to it.
If there’s any complaint I have, it’s that parts of the film maybe drag a little bit near the last act as we try to balance Norton’s relationship with all the other stuff going on around it—but it’s relatively minor stuff. Now, of course, there’s the twist—and on first watch many years ago, it left me wondering just how he even got his little Project going when it implies someone just acting like an absolute lunatic.
All you need, as the quarter-century proves, is just conviction enough, even if that conviction stems from a dude struggling with mental illness. It even arguably extends all the way back into history as well, with demagogues promising blood and sweat aplenty. And the most ironic part is that some were inspired by this one, taking it all at face value despite that—something even more ironically vindicating the very pitch of the film itself. Of course, by most accounts, trying to set up your own ‘fight club’ either ends up at best a pretentious sparring dojo, or some hellhole were you just get your face pounded in by some heroin addict.
I guess it’s proof that if you present something slickly enough, you can have anyone miss the point—like those that forget that, spoilers—Tyler Durden is the literal fantasy of a guy’s sleeplessness-addled desperate subconscious, which itself says everything about those who seem to think he’s some kind of role model. This sort of thing is why Fight Club still resonates so well today, perhaps uncomfortably so—with messages easy to interpret from all sides. Even, it seems, national governments, like the infamous Chinese edit of recent years that snips out part of the ending to remove the bombings therein. I guess it’s also ironic that this film came out just before it became a little more difficult to casually depict such demolition in general.
That’s Fight Club—product of its time, yet also a portent of things and social dementia to come. So yeah, by all means talk about it, because violence and soap aren’t going anywhere…
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