02.12.1999

Don’t blame the mirror

David Fincher Fight Club USA 1999

This film, starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, is the latest one to inspire a shrill conservative cultural backlash. For example, the London Evening Standard’s commentator Alexander Walker wondered back in September whether Rupert Murdoch (the owner of the company that released it) realised what kind of film Fight Club would be. It was “anti-capitalist” and even “anti-god”, Walker shuddered.

This is a revealing comment on the stupidity of conservative reviewers. Up to a point, pillars of the system like Murdoch are willing to put out socially subversive films or TV shows, as long as they turn a profit.

The director, David Fincher, told Empire magazine’s December issue that one of the main characters of the film, its narrator (Edward Norton), knows that there is something wrong with the world we live in and does not want to simply accept it as it is. In fact, one of Fincher’s previous films, Seven (1995), is set against the backdrop of a world which is far closer to hell than heaven.

The film opens with Norton’s character, an alienated office worker, hanging around self-help groups (the terminally ill, men with testicular cancer, etc). (Incidentally, there are a lot of alienated office workers in recent films, and this must be of some sociological significance.) He does this because he is trying to overcome his own alienation. Then he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) who asks the narrator to hit him.

They start fighting and this turns out to be a form of recreation. Eventually they set up bare-knuckle (men only) boxing bouts in the cellar of a bar and this takes off in a big way. There are a lot of men out there wanting to let out their aggression. In fact fight clubs spring up everywhere as a sort of mass movement.

Tyler also goes in for other subversion: working as a movie projectionist, he splices pornographic images into ‘family’ films; he sells expensive soap made out of the fat liposuctioned from the bodies of rich women; he replaces airlines’ safety cards with ones of his own design which depict passengers panicking and fighting to get to the exit, and so on. Meanwhile, the bone-crushing boxing matches go on. Then Fight Club develops into ‘project mayhem’, a kind of anarchist assault on corporate America. To reveal more would probably be to reveal too much.

This is a flawed film: it runs out of energy in the last half hour or so, and none of the characters are depicted in any depth. For example, the only major female character, Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), is mainly there to counteract the film’s strong homoerotic overtones.

Weekly Worker readers who want to see Fight Club should be prepared for a film with violent imagery and sound and a darkly comic view of the world we live in. It does not offer a solution, but it is pitiless about the dystopia of life at the end of the century. It is this that makes the Alexander Walkers who defend this system apoplectic. As the Russian proverb has it, “Don’t blame the mirror if your own mug is crooked”.

James Robertson