When I was in school they showed us graphs
and statistics representing our predicted future riches. “Go to University and
get a qualification. Walk into the world with a degree and you'll live a life
of wealth. Failure to do so will leave you poverty-stricken and starving.
You'll wander the streets selling drugs and sex until you finally spiral into a
state of suicidal depression. After years of whoring yourself out for that 'one
last hit' you'll eventually reach rock bottom with your family finding your
deformed and rotten carcase festering somewhere in a ditch”. I'm paraphrasing
the teachers slightly but that was the basic jist of what they said.
A year after I'd received my prestigious BA
(Hons) a friend and I were leaving the dole centre following one of our many
regular visits. He was going to try and get hold of some weed whilst I was
heading to a supermarket to beg them for a menial job. If I was really lucky
they'd allow me to sit at a till where I could swap a percentage of my life for
their minimum wage. This was not the situation I'd been promised by school. I
don't know the legal backing of education but I think I'd have a genuine case
if I sued them under the trades description act.
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| You are not your bank account |
I'm young, male and enduring the aftermath
of a system of lies. In times of crisis, many people will turn to their
favourite book of fiction for help. The Bible’s never been there for me though
and so I wouldn't consider the magical sky-man as a suitable source of
guidance. With my degree lost somewhere in a draw of miscellaneous bedroom crap,
I am not living the promised life of riches. I'm dwelling and stewing in a
sleep deprived body filled with a sense of betrayal, frustration, self-pity and
suppressed rage. As target markets go I couldn't be more perfectly designed to
understand and enjoy the masterpiece of Fight Club. I am Jack's raging bile duct. I am Jack's inflamed sense of
rejection. This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time.
I first saw the film when I was
about fourteen years old and I just didn't get it. I went in wanting to see men
punch the living shit out of each other but what I got was a lot of surreal,
pseudo-philosophical waffle. The things that were spoken meant nothing to me
with its preachy, life advice drivel sounding like the deranged ramblings of a
drunken uncle. I gave it a few years though and returned for a repeat viewing
aged about seventeen. I don't know what happened to me in that brief time
because I certainly didn't grow up but by now the weight of the world was truly
on my shoulders. At best I suppose I'd probably started to develop my
smothering sense of cynicism as I slowly realised that adults actually don't
know what the fuck they're talking about. Suddenly though Fight Club wasn't
a disappointing film about men being hit in the face. With my slightly wearier
outlook it was an exhilarating and unfamiliar lesson in honesty.
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| "I'll give you £20 for the bendy spoon" |
From the moment it began I hung
onto every line of dialogue like a schoolboy Neo finally being told the
realities of this bullshit existence. It wasn't simply a case of “there is no
spoon”, but rather that the spoon is a shiny slice of aspiration that I would
be manipulated into yearning for. Mindlessly following the herd has never
really appealed to me and suddenly here was a film that understood my greasy
teen angst as though it was written in spots on my forehead. In two hours, Brad
Pitt morphed from being the beautiful face that I angrily wanted to destroy,
into the blooded grin of an anarchic messiah. For us alienated craps of the world,
Tyler Durden is pretty much the Dalai Lama which is assuming that the Dalai Lama
also likes to knock men’s teeth out and fuck women more damaged than himself.
It's kind of hard to describe the
plot of Fight Club just because of how mental and how random it all is.
It begins with Ed Norton's nameless narrator living life in a stupor after the
modern world has left him unable to sleep and almost emotionless. To try and
counter this he spends his time pretending to be ill at various cancer support
groups which he believes helps his situation. This might sound odd but then
loads of people fake illnesses. It's just that most of them do it to claim
benefits and not because they like the cushiony comfort of MeatLoaf’s fat tits.
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| If I had a tumour, I would name it 'Marla'. |
This little system seems to be working
for a while until it's ruined by the arrival of two people. Firstly there's
Marla Singer who is a deranged, rape-victim looking woman that has started
visiting the same therapy groups as him. From her appearance it's possible that
she may also be the lead singer of The Cure, though it’s never mentioned in the
film. Then there's Tyler Durden, a soap making nutcase that seems to see
through the bullshit of society. Like Pee Wee Herman and Fred Willard, Durden's
hobby also seems to include exposing innocent cinema goers to a brief flash of
cock.
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"Arbeit macht frei"
|
So anyway word gets out about these
secret fighting sessions with the concept starting to spread. It turns out that
we men are the stereotypes that had always been assumed, and we actually love
nothing more than smacking the actual crap out of someone. At the start of the
meeting, Tyler Durden delivers a speech in which he lists the rules in what was
once a fairly cool scene. It's kind of been ruined for me now though because
someone once told me to mentally replace the word, “fight”, with the word,
“wank”. With this in mind I can never take them seriously past rule number three,
“If someone says "stop" or goes limp, taps out,
the fight is over”.
From here on out things get even
more strange. Their basement brawls evolve into some prankster revolution as
though a corporation-hating Che Guevara accidentally watched too many episodes
of Jackass. As Durden becomes more obsessed with his mission of
improving peoples lives through self-destruction the repeated message becomes, "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything”. If that's true then
those starving Africans don't know how lucky they are. Sure they might be dying
of AIDs but so was Freddie Mercury-- at least they haven't got all his money
holding them back as well.
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| "I want you to hit me as hard as you can." |
The key to loving Fight Club
beyond simply being male is to quickly understand that it's actually a black
comedy. Like my younger self, anybody going in hoping for the bargain budget
version of The Warrior is going to be very confused. With its laugh-out-loud
moments, themes of anarchy and frequent flourishes of surrealism, it's more
like a Monty Python film than it is a Rocky of the basement. Sure
Tyler Durden might be the messiah for those fighting the impotence of
masculinity but considering he also pisses in soup bowls there's a chance that
he could also just be a very naughty boy. Also as I’m sure everybody knows, a
black comedy is simply one which deals humourlessly with the darker more taboo
subjects. I shouldn't have to clarify
that, but in the second year of my movie related degree course a fellow student
actually had to ask if an example of a black comedy might be The Fresh
Prince of Bel-Air.
So beyond loving the story, humour
and characters, it goes without saying that Fincher brilliantly directed the
shit out of this. He's known for his extravagant camera movements and so it's
nice to see Fight Club start as he means to go on. The first few minutes
of the film follows a path through the inside of Ed Norton's brain, out of his
forehead, down his nose and then up the barrel of a gun that he's
inconveniently deep throating. I guess we should be grateful that for this
scene, Ed Norton was cast and not Paris Hilton. Firstly this five minute mind
journey would have been a hell of a lot shorter and secondly she'd probably
revert to auto-pilot and just start sucking off the gun. As it stands though,
these titles are long enough to give us our first taster of the soundtrack.
Composed by the Dust Brothers it's got a brilliantly raw and grungy feel to it
that perfectly matches the tone of the film. Not that I have any idea who the
Dust Brothers are by the way. They sound like they might be a couple of cool,
streetwise, ghetto style musicians but from the name they could just as easily
be two disillusioned old English Butlers. Regardless of how great a job they
did, I will be disappointed if it turns out not to be the latter.
I won't mention the revelation at
the end, although if you don't know what it is by now then you really need to
stop living under that rock. Having said that, it's worth noting just because
of how it highlights the brilliance of Helena Bonham Carter’s performance. On
first viewing she seems to be one of the most deranged women on the planet.
However after seeing the ending, her actions actually make quite a lot of sense
and she's not as random as you might initially assume. I mean, she's still
fucking mental but that obviously can't be helped. She's played by the mother
of Tim Burton’s children and belongs to the crazier half of our species, so
Marla was never going to be completely normal.
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| Fight Club- Female Edition: You are the money in your bank account. |
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