Fighting back

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in November 1999)

My place in the hierarchy of Toronto film critics doesn’t amount to much of anything, but even so I feel like resigning it in disgust after looking at what’s been written locally about the current film Fight Club. An excessive response on my part? Of course, but folly on this scale demands no less. It’s the edge-obsessed passivity of the reactions that’s so annoying. Malene Arpe in Eye: “A demented, funny and brutal exploration of manhood, Fight Club posits that irony, clever post-modern references and style for the sake of style suck – all the while employing those very devices liberally and to great effect.” Sounds to me like that ought to be setting up a condemnation of the film’s cynicism and hypocrisy, but instead it’s the start of a rave, five-star review. Cameron Bailey treads almost identical territory in Now: “The way (the film) tries to resolve (its) contradictions is so obviously weak that I have to imagine it means Fincher agrees to let them stand.” He cuts the movie another five stars worth of slack. Even the semi-mighty Rick Groen in The Globe and Mail goes along for the ride, noting that the film “inevitably degenerates into the very thing it derides – a saleable commodity” but deeming it an important work nonetheless.

Man’s fate

Fight Club is an ugly, incoherent piece of work that pushes its incoherence right up tight against your face until the thing virtually splatters into pieces, and then goes on pushing. The attention given to the film focuses mainly on the concept in the title: the notion of an underground club where men go at each other with bare fists, rediscovering their stifled identity through violence. Edward Norton plays a pathetic, directionless middle-manager who hooks up with Brad Pitt, a charismatic, self-driven, perpetually self-renewing rebel. Pitt’s reinvigoration of Norton, initially fairly benign, takes off when they discover the liberating impact of a tussle in a parking lot; as other men gather around them, the official fight club soon springs into life.

For some reason, most of the reviews of Fight Club seem to be written as though the film more or less ended there; had it done so, it would have been merely a shallow, forgettable, efficiently handled piece of glossy exploitation – certainly capable of prompting a discussion about the place of manhood in society, even if the film’s tangible contribution to that discussion is negligible. But there’s much more to come, as Pitt parlays his leadership of the fight club into the assembly of a fanatical fighting force: a dark-suited fascistic crack squad that worships him as a Messiah, and meticulously prepares for a revolution of sorts. And the plot turns out to have a Sixth-Sense-like “twist,” although one which leaves the movie looking like a partial retread of Fincher’s last work The Game, and which makes a mockery of most of what’s gone before (rather than, as in Sixth Sense, enhancing it). Long before the end, Fight Club has become tedious in that particularly barren, monotonous way that only a big-budget Hollywood extravaganza can manage.

Coddled in stuff

But what about this central thesis that (per Arpe’s synopsis) “contemporary man is emasculated by a society that offers him no outlet for aggression and no real purpose and instead coddles him in stuff?” Well, I doubt the notion has any merit. Who does this emasculating “society” consist of? Contemporary woman? (Fight Club has no insight on this side of the equation, having virtually no female roles other than a freakish, inaccessible Helena Bonham-Carter, and a briefly glimpsed dying cancer sufferer longing to get laid one last time). What is the “real purpose” that contemporary man lacks – and that, presumably, some pre-contemporary generation of man possessed? The honest trade of a dirt-poor farmer? Cannon fodder in the army of a feudal leader? Of course one can meaningfully talk about the emasculation that accompanies – for example – economic deprivation or systematic racism? But to suggest that a well-paid corporate up-and-comer like Norton has an even faintly legitimate interest in surrendering to violence is a careless, complacent brand of armchair anarchism. (Similarly, Bailey adopts a goofily pugilistic approach to writing his review: “What do you hate about your life? Who do you want to kill? What’s stopping you?”)

Along the way the film has some good lines, some imaginative individual scenes and ideas, and – whether intentionally or not – some intriguing echoes of other, better movies. But Norton gives his least interesting performance to date, and Pitt’s work merely confirms that he’s only at all worth watching when playing ghosts or weirdos. Obviously  the whole thing rubbed me the wrong way. It would be pointless (and hypocritical on my own part) to insist that filmmakers must practice what they preach, but I find something particularly galling about the way Fight Club relentlessly lectures the audience. Ikea, for instance, is constantly attacked as a symbol of the pernicious consumerism in question, but I see no significant way in which a multi-million dollar, intensively-marketed, string-pulling Hollywood movie has a moral upper hand over such products.

It’s all crap

As I write that, I can already hear the film’s defenders protesting: well, that’s one of the points, that’s part of the self-reflective irony. Which is the sort of application of irony that makes you want to jump on the Jedediah Purdy wagon. If any criticism of Fight Club can be absorbed by positing that the film anticipates and provides for them, then that seems to me like the ultimate proof of its self-regarding vacuousness. What kind of achievement would that be, anyway, once you get past Philosophy for Dummies – to have grandiosely undermined everything we think we know (or everything, that is, except the manipulability of the audience, in which the film most assuredly does believe)? Shouldn’t a five-star movie have a better message than (approximately): it’s all crap?

Is the film, as some have charged, irresponsible? Arpe considers it “sure to inspire dimwits to copy what’s going on onscreen” (the rest of contemporary man – you know, the portion that aren’t dimwits but nevertheless are emasculated with no real purpose – will presumably have to go on suffering). But I suggest that the film, for all its insistent immediacy, is stifled by its hysterical virtuosity – that even dimwits will be repelled by the weight of the calculation. Having been pummeled to the limits of endurance by the movie itself, few will be inclined to experiment further. “It’s an open text,” raves Bailey. “An open wound. It’s bleeding.” And so, for the lack of a Band-Aid, two hours were lost.