Fight Club

It may be hard to believe, but it's been over 20 years since the release of the movie Flight Club I recorded it during one or another of the free preview weekends, never having blogged about it before; recently, I finally got around to watching it to free up some space on my DVR.

Edward Norton plays the technically unnamed Narrator, although some sources refer to him as Jack because the character finds "I Am Jack's [insert body part here]" articles from old Reader's Digest magazines and keeps using the phrase. Our Narrator lives in a high-rise condo in a big city where he works preparing reports on potential automotive recalls for a car manufacturer. It's a job he finds empty, so he goes to a whole bunch of support groups for problems he doesn't have to try to deal with his emotional emptiness. It's at one of these where he meets Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), who is also empty and goes to the support groups for the same reasons.

Our Narrator's job requires him to travel around the country, taking one flight after another, which is equally disorienting. It's on one of these flights that he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), who is one of those kids from high school who seems profound but who has never grown up and is now just tedious and inane. But to somebody who feels his existence is empty, like the Narrator, he thinks about the faux profundity. So when his condo is blown up, the Narrator calls Tyler.

Tyler lives in an abandoned house, where he allegedly runs an artisanal soap company out of the basement. The two go out to a bar to get some drinks, and after one of these evenings, the two decide to fight in the parking lot in the rear. It's exhilarating for our narrator, and slowly, word gets out about what's going on, leading Tyler and the Narrator to start a "Fight Club" in the basement of the bar. This taps into a lot of men's feelings of emptiness, not just the Narrator's, and the club becomes increasinly popular, even though as Tyler says, the first rule of Fight Club is you don't talk about Fight Club.

Tyler becomes increasingly erratic in the Narrator's eyes, worrying him as Tyler decides he's going to start a project called Project Mayhem which is a grandiose plan for dealing with what Tyler and the Narrator both see as the increasing commercialization and indebtedness of modern American society. Our Narrator also finds that Project Mayhem is putting a crimp in the friendship between him and Tyler. But he's also finding that it's quite difficult to do anything to put a stop to Tyler's actions.

Although the movie is called Fight Club, it's really not about the fighting, which is just a metaphor for doing something completely out of character as a way of trying to change one's life and get out of a rut. That, and all of the faux profundity, make it easy to understand why the movie would have struck a chord with a certain segment of society. At the same time, however, the movie could easily be perceived as baffling, especially if you're not the sort of person who feels the sort of alienation that the Narrator does and who would find a real-life Tyler Durden nothing more than a pretentious little shit who needs to be smacked upside the head in a non-underground fighting sort of way.

I have to admit that I'm at the age where I wouldn't buy in to Tyler's nonsense, so I don't have quite the positivity towards it that twentysomethings even today might have. However, I can see why it would have struck a chord in the zeitgeist, and for that reason it's absolutely worth seeing, even if you're not the sort of person the movie is targeting.