Julian Rhodes

“What is the greatest film ever made?” This is a question that continually challenges film enthusiasts throughout the world. For with this question comes a greater question — how are we to evaluate greatness and excellence in a film? The answers to both questions vary from person to person, as standards for art critique are vastly subjective. But beyond individual response, there is also a cultural response to these questions — for fifty or more years, Citizen Kane (1941) was hailed as the greatest film ever made, holding the top spot on polls taken by multiple film institutions. Only just recently was it ousted from the #1 position on Sight & Sound’s “50 Greatest Films of All Time” list. The film that replaced it was Hitchcock’s colorful and haunting masterpiece Vertigo (1958). Is Vertigo a better movie than Citizen Kane? Absolutely; though at the moment it’s best not to explain my reasons for believing so. But is Vertigo the greatest movie ever made? Most likely not. Vertigo is a perfect movie, in many senses — but in order for a movie to be given a ranking that places it above all others it must be more than perfect — it must be quintessential, “quintessential” meaning in this context a film that portrays key facets of the human experience, relating them to classic archetypes while staying within an original and consistent aesthetic, in short, the purest example of a film.

When I was stirring this question around in my head about a year ago, searching for the “quintessential” film, I was trying to find something that would have artistic excellence, unique ideas, popular appeal and cultural significance. Then I saw Fight Club. My immediate response was confused, but elated — I felt in a way I had found the greatest film I had ever seen because it was “quintessential,” but at the same time, was it “perfect”? No. The pacing seemed off in some parts, and the plot was so insane and twisted at times the film appeared to lose its own coherency; even the framing and the aesthetic could have been a bit more finely mastered. Could a film that is quintessential but flawed be better than a perfect one? Perhaps. But then I had to wonder, could the film ever be considered as one of the greatest films of all time by any respectable institution? Despite all the good questions of ethics and sociology a film like Fight Club raises, it was marketed as a violent blockbuster and will hence be viewed as such. And yet some films on many lists were once seen as nothing more than simply really good blockbusters. Does age change a film? In the future, will Fight Club be looked at with the same fondness with which we look at films like, say, The African Queen? No one can really say — but why are films like Fight Club brushed aside by many respectable critics? Why not put Fight Club in the top 10? I am not saying the film is the best film ever made, that it deserves to outrank films like Vertigo, Apocalypse Now, or Aguirre: The Wrath of God. However, I do aim to encourage you to challenge your own conceptions of what a perfect film looks like. The argument I hope to make here is as a film, Fight Club is the a keystone example of the union between thought-provoking artful cinema and popular mass-market action-suspense cinema and therefore is a culturally valuable piece of art that deserves more recognition within the world of film analysis. I will do this through examining first: the storytelling and narrative, second: the use of aesthetic, and third: the philosophical themes presented within the film.

Narrative. The film captures our suspense from the opening shot. It begins through a stunning visual effects sequence of painstaking CGI — the nerves of the brain, electronic impulses passing back and forth through a tense mind. Immediately this tells us what to expect — this is going to be a film of the psychological, perhaps of the psychotic. The camera pulls back further and further until it passes out through the skin pores and pans back to show us the narrator of the story, sitting in a chair in a dark room, with the barrel of a gun stuck inside his mouth. We are soon informed he is being held hostage by one Tyler Durden — we are also informed through another visual effects shot there are vast quantities of explosives surrounding the foundation pillars of several skyscrapers surrounding. Now that the stakes have been placed on the table, the narrator feels it’s safe enough to take us back to the beginning of the story and explain all the events that led to this moment. We are hooked, and then very abruptly reeled in, held in curiosity until the end of the film. Chronologically, the story really begins with the main character’s insomnia. Note that the narrator and protagonist is never named — he is the hopeless everyman on the quest for truth and enlightenment — a truth that constantly eludes him. Though, for the sake of convenience, we shall call him Jack, as he is called in Jim Uhls’s script.

Through clever uses of visual montages and special effects, we are shown the protagonist’s world — he is living in a state of apathy, trying to give his life meaning through his IKEA purchases — to quote the film directly, “Like everyone else, I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct. If I saw something clever like a coffee table in the shape of a yin-yang, I had to have it … I flipped through catalogues and wondered: what type of dining set defines me as a person?” He consults a doctor about his insomnia, where he complains he is in pain because of his sleep loss. The doctor’s response: “You want to see real pain? Swing by First Methodist Tuesday nights. See the guys with testicular cancer. That’s pain.” Having nothing else to do, he takes his doctor’s suggestion and visits “Remaining Men Together.” This phrase resonates throughout the film: remaining men. The character Tyler Durden’s entire fight against society is built upon the idea society is slowly emasculating us — the struggle is to not sink into apathy, but rather to feel the vibrancy of life, the feeling of freedom and strength men are intended to feel. Our unnamed protagonist becomes addicted to these support groups, to people sympathizing with him because they believe he’s been through some tragic circumstance. This is his first experience of “hitting low” — another theme that resounds throughout the film.

What disrupts this empty bliss? Marla Singer — a cigarette-smoking, punk-goth, neo-noir femme fatale. We get a picturesque image of her face as she smokes indoors, while wearing sunglasses — her mouth is an empty abyss, we are staring into the endless darkness of something that looks, by all appearances, utterly hollow. Marla brings chaos into our hero’s life because she reflects the lie he is living — she exposes him to himself, his deception. He has an attraction toward her he is afraid to admit, and he feels inadequate because of her presence in his life, she is a reminder he doesn’t stand a chance with her.

Now he feels empty, powerless. Hence a new force steps into his life — Tyler Durden, a charismatic stranger he meets on a plane, who claims to make a living by selling soap. Tyler claims the oxygen masks on planes are to make passengers high so they don’t panic in an emergency situation, and equal parts gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate can be made into an explosive. Strangely enough, that very night Jack’s apartment explodes. Having nowhere else to go, he calls Tyler up using the number on his business card. The two share a drink, after which Tyler invites Jack to his house. On their way out of the bar, Tyler asks him to hit him as hard as he can. “You never know yourself until you’ve been in a fight,” Tyler says. Neither of them have been in a fight before. They fight, with no reason between them for doing so — and they find it strangely therapeutic. Soon it becomes a group activity: other people join in, and before long, a fight club is started. People meet once a week, fight, and then go back to their normal jobs, pretending like none of it ever happened. This becomes a new therapy group for Jack, his second “Remaining Men Together”; at one point he compares the group of hollering men to a Pentecostal Church.

As Jack lives with Tyler in his dilapidated house, Tyler slowly begins influencing him with his principles — the life they embrace is so disconnected from the rest of civilization their behavior and ideals become closer and closer to a naturalistic animal-instinct state. They go out and start “sizing things up” with their life-or-death survival-of-the-fittest logic, looking at people and wondering how well they’d fare in a fight. The fight club is compared to “a Pentecostal church”… the experience of hitting the ultimate low is described as “enlightenment.” There is a very masochistic nature to Durden’s philosophy — it is only from giving up and realizing there is absolutely nothing left to live for that true knowledge of the human condition comes: to Tyler, this is “enlightenment.” “Self-improvement is [self-stimulation],” to quote/paraphrase Durden, “now self destruction.” Durden slowly evolves Fight Club into something beyond a therapy group, something resembling a fascist terrorist organization, through which he wreaks anarchist havoc on the city’s symbols by destroying corporate art, smashing car windows, blowing up computer displays, etc. As the chaos caused by Tyler’s organization “Project Mayhem” increases, Jack tries to distance himself from Tyler — only to discover he and Tyler are the same person: Tyler’s aggressive personality was his own mental projection. Tyler is the person Jack secretly wishes he could be. Now Tyler has evolved into a threat to himself and others, and he must find a way to seize back control before Tyler takes over his life entirely. Jack discovers Tyler plans to demolish all the buildings belonging to major credit card corporations, in an attempt to set everyone’s debt back to zero. Jack has a final climactic confrontation with Tyler, during which he diffuses only one of the bombs. He finally finds a way to rid himself of Tyler, by putting the gun in his mouth and shooting through the cheek — the bullet does not kill him, despite the physical damage it causes the trauma of the gunshot is enough to give him the mental shock he needs to restore his sense of objective reality and bury Tyler down in his subconscious forever. In the final moments of the film, he is reunited with Marla, brought back to him through unfortunate circumstances. They stand on the balcony of the building, looking out the window. “Everything is going to be fine,” he says. No sooner has he said this than the buildings in the background explode, and the song “Where is My Mind” by the Pixies begins to play as the skyline crumbles. The narrative choice to end the film on a note such as this indicates while his life is back to normal, Project Mayhem continues. Does this mean Tyler’s philosophy was correct? Society needs to be destroyed and rebuilt? Not necessarily. It meant Tyler was, in a way, successful — not that he was necessarily correct. The film presents the opposing views objectively and asks you to interpret the events and decide for yourself whose side you’re on.

Style/Aesthetic. The director David Fincher (known for Se7en, The Social Network, and most recently, Gone Girl) was highly particular on the aesthetic to his film — it’s a look that’s hard to describe. When the film prints were sent to the studios, there were complaints about dirt and smudging on the film. This was intentional. The film was tinted to become darker, browner, greener, or bluer in some sections — all to establish a neo-noir effect; that the frames are smudged, shaky, intercut establishes a sort of grunge. “Fight Club presents Tyler’s stylized, designer-grunge-aesthetic as the alternative to Jack’s erstwhile affluent IKEA-appointed environment and constructs an excessively squalid mise-en-scène as a lifestyle choice. Tyler delivers an agitational address to a large Fight Club residency that meets illegally in a dank basement during the midway plot-point discussed above” (Bedford 8). The settings and mise-en-scène, especially in the basement where the fights take place and the house on Paper Street, are consistently associated with low-key lighting and the feelings of wet and dry. As it rains, water drips through the floorboards of the house. Dust cakes in the windows on a hot day. In the fight club, puddles of blood form on the floor — yet later we see Jack looking at the dry floor and thinking of the feet that scuffled there the night before.

Fincher’s work on the project gives it a distinct out-of-the-box feel: there are bizarre and surreal moments like the meditation scene, where Jack imagines himself in a cave of ice, confronting his chakra animal, a penguin that looks at him and says nothing but “Slide!” in the voice of a child and then slips away. Strange moments like this would not happen were it not for Fincher’s unique touch; his creative insanity. The film is full of odd moments like this, little treats for the audience, that give it a multi-flavored and zany feel. The best of these are what Fincher calls the “subliminal Brads” — moments before Tyler Durden is introduced, he appears five times in the film, for one frame only. This subliminally introduces the character to the audience before they even meet him (Smith). This parallels the film editing Tyler does when he works as a film projectionist and splices single frames of pornography into children’s movies — it is as if Tyler himself is editing the movie we are watching.

This is not the only instance in which flash-frames are used within the film. The use of brief and passing frames are used to great effect in the “chemical burn” scene in which Tyler pours lye onto Jack’s hand and forces him to deal with his pain. The narrator attempts to retreat into meditation to imagine away the pain, but Tyler tries to awaken him back to reality. “The excruciating bodily pain caused by the chemical burn immediately catalyses a visceral thought-image montage that vies for prominence amongst the action images,” writes William Brown, “The narrator initially attempts to apply meditation to escape the intense pain, and viewers are presented with serene images of a green forest. After returning to a close-up of the hand, now bubbling as his flesh chemically dissolves, mental images of fire and intertitle-like images isolating words like ‘searing’ and ‘flesh’ intermix with sounds of intense burning and crackling. These compete with Zen-like images of trees, birdsong and the narrator’s healing cave as he attempts to escape these overwhelming feelings and sensations” (288). The pain and mental urgency of Jack’s situation is communicated effectively into the minds and hearts of the audience through stark imagery we are forced to process very quickly.

Philosophy. The film discusses a wide variety of philosophical topics, namely consumerism, authoritarianism/fascism, Übermensch/nihilism, masculinity/gender roles. All of these tie together into one unifying theme — as humans living in the 21^st century, what do we find our identity in? What do we use to define ourselves? The essential problem presented in the film is we have a society that bases self-worth on achievement, that encourages us to communicate our identity to other people through what we buy, that having a job is the end, not a means to some higher goal. While this is not always true, it is largely accurate and therefore concerning. The fight clubs Tyler starts are attempts to solve this problem; when people connect to their primal selves, they come alive. To quote Tyler, “In the world I see, you’re stalking elk through the damp canyon forest around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn. Laying down strips of venison down on the carpool lanes of some abandoned superhighway.” In the film, Tyler performs what he calls a “human sacrifice,” in which he points a gun to a small-time store clerk’s head, asks him what he studied for in college, what he wanted to be in life. He responds saying he wanted to be a veterinarian. Tyler takes his license and says, “I know where you live. I’m going to check back on you in six weeks. If you’re not on your way to becoming a veterinarian, you’re going to die.” The scared man runs off, promising to pursue a degree in biology again. The narrator stands befuddled, looking at Tyler and asking why he did that. Tyler responds, “Tomorrow will be the best day of that man’s life. Tomorrow, he will eat breakfast and it will taste better than any meal that you and I have ever tasted.” Tyler’s goal is a destruction of society, but what will he profit from it? What are his ideals? From these two scenes, it seems what is important to Tyler is people look at themselves and feel they are doing something important. As Christians, we derive our sense of worth from our connection to God, our purpose in living comes from His mission to us. Christ is our identity. What Fight Club demonstrates, albeit unintentionally, is deriving a personal sense of worth from anything else will lead to disastrous results.

Tyler is a poster-child of nihilism — Nietzche’s Übermensch. “Our fathers were models for God, and they bailed on us. Now what does that tell you about God? We are the middle children of history — God’s unwanted children.” Thus is Tyler’s perspective on reality. The schism with the father figure and the mother figure is what defines the entire subversion quality within the film (Gunn 287). Jennifer Barker makes the connection between Tyler’s “Project Mayhem” and fascism in her article “A Hero Will Rise”:

[Jack] becomes addicted to submission, first finding the freedom of “losing all hope” with self-help groups and then replacing this with the freedom of losing all control with Tyler. He destroys his past and his identity upon Tyler’s arrival and submits completely to the meaning Tyler creates. This experience, not only of submission, but the feeling of freedom through submission is a process required of fascism’s political agenda. Hitler, in Mein Kampf comments that the masses, by giving in to the strong man, engage in a complex game of denial: “They are equally unaware of their shameless terrorization and the hideous abuse of their human freedom, for they absolutely fail to suspect the inner insanity of the whole doctrine. All they see is the ruthless force and brutality of its calculated manifestations, to which they always submit in the end.” Or, as the narrator points out: “Sooner or later, we all became what Tyler wanted us to be.” This process is fundamental to fascist subjectivity, requiring a misconstruction of the self in terms of an ideal other, and for the narrator, manifests itself in a literal misrecognition of Tyler Durden.

It is only through the loss of identity the authoritarian submission-based state Tyler starts is possible.

Critical reception of Fight Club can go to one of two extremes — critics have either lauded it or hated it. It would not be a lie to say it is one of the most controversial films of the past twenty years — the mistake to make while analyzing the film is to believe it advocates the violence and rebellion it portrays. “In one of the more apoplectic slams, Rex Reed, writing in The New York Observer, called it ‘a film without a single redeeming quality, which may have to find its audience in hell.’ More than one critic condemned the movie as an incitement to violence; several likened it to fascist propaganda. (‘It resurrects the Fuhrer principle,’’ one British critic declared.) On her talk show an appalled Rosie O’Donnell implored viewers not to see the movie and, for good measure, gave away its big twist” (Lim). The film does not advocate violence — in fact, the entire point of the ending of the film is to laugh in the face of Tyler’s agenda and beliefs — it is those beliefs that are destroying us, that must be opposed. The film complains about the consumerist apathetic society, yes, but it is just as much about the counter-reaction to that society, and it shows how both are wrong. Who we are is something for ourselves to decide. When we simply allow ourselves to be defined by the material and the physical, we degrade from humans and become more like machines or animals.

To conclude, if Fight Club is not one of the greatest films of our time, it is one of the greatest films of our era — I have not seen another film made since 1999 that has equaled it in sheer impressiveness. Why is it great? Because it is important, because it provokes heated discussion amidst the film world. The movie is analyzed extensively, so surely it is finely crafted. And it is also debated extensively, so it must have left an impact. Dare I even mention its massive cult following? It has become an icon of popular culture. Unlike many critics, I do not believe it is pseudo-intellectual. Though it is clever, it is not as pretentious as some would argue. It does not market some new panacea-philosophy, but rather encourages us to look around us and rethink things. Are we allowing ourselves to be deceived by the popularly conceived notion of masculine ideal? What do we find purpose in, in a world caught between a deluge of marketing and a violent counter-culture? Where is the world going from here, as a new millennia begins and the world becomes more and more populous and more and more technology-inundated and culture-inundated?

Having nothing more to say, my final urge is this: if you have seen this film, I encourage you to pay attention to these things if you choose to see it again. And if you haven’t, I hope I’ve helped you to rethink your ideas about what you’ve heard about it. And as a last safe reminder: keep hydrated. It’s cough & cold season.

Bibliography

Barker, Jennifer. “A Hero Will Rise: the myth of the fascist man in Fight Club and Gladiator.” Literature-Film Quarterly. July, 2008, Vol. 36, Issue 3, 171.

Bedford, Mark. “Smells Like 1990’s Spirit: The Dazzling Deception of Fight Club’s Grunge Aesthetic.” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film. 2011, Vol. 9:1, 49-63.

Brown, William. “Deterritorialisation and Schizoanalysis in David Fincher’s Fight Club.”  Deleuze Studies. 2011, Vol. 5:2, 275-299.

Gunn, Joshua and Thomas Frentz. “Fighting for Father: Fight Club as Cinematic Psychosis.” Western Journal of Communication. May/Jun 2010, Vol. 74:3, 269-291.

Lim, Dennis. “Fight Club Fight Goes On.” New York Times. Nov 8, 2009, Vol. 159:54853, 18.

Smith, Gavin (Sep–Oct 1999). “Inside Out: Gavin Smith Goes One-on-One with David Fincher.” Film Comment 35 (5): 58–62, 65, 67–68. < http://www.edward-norton.org/fc/articles/filmcom.html&gt;.