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Tyler (Brad Pitt) enjoying the action in the underground ‘fight club’.
Fincher’s
Ring Cycle
Odds are, if there was a worldwide competition to invent a better universe, few people over 45 would vote for one designed by David Fincher. The prison planet of Alien 3 (Fincher’s directorial debut), the mutilated corpses of Seven, the paranoid universe of The Game - these could well be places you wouldn’t want to live in, not if you’re getting on in life.
Edward Norton as Jack, the narrator of Fight Club, who gets drawn into Tyler’s world.
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On the other hand, maybe they represent things that should be faced up to. Maybe there is more to life than romantic comedies and action epics in which a few well-toned men and a couple of token women save the planet from a careening asteroid. At all events, Fincher’s new movie Fight Club, which received its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in early September, is not just true to form, it takes his worldview to extremes. Subjects include bare-knuckle fighting, urban terrorism and nihilism, while sex and violence are the very essence.
In an early scene, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton go down into a dank basement and beat the crap out of one another, almost for the sake of it - in Fight Club, fighting is about fighting, not winning. There are no rules, other than that you don’t tell anyone about the Club. It’s part of a process of finding yourself in a world where your identity has become increasingly tied to what you do, where you live, what you wear, what you earn...
Brad Pitt and Edward Norton star in Fight Club, David Fincher’s new movie. Like Fincher’s first film, Seven (in which Pitt also starred), it’s not easy viewing, but it’s already being labelled a masterpiece. Nick Roddick reports.
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Fincher himself, who learned his trade making music videos for the likes of Aerosmith, Madonna and the Rolling Stones - not, you might say, the three easiest sets of clients to get along with - is equally uncompromising about what he is trying to do. “You should educate people about the repercussions of violence,” he told Corie Brown of Newsweek. “This is a moral movie - every bit as moral as, say, M*A*S*H.” Brown recorded her reservations about this. “Convincing everyone of that may be an ugly fight,” she concluded.
From which you may deduce that Fight Club’s relationship to Babysitter’s Club, The Joy Luck Club or First Wives’ Club is little more than a semantic coincidence. Fight Club - not The Fight Club: we’re talking something almost generic here - is, in the words of one Internet user who saw an advance screening, “angry, savage and out-there”. The word “masterpiece” also figures in references to the film on the Net.
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