



Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
Prepare for your exams
Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points to download
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
Community
Ask the community for help and clear up your study doubts
Discover the best universities in your country according to Docsity users
Free resources
Download our free guides on studying techniques, anxiety management strategies, and thesis advice from Docsity tutors
Fight Club is a 1999 film directed by David Fincher and written by Jim Uhls. The movie explores the life of a businessman named N, portrayed by Edward Norton, who is disillusioned with his material possessions and the emptiness they bring. He encounters Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt, a charismatic and rebellious figure who introduces N to a world of sado-masochistic hedonism and anti-consumerism. Together, they form a fight club, where men engage in physical fights as a means of seeking meaning and masculinity. The film delves into themes of masculinity, emasculation, consumerism, and self-destruction.
What you will learn
Typology: Study notes
1 / 5
This page cannot be seen from the preview
Don't miss anything!
Directed by David Fincher, written by Jim Uhis
How can you not like a movie where half a dozen corporate skyscrapers are blown up and the explicit message the film delivers is: ―Things you own end up owning
peculiar kind of sado-masochistic hedonism for the masculine elite, and a cult-like subservience for the masses. The cure is worse than the disease. No wonder some critics have declared the movie fascist. The movie opens near its eventual climax. The Narrator (Edward Norton – he‘s not named in the movie so I‘ll call him N) is in an office overlooking a big city skyline and Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) is shoving a gun in his mouth, apparently ready to detonate both the pistol and the home-made explosives under the towering corporate icons. The movie then backtracks and the story is told mostly through flashback. N is a modern-day seeker. That means that, in the beginning, he isn‘t sure what he‘s seeking. He‘s a 30-year old businessman who‘s playing the consumption game self- consciously and looking for meaning in the possession of goods. He reads magazines on the toilet about contemporary furniture. Compulsive consumption substitutes for sex. In his own words, he ―had it all‖, including a ―wardrobe that was getting very respectable, close to being complete.‖ Of course, this is a blind alley. Consumption never satisfies; it only multiplies desire. It is not more that we need, he thinks, but less – much less. We‘re ―working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don‘t need‖. When possessions cease to bring meaning, what‘s next? N is attracted to a self- help group for men who have lost their balls, literally, through radical cancer surgery. It‘s the physical version of social emasculation that has turned men such as N into pansies and puppets of mass consumption. Soon, he‘s addicted to self-help groups because: ―Only crying makes it real!‖ Because he‘s on the track of seeking reality in feelings rather than things, he hasn‘t escaped the feminine. He needs new balls, not empathy. In the process, he meets one of the two people destined to change his life. Marla Singer (Helena Bonham-Carter) is about the only physically present female in the film. She is equally lost and addicted to self-help groups. Through a chance encounter on a plane, N meets the second personal force in his new life, the dynamic and self- assured Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), N‘s antithesis, apparently, in all respects. He‘s younger, better looking, charismatic, and totally uninhibited. Then, apparently fortuitously, N has change thrust upon him. His showcase- apartment is destroyed in a gas explosion. Later he learns it was caused by home-made dynamite. He suspects Tyler Durden, but the actual cause is revealed only later. Thinking his old world was ―all gone‖, N turned to Tyler. The two debate N‘s new situation:
N: I had it all….Now all gone. TD: All gone. [Pause] TD: Do you know what a duvet is?
N: Comfort. TD: It‘s a blanket. Just a blanket. Why do guy‘s like you and I want duvets? Is this essential to our survival in the hunting and gathering sense of the word? No. What are we? N: Consumers? TD: Right, we‘re consumers. We are by-products of the life-style obsession. Murder, crime, poverty. These things don‘t concern me. What concerns me is celebrity magazine, television, 500 channels, some guy‘s name on my underwear, rogaine, viagra, olestra. N: Martha Stewart. TD: Fuck Martha Stewart. Martha‘s polishing brass on the Titanic. It‘s all going down, man, so fuck off with your sofa and string green stripe pattern. I say never be complete. I say stop being perfect. I say, the chips fall where they may. [Pause] That‘s me and I could be wrong. Maybe it‘s a terrible tragedy. N: Its just stuff. TD: You just lost a lot of versatile solutions for modern life. N: My insurance is probably going to cover it. TD: Things you own end up owning you. Do what you like.
What he likes at the moment is this new insight, and Tyler Durden is about to offer him a whole other angle on the self-help gig. When the two leave the bar, Durham unexpectedly and inexplicably asks N to hit him. This leads us into another voice-over and flashback, to explain Tyler Durden. Fincher indulges in self-conscious, modernist movie making, bordering on metacinema – an exploration of making movies during the making of a movie. Tyler Durden, we learn, works in a movie theatre changing the reels during the show. Speaking directly to the camera, both characters explain the process of physically and seamlessly changing the reels – and we learn that Tyler Durden intersperses a ―big cock‖ subliminally between the reels. He also practices irreverent, individual rebellion in the kitchen of the luxurious Pressman Hotel, performing acts of gourmet terrorism by adding various obscene bodily fluids to the bubbling dishes. He‘s an urban guerrilla in the mass consumption society, working invisibly behind the scenes—literally within the consumption—to supposedly undermine it. What, then, is represented as the opposite of mass consumption? The ratcheting up of physical desire, violence and sex, S&M—where the death instinct collides with uninhibited libido. You have to be stripped down to raw desire before you‘re anything real. For men, it‘s violence; for women, debasement. Although the invitation to a rock-em sock-em fist-fight seems absurd, Tyler and N square off outside the bar in an apparently motiveless bare-fisted fight. No serious damage is done, although each inflicts a lot of pain. It‘s N‘s macho initiation. The two are bonded and N moves into Tyler‘s house, a once grand mansion, now a condemned wreck near a paper mill in the toxic end of town. As N experiences a downward mobility that hasn‘t been this rapid since 1929, he recalls his past. He and Tyler shared a similar upbringing. N‘s Dad left when he was six, leaving for another town with another woman to start another family. He did it every six
need ―was in everyone‘s face;‖ Tyler Durden just ―made it visible‖. ―It was on the tip of everyone‘s tongue‖ and he ―gave it a name‖: Fight Club. Eventually, underground ―franchises‖ sweep the country. The rules of Fight Club were simple:
fact that the targets of these shock-trooper terrorists are the symbols of corporate power and culture doesn‘t make them ―good guys‖; rather, it reminds you that even ―Nazis‖ at first called their movement National ―Socialist‖. The movie would be completely unrelenting if it simply spiralled down to oblivion and destruction. Instead, N doesn‘t hit bottom. A gulf begins to separate N and Tyler. Molecules of humanity survive in N—in his feelings for Martha; in guilt over the destruction of what was beautiful (externally and internally); and in N‘s concern for Bob, a guy who had grown large, womanly breasts as a result of hormone therapy following his testicle-ectomy, and who became an accidental casualty of Project Mayhem. N has feelings for the feminized Bob and frets to Tyler, ―Bob is dead, they shot him in the head.‖ Tyler merely paraphrases Mao Zedong: ―You want to make an omelette, you gotta break some eggs.‖ But Bob wasn‘t an egg; he was a human being with a name. These are steps towards self-discovery for N. When Tyler suddenly disappears, N searches for him all over the country, finally rediscovering both himself and the truth about Tyler Durden. N realizes that he encountered Tyler Durden ―at a very strange time in my life.‖ The movie returns to the beginning – if you have had the stomach to stick with it. Tyler has a gun in N‘s mouth and Project Mayhem is about to culminate in the mass destruction of corporate property. The Oklahoma City bombing would be kindergarten. So, are we relieved when N manages to free himself from Tyle‘s grip? Hardly. Too much ugliness has survived, too much hatred has been aroused, too much nothingness has been revealed. It isn‘t just inside Tyler or the corporate culture; it‘s in
sin more than fascism. The destructive worm in creation is inseparably part of our gendered human nature. When you‘ve lost everything of value, only pessimism and despair remain.