Fight Club (1999)
Bob had bitch tits.
THE SUMMARY: A disillusioned insomniac automotive recall specialist searches for meaning and excitement in life, and finds it in a new reckless friend with whom he forms an underground fighting operation turned crime ring, only to discover that insane friend has been him the whole time - a split of his personality he aspires to be. And just like the narrator’s personality, my experience with this movie is split - I didn’t really enjoy watching it, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it later.
THE BEST:
I didn’t enjoy it, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it: That’s an odd thing to say, but it’s how I experienced this movie. The degeneracy, the gratuitous violence, the giant man-rack on Bob - none of these things I enjoyed viewing, but after seeing the twist that the narrator and Tyler Durden are actually the same person, I couldn’t stop thinking about the story, which has to be the mark of a good movie. Thankfully I didn’t have the twist spoiled for me, so once it was revealed, it prompted me to think about every scene prior and how or if that scene makes sense if the narrator and Tyler are actually the same person. Even if this movie isn’t for me, it’s a movie that almost forces you to re-watch it with a new understanding later, and I can respect that depth.
Pure liberty unrestrained by morality is not freedom: I found interest in a lot of the broad themes of freedom and morality in this movie. The narrator craves excitement. He craves meaning. He craves purpose. I think wrongfully, he seeks those things by indulging in any degeneracy his appetites desire: cheap sex, recreational violence, petty crime turned more serious, etc. But none of this immorality truly sets him free. In fact, his appetites only enslave him and he achieves freedom by killing that corruption of his mind.
As is often discussed on our show, and as our country’s founders recognized (see John Adams), pure liberty is not itself an inherent good. Liberty must be restrained properly by a moral core within each individual. Without that moral core, it is aimless and destructive. To be free, one must learn to control himself, and not to indulge his every momentary whim.
Better gun discipline than Alec, Dave, and Hannah: The movie started to lose me once ‘Fight Club’ turned into ‘Project Mayhem,’ and the voluntary, consensual combat became aggressive criminal acts against innocents. Still, I got a chuckle when Tyler held up the store clerk at gunpoint, only to let him go and reveal there was nothing in the revolver cylinder. If only the crew on Rust would have had the discipline of Tyler Durden.
THE WORST:
Nihilist and degenerate themes: To be fair, I’m not sure this is a movie that’s trying to each you lessons or philosophy, but the messages it implicitly sends are unwise ones. The story’s general theme is ‘the world is purposeless, so build chaos.’ Wrong. If the world is purposeless, build order. If the world sucks, don’t shrug and make it worse. Wash your hands and make it better, starting with yourself and your immediate surroundings.
Maybe the point of the movie was to show what happens when you embrace nihilism and destruction, but the narrator wasn’t punished for that, other than by himself. Instead, he got to watch his plot executed, with the girl by his side. Those are prizes, not punishments.
The twist makes no sense, at least partially: I didn’t watch the movie in full again after seeing the twist, but I have been thinking about several scenes and evaluating if they make sense in the context that the narrator and Tyler are actually the same person. Most seem to hold up, but the one point I can’t get over is how Fight Club ever would have been established in this reality. If the narrator is just kicking his own ass outside of a bar, why would the two men walk up and express interest in joining the fight? And why would they accept the narrator/Tyler as their leader?
In conversational contexts, I can see a split personality making sense in this plot. In the context of the two personalities physically fighting each other and passersby watching, I can’t see how those outside observers would make sense of it, let alone want to join the action.
The ending makes no sense: I was expecting a suicide that killed them both, but then it turned out the narrator only shot himself through the cheek, and somehow that still killed Tyler by blowing out his skull. How? Why? Why does the narrator get a survivable wound, but Tyler is killed instantly?
Implicitly, it seems the shot is a symbol in the narrator’s mind that finally defeats Tyler for good. But if that’s all it took to defeat Tyler, a frame of mind and mental fortitude, why was the physical shot necessary? And if the narrator had the mental strength to remove the gun from Tyler’s hand, why didn’t he have the mental strength to just imagine Tyler himself away?
It just didn’t make any sense to me, and I’m not sure what the writer’s intended message for the ending was.
THE RATING: 3/5 Wickies. An ironically bi-polar experience for me - a movie with plenty I found thought-provoking, and plenty I absolutely hated.
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NEXT WEEK: Short Circuit (1986)
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