So Good It Hurts

David Fincher's Fight Club opens inside the fear centre of its protagonist's brain, although we don't realise that's where we are until we're no longer there. What we see is a semi-dark space that seems both confined and limitless, its details vaguely biomorphic. We are moving through the space at a smooth, regular clip. Our journey is enlivened by flashes of light, pumping music and the film's titles, which are superimposed on the brainscape. Just when we might start wondering about what kind of place we're in, we're expelled in a rush and hurtled alongside the body of a gun that's half-way jammed inside someone's mouth.

What's exciting about Fight Club is that it "screws around with your bio-rhythms" - to borrow a phrase from the Chuck Palaniuk novel of the same name which has been adapted with considerable fidelity by Fincher and screenwriter Jim Uhls. Like the novel, the film disrupts narrative sequencing and expresses some pretty subversive, right-on-the-zeitgeist ideas about masculinity and our name-brand, bottom-line society - ideas you're unlikely to find so openly broadcast in any other Hollywood movie.

"Self-improvement is masterbation. Self-destruction might be the answer" is the slogan of Tyler Durden, who is not Fight Club's protagonist but rather the protagonist's significant other, doppelganger, alter-ego - all that and more. Tyler is the embodiment of pure id with just enough Nietzsche thrown in to make him articulate. (In the film Tyler's voice trails off after the word "destruction", which he delivers with a pregnant, upward inflection and Cheshire-cat grin. The alteration of the line is, I suspect, a concession to the MPAA ratings board which probably gave Fight Club an 'R' because it's members didn't understand its 'unamerican' social critique.)

Tyler (Brad Pitt) has invaded the life of our protagonist and narrator (Edward Norton) who is nameless in the novel but referred to as Jack in the film, though only when it's absolutely unavoidable. Jack is a depressed wage-slave with terrible insomnia, a corrosive wit and a disassociated perspective on his sterile IKEA life. Tyler encourages him to turn his frustration and bottled-up rage into action. After Jack and Tyler have their first heart-to-heart, Tyler asks Jack to hit him. Jack obliges and Tyler returns the favour. They discover that they are exhilerated by this brute interaction. This is the beginning of Fight Club, a secret society open to anyone who's male and for which Tyler (the self-styled anarchist) lays down the rules. "The first rule of Fight Club is that you don't talk about Fight Club."

In Fight Club men strip off their shirts and shoes and go one-on-one with bare knuckles. Everything is allowed short of killing your partner. Fight Club is so seductive as an idea and experience it takes in a life of it's own - independent of Tyler and Jack - and soon there are Fight Clubs springing up in basements and parking lots all over the city and then in other cities across the country.

Jack moves into Tyler's house after his perfectly appointed condo is destroyed in a mysterious explosion. Tyler inhabits a dilapidated, decaying mansion on the edge of a toxic-waste dump. Except on Fight Club nights, says Jacn, they're Ozzie and Harriet. Which isn't quite true because Tyler had many other ways of disrupting the social contract. A terrorist of the food industry, he works as a waiter in pricey restaurants where he pees in the soup. Moonlighting as a projectionist, he splices single frames of pornography into squeaky-clean family films.

Tyler also sells his own brand of soap to upscale department store; it's secret ingredient is human fat which he scavenges from the medical-waste bags of liposuction clinics. (This last transgression has brought accusations of anti-Semetism on the film, but if you've ever lived in LA, where women have fat suctioned out of their bodies as casually as they go to the hairdresser, your first association would not be with Nazi concentration camps. Misogyny, maybe; anti-Semetism, no.) One night as they're making soap Tyler kisses Jack's hand and then burns the imprint of his lips into Jack's skin with pure lye.

If pain is the most expedient route to feeling alive, then the flirtation with self-destruction is what bonds Tyler and Jack - a bond no woman can set asunder, not even Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), a Goth queen with the opalescent skin of a heroin addict and the belligerent manner of Judy Garland at the start of a bender. Marla is after Jack but she fucks Tyler while Jack lurks outside the door as if he's a child spying on the primal scene.

It's not Marla who causes Jack to have second thoughts about Tyler; rather, it's that Tyler's tendency to megalomania spins out of control. Without Jack registering what's happening, Tyler transforms Fight Club into Project Mayhem, a guerilla network that blows up building in order to undermine the economic foundations of our credit-card society. When a soldier in Project Mayhem is killed, Jack realises he must break up with the person he's as close to as he is to himself. But Tyler is not easy to get rid of. Which is how Jack winds up where we came in - with a gun in his mouth in an office building that has been targeted for demolition by Project Mayhem. Since Tyler's bombs are as reliable as Jack is as narrator, this is what you might call, if you think about it carefully, an open ending.

There's a twist in the climax of Fight Club that I haven't revealed. No one I've spoken to saw it coming, and the experience of the film in quite different when you know it in advance. Since the twist subverts what for 100 years has been an essential premise of cinema - that it is an index of the physical world - to leave it out of this analysis does the film an injustice. Especially since this premise will become a part of ancient history when film is trnasformed from a photographic medium to a digital electronic medium - and Fight Club is nothing if not a glimpse of that future.

Like all Fincher's previous films (Alien3, Se7en, The Game) Fight Club sets up a conflict with a violent, potentially murderous being who is, as the id is to the ego, the doppelganger of the protagonist. Weakened by a toxic and perverse society, the protagonist is barely able to hold on to some shred of moral consciousness in the face of this anachic force. (The Game, Fincher's least convincing film, doesn't quite fit this pattern.) Thus Tyler's nihilism and incipient fascism are not the values Fight Club espouses, though Fincher complicates the issue by making Tyler so alluring and charismatic. Tyler is posed as an object of desire and of identification - and Pitt, who has never been as exquisite as he is with a broken nose and blood streaming down his cut body, emerges as an actor of economy and control who can rivet attention merely by turning his head.

For the protagonist, who feels emasculated by his buttoned-down, consumerist life, Tyler represents some ideal of free-wheeling male power. He wants to become Tyler or to be taken over by Tyler. There's a blatant homoerotic charge to this identification which the film doesn't shy away from. As in Scorsese's films, the male body is feminised through masochism. You prove your masculinity not by how much pain you can inflict, but by how much you can endure. Shot in a wet-dream half light that gilds the men's bodies as they pound each other's heads into the cement, the Fight Club sequences aresuch a perfect balance of aesthetics an adrenaline they feel like a solution to the mind/body split.

But what's most innovative about Fight Club is the way, at moments, it seems like the projection of an extremely agile, associative train of thought that can back up and hurtle forward and switch tracks in an instant. The effect is partly the result of a voiceover which is strikingly separated from the rest of the sound and strangely muffled, as if there were a mike inside Jack's head. Fincher has retained the savage humour and manic prose style of Palahniuk's novel, and Norton Delivers this interior monologue as if he were making it up on the fly.

In the opening scene, seconds after being ejected from Jack's brain, we hear something about a bomb in the basement and suddenly we're plunged through the windo, down 30 storeys, through the sidewalk into the basement, through a bullet hole in the van with the explosives and then out the other side. The sequence, which is digitally created from a series of still photographs, is both astonishing and oddly mundane in the sense that it's a fair representation of the visual component of everyday thought processes. Still, one needs a new vocabulary to describe the vertiginous depiction of space and time in Fight Club. Pans and tilts and tracks just won't do.

Fight Club is an action film that's all about interiority. It pushes the concepts of subjectivity and identification to extremes to suggest a male identity that's not only fragile but frangible. Jack is so filled with self-loathing and repressed rage he's desparate to get out of his own skin and into someone else's. And Fight Club is not the only recent Hollywood movie to place us inside someone's brain. Being John Malkovich, in which the sad-sack protagonist discovers a secret tunnel that leads into Malkovich's brain, is a comic, gender-bent spin on Fight Club, though its creepy denouncement is more grim than anything Fincher envisions. You also don't have to be a psychoanalyst to deduce from the depiction that the route into Malkovich;s brain is through his asshole.

Fincher and Spike Jonze, who directed Malkovich, are collegues in the production company Propaganda Filmd, so it's not surprising they share an idea or two. And perhaps these filmsare no more than another turn of the scre in Frankenstein or heady variations on Face Off. But it does seem transgressive to put a brain on the screen as an exhibit - especially when the exhibit is connected to the loss of self, in particular the loss of the masculine self. Fincher ends Fight Club with the Pixies' recording of 'Where is My Mind'. That's not all thats gone missing.

Sidebar: "Being Brad"

"We're making these fucking movies and they're all, like, prototypes," says David Fincher. "So you have to find something to start with that you know. I knew who was the narrator was because he was me. At some points in my life, I've said, 'If I could just spend the extra money, I could get that sofa and then I'll have the sofa problem handled.' As I was reading Chuck's book, I was blushing and feeling horrible. How did this guy know what everybody was thinking? And I also know, just from personal experience, that id I could choose to be someone else, it would be Brad PItt."

Because he had such a terrible time directing Alien3 for Fox, Fincher was horrified that Fox 2000 had bought Palahniuk's novel. Nevertheless, he pursued the project. "I told them that the movie I saw wasn't Trainspotting. The real act of sedition is not to do the $3 million version, it's to do the big version. I worked on the script with Jim Uhls for about eight months. He had written a version that eliminated the voiceover because the studio told him it was a crutch. It was like taking the voice out of Dashiell Hammet. The interior monologue is what gives you some sort of context, some sort of humour. Without the narration the story is just sad and pathetic. From the script we put together a schedule, storyboard, a budget. I went back to Fox with an unabridged-dictionary sized package. I said, 'Here's the thing. $60 million. It's Edward. It's Brad. We're going to start inside Edward's brain and pull out. We're going to blow up a fucking plane. You've got 72 hours to tell us if you're interested.' And they said, 'Yeah, let's go.'"

Fincher felt the movie needed to move very quickly and to jump around in time and space. "We didn't set out to leave the audience in the dust, but we wanted to be random access. So we talked about how we could get people to go with this. At the beginning of the book there's a great speech about how the dynamite is wired together and set to go off. How do you show that? Wouldn't it be great if you could see Edward looking at Brad and then just drop 30 storeys, right through to the inside of this van, see what he's talking about, and then go back? So we did tests. We got a Nikon and took photographs looking out of a window down the street. We took them from every floor. And then we mapped them on to simple geometric shapes and did an incredibly fast camera movement over thme, and it just drops. And you think, 'Wow, I can make it go as fast or as slowly as I want. I can make it go through the wall.' If you look at it frame by frame, the camera goes through the wall into a janitor's room that has a calendar with naked girls. They literally went in and photographed little rooms the maintenance staff would have used. It's just three frames. It goes by so quickly you'll only be able to see it on the DVD."

The strange sex scene between Pitt and Bonham Carter was also done with stills. "We have two cameras, one shooting 1-second exposures and one shooting at 250th of a second. We had this idea of a kind of Francis Bacon version of Mount Rushmore. Because after 'Don't Look Now', there's nothing else to do. I can't ask people to simulate fucking. It's too embarassing."

After the shooting of teenagers by teenagers last spring at Littleton High School Fox became nervous about Fight Club. The release was postponed; the marketing campaign made the movie look like a goofy comedy [Flatbroke's note: it was actually Columbine High in Littleton, CO and a hurried post-production was stated as the reason for the delay in release]. "Although the book was written five years ago I think the movie is about Littleton in more ways than anyone would care to address. Do I think that people who are frustrated and disenfranchaised should blow up buildings? No. Do I care if people who are consenting adults have this Fight Club? I have no problem with that. I'm no sado-masochist, but it seems more responsible than bottling up all their rage about how unfulfilled their lives are. I think the movie is moral and it's responsible. But the scariest thing about Littleton is that two 18-year-olds would think, 'OK. We're going in and we're not coming out. In order to make this statement, we have to give up our lives.' They haven't had a life yet - how can they know they're prepared to give it up? That people would die for such trivial frustrations is scary. And no one wants to look at that."

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