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You pattycake sissies wouldn't know a good movie if it punched you in the fucking face. WWW.SEXANDGUTSMAGAZINE.COM CRUEL AND UNUSUAL ENTERTAINMENT
Fight Club Uber Alles
Gene Gregorits
There is almost nothing to separate our very souls from the
clutches of material obsession, status envy, and careerism
than controlled violence and guerilla monkey wrench
throwing. More than world peace, more than a cure for
cancer, what we as human beings need is catharsis. And more
than the perfect woman, we as men need our fists, and
strictly male accompaniment in achieving the only rebellion
left: dropping out.
Or so Chuck Palahniuk seemed to think when he wrote Fight Club in 1995. The fights and the type of fighting he described in it's pages were apparently autobiographical accounts of his own barroom transgressions.
Palahniuk tapped directly into the male id and hypocrisy of American class structure with a double blade in his debut novel; now Fincher, his crew, and cast have translated his mix of satire and corrosive social protest into something many more people will experience; in fact, something the world may not even be ready for. I certainly wasn't, at least not at first. Perhaps because I didn't expect to see a film from Hollywood this gutsy, profound, and confrontational before or after the millennium. It says something fairly unique about a work of art when its ideas are seemingly borrowed by individuals who see in its main operative logic the answer to a question they never even thought to ask. Will Fight Club inspire more than just gushing critiques, glowing recommendations, and spittle flecked outrage from the many who are bound to be offended on any number of levels ranging from sexual to religious? I fucking hope so!
David Fincher’s adaptation, despite its flaws, is indeed a dangerous motherfucker, and shows more menace than anything under or above ground you’re likely to find for years to come. It's what any self-respecting weirdo, creep, and sneering malcontent has been waiting for: the kind of movie that makes you expect a visible backlash, that could actually provoke violence, that mines the most dangerous soil for it's aesthetic thrust. This happens about once every ten years, in smaller doses. Those grandiose rabble- rousers, the epic social commentaries made by men the press love to hate. Those bleak five-minutes-into-the future cautionary tales on a grand scale linked by a common trait: they're guaranteed to piss a LOT of people off. Fight Club is one of those films. In fact, it's ALL of them only better. Whereas Clockwork Orange and Crash are films that work as warnings, Fight Club works as...well, an invitation.
The film, like the book, gleefully skirts back and forth from one side of the psychosexual-cum-sociological abyss to the other, so caught up in it's own lunatic fringe sensibility it neglects any form of restraint whatsoever, in fact striving for ultimate absurdism while never losing it's malevolently quizzical edge. The film actually SAYS something with attitude, and with conviction. All the while, Fight Club is saturated to the gills in over the top (but surprisingly inoffensive) flash cut MTVism.
One may wonder whether or not the message is TOO clear, if it is indeed capable of reawakening some very base urges in certain people who see it. Three men were seen by Village Voice writer Peter Braunstein duking it out over the urinal cakes in the UA14 cinema's john, after a screening of Fight Club left them clamoring for a dose of their own repressed testosterone. If this example is anything to go on, one might predict this film to connect severely with large numbers, something as affirming as it is hilarious. Fight Club's brutality is shamelessly glamorized, yet it speaks a visceral truth on many fronts. I found myself wondering obsessively "if this film sparks off a trend of backyard head bashing, would that necessarily be a bad thing?"
Paluhiuk's truth might find a receptive target in male yuppies especially, being as they are men who exist in an oppressive socioeconomic cesspool that buries both their individuality and their manhood. And at the other end of the Fight Club's observed fan spectrum are endorphin junkies and schizoid masochists sure to dig the demonic hell out of the (maybe not so) outlandish solution offered by Fight Club's sublimely erotic bare knuckle theatrics. Simply put, it's a movie that should speak to the dispossessed, the fed up, with an illuminating irony.
You could reject my insinuations of an extremely common, yet unvoiced male desire for the most authentic affirmation of all, physical damage...I'm sure you'll have no trouble finding support. It’s not the most popular opinion. But sincere, socially valid/anti-social negative expression as it defines a culture has been missing for a long time. Fight Club is an insidious sermon of self-destruction, crime, squalor, hatred, disgust, and pitch black (and blue) energy, all things which haven’t been represented this well- and this seductive- since the heyday of the Sex Pistols.
They keep to themselves, but Fight Club’s hardcore cult audience is growing.
This phenomenon is as compelling as the film itself…perhaps because it makes sense. If you know how to appreciate chaos, controversy, and insurrection, and especially if you know where to look for it, maybe Fight Club wasn't enough for you. Maybe you needed a little more. Failing to realize how you can feed your own discontent more efficiently via a sliced inner cheek or shiner on the rise, maybe you did a little research of your own. Last week, a group of seemingly bubble headed wanks started their own Fight Club chapter in Illinois. Membership is $10.50, which includes a bar of soap and an I.D. card. Both of these things undermine what little credibility an act such as this could possibly claim, and yeah, it's pretty fucking lame. However, these idiots will doubtlessly take it a few steps further as they learn more of their own relationship with their gender's true nature, and of their propensity for shrugging off a few loose teeth. At this point, who's to say it's still an exercise in unoriginality? Brutality has more to say than words in the right context. While most would prefer to solicit their uncompromising individuality while grinning through discussions of Verlaine, Rimbaud, and ee cummings in NY coffee houses between poetry workshop and psychology class, others (such as Palahniuk, I believe, at least at one time) lack the patience for philosophical masturbation and ritualized phoniness.
The great philosophers are dead, and the world wants so much money from you, there's no time to even think about who you are anyway.
"How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?"
With dozens of horribly accurate lines such as this, I thought I could anticipate other reports of bloody Fight Club-inspired brouhaha coming in over the wire any day. The dreaded backlash has been under whelming, but on the other hand I don’t get out much and not every story makes it to the Associated Press. Maybe something IS brewing out there.
What Peter Braunstein saw is definitely gonna get REAL popular real soon, and soon enough we will see that this behavior is not only natural, but dignified...even as we move on to the latest 4D CD rom and VR wet dream, as Hollywood continues to trot out it's latest season of billion-dollar baloney, not everybody is satisfied by this kind of pedantic rip-off. If nothing else, Fight Club has given a specific type of male violence a renewed place in the collective consciousness, and it won't be so easily shaken off.
Like it's eponymous order of men who slug away via controlled abuse at their feelings of societal disenfranchisement, Fight Club is angry, pain stricken and impassioned...yet laughs at itself. It is ceaselessly dark, hypocritical, whacked out, sexed out, subversive, sadistic, politically incorrect, and punk with a capital FUCK YOU. So insightful (and inciting), it almost plays as a call to arms. The enemy addressed by Fight Club (although masses of pigheaded critics and tactless talk show shit stains like Rosie "Slag" O'Donnell will surely disagree with me), is not the society of women. Anyone dumb enough to call it misogynistic is in desperate need of both a serious reality check, and a second viewing of the film...preferably with their eyes open this time.
The characters that populate the repugnant, yet weirdly sexy landscape of Fight Club do not espouse any hatred of women. They do not blame women, they disregard them, which, if anything, is isolationist, not misogynistic. The blatantly obvious theme of castration, figurative implied vis-à-vis the literal, is directed towards a system, not a sex. It's an outcry against modern society as it drowns in a collective consumerism gone mad.
You know, these rants of mine sneak up on me like Hare Krishnas at the airport. Sorry about that, and now that it's over, let's move on, and put this loudmouth testimonial to bed. (Although my article is already irrevocably smeared in fanaticism...a quick two rounder, anyone?)
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