Reviewed by Greg Dixon
FIGHT CLUB ***
Cast: Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Helena Bonham Carter, Meatloaf
Director: David Fincher
Rating: R18
It seems the question to ask, in this week of All Black emasculation: what does it mean to be a man?
Clearly, the monumental public handwringing has answered: it means winning, not losing.
Fight Club begs to differ. In this ultraviolent, nihilistic vision of manhood, losers are winners and winners are losers.
Norton, the man with no name other than "narrator," is a harmless, hard-working drone for an insurance company, a slave in America's corporate culture where life has two states - making money and spending it.
His desperation to find anything that will deliver an emotion sends him in search of others worse off - testicular cancer survivors and tuberculosis victims.
Posing as a member of self-help groups, he feeds on their grief, only to have his little game spoiled by Bonham Carter's chain-smoking waif Marla, who's up to the same thing.
Then he meets Tyler Durden (Pitt doing his mad guy thing again). Durden is everything Norton's narrator isn't - cool, nasty and angry, with an anarchist philosophy that redefines the term "bad attitude."
After Norton's apartment is blown up in one of the more strained plot conveniences, he finds himself living in Durden's squalid house.
This leads to friendship and a secret society called Fight Club, where young men can find life and manhood's meaning through bare-fisted, bloody fighting. They are soon embroiled in Project Mayhem, whose goal is a symbolic death of the consumer society.
Director Fincher (Seven) clearly believes he's crafted more than some of the most beautifully filmed, and at times sickening, ultraviolence since A Clockwork Orange.
Apparently he wants this to be a salutary tale of men who have been crushed into spiritual eunuchs by political correctness and consumerism.
As Tyler suggests at one point, society has delivered them no Great War or Depression. All they have is the great spiritual war within themselves and the great depression of their lives.
So they fight back by literally picking fight after brutal fight, and Fincher justifies it with black humour and micro-philosophies such as "without pain, without sacrifice, life is nothing."
But Fight Club's doctrine is as mor-ally bankrupt as its characters. While it decries the new religion of consumerism, it says the only way out is to beat up your friends.
The thousands of Project Mayhem disciples do not become free, they just become mindless followers of an even more destructive faith.
The result is little more than a celebration of violence, beautiful bruises and all.