Fight Club

A BLOOD-CURDLING howl of violent white rage that looks set to reverberate around the world for some time to come, Fight Club is an almighty, disturbing, monstrous motherfucker of a movie which power-drills its way into the viewer’s head like few films since the heyday of Martin Scorsese.

Controversial in the extreme, the film has been interpreted in many quarters as an advertisement for Nazism, violent misogyny, self-immolation and random brutality – it has been denounced as deeply irresponsible, savaged for its nihilistic nastiness, and all but diagnosed as the root cause behind the Littleton high-school shootings and every other senseless act of violence perpetrated in the home of the free since the film’s release.

But one glaringly obvious fact seems to have escaped the film’s legions of PC-crazy detractors. Fight Club’s emphasis on bloody ugliness and universal hatred is presented in a light that demonstrates exactly how dangerous these forces are – and despite the film’s deliberate moral ambiguity, only the very sick and twisted will emerge from Fight Club feeling that this is the way for humanity to go.

The rest of us will witness, with increasing horror, a bombardment of bare-knuckled punches, knee-shattering kicks, bloodied mouths, disappearing front teeth, skulls shattering against concrete walls, blades applied to human genitalia . . . in other words, the film makes your average All-Ireland hurling final look like a McDonald’s kiddie party.

Director David Fincher had already established himself as a major talent with his early warnings Se7en and The Game, but this puts both of them well in the shade. Career-defining performances from Ed Norton and Brad Pitt elevate an already potent script to something approaching the level of emotional eloquence attained in Raging Bull.

The premise is that jaded, insomniac, Jack (Ed Norton) occupies himself at night by attending a range of men’s self-help groups, all of which subject the participants to an incessant barrage of irksome Oprah-ish psychobabble (“Think of your pain as a huge ball of healing white light”). The final straw for Jack arrives when he finds himself having to hug an obese, cancer-stricken Meat Loaf as the pair attempt to ‘share one another’s pain’. A chance meeting with Tyler (Brad Pitt) follows, and the pair discover a much more liberating method of sharing their pain: they take to bashing one another about the face repeatedly, without even displaying the faintest trace of hostility as they do it. They soon form a ‘Fight Club’, open only to males, where the shirtless and shoeless protagonists engage one another in marathon bouts of no-holds-barred savagery. Everything is allowed short of actually killing your opponent, and Fincher’ s camera surveys all this wreckage with an extreme relish that certainly won‘t appeal to everybody’s taste buds. I despise violence wherever it crops up in real life, but I found myself completely glued to the Club’s bouts of bare-knuckle brutality – and for all the right reasons, too. Despite the film’s obvious appeal to macho pugilists, it couldn’t be further removed from Stallone or Schwarrzenegger if it tried.

Norton’s everyman appeal – his character appears never to have been in a fight before – is thrown into brilliant contrast by Brad Pitt’s revelatory performance as the brains behind the Club. No sex-symbol preening here: Pitt wanted the role so badly he shaved his head and had a front tooth chipped for the role, and you’d barely recognise him. Helena Bonham-Carter, the only female character in what seems on the surface to be an inherently misogynistic film, departs wildly from type as a phenomenally alluring pale-skinned Goth/punk with a fine line in caustic conversation – and although the film could be accused of getting a shade carried away with itself during the apocalyptic final half-hour, it’s certainly appropriate that it ends with a bang.

Feel the need to get in touch with your destructive side? Go and watch it, now, immediately. I said IMMEDIATELY!