Believe it or not, the wonderfully dark, brutal Fight Club seems, to me, like David Fincher's version of Office Space (the Mike Judge film). Fight Club is a film that could be read as a disgruntled man's how-to manual or as a comedy showing just how far we're being driven. Either way, it fits well into Fincher's repertoire of films, including Alien3, Seven, and The Game. Like the others, Fight Club includes a multiplicity of themes and social commentary wrapped up in a script and mis-en-scene both creepy and intriguing.
The film centers around Edward Norton's sleepless narrator, a man locked in the boredom of the nineties yuppie. He evades his insomnia by attending support groups - Tuberculosis, Testicular Cancer, etc. Nonetheless, his unhappiness is only challenged when he meets Tyler Durden, a homemade soap salesman with a penchant for mischief. Together they form a support group of their own, the "underground boxing ring" of the title. The film is a wild roller coaster ride from there and frankly, I don't want to ruin it for you.
Fight Club uses dizzying camera work, intricate sets, and fast-paced editing to knock its viewers around. All these techniques - along with an ability to take the sensuality out of Brad Pitt - make David Fincher one of the most exciting directors working today. In this film, starting with the opening sequence, Fincher is delving into, prying open, looking inside the minds of the increasingly disenchanted young men of America. He continually reminds us that this inspection is his project by sending the audience (via the camera) on whirling trips through the garbage can and the like. As the camera dives into things, so do we, the audience.
We also see Ed Norton's imaginations with glaring reality. The most striking case of such is when he imagines a mid-air collision and the theater goes from the relative quiet of the normal plane to the ripped open, speaker screeching chaos of pressure-loss and vacuum. His rantings, his thoughts echo those we've all had (though hopefully in less intensity and number than the poor narrator). We're also ripped from our usual passive audience mode by Fincher's extra-diagetic activity (where we go from narrator telling a story to narrator engaging us in conversation).
The common theory is that the Brechtian asides, the discussion with the audience will break the identification that is the magic of film. I would argue that in this case, however, Fincher draws the audience into a thoughtful dialogue with the film that might not happen otherwise. As he breaks the hypnosis of filmic narrative, he urges us to examine the story being told and the message being sent.
The question as to whether or not this film is fascist seems, to me, to be a matter of perception. On one hand, the narrative makes it hard not to laugh at, and identify with, Tyler's anarchic and (somewhat) noble antics. However, when he gathers others into his group and leads them into mindless anarchy, it does seem as though fascism might be the topic du-jour. But does the film support such activity? Does it condemn it?
Or is it, as Fincher said in an interview in Entertainment Weekly (#507, October 15, 1999, pg. 28), a "90's version of The Graduate?" It was my impression of Fight Club that the fascist activity was condemned, at least in its mindlessness, but not wholeheartedly or with much gusto. The film's commentary does, to me, reek of The Graduate. Fight Club is a film about disenchantment, about the promises given to a generation that was disappointed in the results.
What is it about us, our society, right now, that we churn out disenchanted pieces? American Beauty and Happiness are not so different from Fight Club, they just look at a different group of the unhappy. Are we all this unhappy? What is going to change, what are we going to have to define us as a generation? As Tyler Durden said in the film, "We don't have a big defining moment. They had wars, the depression - we haven't had anything."