Fight Club

When I think about deeper social meanings in a recent Hollywood blockbuster, the first title that comes into my mind is Fight Club. At a first glance, the movie starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter is a story about gratuitous violence and anarchy. The bloody fight scenes seem to follow the pattern described in the article about Saw, which states that the commercial quality of a movie is nowadays directly proportional to the amount of blood and gore in it. However, Fight Club, based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, tends to engage viewers into deeper issues, with a great deal of satire and dark humor.

To a deeper extent, Fight Club is mainly a critique of modern-day consumerism. The main character and narrator (Edward Norton) grows tired of his posh lifestyle and daily routines. While battling a bad case of insomnia, he develops an anarchistic alter ego, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), whose main occupation is manufacturing soap, a product which can be used to make powerful explosives. Paradoxically, soap, an essential element of people’s hygiene and well-being, is transformed into a powerful weapon against consumerism. The first target is the narrator’s cozy apartment, which is mysteriously blown up (later in the movie we find out that the narrator a.k.a. Tyler Durden did it himself). The club started by the “two” characters is only a means of recruiting followers for “Project Mayhem”, which has the final goal of blowing up the headquarters of several important corporations in the city. This would be a decisive blow to the heart of consumerism, an operation dangerously resembling the 9/11 attacks. Since Fight Club was released in 1999, when the Twin Towers were still standing straight, one can only infer that the people who saw Fight Club or read the book back then didn’t really pay attention to its concealed warning message. Moreover, the structure of club where ordinary men go to release their anger through one-on-one fighting on a Saturday night is based on that of most clandestine organizations, terrorist or non-terrorist. The club has a clear set of rules, a hierarchy and a paramount requirement to be kept secret (expressly stated in the first two rules). Towards the end of the movie, the club gains an almost religious following and the nameless narrator, along with his alter ego, receives cult status.

The most interesting character of the movie, however, is Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), who has a decisive influence on the narrator’s life. He meets her in the support groups he attends to get relief for his insomnia and quickly notices that she doesn’t have any problem recommending her for any of those groups(at one point he sees her in a testicular cancer support group). Her presence is deleterious for his sense of relief, and because of her, his insomnia rebounds. As the article about Scream states, women are often perceived in culture as the “root of all evil”. In Fight Club, Marla triggers the narrator’s split personality and all the problems stemming from that.