Fight Club (1999)

(unspecified American city, other city's; contemporary)
IMDb

The first rule about reviewing Fight Club, is not to talk about Fight Club. You can't really, not without betraying Fight Club. It is a maddening movie in some ways, it cheats. Yet it cheats in its cheating, and in that way is perfectly honest. Paradox is part of the bargain.

Now if you make a movie, and you call it Fight Club, and you put say Meatloaf in this movie, well then you've got me in the opposition from the get go. Yet if you make this movie cleaver, and if that works for you, then you might win me over. The early black sarcasm gives way to an alienated philosophical bloviating, and a fascist existential philosophy the film both values for its purity and ridicules for its insanity. It's radical and populist, fascist while being socialisticly anarchist, and all with just a little bit of early 20th century progressivism.

Edward Norton is fine in this role, the white collard nobody who hates his job and hates himself. His insomnia a metaphor for the crushing effects of modern life, his peace drawn from the support groups for deathly conditions he dose not have, emblematic of his need to refresh himself through the pain of others. His mundane yet calculatingly evil job, (which brought him low in the first place) is a catalyst for an massive visual representation of released rage. Is he an apologist for Timothy McVeigh, or Ralph Nader by way of Al-Quada?

We shouldn't feel sympathy, yet we need to for this to work. The creators found an inventive way around all this, in fact its the essence of the story, and it works because Norton builds up such good will in our minds early on, and because Pitt's character is in trajectory between 12 Monkey's and Oceans 11. This film has quite a cult following, which is good in its appreciation of quality and invention, but potently bad in its political implications. It is a libertarian film, in both a wide and fringe sense. While it probably warrant's continued examination on my part, say a repeat viewing in a couple months or so, it kept my subconscious mind occupied, and the rest of me completely entertained. I was being manipulated, but the gun was in my hand all along.