Rethinking 'Fight Club' and its violence

"I want you to hit me as hard as you can."
- Brad Pitt, "Fight Club"

"I wanted to destroy something beautiful."
- Edward Norton, "Fight Club"

Repulsion.

That's my recollection of "Fight Club." At least, the first viewing of it on opening night, after anticipating it like few films in 1999.

It's the kind of rollicking, daring film vision that represents the height of craft. The surreal opening credit sequence. A quick hook at top of a credit office building with the two stars. A clever, brilliant, deeply veined first act. The setup for something grand, transcendent. A meaningful tome on the cathartic and dangerous nature of materialistic America.

Then, repulsion - the word that adequately describes my reaction to the much-debated fight scenes in "Fight Club," blotting out the commentary and singly drawing attention to themselves as set pieces of isolated, backroom fist violence of such a visceral nature that the blood scrunching between the cheek and the teeth of the fighter can be heard on the soundtrack.

There has been worse violence depicted onscreen - "Saving Private Ryan" contains 20 minutes of brain-rattling violence in its opening sequence basically deadening all plotlines arriving after it.

But has there been violence that more poorly served a film than this? "Fight Club" a clever, relatively gruesome novel by retired airline mechanic Chuck Palahniuk is about something. So is, I've discovered in many viewings, the film.

Those fight scenes are about - and solely about - the various ways one's body can contort with blood gushing in all directions. It lingers particularly long on how blood trickles along cold, hard cement.

In my initial review last year, I mentioned them (there's four or five major sequences, depending on what you call major) as the primary reason for an unfavorable opinion, while a colleague gave it a favorable one, choosing to stick on the tack that those who didn't like "Fight Club" did not get it.

I very much understand the film, as much as one can, I suppose, after multiple viewings, and listening to director Fincher's and star Edward Norton's commentary on the DVD package. The fight scenes are still flinch-worthy, and it's questionable as to whether they add any real art to the production.

And yet, "Fight Club" is an essential movie for the 21st Century - one of the few out there - that skewers materialism with such a bold, fierce bravado, and certainly, you wonder what all the fuss over "American Beauty" was for. The latter has ice water running through its veins; it's detached, damning, judgmental. "Fight Club" has hot, black blood running through its two-hour-plus running time. It judges by showing.

This review, then, is a reversal of sorts, recognition of "Fight Club's" virtues while singling its long period of flawed, violent behavior as an anathema. Along with Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia," which serves as a companion piece, "Fight Club" is the most ecstatically made film of 1999 in terms of ambitious, cinematic showmanship. They are the two best films of last year.

While "Magnolia" represents a giant ensemble chorus of stories, "Fight Club," is primarily a two man show inside one man's mind, with a woman in between.

We meet a nameless narrator (Norton), a corporate drone who works as incident specialist at an auto corporation. Early in the film, he describes to a stranger the nature of his work: investigate accidents, then determine whether a recall is necessary (hint: not unless the lawsuit is larger than the cost of a recall).

Fincher rushes headlong into the social commentary, which primarily concerns the narrator's lack of vigor, unrelenting insomnia and strange, momentary hallucination. Norton, still in shirt and tie in the wee hours, spends sleeplessness ordering his wallet off on Ikea furniture and functionally fashionable sculptures. He watches infomercials. And he considers the products as worthy.

And then he gets a tip from a doctor: Want to see real pain? Go visit testicular cancer survivors. Disguised as such, "Cornelius" meets bitch-tits Bob (Meat Loaf) and discovers an odd cathartic outlet - lying about an illness he doesn't have, releasing real tears based on fake emotions, presumably leftover from his real angst. It works, and as the narrator frequents other diseases - tumors, intestinal disorders - he begins to sleep.

When another faker enters the mix, a ragamuffin named Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), the narrator is perplexed and can't cry. In confronting her, there's an odd connection, an arrangement to split up the diseases and an exchange of phone numbers.

That first act doesn't formulate the groundwork for the last two through simple plotting, but by misdirection. Like a Hitchcock film, "Fight Club" hasn't yet offered us its second primary character - Tyler Durden (Pitt), a soap salesman who quickly becomes the narrator's savior after his apartment explodes. Over beers, Durden, played by Pitt as a self-styled, wildman experience aficionado, plugs into a main theme of the film: "The things you own ... end up owning you."

There is much talk of mothers, lost fathers, disconnection from God, the materialistic nature of a woman inhabiting and capturing a man's mind and spirit. Out of these frustrations is born "Fight Club," a beat-em-up merry-go-round of fists for the corporate drones like the narrator.

The concept of "Fight Club" as an anarchist response to the world pressures - there are rules (don't talk about it), there are rewards, there are comrades - is a brilliant set piece to explore, which Fincher, along with a script from Jim Uhls, do aptly, by slowly growing the bonds of the members above and beyond simple one-on-one matches.

Quite soon, the figurehead Durden has spearheaded Project Mayhem, a shadow prankster outfit bent on eliminating all that was beloved by the consumer. Fight clubs grow throughout the States; men speak of "the word of Tyler Durden." Where "Fight Club" succeeds so clearly in future viewing is drawing out, in speech and subtle acts, the growing of an underground dictator, which parallels the general rise of any unfriendly, militaristic outfit our world has known.

Face it: What in the United States, save the lack of depression, is so much different from that Germany which Adolf Hitler assumed control of with a small portion of the vote? Like Durden, Hitler chose the public works of the wealthy - in this case, Jews - to stake his claim on. Like Durden, Hitler instilled a sick pride in his denizens.

And like Hitler, Durden demands a certain look (all black), a certain secrecy (no names, no leaking, even to the leader). Like Hitler's "final solution" to reset the population to his like, Durden has a plan to reset everybody "back to zero." And where a financial depression does not exist, Durden creates another: "Our great war," he says, "is a spiritual war. Our great depression, is our lives."

This line is uttered not long before another massive fight, one of many bloody duels through the course of the film. The worst arrives when the narrator beats up a moon-faced underling (Jared Leto) to the point where he incurs permanent, pus-filled scars.

Considering the relative artistic undertones of Fincher's and Norton's aspirations with the film (both somehow see it as a high-line masculine version of "The Graduate," with Durden as Mrs. Robinson), the sheer gratuity of the violence seems out of place, too pulp for a movie with messages to spread. There's a key scene right after a fight, where one fight clubber basically acts as a butler for Durden, that gets lost in the aftershock of another beating, which says nothing for the beating from five minutes prior still buzzing. "Fight Club" is almost masochistic in its depiction of violence - it wants to extract pains and subversive pleasure in the same breath.

Which means there's some brooding undercurrent pulsing underneath that might not reside too far from Durden's persona itself. Depending on attentiveness, the crucial, buried twist regarding the relationship between the narrator and Durden can be detected rather quickly, and by the end of "Fight Club," we're quite aware that Durden and Co. have to be stopped in some form.

The implication of that twist doesn't hit the first time you see it - better to see it again and retrace how it affects the film's first act, which scenes were significant, which weren't. Far better than the invisible/nothing's real twist of "The Usual Suspects," "Fight Club's" revelation actually puts the opening hour into some sort of order, tracing the narrator's descent into something he's only beginning to grasp.

Norton's character correctly guesses Project Mayhem has gone too far in theory - though it has just begun to exert its force. And the solution to that problem is properly disturbing at first, then quirky, then, in the final shot, another jolt of juice, aptly closing a strange, piercing journey, one you want to take again, almost immediately.

Even I, disgusted by the fights, was drawn toward a second theater viewing for the commentary material. The fights, in the meantime, became the traffic accident you don't look away from and feel ashamed for not doing so.

In subsequent DVD viewings, I kept returning to the fights, appropriating the measure on the viewer. It wasn't so intense for everyone; some reviews didn't bother mentioning the gushing and bruising, even negative ones, which were far more willing to pounce on a wrongly-considered childish tone in the script. Enjoying the craft, even reveling in it as Fincher does, is too far from the spare, idealized version of European art house cinema that some critics champion.

The nonchalant attitude toward the violence is disturbing. For me, the depiction of the fight scenes were all that held me back from interacting with the intricate narrative. In the post-"Ryan" era, what wound can possibly be foreign to us, what sound can possibly be new? I shiver to know that, as a history lesson, children have seen that movie. I shiver, too, to know that others have seen "Fight Club," glossed over its high line message and become beholden to the word of Tyler Durden - that blood is the answer, that all should be reset back to zero.

Because while he is right about you not being your khakis, it takes a discerning mind to detect when he's become wrong. And while "Fight Club" has been rethought in my mind as a daring, bold vision of how dictators and maniacs are born, it doesn't necessarily tell the uncouth mind not to follow it. Rather, it's up to assumption.

And frankly, there's some paramilitary wings out there I'd rather didn't have that privilege.