Educational reasons for upload

1. One of the most influential critics in the US at the time Fight club was released was
Roger Ebert. He described Fight Club as ‘Cheerfully fascist and macho porn’ - ‘the
sex movie Hollywood has been heading towards for years’ in which the eroticism
between the sexes is replaced by all-guy locker-room fights. (Full report below)
Fight Club
Release Date: 1999
Ebert Rating: **
By Roger Ebert Oct 15, 1999
"Fight Club" is the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since "Death
Wish," a celebration of violence in which the heroes write themselves a license to
drink, smoke, screw and beat one another up. Sometimes, for variety, they beat up
themselves. It's macho porn -- the sex movie Hollywood has been moving toward for
years, in which eroticism between the sexes is replaced by all-guy locker-room fights.
Women, who have had a lifetime of practice at dealing with little-boy posturing, will
instinctively see through it; men may get off on the testosterone rush. The fact that it
is very well made and has a great first act certainly clouds the issue. Edward
Norton stars as a depressed urban loner filled up to here with angst. He describes his
world in dialogue of sardonic social satire. His life and job are driving him crazy. As
a means of dealing with his pain, he seeks out 12-step meetings, where he can hug
those less fortunate than himself and find catharsis in their suffering. It is not without
irony that the first meeting he attends is for post-surgical victims of testicular cancer,
since the whole movie is about guys afraid of losing their cojones. These early
scenes have a nice sly tone; they're narrated by the Norton character in the kind of
voice Nathanael West used in Miss Lonelyhearts. He's known only as the Narrator,
for reasons later made clear. The meetings are working as a sedative, and his life is
marginally manageable when tragedy strikes: He begins to notice Marla (Helena
Bonham Carter) at meetings. She's a "tourist" like himself--someone not addicted to
anything but meetings. She spoils it for him. He knows he's a faker, but wants to
believe everyone else's pain is real. On an airplane, he has another key encounter,
with Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a man whose manner cuts through the fog. He seems
able to see right into the Narrator's soul, and shortly after, when the Narrator's high-
rise apartment turns into a fireball, he turns to Tyler for shelter. He gets more than
that. He gets in on the ground floor of Fight Club, a secret society of men who meet in
order to find freedom and self-realization through beating one another into
pulp. It's at about this point that the movie stops being smart and savage and witty,
and turns to some of the most brutal, unremitting, nonstop violence ever filmed.
Although sensible people know that if you hit someone with an ungloved hand hard
enough, you're going to end up with broken bones, the guys in "Fight Club" have fists
of steel, and hammer one another while the sound effects guys beat the hell out of
Naugahyde sofas with Ping-Pong paddles. Later, the movie takes still another turn. A
lot of recent films seem unsatisfied unless they can add final scenes that redefine the
reality of everything that has gone before; call it the Keyser Soze syndrome. What is
all this about? According to Durden, it is about freeing yourself from the shackles of
modern life, which imprisons and emasculates men. By being willing to give and
receive pain and risk death, Fight Club members find freedom. Movies like "Crash"
must play like cartoons for Durden. He's a shadowy, charismatic figure, able to

2. inspire a legion of men in big cities to descend into the secret cellars of a Fight Club
and beat one another up. Only gradually are the final outlines of his master plan
revealed. Is Tyler Durden in fact a leader of men with a useful philosophy? "It's only
after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," he says, sounding like a
man who tripped over the Nietzsche display on his way to the coffee bar in Borders.
In my opinion, he has no useful truths. He's a bully--Werner Erhard plus S & M, a
leather club operator without the decor. None of the Fight Club members grows
stronger or freer because of their membership; they're reduced to pathetic cultists.
Issue them black shirts and sign them up as skinheads. Whether Durden represents
hidden aspects of the male psyche is a question the movie uses as a loophole--but is
not able to escape through, because "Fight Club" is not about its ending but about its
action. Of course, "Fight Club" itself does not advocate Durden's philosophy. It is
a warning against it, I guess; one critic I like says it makes "a telling point about the
bestial nature of man and what can happen when the numbing effects of day-to-day
drudgery cause people to go a little crazy." I think it's the numbing effects of movies
like this that cause people go to a little crazy. Although sophisticates will be able to
rationalize the movie as an argument against the behavior it shows, my guess is that
audience will like the behavior but not the argument. Certainly they'll buy tickets
because they can see Pitt and Norton pounding on each other; a lot more people will
leave this movie and get in fights than will leave it discussing Tyler Durden's moral
philosophy. The images in movies like this argue for themselves, and it takes a lot of
narration (or Narration) to argue against them. Lord knows the actors work hard
enough. Norton and Pitt go through almost as much physical suffering in this movie
as Demi Moore endured in "G.I. Jane," and Helena Bonham Carter creates a feisty
chain-smoking hellcat who is probably so angry because none of the guys thinks
having sex with her is as much fun as a broken nose. When you see good actors in a
project like this, you wonder if they signed up as an alternative to
canyoneering. The movie was directed by David Fincher and written by Jim Uhls,
who adapted the novel by Chuck Palahniuk. In many ways, it's like Fincher's movie
"The Game" (1997), with the violence cranked up for teenage boys of all ages. That
film was also about a testing process in which a man drowning in capitalism (Michael
Douglas) has the rug of his life pulled out from under him and has to learn to fight for
survival. I admired "The Game" much more than "Fight Club" because it was really
about its theme, while the message in "Fight Club" is like bleeding scraps of Socially
Redeeming Content thrown to the howling mob. Fincher is a good director (his work
includes "Alien 3," one of the best-looking bad movies I have ever seen, and "Seven,"
the grisly and intelligent thriller). With "Fight Club" he seems to be setting himself
some kind of a test--how far over the top can he go? The movie is visceral and hard-
edged, with levels of irony and commentary above and below the action. If it had all
continued in the vein explored in the first act, it might have become a great film. But
the second act is pandering and the third is trickery, and whatever Fincher thinks the
message is, that's not what most audience members will get. "Fight Club" is a thrill
ride masquerading as philosophy--the kind of ride where some people puke and others
can't wait to get on again.
Background reading:
Fascist: Fascists believe that a nation is an organic community that requires strong
leadership, singular collective identity, and the will and ability to commit violence

3. and wage war in order to keep the nation strong. They claim that culture is created by
the collective national society and its state, that cultural ideas are what give
individuals identity, and thus they reject individualism. Viewing the nation as an
integrated collective community, they see pluralism as a dysfunctional aspect of
society, and justify a totalitarian state as a means to represent the nation in its entirety.
Fascists advocate the creation of a single-party state. Fascist governments forbid and
suppress opposition to the fascist state and the fascist movement.
Robert von Dassanowsky identifies Fight Club, alongside The Talented Mr. Ripley
and Hannibal, as an American film released at the turn of the 21st century that
examines European fascism through cinematic metaphor and explores fascism's
cultural and sexual politics. Fight Club's portrayal of the paramilitary Project Mayhem
represents a response to the feminization of America, and the portrayal is reminiscent
of the creation of Nazism in response to the "decadent" Weimar Republic of
Germany. In the film, the counter to the feminized male is a model of male that is "an
identity-less, violent and destructively nihilistic cadre that intends to discipline a
world gone too tolerant." The paramilitary members' processing of human fat from
liposuction into designer soap is a Holocaust reference "if ever there was one." The
process surpasses in potency Soylent Green's premise of processing people into food.
Dassanowsky writes, "[It] is not only possible and marketable in the real world, but
the very concept of this postmodern self-improvement elitism derives from the most
horrific inhumanity in human history."
The film's embodiment of the crisis of masculinity is former bodybuilder Bob
Paulson, played by Meat Loaf. As a result of steroid abuse, Paulson has lost his
testicles, developed "bitch tits," and become estranged from his family. His body and
spirit are crippled by failed modernity's science and technology. He embodies how
traditional patriarchy is being lost and how his generation fears feminization.
Dassanowsky summarizes.
"Without his testicles and with female breasts Bob has become the extreme metaphor
for middle-class, male-led panic in the postmodern era, a setting that features a
recasting of the same factors of interwar German angst: dehumanization through
(post)modernity and its technology: international economic and geopolitical
instability; and lack of trust in social and political concepts and/or the national
identity and role."
Paulson is killed accidentally while participating in one of Project Mayhem's "urban
terrorist" operations. In his death, he becomes "a mythical icon" who receives his
name back, having previously gone nameless like other members of the Project. The
scenario retells how Nazi activist Horst Wessel's own accidental death was exploited
by the Nazi movement to portray Wessel as a fallen hero. Dassanowsky observes the
effect of Paulson's death and the response to it, "Mythology and the constructed
enemy against which Bob perished in battle obscure the Fight Club's reactionary
'revolution.'" Another member of Project Mayhem, Angel Face (played by Jared
Leto), is disfigured by the narrator in Sadean destruction "of the 'normal' or ideal as
sexual act." The disfigurement signifies how "there is no symbolic Other that is
victimized or battles fascist oppression." The narrator himself is unable to recognize
his actions as Tyler Durden. He attempts to rid himself of Durden, which is
metaphoric of "the post-war trauma in dealing with fascist destruction." Fascism
arises when humans fear inadequacy and losing social control. Audiences respond
eagerly to the film's presentation of fascism, having a base desire "to experience the

4. forbidden, to see the cornerstones of industry dynamited and collapse." Fight Club
concludes with the narrator and his female companion watching Project Mayhem's
successful detonation of buildings that hold credit card information to reset society's
debt. Dassanowsky writes of the conclusion, "The ecstasy of a fresh start that can not
be reversed... as the Narrator and Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) hold hands
while the buildings sink, [is] as potentially wish-fulfilling as any hyperthyroid
promise Hitler may have made to a tired and bruised nation in 1933. (Ref: Wikipedia)
Answer the following questions:
1.Do you think Fight club is a fascist film? What elements in the film do you think
Ebert is referring to?
2.What is meant by the phase ‘the sex movie Hollywood has been heading towards
for years’? What does this suggest about the representation of women in Hollywood
films?
3.How could Fight club be seen as a sexist film?