Fight Club - A Controversial Movie

"The first rule of Fight Club is…you do not talk about Fight Club". Let’s break this rule, though, since it’s a really good and interesting movie. It is in fact an adaptation of the novel of the same name, published in 1996 and written by Chuck Palahniuk. The 1999 movie was directed by David Fincher, starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter as main characters. It has been one of the most discussed and controversial movie of 1999. It has in fact inspired people to set up fight clubs in the U.S.

The main hero who is also the narrator, works in a car company and goes to accident sites to make cost appraisals with a view to product recalls. He suffers from insomnia, but his doctor refuses to prescribe him any medication, suggesting him to frequent a support group for testicular cancer, to see what true suffering really means. Apparently, this helps him get his sleep back, and so decides to go to more such support groups and fake all sorts of deadly diseases. When he meets another impostor in the person of Marla Singer, his insomnia comes back.

While flying on one of his business trips, the narrator encounters Tyler Durden, who claims to be "selling soap" for his living. When he gets back home, the narrator finds out his condo was destroyed in a blow-up. After escaping the police, he calls Tyler who offers him a place to stay if he agrees to "hit him as hard as he can". The narrator thus discovers that violence, aggression is a way of releasing all the stress, pressure, frustrations or any other issues a Post-modernist man might have. After attracting a crowd during one of their fights, the two set up an illegal fight club in the basement of a bar.

Marla Singer, another interesting figure in the movie, is obsessed with dying. At some point, she takes an overdose of Xanax and asks for help. Tyler saves her, and the two get involved in a relationship. But Tyler asks the narrator never to talk to him about that woman or their relationship. Tyler takes the leadership of fight club, and the whole thing gains amazing proportions, and the official authorities seem to secretly support such actions. The two main heroes start what they call "Project Mayhem", which is aimed at the capitalist, consumerist city society. Tyler and the narrator have an argument, and Tyler disappears, and after one of their disciples, or "space monkeys", as Tyler calls them, is killed in one of their actions, the narrator decides to put an end to Project Mayhem. But he finds out the situation is far more complicated than he thought, and that surprisingly many people, from all walks of life, are on Tyler’s side. The narrator starts on a journey around the country, and discovers that a great deal of fight clubs have been established all over it, and that Tyler’s figure is worshipped all over the place. The even more surprising thing is that everybody identifies the narrator with Tyler Durden, even Marla Singer. He thus realizes he is a split personality, and that Tyler Durden is nothing but an alter-ego of his. Tyler appears again to explain to him how he controls his body when he is asleep.

The narrator also finds out about Tyler’s interventions to blow up the headquarters of some major credit card companies, in order to weaken financial networks. He tries to stop him, or stop himself, so he has a sort of murder-suicide gesture at the end of the movie. The narrator gets rid of Tyler, he reconciles with Marla, and the two end up watching through the windows how an entire city block of financial networks is exploding.

The movie certainly raises many issues concerning our contemporary world, the search for true identity in a world where "everything is a copy of a copy of a copy." Some of the main messages in this movie seem to be that "only when you lose everything, you have the right to do anything", or "the things you own end up owning you." A bit scary, yet they give you food for thought.