BP’s Top 100 Movie Challenge #100: Fight Club, by Sarah Brinks
I’ve decided to undertake a movie challenge in 2017. This seems like a good way to see some classic movies that I have tragically never seen. The Battleship Pretension Top 100 list has a good number of films I haven’t seen before so it is a good source for my challenge.
You too can join the 2017 BP’s Top 100 Movie Challenge. It’s easy. Just watch each of the 100 films on the BP top 100 list from 100 to 1. It will end up roughly equaling two movies a week from the list each week of the year. It’d be great to hear your thoughts in the comments each week.
Even though it is breaking the first and second rule of Fight Club, I am going to talk about Fight Club. This is a doozy a film to start with, I saw this film back in 1999 when it was released and did not like it. Though I wasn’t in a hurry to see Fight Club again I was curious if my opinion would have changed in the 17 years since I first saw it. I will say the film is improved by two things: knowing the twist ending and time/perspective. David Fincher is an interesting director whose films more often than not work for me, Fight Club is a notable exception. It was a little better watching it knowing that Tyler Durden and The Narrator are the same person and seeing the fun ways they hint at it throughout the film gave me something to focus on while I watched it. Time also helps this film. In one of Durden’s speeches he refers to this generation (my generation) as the “middle children of history.” We do not have a Great War or depression to define us. September 11th and the 2008 recession have happened since then but they still have not united us for or against a single cause. Seeing how men of the 90’s felt impotent in some way as the century was about to change and materialism was rampant was interesting with hindsight.
The film’s rampant misogyny and machismo is still a big problem for me. With the exception of Helena Bonham Carter as Marla and a few women in the various support groups, there are no women in the film. Granted that a chisel-chested, shirtless Brad Pitt is nice for the ladies the film is really targeted to men. The testosterone-driven violence, the abandonment of material possessions, the push-back on society’s mores all feels distinctly male (though I do not claim to speak for all men or women here). The speeches when Durden tells his army that they are not their wallets or that they can find their potential by fighting are not messages that resonated with me in 1999 or now. I agree that materialism is not a good quality but I don’t think abandoning society or fighting will fix the world’s problems or my own.
I can understand why this film works for a lot of people and it is very well made and acted but I really think there was a better film out there to put on the Battleship Pretension top 100 list. I can at least take comfort that it is in the 100th slot.
I have decided to rate each of the films on the list using an arbitrary scale based on the board game Battleship (lowest: Destroyer, Submarine, Cruiser, Battleship, highest: Carrier).
Fight Club Battleship Rank: Destroyer (sink away!)
I didn’t think the film was an endorsement of Tyler Durden’s philosophy. I always interpreted it to be a cautionary tale against the cult of personality, that while the problems he cites are valid (globalism has left generations adrift), his solutions are terrible. But, like Mad Men, so many have romanticized the film as some kind of plan of action. It became the thing it railed against, but I don’t think it was the fault of Palahniuk or Fincher.
It’s been said before (I think Tyler and David have discussed it multiple times, along with GoodFellas) but I think the big problem with Fight Club is that fans have taken its surface themes and ideas for truth and missed any satire. You can say Fincher and co. are partly to blame for laying the style on so thick that it’s easy to get lost in the gloss and energy of it all, but to call the film misogynist is – I think – to misinterpret the film in the other direction.
I fall in the camp of thinking the execution ultimately fails but probably not for a lack of good intentions on Fincher’s part. Just judging by the results, I think it shares a similar tone-deafness to Snyder’s Watchmen adaptation, although admittedly not as egregious, which is a shame because I do believe Snyder to have been genuinely misguided whereas I’d like to give Fincher the benefit of the doubt.
Your note on its take on gender reminded me of Vox Day’s essay (more about the book than the film), which claimed the homoerotocism was so overt it shouldn’t even be called subtext. Of course, he wrote that after Palahniuk had already been outed, and there’s no way to verify his claim that he’d deduced as much by the first chapter.
As you go through the films please keep a ranking so that at the end you’ll have your own top100.
I agree with the previous commenters who point out the movie is NOT sympathetic to Tyler Durden. The Narrator’s journey takes him from one extreme (consumerism and materialism) to the other (nihilism and anarchy). The fact that Tyler Durden is just another element of his personality is not a cheap “gotcha” moment; it’s a reflection of the fact that the Narrator tries to solve his problems by turning within, rather than reaching out for a human connection, as represented by Marla.
Admittedly I haven’t seen the film in probably a decade, but even when I was in high school I think I recognized the fact that Durden was not representative of any kind of solution to society’s woes and should not be accepted as such, at least not wholesale. His philosophizing was sexy but immature and overly simplistic and Fincher counts on the audience to parse that out for themselves rather than telling them what to think.
So the movie isn’t that of value to you just because there is only 1 female character? Did you seem to forget that the 1 female character plays one of the most significant parts in the movie? Funnily enough, the movie is also a critique on masculinity, while you have heavily implied that the movie is “macho” and “misogynism”. The true message of the movie is heavily misunderstood, which is what also makes fight club such a piece of art of a film.
This is such a horrible take lol.