En direct de St. John's University, Jamaica, New York...

THE SMALRUS WEB SITE v. 7.0

Fight Club Puts On a Good Show
by Spencer Ross

I remember going to see The Sixth Sense about two months ago and watching a preview for the movie Fight Club. It looked ridiculous, as the preview showed nothing but twentysomething men beating the snot out of each other. There seemed to be no substance to it and I must admit, I had some reluctance to wasting my money on seeing this movie if the only premise of the movie was a bunch of guys fighting. But on a four day weekend when there's not much better to do at night than to see a movie, I decided that I would heed the rave review of the friend who was with us, and take a gander at what I heard was a movie beyond simple underground brawls.

Studying some basic film technique in Mr. Duclos' English class, I was immediately pulled into the movie, as the director, David Fincher, begins the opening credits with a long take of electrical impulses in the the narrator's (played by Edward Norton) brain, through the body layers, and up to the end of Tyler Durden's (played by Brad Pitt) gun. There are various camera angles as well as multiple speeded up long takes all within the first few minutes of the movie. These techniques, along with the creative use of flashbacks and some exciting musical scoring by electronica DJs, The Dust Brothers, add a lot to the drama of the movie.

From the beginning, the narrator flashes back to how he got in the situation he was in. He is your stereotypical businessman in a liability firm, who feels like a drone and claims to suffer from insomnia. To help him sleep, he attends support meetings for people with tuberculosis, people with testicular cancer, and so forth, even though he has none of these diseases. He is a "tourist," and when he meets Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), another "tourist" to these groups, he cannot derive the same masochistic pleasure that he previously experienced. They part and on a business flight, the narrator meets the "most interesting single-serving friend" he'd ever need: Tyler Durden. Tyler has wit and a somewhat lax attitude about life. When the narrator's Ikea furnished apartment blows up, he needs a place to stay, so he calls Tyler and they go to the bar. After they leave, they start fighting with each other for fun, thus, the origin of Fight Club.

The theme of Fight Club and it's five rules are recurrant throughout the movie and show the making of an anti-consumerist, anti-self underground army of stereotypical GenX businessmen who learn that name brands aren't necessary for survival. In a society where we work to buy Nike, Abercrombie, and Mercedes, this movie puts a different spin on it all. "You are not your job. You are not how much money you make. You are not the car you drive. You are not the contents of your wallet," Tyler states, effectively summarizing most of the movie.

While there is a lot of fighting and even more blood lost, it does serve a purpose and only one person actually dies in the whole movie (a convincing performance by the great Meat Loaf). For an action movie, this is rare. The movie is rated R for the fighting, the blood, some sex, and obscenities, but is extremely well done. With all of the thought provoking ideas presented through the transformation of the narrator and a twisted ending, it makes for a movie that can easily be seen again to try to absorb it all. Fight Club is definitely five star material.