Fight Club is an exhausting film. Years of heated discourse and malicious fandom have made it so, its miscalculations laid bare by the legacy it has earned. Inheriting the pulp narrative of Chuck Palahniuk's source novel, the movie is a failed satire, critique made incoherent by cinematic idioms where the visceral appeal of style is at odds with necessary intellectual remove. The love many feel for it is still easy to understand, whether it's masked by irony or proudly defended. David Fincher's bravura filmmaking makes toxicity seem cool, kinetic and self-aware. Though, Fight Club seduces too well and, in the end, is unable to bat away its lovers with some feeble pretension of dissected masculinity.
If 4chan had a cinematic embodiment, here it is, as gloriously enraged as it is putrid and entitled, shallowness dressed in a costume of depth. Quite frankly, it's even exhausting to write about the thing. Maybe because so much has been written already. After so much discussion of its theme, intent and Mephistophelean stylings, I propose we discuss an element of the picture that's rarely examined – the art of acting Fight Club…
In the eye of the hurricane that is the critical evaluation of Fight Club, it's sometimes difficult to find a great many words about the work of its cast. Considering how maddeningly watchable it is, how serpentine its ideas can be, one shouldn't fault the cinephile that gives more attention to those elements rather than the actors. Still, the movie wouldn't work as well as it does if its players were any less prodigious. From the leads to the bit players, everyone is excellently cast and in tune with Fincher's fractured vision. That said, in the name of brevity, let's just focus on the three leads (or is it just two?).
As the nameless protagonist, Edward Norton might seem nebulous and undefined, but the blurriness is more purposeful than incidental. Since the movie is intrinsically connected to the man's psyche, always showing us the world filtered through these insomniac's mad eyes, it's only logical that the performance is as amorphous as the picture that contains it. In that regard, the choice of Norton is inspired, for he was always shown to have intensity to spare, especially when it manifests as brazen hostility. Here, all that fiery power is poured into an inchoate form, devoid of identity but rich in angst. He's male aggression personified.
However, that same testosterone-fueled rage is not glamourous to watch. Norton plays the nebbish man who's angry at women and the consumerist void of society, the asshole that needs someone to point him in the direction of bloody catharsis. The nameless man is a follower, not a leader. If you're looking for leadership and guidance, Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden is your man. Dressed in red leathers and gaudy patterns, his brow glistening with dirt and sweat, he's a Godly vision, a messiah of cum stained anarchy (or is it fascism?). Tyler is also the first great creation of Brad Pitt, the movie star.
After years of building his fame and trying to prove his chops as an actor, Brad Pitt was a fully formed phenomenon by the time Fight Club came around. In his previous Fincher collaboration, Se7en, the actor had constructed a careful characterization, full of aching humanity and personalized ticks. As Tyler, on the other hand, he's not making a human being out of a screenplay mechanism, he's sculpting his movie star magnetism into the shape of a false messiah. Tyler is the id to the nameless man's psyche, raw and devilishly sexy, a siren song we're all too willing to follow, even if it leads to hell.
Against the coherent incoherence of these two fragments of man, Helena Bonham Carter plays Marla Singer, an unexpected reality-check made up like one of the actress' trademark weirdos. Of course, in the history of Carter's career, this is the first of those weirdos. Regardless, Marla's quite the character, a live-wire of disruption, chaos smeared with kohl and the only sane person in the narrative. Barely hiding her British accent and fidgeting about in constant disarray, Carter is also the only element of the film that feels genuinely unpredictable. Her somersaulting through disparate tones and abrupt line readings are particularly odd, rubbing against the formalistic perfection of David Fincher's directing.
The insomniac, the id and the goddess of chaos, these are the performances that helped make Fight Club into the cultural touchstone that it is. Let's celebrate them for they are great, even if the film they belong to isn't (or is it?).
Fight Club (1999) is now streaming on HBO