Fight Club: The Verdict

What a load of shit.

I enjoyed the first half of the film. I thought the protagonist's journey was interesting. Going to lots of support groups for problems he doesn't have, and feeling better because of it, is a novel scenario. The fact he can't enjoy it in the presence of another fraud is interesting too. His journey into Tyler's world is compelling and so is the gradual formation of the fight club as their unusual coping mechanism attracts more men.

What I found so interesting is the two psychological coping strategies "The Narrator" has. Firstly: talking about feelings, hugging each other, and crying, then later: consensually fighting other men also trying to cope. Funnily there is no support group for men who are lonely, single, unfulfilled, and bored at work — until the fight club is formed.

I don't consider myself very masculine, but I can understand the appeal of the fight club; I remember as a child feeling catharsis from hitting something or someone. I can believe the characters would tolerate being hurt due to self-loathing, or living devoid of strong emotion, or in exchange for the exhilaration of a fight. I can understand the appeal of becoming fit, bettering yourself, and becoming tolerant to pain in a world where it's unavoidable.

The film remaining to this day in the public consciousness I'm sure is due to the elements on truth in the fight club and Tyler's philosophy. Tolerating pain can strengthen you against future pain. People are often compelled to make positive change in response to dark periods of their life. Tyler uses these facts to force others to change, and his extreme methods make him an interesting but morally questionable character.

I'm sure Tyler's philosophy has very broad appeal among men. You can even see elements of it echoed on Ru Paul's Drag Race. Ru and other Queens will tell someone a harsh truth about their personal qualities and justify doing so as "lighting a fire up their ass" to motivate them to make positive change. The benefit of a culture of "shade" and "reading" is said to give each other thicker skin, an idea that evolved in a world hostile to gay people and drag queens.

It is difficult to argue against the fight club through a modern liberal lens. The violence at the fight club takes place between consenting adults who believe that it's a positive experience. If you are uncomfortable with it, as most will be, you have to say that these men don't know what's good for them and what problem the club causes.

My attempt is as follows: The way you choose to actively respond to stimuli feeds into the way that you automatically respond, therefore involvement in the fight club will lead one to become more aggressive. (We see this somewhat in the way The Narrator talks to his boss.) If you are angry or aggressive more often, you end up with more to cope with. The injury caused by the fighting is a problem in itself and other methods of coping without injury exist.

I was expecting the movie would explore some kind of critique of the fight club and find some way of giving the characters consequences for their involvement in it.

Instead, the second half of the film becomes about Tyler's cult of personality and it turning into a fascist terrorist cult with comically stupid devotees. The issues the film raises are sidestepped and replaced with a nonsense scenario that doesn't feel like a believable consequence of the fight club. The motivation for the terrorism is partly lighting fires under people's asses and partly trying to make extrinsic change through destroying credit records.

In the first half, Tyler inflicts trauma and then gives his rationale, but his terrorism isn't necessarily going to have the effect he wants because his verbal motivation is missing. In reality, if someone loses their apartment, it's likely that they'll just claim on the insurance and move elsewhere. When the narrator moves in with Tyler, it starts as a temporary arrangement that continues because he finds enjoyment in the lifestyle. I was convinced that The Narrator would radically alter his life to be less material but I'm not convinced that terrorism will cause that in others.

The reveal that The Narrator has a split personality made me roll my eyes. I hit pause and went off to do other things, came back, considered watching the rest and decided I would instead start my new year's resolution of going to bed earlier, which I hadn't bothered to attempt the previous 26 days.

I considered not watching the end just so I could express how bad I thought the film was. I sought advice online about whether to finish it and it was confirmed to me that the remaining thirty minutes weren't worth it. I did then finish it the next day because it was not too much of a time commitment and I didn't have anything else to watch on the go to watch with my dinner.

When a film has an unreliable narrator or misleads the audience, there is a risk that the audience will feel that nothing matters — anything you get invested in can be retroactively invalidated before you receive the payoff. At this point schizophrenia, split personalities, amnesia are trite tropes that audiences expect. These features require justification to not feel like a cheap trick that lets the writers do whatever they want.

• Memento gets a pass because the film is about following a guy with amnesia. It never lies to you, but it feeds you information in an order that is initially ambiguous and later clear.
• Brazil gets a pass because we are always brought back to reality and learn what is real.
• Shutter Island almost gets a pass, but there is no more reason to believe the reveal than anything prior. I don't think it's even intended to be left to interpretation. (I became convinced that the people safeguarding DiCaprio are just terrible at their job. I can enjoy films with sad endings, but *I* don't want to be worse off at the end. I would accept a cautionary tale / bright flame burning more briefly / a heroic sacrifice. Shutter Island's conclusion is unenjoyable just because it is and so I come away from it unhappy and unwilling to recommend it.)
• Black Swan gets a pass because it's the culmination of a film in which she descends into madness, struggling to overcome a fundamental aspect of herself, which she confronts.

In Fight Club, suddenly we can no longer have faith that any scene past or future will present the story accurately. The split personality further buries the interesting core of the film. Split personalities are more of a supernatural condition than a medical one in film; it's hard to be invested in something with unknown arbitrary rules.

There are several plot issues the split personality causes, which require mental gymnastics to accept. He gets on the plane with one suitcase; he doesn't realise it's full of soap until he opens it and shows it to himself. All he brings back from his trip is the soap he should be getting rid of (unless he imagines the soap as well), but also his luggage gets taken by security because presumably he puts something in there that buzzes. He sees from afar himself steal a car and drive off but he gets home without a car and finds his apartment exploded. He calls himself and picks up or imagines placing a call. Does he have a second mobile he doesn't know about? If his business number is for a landline, he would only be able to answer at night. Is the business card itself a hallucination? Punching himself in a car park wouldn't encourage people to punch each other. He's had multiple night jobs; when Tyler talks about them it makes sense, but not once you realise he doesn't need the money. Does Tyler have secret bank accounts? It's farfetched that he's living in two places at once. The film (I know it was a book first) wants to have its cake and eat it too by setting up a plot twist with a story that only makes sense without it.

He solves his split personality problem by having a fight with himself and then shooting himself in the head a bit. It's unconvincing that this would make Tyler completely go away. For some reason the film's actual resolution has him solve a psychological issue through violence and self-harm, even after it shows the fight club descend into violent chaos. What am I supposed to make of this? Am I supposed to take nothing away from the film? It doesn't start like throwaway entertainment. Am I supposed to not ask questions and just enjoy the punching and explosions? (The explosions at the end weren't in the book btw.) The film could make it seem that The Narrator's only problems were the cult and his split personality; it could seem that joining a fight club is superior to therapy since The Narrator and Bob abandon therapy and relish the fight club.

He also gets the girl. Why??? She said she's finished with him. Her concern about his injuries doesn't invalidate those feelings. Blowing up lots of buildings will not make her no longer fed up with his chaoticness. It's not explicit that they will carry on seeing each other, but I think that's what is implied the way they are filmed together at the end.

I know a lot of my criticism is: I expected it to be one way and it wasn't, but I think that's justified given how refreshing and meaningful the first half was only to become something trite and pointless.

Go into it knowing that only the first half is good /10