My Life at the Movies 3.24.09: 1999 - Fight Club
Posted by DC Perry on 03.24.2009
This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time. You wake up at Air Harbor International. If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?
1999 was a big year for disaffection with consumerism. The economy was soaring on the back of the dot-com do-nothing economy, and something in the air told us it was all too good to be true. The Matrix painted a bleak picture of the end of humanity at the hands of our own technology. American Beauty showed us the disastrously impotent life of a suicidal, suburban advertising executive. But the most visceral tap into the over-pampered, suffocated, unreal existence of modern America is a movie with eight simple rules.
1999 at a Glance
US President: Bill Clinton
Median annual salary: $39,973
Gallon of gas: $1.17
Dozen eggs: $1.08
New house: $195,800
New car: $19,992
Movie ticket: $5.08
Boston Red Sox: 94-68, second place, American League East
Me: Working in a used bookstore and doing exciting telephone-based market research.
Our protagonist (Edward Norton), a man with many names and no names, but who we'll call Cornelius, has insomnia. He's sleepwalking through his plastic fantastic, workaday world, and no amount of drugs or television can give him any rest. The only thing he finds that does give him peace are the support groups he crashes. He poses as a victim of a variety of cancers and other fatal ailments, finding catharsis in the open display of emotion. After a good cry, he can sleep. It doesn't last, though. Another tourist, Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), is using the groups just like he is, and the exposure destroys his ability to cry, which brings back his insomnia. The two agree to split the groups, but on a business trip, our protagonist finds something even better than ascending colon cancer.
How's that working out for you? Being clever.
His perfect Ikea catalog condo is destroyed in a fireball, and after an aborted attempt to call Marla for a place to stay, he calls his newfound friend, soap salesman and soapbox ranter Tyler Durden (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000093/Brad Pitt). Tyler agrees to take him into his run down ramshackle house on one condition – he wants him to hit him as hard as he can. A life without scars is a life without meaning, and a life with Ikea furniture is most definitely a life without scars. More and more men get in on this self-destructive ritual, and our nameless protagonist begins to feel the power and sense of purpose return.
Well, you did lose a lot of versatile solutions for modern living.
Marla notices Cornelius has been missing his support groups, which she's been sneaking into, and calls him with a cry-for-help suicide attempt. He leaves the phone off the hook, and the next thing he knows, Tyler and Marla are fucking. And fucking. It seems like it will never stop, and he's caught in the middle, passing messages between them during their passive aggressive non-fucking time. Marla continually advances on Cornelius with her quirky affection, and reacts angrily when he rebuffs her.
Slide.
He and Tyler live in their crumbling house, discussing God's abandonment and which celebrity they'd like to fight, making their minimal ends meet by making designer soap from fat they steal from the local liposuction clinic. Cornelius' work life is deteriorating, his interest in the corporate, consumerist American dwindling as he discovers the freedom of violence. He shrewdly negotiates a new position for himself as an outside consultant who never reveals the company's darkest secrets, exploiting his manager's fear of violence and security's assumption that no one would ever inflict it on himself.
For some reason, I thought of my first fight with Tyler.
Tyler begins giving the Fight Club members homework assignments – innocuous at first, like picking and losing a fight with a stranger, to spread that delightful feeling of empowerment. Slowly, the assignments get more and more destructive, and Fight Clubs crop up farther and farther from home. Fight Club morphs into Project Mayhem, and when Tyler puts a gun to a store clerk's head to terrify him into doing something with his life, Cornelius realizes he has lost whatever bit of control he had.
You have a kind of sick desperation in your laugh.
Tyler starts accepting trainees for Project Mayhem into the house, and when it all grows too much for Cornelius, he and Tyler fight, and after a car wreck and a fever dream, he wakes up to find that Tyler has left. Project Mayhem continues without him, but when his long-time support group friend Bitch-Tits Bob (Meat Loaf) is killed on a mission, he can't let it go on any longer. He finds Tyler's plane tickets and follows him, finding Fight Club after Fight Club, and learns something deeply unsettling about Tyler Durden.
We have just lost cabin pressure.
Tyler Durden is Walt Whitman's barbaric yawp. Tyler Durden is a chemical burn on the back of your hand. Tyler Durden is the abandonment of materialism. And of course, Tyler Durden is our protagonist. Tyler Durden has been blinking into the periphery of the frame throughout the movie, flashing up at his greatest moments of stress and emotional disturbance. He calls Marla, who confirms his fears, and all of her irrational reactions to his disinterest come into focus. He passes out from the shock, and wakes up to find that Tyler has used his absence to plan a massive Project Mayhem attack on several major credit card corporations. He tries to undo Tyler's plans, but he is knocked unconscious and, after a Tyler Durden-induced gunshot wound through the side of his face leaves him maimed but Tyler-free, is left with Marla to watch the collapse of the financial machine.
One step closer to economic equilibrium.
Fight Club hits a raw nerve, appealing to the urge to disconnect from the false, constructed, safely modern world. We value things over experience, our wardrobe over our integrity, our safety over our freedom. Tyler Durden represents that indulgence of chaos, but when left unchecked, he becomes mayhem. One removes us from control of our lives as much as the other. The freedom the protagonist feels as he first starts Fight Club, that disconnection from his workaday life, makes him feel powerful, above it all. But as it morphs into something more irrational, something more barbaric, he watches it careen out of his control more than his boss's cornflower blue ties and icons ever could. He finds an anchor in Marla, a middle ground between chaos and conformity. In Marla, he finds the intimacy and catharsis he sought in the therapy groups that she chased him away from. That ambiguous treatment of the modern consumerist condition and its unsatisfying resolution, as well as the slow, satisfying unraveling of both the plot twist and the narrator's psyche, make Fight Club the best movie of 1999.
