I Want You to Hit Me as Hard as You Can

Back in '99, when I saw the preview for Fight Club, I marveled at Brad Pitt uttering that line and vowed to see the movie. Wifezilla, who viewed the same preview I did, groaned and tried to get out of not going. But I dragged her anyway. Fight Club was on HBO this weekend so I had an opportunity to see if I still enjoyed it as much as I did eight years ago.

Fight Club does not disappoint. It's about as perfect as any movie I've seen. Great beginning, flawless middle, grand slam ending. The acting, top-notch. This was the first movie featuring Brad Pitt where he didn't annoy the hell out of me. I remember seeing Legends of the Fall and hoping throughout the movie he'd fall off his horse or have his flowing locks shaved off. But in Fight Club, he nailed the role of hedonistic Durden. I also happen to think that Ed Norton is overrated in most every movie he's been it, but he's the perfect counter to Pitt in this flick. It's a shame they haven't done a few more projects together.

What I like most about Fight Club is that it's a splinter movie: people either love it or hate it. And most people hate it. I like being in the minority that like it. The people that hate the movie usually shut it off well before the surprise twist. Their loss to be sure, but the twist isn't my favorite part. What I like most about Fight Club is what it has to say about men living in the world today. I relish the beginning of the movie where Tyler (the Ed Norton one) frequents self-help groups to fill the emptiness inside him. He's a pathetic shell of man, a consumer of IKEA products, a mindless zombie at work, a "tourist" to use his own vernacular against him. The testicular cancer group is the most damning testament of men in the movie, a circle of emotional, vulnerable men discussing their feelings, weeping uncontrollably as they hold each other closely. Wallowing in the detris of modern life and disconnected from his own masculinity, Tyler Durden suddenly just . . . snaps in the middle of all this, creates an alter-ego who operates outside of his emasculated slumber. The duality he imposes on himself abandons his self-loathing and ricochets the completely opposite direction, forming a club whose sole purpose is to punch and hit and kick fellow men until teeth fly and blood sprays. To what end? Maybe no end. Or maybe to feel alive. To awaken too.

Awaken what? I guess the barbarian all men have inside them from thousands of years of evolution. Or maybe just that urge to push back once a certain philosophical line has been crossed, the "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" tact. It may seem that I admire the violence the movie presents. And maybe I do, at some basic instinctual level (to be clear, I haven't thrown a punch in anger since middle school). But I think it's too simple to theorize that men require violence to make their lives complete. The movie takes that stance to make a point, but I don't necessarily think it seriously advocates it. Instead, the movie is about fulfillment if it's about anything, carving out meaning within life.

This is what makes the movie so great. It spawns a necessary conversation about what it means to be a man nowadays. The movie doesn't necessarily put forth that men have to give in to a primal rage and beat each other weekly. Instead, to make a point, it exaggerates what happens when men bottle the rage fueled by the pressures of everyday life. Through the miserable Tyler Durden, Fight Club theorizes that the Information Age has blunted within men what once used to be sharp, that we sometimes resemble a shadow of men that came before us, that we walk around our daily lives asleep, adrift. There can be no better metaphor for this than the idea of Tyler waking up from his own stupor by punching himself in the face.

Is violence really the answer to the civilized man's plight of stress and pain?

I am Jack's psychoanalytical review of Fight Club.