movie review - Fight Club
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
This is a movie about an insomniac insurance adjuster who is locked in a consumerist distraction. He has a psychotic break, and takes on two personalities. One is everything he wants to be, the other is the one that occupies most of his day. Through a long sequence of unlikely events our man (and his doppelganger) take the idea of getting what he wants out of life in a strange destructive path. He amasses a cult following of warriors willing to do his dirty work as he plans to bring society down and start again.
There are three things that don't work for me for this movie.
1. You can't wipe out financial records by blowing up office towers. Even when this movie was made, this was clear. You would need to target the data centers, the read-only data vaults that store the backups, the paper records, and probably other sources. Secondly, wiping out credit card records would do nothing to deal with the central problem the "protagonist" was attempting to overcome, which was the meaningless of his life in the context of consumerism and capitalism. I couldn't even fathom the linkage.
2. Nothing this complex and dangerous plan would have worked in the shroud of secrecy as depicted, virulently recruiting a substantial minority of men in the country. The types of guys depicted here would have been exactly the type of coke- or pill-heads around which you cannot found a conspiracy.
3. I feel pretty certain that this is not a clever story of men finding their way in a world that increasingly diminishes our supposed heroic path, it is about lashing out and simultaneously pursuing that old past when never was. That superficial take, which I am afraid many people attribute to the movie, is exactly what the unnamed hero is trying to quash by the end. He understands that the violence resolves nothing, and is not a valid extension of the pranking that he felt worked in the context of a meaningless world. It was my clear impression watching this thing that even though the main character undergoes a strong personality schism his strongly punk rejection of the consumer/worker-slave lifestyle and the over-the-top fight club was effective in liberating him. He didn't need the violent overthrow of society to liberate him. I feel that the movie simply rushed his awakening and left waaaay too many viewers with these under-developed final thoughts. I was with the hero until the violent plotting began, and I think the hero was with us through the whole thing but 9/10 viewers weren't.
I first watched this in the cinema in April of 2000. I can see I wasn't thinking very critically about it at the first viewing, which is fine. But things have changed and the various incel and right-wing insanity that has attached itself to this movie (again, in my view mistakenly) is a problem.
Not recommended.