Fulfillment at the end of a fist

With Fight Club, Edward Norton, Brad Pitt and director David Fincher create a mysterious movie about people hooked on beating each other up

by MATTHEW HAYS

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It's a very odd scene unfolding before me. Uber-hunk Brad Pitt and thespian Edward Norton are sinking into their seats at a swank Beverly Hills hotel. They couldn't seem more different. Norton, having shed all those extra beefy pounds he gained for his Oscar-nominated role in American History X, is seemingly introverted, unconventionally good-looking, with a cerebral appeal.

Pitt, dressed in a tight yellow T-shirt, with cell phone clinging to khakis, is more outgoing, with a face perfectly suited to the camera, and an appeal that is, well, something other than cerebral.

But here they are, finishing each other's sentences, talking as if in some kind of intensely rehearsed defence of their latest film, the much buzzed-about Fight Club.

Their cohesion is fitting and certainly reflective of the film's plotline. Norton plays the film's unnamed narrator, a young man on the cusp of 30, who finds himself unmoored and adrift while at a corporate job with a perfect apartment. In one of the film's most arresting sequences, Norton maneuvers through his pad, which becomes a living, breathing Ikea catalogue before our eyes. Norton has consumed, and dammit, he's consumed right.

But amid all the creature comforts, Norton's character finds his soul is in a bad spot. Unable to sleep, he soon finds solace visiting every self-help group meeting advertised in the local paper. Drug abusers, testicular-cancer-survivors--you name it, Norton is attending them all.



STAYING ALIVE

Norton truly feels alive, however, after meeting up with Tyler Durden (Pitt), a bizarre renegade who makes soap from the gunk they suck out of people during liposuction (he burgles the dumpster of the local plastic surgery clinic) and also moonlights as a projectionist (intercutting a few frames of a penis shot into the final moments of family films, just to shake up the audience).

Pitt, an unwieldy, no-holds-barred id, is everything Norton is not. Thus Norton becomes infatuated with him. And the two discover a new way to experience life fully: they begin to punch the living shit out of each other.

In a film that becomes at once a snapshot of a generation completely cynicallized by bombardment advertising and a vicious satire of the era of New Age self help, Norton and Pitt find fulfillment--at the end of a fist. Building their own secret society, the Fight Club they establish soon catches on across America, as a secret underground of the alienated who are determined to do everything against the grain.

"This film felt much more real to my generation than a lot of those Gen X films," says Norton. "The Reality Bites versions of us, for example. I felt like Fight Club really came down to the despair and paralysis that people feel about being handed this value system born out of advertising. I felt like this was the Rebel Without a Cause for my generation."

Pitt concurs: "I get a sense that people are watching TV, sitting there, but not a part of anything. This is about people trying, desperately, to feel something, anything."



THROUGH A LENS, DARKLY

Indeed, maverick director David Fincher--who cut his teeth on commercials and music videos before directing features like Alien3, Seven and The Game--felt something very strong when he read Chuck Palahniuk's novel three years ago.

"The most interesting thing I thought about when I read the book was, 'How the hell do you make a movie out of this?'" Fincher says, lifting his hands into the air for effect. "How do you jet about in time so much? How do you upset the chronology and pack a certain density of information? There were challenges, but it struck me as very cinematic. I thought that pictures would be more interesting than mere descriptions."

Fincher has certainly crafted a bizarre film. Scathingly funny, it looks very dark--even in comparison to the moribund Seven, which concluded, for those who don't recall, with Pitt finding Gwyneth Paltrow's severed head in a box. Now that Fight Club's in the can and set for release, there's been oodles of ink spilled about it, with plenty of speculation about its place in the evolution of cinema. And there are a number of Fox execs who are reportedly betting their suits on the film's expected-to-be-hefty box office numbers.

As usual, separating a film's hype from reality is a tricky thing. I am happy to report that Fight Club is a film well worth seeing. Though not the greatest bit of celluloid ever, its stream-of-consciousness narrative, central premise--that an emasculated group of men will somehow feel whole after pummeling one another--and kicker conclusion that rivals those of The Crying Game and The Sixth Sense, combine to make Fight Club a movie you're guaranteed to never have been in before.



A CALL TO ARMS?

Then there are the inevitable controversies. In a film community currently caught up in a severe blame game over school shootings and their relation to onscreen carnage, defensiveness over a film like Fight Club, which does indeed make a good fist downright sexy, is understandable. Pitt, Norton, Fincher and Palahniuk have their collective back up.

Palahniuk already had a taste of just how sexy his concept was while on tour with the book. "At the end of book signings," he recalls, "someone, and you could always guess who they might be, would wait until the crowd died down, and then ask me where the local secret chapter of the Fight Club was. I found this rather sad."

As the book caught on, the author found his own lore took on Blair Witch dimensions. "Culture magazine editors would contact me and want to know where the Fight Club was in their area. I'd say, I can't tell you because I made it up. And they'd say, no, really, we know it's a secret. And I'm like, no, it really doesn't exist. Then they'd get angry and hang up."

Fincher is fully aware of the increased capacity of film to reach a mass audience. Despite the rumours, none of the film was touched due to Columbine, and the release date was delayed, not because of the shooting, but due to Fincher's obsessive last-minute re-edit job.

But yes, Fincher concedes, some may misinterpret his take on Fight Clubs as an anthem, rather than a condemnation. "But how do you make a movie about a taxi driver and then take responsibility for someone going and shooting the president? Or someone having sex with underage prostitutes? I don't think we can limit the subject matter or things that interest us. Some would say, just because it's good for you doesn't mean it should be seen by a mass audience. I don't know how to address that.

"I don't want people to destroy things because they've seen this movie. But if people want to start their own Fight Club, I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with that. I think it's healthier than shooting up.

"One woman said she was horrified after sitting through a screening because there were a group of men sitting behind her cheering the violence at the end. How do you know they were cheering the violence? Maybe they were cheering the cock shot."

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Fight Club opens Friday, October 15