Let’s Talk About Fight Club0

David Fincher’s Fight Club is truly one of the best mod­ern American films, and one of the more impor­tant ones as well. It is inevitable to break the first rule of Fight Club – as like in the film, one is unable to refrain from talk­ing about Fight Club. Possibly one of the most mis­un­der­stood films ever made, by those who hate it and actu­ally also by a lot of those who love it, the film plays around these per­cep­tions and con­ven­tional beliefs of what straight and mas­cu­line men should be like and pro­poses the con­stant chal­lenge towards it, such as cas­tra­tion, the need of woman, perfect-men image in adver­tise­ment. Instead the film tries to be flex­i­ble of what ide­al­ized men should be imaged as. Both fans and crit­ics alike tend to read too nar­row of influ­ences on very sub­tle aspects of the film. The film does include the exam­i­na­tion of nihilism, Nietzsche, and anar­chism, but the main point missed by both fans and crit­ics is the Führer Principle — the lead­er­ship prin­ci­ple. There are strong under­tones about the Leadership Principle and how the attempt to “free” us from oppres­sive social ten­den­cies that over­power indi­vid­u­als and can lead to cults of per­son­al­ity where a con­cept and supreme charis­matic leader are equally oppres­sive and soul crush­ing. In the end, the film is about the sat­is­fac­tion of one­self, how­ever dif­fer­ent or per­haps unat­trac­tive. Brad Pitt steals the show in Fight Club as the bril­liant and charis­matic Tyler Durden. Pitt’s por­tayal of Tyler has to go down as one of the great cin­e­matic char­ac­ters in mod­ern cin­ema. However, I have to sing praises for Edward Norton as the unnamed nar­ra­tor. He prob­a­bly gives the per­for­mance of his career in this film as he man­ages to con­vince the audi­ence to side with this loser he cre­ated over the bril­liant Tyler. Not an easy task def­i­nitely. The biggest com­pli­ment I can give Fight Club is that it’s the sort of film I would have loved to make. – Reviewed by Muhd Salihim