ABSTRACT
Fight Club (David Fincher, USA, 1999) is a film depicting groups of men around the US who meet in basements and parking lots to fight. They are not angry when they fight and they do not keep score of who wins. Instead they find fighting exhilarating. Fighting also frees them from the stress of daily life. Even though they are often hurt badly, they view this too as a positive part of the activity. It makes them feel alive and unconcerned about the small things. There are three persons of focus: a main character and narrator who remains nameless (Edward Norton), his outgoing and thrill-seeking friend Tyler Durgen (Brad Pitt), and a love interest, or at least a sexual interest of both, who is also a strong female figure, Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter). Marla is a rather offbeat femme fatale, perhaps post-punk girl who might appeal to the tastes of those who like Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) in Pulp Fiction. As the story continues, the men begin to find less excitement in fighting and so form Project Mayhem, a self-proclaimed terrorist group with few or no political goals. Again, the purpose in Project Mayhem’s activities is personal satisfaction. The men are given homework assignments such as to start a fight with a stranger and lose the fight. They also buy guns but no bullets and burn a grinning demon face on the side of a city building. If they are caught, they are out of the group. The narrator and Tyler also urinate in soups at restaurants, splice pornography clips into children’s movies at theaters, and steal human fat from a medical waste facility to make soap to sell in upscale department stores. All these and other overgrown-boyish activities apparently had wide appeal among film goers. Near the end of the film, the narrator becomes aware that he is Tyler Durgen and that he has been erroneously thinking they were separate people. Seeing this, he realizes that he has let Fight Club and Project Mayhem grow 14beyond control. He tries to stop the terrorist activities but learns there are Fight Clubs around the country and Project Mayhem members in the police department and elsewhere. He attempts to free himself from Tyler and the Project by suicide. Although Tyler disappears from his life, the narrator does not die. Instead he is united with Marla, who he now realizes he loves.
