I saw this awful movie today, and I must disagree with you, Peter--I think it *is* fascistic. To the extreme. Probably this can be attributed more to utterly incompetent filmmaking than to any real affinity for brown shirts, but it still makes a rather frightening statement--and not in the way it intends to.
This Fincher guy, the director, seems to come from the Oliver Stone school of filmmaking: if I yell loud enough and make everything as intense as possible then I must be making an important statement, right? In the process of course he drains all life and humanity from his characters, reducing them all to a caricature in his cynical game. This is a guy who thinks "art" means showing dankly lit peeling wallpaper from an obtuse camera angle.
Fight Club aspires to satire. The opening sequences focus on the workplace and support groups, both with the usual cliches (asshole boss, touchy-feely new-agey lingo), before Fincher turns his myopic eye toward consumer culture. Here's where things start to get fuzzy. At this point in history we could really use a film that explores the banality and destructiveness of our consumer-product-based present, but it would take someone with more than an interest in merely cataloguing all the right brands and looks and styles; it would require someone who actually wanted to show the effects of this commodification of life(style) on people, how it disturbs their humanity and social relations. Fincher doesn't have any interest in that.
Okay, maybe he does. When we meet the Brad Pitt character he lets us in on the secret of what is causing the crisis of manhood: it's sissification. This generation--Ed Norton's character is 30--of menschen was raised by sissies to be sissies, and the consumer culture is just an extension of this: how effete, Pitt is saying, is it to let yourself be defined by furniture and nonfat yogurt? You'd think this would be the perfect place for the satire to heighten, but instead it drops from sight. It's here we discover the true sympathies of the film; you can almost see Fincher nodding along with Pitt's bile.
Pitt's character, it must be said, is tres kool: he's, like, totally independent of the business world and doesn't have any material possessions; he rails against the system and wants to lead a coup d'etat; he looks so spectacular when he smokes, and boy is he an animal in the sack. In sum, he's everything Norton is not, including a fascist. And this isn't being used just as an empty, automatic epithet; I can't describe exactly how without giving away the movie, but it's true that he is literally a fascist.
And yet we still love him. Oh sure, Norton, after emulating him, realizes he's evil, and fights and eventually succeeds in banishing Pitt. But Norton doesn't earn it; it's just a gift bestowed upon him by the filmmaker. This, of course, is the formula Hollywood demands: you can make a movie that glorifies fascism, as long as it doesn't win out in the end. The other formula it adheres to is that the force that wins in the end has to be a lone man, an individual absorbing our sins and destroying evil, so we can just watch in admiration while chewing our Junior Mints. It's because of adherence to cliche--there are two others: one of them quirky plot twists that Hollywood loves so much (because it has no other ideas), the other the action movie's witty last line--that fascism really wins in the end: with the chiseled mug and hot bod of Brad Pitt, it's infinitely more sexy than consumerism or socialism (which is never an option anyway), and because Norton doesn't deserve his redemption, when he gets it, it's hollow, cheap, and empty. Just like this film-watching experience.
Last week I saw American Beauty, which is similarly themed to Fight Club: frustration with the malaise of modern life. I tend to doubt these filmmakers reflect accurately the greater culture; but if they do, things are really seething underneath. Either way, these films make me somewhat frightened of the mindset of our elite cultural producers.
Pessimistically yours,
Eric