Thirteen years after its general release, David Fincher's finest film still packs a punch. You stagger out of Fight Club woozy, concussed and blinking into the light. Contemporary cinema, however, has yet to recover. Nothing has come close to surpassing (let alone matching) the magnetic maelstrom that is Tyler Durden; leader, liberator, lunatic. It's impossible- even now- to see Pitt, Norton and Bonham-Carter as anything but their career-best characters; three corners of a particularly poisonous love-triangle.
How did a sleeper hit, adapted from Chuck Palahniuk's 1996 novel, transform soap, self-help and anti-consumerism into a darkly cynical masterpiece for modern times? Or, rather; near-masterpiece. Could it be improved? Should it?
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Somewhat perversely, Fight Club strives for imperfection. After all, even the Mona Lisa's falling apart...
5.Show, Don't Tell
After Jack carelessly leaves a copy of Fight Club's rules for his boss to find by the photocopier, his response is less of an excuse and more of a direct threat. Slowly rising from his chair, he explains that the person who wrote it is 'dangerous', before describing a vision, a daydream, of that same person ''stalk from office to office... pumping round after round into colleagues and co-workers''; a fantasy that sits rather uneasily in a post-Columbine America. In this case, sensitivity may have led to censorship, yet one can only wonder how differently the scene could've turned out had we seen, not simply heard, Jack's reverie. Silence, slow-motion, a tsunami of paper stacks and fluorescent light fittings. Jack's lines delivered in voice-over; while appearing onscreen, half-asleep, mouth agape. Or as a spectator to the off-screen carnage, his expression as bored as when he anticipated the (imaginary) plane crash. Those who justified the film's violence highlighted the low correlation between firearms and fatalities (onscreen, at least), when compared to its contemporaries, such as, say, The Matrix. Perhaps the problem really was a question of fantasy: it's one thing to portray a killer as an anonymous, amorphous suit and quite another to portray him as the man in the cubicle next door...