Despite all its anti-capitalist rhetoric, all its mockery of conformity and the modern world, Fight Club is as complicit as any film made in, and by members of, said world - and the director understands that. As the Narrator says in one of his voiceovers "I had become a slave to the Ikea nesting instinct", Fincher cuts to a shot of an Ikea catalogue, the spot paid for by Ikea itself, part-funding this film's very existence. Fight Club's call for revolution is hollow; it's guilty of criticising a system it's intrinsically part of. But, taking into consideration David Fincher's own subversive sense of humour, the film's probably having a good laugh at itself about it. This is a profoundly hypocritical movie, unless you believe Fincher was trying to add another layer and make another key point: that everyone, no matter how much they bitch, is inescapably part of and reliant on that consumer-capitalist machine. Does this explain why, at the end, the Narrator tries to shut down Tyler's revolution? As he frantically tries to expose Fight Club to the authorities and dismantle the office block bombs, it's almost like the Narrator is still acting as a slave to the system, a worker bee instinctively trying to prevent its collapse, even though he stands only to resume a life of misery by saving it.
Lover of film, writer of words, pretentious beyond belief. Thinks Scorsese and Kubrick are the kings of cinema, but PT Anderson and David Fincher are the dashing young princes. Follow Brogan on twitter if you can take shameless self-promotion: @BroganMorris1
