In a cinematic world muddied by CGI and its patron saints Michael Bay and David Cameron, debauched by cheap sex and undermined by uninspiring performances, directors like David Fincher and films like Fight Club are increasingly rare Hollywood commodities. To illustrate: How many indistinguishable, idiot Seth Rogen stoner comedies directed by idiot Judd Apatow have come out in the last ten years? How many characters has this buffoon played? To answer, he’s played one character, himself, and has starred in derivative variations of the same shit movie. Sometimes funny, but mostly, just shit.
However, directors like Fincher have taken on scores of material ranging from power hungry, powerfully contemporary Washington officials, the rise of the social network, psychopathic killers both fictional (Se7en) and historical (Zodiac) as well as one keen dissection of the postmodern condition outlying American cultural imperialism, consumerism and the death of masculinity and the American Dream. You know what I’m talking about. But we’re not supposed to talk about it, so…
Fight Club was sourced from the novel of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk. Oftentimes film critics will automatically drop a film a few pegs if the screenplay is not original. But, to take a novel and to apply its contents on film and to do it as expertly and faithfully as Fincher in this case did, is no walk in the park. Battling imminent nerd rage over minute details (Brad Pitt’s character’s hair was long in the novel, short in the movie) and other trivialities is tough; creating a work that will appeal both to its original fan base and to an entirely new one, is daunting. Here is an excerpt from a DVDTalk interview regarding author Palahniuk’s take on the film version of his work:
“The first time I saw dailies of the movie was when I went down to the film’s location, and David Fincher would drag me off the set to his trailer to show me dailies. He would be watching me for my reaction, and I had little or no idea where these scenes fit together. Here were these wonderful reaction shots and things like that which seemed so random, beautifully composed, attractive and funny in their own way, but I had no idea how they went together. I felt so self-conscious with David watching me. Now that I see the movie, especially when I sat down with Jim Uhls to record a commentary track for the DVD, I was sort of embarrassed of the book, because the movie had streamlined the plot and made it so much more effective and made connections that I had never thought to make. There is a line about “fathers setting up franchises with other families,” and I never thought about connecting that with the fact that Fight Club was being franchised and the movie made that connection. I was just beating myself in the head for not having made that connection myself.”
Did you read that? The author himself basically just said the movie did a sort of better job of telling his own story than he did!
We all meet book snobs everywhere that say, no matter what, that the book is always better than the film. I’ve spoken to several of these book snobs myself, regarding Fight Club, and automatically they regurgitate the tired thesis: “The book is so so so so much better.” Sorry, in the case of Fight Club, you’re just wrong. The film is objectively as good, or better, than the book—as evidenced by the author himself.
I don’t think a disjointed, nonlinear narrative film has ever been shot (and edited) so cleanly and effectively as Fight Club has. When you see it for the first time, despite the fact that the film really, really tries to tell you that Brad Pitt’s character isn’t real (Watch the Fight Club Honest Trailer for an illustration of this), you still don’t see the end coming. And when you watch it a second time, your knowledge makes the film a completely different experience. Besides challenging the notion that the novel is always better, Fight Club additionally challenges the notion that the second viewing of something is never quite as good as the first. With Fight Club the second time around, you’re looking for the clues and you’re finding them because the director knew exactly what he was doing. Off the top of my head I can’t think of another movie which changes so radically from its first to its second viewing. Except maybe Mulholland Dr, but for entirely different reasons.
Suffice to say, film schools should be praising the work of Fincher over that of David Lynch. I liked Twin Peaks, I liked Dune for its highly imaginative production design, but I absolutely hated, and continue to hate, Mulholland Dr. I’ll be posting something else about that here in a second, stay tuned!
callmesteiner 