I wanted to talk to you about a really good movie: Fight Club!
It's is a drama movie directed by David Fincher and based on a novel written by Chuck Palahniuk. The movie starring Edward Norton, Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter was released in 1999.
This movie tells us the story of an insomniac, depressed, middle-aged man who finds a meaning to his life when he creates a clandestine and illegal fight club. His partner in this is a mysterious and charismatic stranger whom he randomly met on a plane on his way back from a business trip. This stranger, Tyler Durden, won't stay one for a while since he will basically wind up leaving under the same roof as the main character. Together, they will see this fight club organisation grow as the number of lost souls ending up there will increase until the fight club becomes a national organisation.
Fight Club is a unique film and that's what I like most about it. For example, you spend more than an hour and a half watching this film without ever getting to know the main character's name. But I think that is something that I like in general because another film that I really enjoyed, Drive, never reveals the identity of it's main character either.
The ending of the movie is also what makes it so special. I love mind-blowing plot twists, the kind that make you reconsider the entire movie and make you want to see the film all over again, only to get what you might have missed the first time. Again I felt the same way about another film ending that I love, Cloud Atlas, even it the context might have been totally different I still felt astonished when I reached the end of the film. And I watched both Fight Club and Cloud Atlas many times after that.
Fight Club is a movie with quite a dark and violent atmosphere and that's a feature that I love about this film. The way the main character is described (or describes himself, since this story is told by a first person narrator) and the feelings he goes through felt honest and real to me. The nation shown in the film is frank even if characters such as the main character's boss, Richard Chesler, may feel quite caricatural.
Fights and destructiveness are important elements here but I think they both have a new meaning in this context. The characters in the movie don't use violence as a promotion of hatred, in my opinion they use it as a way to feel emotions if pain may be called one, since their daily lives do not give them the opportunity to.
I feel like this is something that we may relate to because today it's still quite easy to end up disconnected from other human beings and to some extent, from yourself. Albert Camus once wrote: "And never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world". That's the reason why I think that this feeling of being an outcast, not fitting in the present society, expressed here, in Fight Club, is universal and has been felt by many people throughout time.
