^{Fight Club}

Anyone doubting that Edward Norton is a huge star should rent Fight Club, which even has a starring role for his penis, played by Brad Pitt.

Norton plays the narrator of Fight Club, a yuppie alienated from his job, repulsed by the people around him, and wracked with insomnia. But most importantly, he’s missing his penis. Given the number of hints the movie gives us, you’d think he’d be able to figure this out. He finds comfort in a testicular cancer support group, pretending that his balls have been removed. (He meets Bob, upset because his testicles have been removed, he’s growing breasts, and because, in real life, he’s Meatloaf.) The group, Remaining Men Together, repeat the mantra, “Yes, we’re men. Men is what we are.” They have to repeat it because they’re not sure.

Everyone who meets Norton immediately senses that he’s missing his penis. Marlo questions whether he has more balls than she does and Tyler (Pitt) questions whether he’s “man enough” to handle the airplane safety door. Even some stooge working for the airlines implies that Norton owns a dildo, a fake, plastic penis substituting for the narrator’s lack of one. Norton gets all weepy because he’s reading catalogues instead of pornography.

When Brad Pitt appears, he has all the swagger Norton’s been missing. Pitt wears a Hustler T-shirt, no catalogue reading for him. When he has sex with Helena Bonham Carter, he knocks her off the bed and leaves four condoms in the toilet. The condom part struck me as out of place at first. Pitt didn’t seem like the type of guy to practic safe sex. Then I realized the point isn’t that he used a condom but that he used four of them. He splices frames of “a nice big cock” into family movies at theaters to shock the women and make the little girls cry at what they thought they saw. He has penis to spare. That last bit is a funny trick, since Pitt’s character is a penis (Norton’s) on a movie screen, and nobody is really sure they’re seeing it.

Pitt taunts the narrator: “A woman could cut off your penis and throw it out a car window ...” He doesn’t add, “And then it would walk around, start to look like a movie star trying not to look like a movie star and talk to you in fantasy sequences,” but it’s implied. You see, Pitt doesn’t really exist. He’s a hallucination of the narrator’s, a fantasy of everything he is lacking. (Again and again and again, it’s a penis).

I’m glad I didn’t see this in the theaters. I’m not sure I could have resisted the temptation to respond to the narrator’s hang-dog expression with “I’ve lost my Mojo!” We’ve all heard far too many Austin Powers impressions, as well as too many people talking in theaters.

Anyway, when the narrator hooks up with Pitt, he starts walking with that swagger, he starts having sex, he starts to feel “alive.” Now masculated, he also starts taking revenge against the forces which once emasculated him, namely work, consumer culture, and women.

Fight Club’s reputation benefits quite a bit, I suspect, because Hollywood does not make many dark movies. Even fewer that deal with the alienation of the workplace. Fewer still that deal with consumer culture. The relationship between Norton and his imaginary friend could have come off as a wait-while-I-tilt-my-head-and-listen-to-the-voices-in-my-head bit, but it’s extraodinarily well done. Much better done than, for example, Him, an eighties comedy in which a man hears his penis thinking. I would even say those hallucinogenic parts reminded me of some Philip K. Dick novels, which is high praise from me. I would even say that this is a thought-provoking movie, which may be unfortunate since they more you think about this movie, the sillier it gets.

First of all, saying consumer culture is an emasculating force is fairly simplistic. Let’s face it, a consumer worried about fading machismo would just drink Bud in his SUV, listen to Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit CDs, read Details, wear a Co-ed Naked T-shirts, and head to the movies to see something like Fight Club or, if that’s too arty, Gone in 60 Seconds (the story of Nic Cage’s credibility). By only mentioning vaguely feminine products - IKEA furniture, clothes, celebrity magazines, vanity soap, coffee bars and chic meals - the criticism blurred. It went from “We’re a slave to our possessions” to “Our possessions aren’t masculine enough.” Consumer society does not care if you act like a man or a woman as long as you’re a passive recepient and you buy shit. Saying this passive role is womanly tells us more about the movie’s makers than it does about consumer society.

The narrator, with his newfound penis, starts a very silly revolution. He steals human fat from plastic surgery, turns it into soap and sells it to vanity beauty boutiques. I’d say this Nazi reference is obvious, but the filmmakers seem unaware that they made it. He pulls an asian convenience store clerk into an alley, puts a gun to his head and demands that the clerk admit to, and then start living, a forgotten dream. The scene is played like the clerk should be thankful for the encouragement. Fortunately, the clerk has a dormant ambition and just needed a little tough love. (I’m not sure what would have happened if he’d said his dream was to run a convenience store.) This is the Robert MacNamara policy on Vietnam, or the Reagan policy on Central America: “We must force them to be free.” Anyway, the clerk runs off screen, seeking a veterinarian school and not, we are to believe, psychological counseling.

Okay, so you’re a male disaffected by corporate hierarchy and dehumanized by consumer society. What do you do to regain your individuality? In Fight Club, you join Project Mayhem, shave your head, wear a uniform, obey orders unto death and chant in unison. Tell me I’m not the only one to see a problem with this. They obey Norton in a way they never obeyed their bosses, girlfriends or Pepsi commercials. Then again, he’s the one whose dick is so big it needs a separate set of pants. At one point his penis says, “Stop trying to control everything.” This from a cult leader who gives out homework assignments and tells his followers how to dress?

(Incidentally, you can probably guess what happens - in this movie obsessed with castration - to anyone who gets in the way of Project Mayhem. That’s right, they hold you down and threaten to cut your little Brad Pitt off.)

Project Mayhem probably wins the prize for silliest element in the movie, but it’s a crowded competition. Three quarters of the way through, Norton suddenly claims to represent the workers of the world. It’s just tossed in there, like the writers forgot that he was an IKEA furniture loving yuppie with too many possessions. Are his followers working class? No, the movie made the point that Fight Club/Project Mayhem cut across class and race (but not gender) lines. They are cops and executives and waiters yearning to have a penis as big as Ed ward Norton’s. (Brad Pitt is six feet two inches tall according to People magazine.) Besides, haven’t they all been fired for spending too much time in the leader’s basement making bombs? Are these workers/yuppies liberated? Ask the guy with the shaved head who doesn’t have a name anymore because the leader doesn’t want him to.

If the filmmakers intended Project Mayhem to be a satire on groupthink and male insecurity, they’ve failed miserably. In a scene which made me laugh out loud (unintentionally), two Project Mayhem members are shown to still have their individuality and dreams. Achieve individuality through the cult. Uh, okay. I also cracked up at Project Mayhem’s ultimate goal. They’re going to blow up dozens of buildings in numerous major cities ... And no one is going to be hurt! Also the buildings contain credit card companies ... And once credit card debt is erased everyone will be equal! Because credit card debt is the major cause of alienation and social stratification!

So we have a movie about an alienated young white guy who drops out of conventional society into a life of violence, gets a too beautiful to really be with a criminal girlfriend, blows up financial records for social justice, becomes a folk hero, and then ultimately turns away from his increasingly surreal fantasy into an act of suicide. This is all billed as the pinnacle of Hollywood subversion, but it’s also the exact plot of a 1987 movie called Wisdom starring Emilio Estevez and Demi Moore. Watch Wisdom today and you’ll crack up. Watch Fight Club in five years and you’ll do the same.

P.S. I love the Pixies and don’t want to complain about a Pixies song played over the end credits, but how could they miss the obvious choice? King Missile’s “Detachable Penis”?