Boys' Night Out.

• Author: SHARRETT, CHRISTOPHER
• Position: Review

DAVID FINCHER'S "Fight Club," like the director's earlier "Seven," places doomsday moodiness within humdrum routines and neuroses. While "Seven," a latter-day film noir, expressed a surprisingly medieval vision of the abyss within the conventions of a police thriller about the collapse of the justice system and all notions of meaning and normality, "Fight Club" finds its terror in the equally familiar terrain of the angry white male narrative. It isn't as flat-footed and polemical a film as "Falling Down," but it shares the anxieties of a host of cultural products that suggest the world's problems take a backseat to male frustrations.

The nameless narrator (Edward Norton) is a "recall coordinator" for a nameless megacorporation. He travels around the country inspecting car wrecks and plane crashes, protecting his employer from liability. The movie is a whirlwind of images that would make Russian director Sergei Eisenstein dizzy. The narrator addresses the audience head-on, after an unnerving prologue/flash-forward showing him with a 9mm automatic shoved into his mouth as he sits hog-tied on the barren top floor of an office towel He then takes the audience all over the place. For long stretches, viewers are inside trash cans, medicine cabinets, and one of the many Ikea catalogues that take up the narrator's free hours and disposable income.

The densely written script, a close adaptation of a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, is a kind of primal scream that pushes the envelope of film narrative style. At times, the movie looks like a political tract against consumer society and its associated profound alienation and ennui. It is also one of those pictures that want to rip the medium apart. At a couple of points, the film's sprocket holes are seen as the image vibrates violently and threatens to explode. The movie also plays with subliminal images that, if audiences catch them on first viewing, seem gratuitous and unnerving until their role is seen in the narrator's escapades.

Like the works of David Cronenberg and a host of pictures that seem to recognize the exhaustion of the medium, "Fight Club" is about the slow death of capitalist civilization and the ravages it has perpetrated on everyday life. The narrator finds solace in 12-step programs and support groups, including one for men with testicular cancer, and it is here that the other side of the film's agenda becomes explicit.

In his nighttime journeys in search of psychological catharsis, the...