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| Alexander Walker on "Fight Club",
Reviewing the reviews |
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| Media,
Justin Harries,
20 January 1999 |
Rating: F1
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Hats off to Mister Walker. This is the kind of review I love the most. Balls to the wall, fire and brimstone reviewing. Walker takes on Fincher’s playful attack on urbane morays with a ferocity to equal the director’s vision. I wonder if he would like to take Fincher around the back to put him through a few rounds himself.
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He begins by claiming that the movie has a "fascist sensibility". I thought crackpot Norton’s project Mayhem was purely anarchistic, destruction for destruction’s sake, not a tool to remodel the world to your perceived vision. Walker even brings poor old Nietzcher kicking and screaming to the party, who I’m sure is sick of such Nazi collaborations. I couldn’t really see Norton’s gang becoming ‘ubersmechen’, they more reminded me of Jeffery Palmer’s ‘Fairly secret army’.
"Helena Bonham Carter is the sleazy slut who services both men’s flesh and fantasies" Whoa hold on big boy – this sounds like serial killer speak to me. When coupled with talk of "degenerate" Hollywood with "its own psychosis", Walker would be right on form on a Deep South pulpit. ‘Save us Alexander, save us from this corrupting evil’.
Of course Walker’s been on the warpath before (including Ken Russell’s most lucid movie, ‘The Devils’), and was especially verment about David Cronenberg’s ‘Crash’. This film has a lot in common with Fincher’s film, both were adapted from books and both share the idea of violent or destructive urges as potentially liberating forces. Of course these themes will enrage the moral majority, who view these films as purely nihilistic, antagonistic, even dangerous. However these elements have always been part of story telling, providing a carthatic ritual for an audience. Walker distrusts this audience, and makes moral judgements over how they supposedly experience this material. Quite understandably I don’t want Walker to second-guess my emotions or my very nature.
He summarises that the movie relies on "freedom of speech to defend its pursuit of profit." Many films use aspects of violent imagery to sell themselves, but because this imagery floats explicitly upon the surface of Fight Club like an oil-slick, we are more readily drawn to it. But by exposing this attitude expressly, does this not raise many more questions about its very nature, something a conventional narrative feature would be afraid to do. And because it is not routed in a conservative morality for easy and fulfilling digestion is it "repugnant", or merely non-reductive?
Fight Club is actually just really silly. Its too stylised for people to start beating each other to a pulp, let alone forming anarchist cells (if a movie could actually inspire the latter applause would certainly be due), What sticks in the throat about Walkers review are the sweeping assumptions and pompous moral tone. For me this form of journalism says more about the reviewer than the actual reviewed. And it seems Mr. Walker has a lot of bile to vent. Look out Fincher, he knows were you live.
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