No Shirt, No Shoes

So I finally got around to seeing Fight Club. I had been wanting to see it for years, to finally understand the hype, the obsession, the constant quotes, the rules.

It is one fucked up movie.

And yet, I want to watch it again. And I want to read the book. Funny thing is, I didn't know that the film was even based on a book until I came upon this in the bookstore a few months ago. After seeing the truly terrifying cover and then reading some reviews, it was decided: Chuck Palahniuk is disturbed. Deeply disturbed. (Granted, I have yet to read any of his books, so I should reserve judgment, technically). But this prepared me for my viewing of Fight Club.

As an extremely squeamish person, I was surprised to find myself glued to the screen from beginning to end. Maybe it was because of the interspliced screen shots at the beginning - I didn't want to miss a thing. Sure, I had to turn away a few times, but the violence didn't really bother me. Saw bothered me - it was gross for the sake of being gross. The blood in Fight Club was like another character. It was necessary and really not all that gratuitous.

I already knew the "twist" - sort of. But I started thinking about it too much, causing my brain to jet off in other directions. I don't think that it ruined the film for me - that really wasn't the point, was it?

My favorite parts:

-Bitch tits.

-Tyler Durden fucked with movie-goers by splicing single screen shots of porn into family movies. The makers of Fight Club did the same. Tyler fucked with his audience, the filmmakers fucked with theirs. Brilliant.

-The soap. "We were selling rich women their own fat asses back to them."

-Marla Singer's hair. Oh wait. Yeah, I hated that. It was so distracting. Never mind. Helena Bonham Carter, on the other hand, was amazing.

-The final gunshot.

Fight Club asks a lot of questions and ultimately forces the viewer to consider his own rage, his own problems, his own reality. Are we too materialistic? (Probably.) Is this a kind of Hobbesian threat to return to nature and survival of the fittest, or is it more of an Emersonian idea to return to the reason and faith of nature? I think that it's a bit of both, though who knows how philosophical Palahniuk intended his novel to be.