Dance Club

Did you know that there's a Bollywood remake of Fight Club?

True story.

I'm sure that many of us saw David Fincher's seminal 1999 film about nihilism, self-destructive impulses and the male id and thought, "What this film needs is more song-and-dance numbers." Well, maybe only one person thought this, but he appears to have been an Indian director.

Actually, from what I can tell probably no one involved in Fight Club Members Only has actually seen the American film, and the only people interested in referencing it were probably the marketing department. The Bollywood film's story of a rough-and-tumble group of friends who get in trouble with the law doesn't appear to have anything to do with Edward Norton's trajectory of insomnia and schizophrenia.

Still, comments on various related sites along the lines of "at least this one isn't full of people bashing each others heads with baseball bats" reveal that even a decade on, a lot of people don't have a clue what the original film was about. The perception seems to be that it was a piece of exploitative, macho, ultra-violent Hollywood trash. Perhaps this isn't so suprising, given the movies' famously difficult-to-explain plot.

So, I thought I'd give the summary a whirl. Here's your spoiler-free guide to David Fincher's Fight Club:

The narrator and protagonist (who by the way is never named in the film but who is generally referred to as Jack due to a series of ironic asides made throughout the movie) is having trouble sleeping.

Jack is a young office drone blindly following consumer culture who has, largely unbeknownst to himself, become increasingly dissatisfied with his nice, tidy, hermetically sealed life. In pursuit of some sort of meaningful reality he takes several strange detours, during which he encounters a self-destructive woman named Marla and a charismatic rebel named Tyler Durden.

Jack is as drawn to Tyler's devil-may-care individuality as he is repulsed by Marla's. And he's not the only one. When the two of them start an impromptu fist fight outside a pub, other disenfranchised males are drawn into Tyler's orbit as well, and the titular Fight Club is born.

Tyler encourages Jack to take risks, do dangerous things and generally live it up. But Jack finds Tyler's schemes increasingly frightening and begins to wonder if things aren't spinning completely out of control. And Marla may be in danger.

Fight Club is a movie with a famous twist, and it's one that is so ridiculous and so ballsy that only a movie as deeply metaphorical as this one could pull it off. Because that's what the film ultimately is, a metaphor; it's a huge, deconstructive exploration of a repressed male psyche.

Edward Norton called Fight Club a zeitgeist film, and that's what it is. Released two years before 9/11, it spoke to a culture of guys with nothing to fight, no purpose other then bland, corporate-sponsored consumerism. If there's a central message to the film, it might be that if people don't have a reason to fight for, they'll invent one.

There are only a handful of actual fight scenes in the movie, although they are pretty brutal. More disturbing is the very black humor. This is a film that riffs on cancer patients, liposuction clinics and domestic terrorism. It's not for the faint of heart.

The film has often been accused of promoting nihilism, and it's true that an unreflective young male viewer could come away thinking he'd just seen a film that was an endorsement of fascist machismo. On closer inspection, though, it's pretty clear that while this is a philosophical phase our 'hero' Jack is going through, that he ultimately rejects it and that the film is not endorsing it.

Jack is the center of the film, but he's no hero. As Jack says in one of the closing lines of the film, "I'm afraid you've met me at a very strange time in my life." Fight Club is a portrait of the male psyche in the modern age. An exaggerated portrait, definitely, but in its extremes it still illustrates some real truths: Western civilization has succeeded spectacularly at providing for our material needs, while failing to address spiritual needs at almost every turn.

There will always be Tyler Durdens waiting to step up and fill that void.

On a side-note, I am of the opinion that Fight Club is a genuine 'guy movie' in a way that most 'testosterone-fueled thrill rides' aren't. It's about men on a very fundamental level. Of course we have Helena Bonham-Carter's Marla representing the ladies in the movie, but it's safe to say that her part in the story is seen mainly from the man's perspective. Plus the poor woman puts up with more than her share of abuse from our 'heroes'.

I'm not saying that women can't enjoy the movie, and I know some that do. But as far as tales of post-modern disaffection go, this is the XY version.

That said, I'm curious, is there a female equivalent? What film represents the girls' Fight Club? And if one doesn't exist, what would such a story look like?