Fighting Fincher?

The director pulls no punches

LOS ANGELES -- You'd never guess from his voluble, animated conversation that David Fincher is the press-shy, gloom-and-doom director of such bleak films as Alien³, Seven, and The Game. His latest, Fight Club, is a similarly dark -- if laceratingly funny -- tale of disenfranchised, desensitized young men who unite under the principle that (to paraphrase Matt Dillon in Drugstore Cowboy) there's nothing so life-affirming as having the shit beaten out of you.

Fincher pulls no punches in discussing film violence. "Everybody's got to take it seriously. There's no way you can say that our medium doesn't have a great influence on a huge number of people. But if you said, `If you erased the memory of Taxi Driver in order to not have John Hinckley, would that be an even trade?', I would say no. The world is a better place with a movie like Taxi Driver. There are a lot of stupid movies. There are also a lot of stupid politicians and stupid magazines and stupid TV shows. I don't know how you say, `Which politician is too stupid to have a job?' or `Which movie is too stupid to be made?' or `Which presentation of violence is too stupid?' "

Still, a skittish Twentieth Century Fox delayed Fight Club's release to put more distance between it and April's shootings at Columbine High School. To which Fincher responds, "It would be nice if you could limit all the information people get to only the things that are healthy and help them through whatever dark times they're in. But the fact is, we don't know what that is. We can't say Doom made Columbine, or Leonardo DiCaprio in a black trenchcoat made Columbine. People have to start taking responsibility for their own actions."

In Fight Club (which is based on Chuck Palahniuk's 1996 novel), provocateur Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) and his disciple (Edward Norton) start their bare-knuckle brawling club as a travesty of self-help groups, in order to address a perceived need for men alienated from their natural drives by a culture of consumerism and celebrity to reclaim their masculinity. It's a crisis also addressed in the current film American Beauty and in the new book Stiffed, by feminist Susan Faludi. Says Fincher, "I'm happy to have this movie rolled into that argument. I don't see men as victims. I do think that society runs some interesting risks. Boys and men have to make a transition from hunters to gatherers. We don't need any gazelle pelts, thank you. It has changed. Change with it. Get over it."

Asked whether his amphetamine-fueled anarchist manifesto is an expression of millennial angst, Fincher counters, "I think that's a bunch of shit. Millennial angst is just so much nonsense. Three months from now, there'll still be coming-of-age stories. This story has a lot more in common with The Graduate than it does with The Matrix. More so than ever, kids have a certain kind of sophistication at a much earlier age and a certain kind of retardation to a much later age. There's an emotional place, an understanding of who you are and who you want to become, that comes later and later. Call it slackerdom or whatever you want.

"At the same time, there's also this incredible sexual and political bullshit detector and sophistication that happens earlier and earlier. So this void is growing larger. I don't think it has anything to do with the millennium. It has to do with how easily attainable information is, and how sophisticated television and movies and radio are, and how all these kids are getting these ideas, and how they're not getting an emotional foundation for how to receive this stuff, to process it as bullshit or important."

If information overload has castrated and numbed Fight Club's Gen X characters, it's also Fincher's strategy (in the form of subliminal images, a fragmented narrative, and a major plot twist) for inoculating his Gen X audience. Fincher isn't worried that his technical trickery will be too mind-blowing for viewers to absorb. "You pay eight bucks and you go, and you wait in line, and you have to find parking, and all of that. You deserve to get a pretty dense experience. If there are a bunch of little things that can help me illustrate my point and support my idea, why not do them? It never concerned me that the movie would be so dense it would go over the heads of people. It's my responsibility to make the world as complete as possible and the experience as complete as possible."

Fincher's actors certainly applaud his command of the medium. "I think Fincher's picking up where Kubrick left off," says Pitt. Norton elaborates, "He is the comprehensive modern filmmaker. He has a complete command of all the tools available to a filmmaker now." "He has a great rapport with the actors," says Meat Loaf, who plays a Fight Club member named Bob. "His shotmaking ability is extraordinary. His eye is absolutely incredible."

Bob is one of the film's stranger special effects: post-surgery hormone therapy has given him what he calls "bitch tits." The actor/rocker, who is much trimmer than his name and reputation suggest, reassures moviegoers that he wore a 38-pound prosthetic. "I was padded from my knees all the way to my elbows. It's all flaxseed. If we had been doing Hitchcock's The Birds, I would have been dead."

-- Gary Susman

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