Watched on DVD

"We are consumers. We're by-products of a lifestyle obsession."

David Fincher's "Fight Club" was a real punch in the face in 1999, a relatively faithful adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel published three years earlier, which only received widespread attention through the film version. Even generating real controversy, sympathetic, fascistoid comparisons were drawn at the time, but this ultimately only doubles and triples the work in its ambivalent, sarcastic ambition. In that respect, similar to Paul Verhoeven's masterpiece "Starship Troopers", any form of subordination to a system manipulated for the moment not only as perfect, but as having no alternative, is exposed through what amounts to a caricature, vomiting venom and bile satire - without failing to puff up the absurdity of it all with due mockery in an entertainingly ironic way. It is precisely this that makes an ultra-offensive, stylish grotesque like Fight Club so extraordinary in the first place, because here practically everything hits itself in the face with full force. To leave only a single pile of rubble from the seemingly cowardly double standard, with the realisation that in the end it doesn't give a shit what we specifically use to ruin ourselves...because uncompromising extremes have nothing else in store.

"I was close to being complete." - "I say: Never be complete. I say: Stop beeing perfect. I say: Let's evolve!"

Carefree and yet restless. Well-off and yet totally unhappy. The hostage of a striving for a plastic, perfected possession and habitus imposed by social norms: this is our protagonist...let's call him Jack (Edward Norton) for simplicity's sake. Jack is a higher-set but non-directional cog of consumer society. Striving to always more than live up to the status quo. Driven and lost in trying to enhance his actually monotonous and disorientated existence with decorative accessories. Bored, frustrated, remote-controlled because without a plan. At some point paddling in a whirlpool that is not only socially accepted but even aspired to by many. He himself could hardly be more unhappy. Until Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) enters his life. Casually, ending with the question of decency, whether one prefers to turn one's ass or crotch to one's counterpart when passing by. Neither fish nor fowl. Nothing seems ultimately right in this case, and it's a small teaser for the larger discourse, unresolvable with only two polarising options available, that Fight Club deals with on a most unmasking level.

"I want you to hit me as hard as you can!"

Anyone who approaches Fight Club completely unprepared (enviable!) is likely to stagger around for a very long time similarly groundless as Jack, but also comparably euphorised by a surprising idea. A train of thought that, despite its clear language from the start, only slowly reveals its full extent. Who wouldn't want to escape the certain, safe standard-generating hamster wheel? Especially if this is built on self-sacrifice. Destroying you like a parasite, like a tumour, slowly, that the only cry for help that remains is just as mendacious hypocrisy as the system you actually want to fight against? Until the personified antithesis to yourself becomes not only your best friend, but the messiah of all pent-up problems. With a simple method: Let yourself go. Burn it down. Fuck it. Feel. Bleed. Live.

"I'am Jack's wasted life!"

In the guise of a creeping psychological thriller, with the pitch-black cynical humour of an unrestrained cabaret, Fight Club gleefully dissects the desperate search for anchor points in a society recently groaning under its own pace of development. Where do I stand, what am I, what do I define myself by? Very difficult in a world that can seemingly only be judged in terms of material values and positions, whereas a society only stands by its foundation. So what happens when the frustrated proletariat forms its own rage-fuelled self-help group and trusts the promises of a leader who projects a chance for a new beginning only on the destruction of the system? Which is again just as destructive as the previous one, this time only off the cuff, without blinkers and immediately consistent in its intention. If we're going to die, then please do it in a self-determined way and with a bang.

Fight Club is not a film that takes a direct stand for a radical camp, on the contrary. It smugly causticises against every form of dehumanisation; consciously demands its own, unambiguous statement and unmistakably depicts what happens when one simply lets oneself drift like a lemming. Zombie in a consumer prison or apocalyptic horseman with a terrorist wrecking ball, both are bullshit. Silently rot in the general population or die a nameless partisan in a war whose rebellious, redemptive beginning has long since given way to a para-military, cult-like cult of personality? Fight Club is so forceful, provocative, assailable and yet, in the end, the absolute winner of any discussion of principles because it celebrates the individual and elevates him or her above any foreign-controlled movement...even if this particular one has a lot to live up to in order to do so. It is not easy to exist in a state that has long since become accustomed to pigeonhole thinking. That the highest form of self-destructive perception then remains as the only remedy is, unfortunately, not so far-fetched.

"You met me in a really strange time of my life."

A socio-cultural swansong with unmasking cynicism: "Fight Club" is the ugly, nasty reflection of a society that has not only split, but is continuously moving away from each other. And this film is currently 22 years old. It is not getting any better. Here, one could still counter this trend with a then already daring portion of gallows humour, even with a still slightly admonishing function. In the meantime, the air is getting thinner even for that.