Thriller Films

"Edward Norton: The reason Fight Club penetrated to a lot of people our age was that it grappled with that idea that there's this person that I am who's forced to move around in this neutered, contemporary world, but people don't know what I've got inside me. That sensation—not just in young men, but in people in general—or that idea of how to get your authentic self out there in the contemporary world. I think the reason that lodged with a lot of people was that people really do understand that sense that there's a schism inside them that they're aware of, that doesn't get expression. I feel that way. I think a lot of people our age feel that way. They feel more complex than the world allows them to be."

""Fight Club" appears threatening to some because it seems to challenge the safety of the modern world. But while Edward Norton and Brad Pitt seem only to offer unprovoked violence and mayhem, there are some salient points on offer behind it all. Namely, it is the examination of a man who has allowed himself to become sucked into the minutiae of his corporate job. He further exacerbates his spiral of paranoia by turning to other corporate gimmicks for solutions, and treating them like a religion. He is Edward Norton and Fight Club is his desperate reaction."

"The movie is not that violent. There are ideas in the movie that are scary, but the film isn't about violence, the glorification of violence or the embracing of violence. In the movie, violence is a metaphor for feeling. It's a film about the problems or requirements involved with being masculine in today's society. I do like movies that take a toll on the audience. I want to work the subconscious. I want to involve you in ways in which you might not necessarily want to get involved. I want to play off those things that you're expecting to get when the lights go down and the 20th Century Fox logo comes up. There's an audience expectation and I'm interested in how movies play with—and off—that expectation. That's what I'm interested in."

"A stylized version of our IKEA present. It is talking about very simple concepts. We're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of shopping. There's nothing to kill anymore, there's nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman is created. We wanted a title sequence that started in the fear center of the brain. [When you hear] the sound of a gun being cocked that's in your mouth, the part of you brain that gets everything going, that realizes that you are fucked - we see all the thought processes, we see the synapses firing, we see the chemical electrical impulses that are the call to arms. And we wanted to sort of follow that out. Because the movie is about thought, it's about how this guy thinks. And it's from his point of view, solely. So I liked the idea of starting a movie from thought, from the beginning of the first fear impulse that went, Oh shit, I'm fucked, how did I get here?"

"Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing."

"In the world I see; you're stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway."

"Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."

"Our fathers were our models for God, if our fathers bailed, what does that tell you about God?"

"Self-improvement is masturbation. Now, self-destruction..."

"Gentlemen, welcome to Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: YOU DO NOT. TALK. ABOUT FIGHT CLUB! Third rule of Fight Club: Someone yells "Stop!", goes limp, taps out, the fight is over. Fourth rule: Only two guys to a fight. Fifth rule: One fight at a time, fellas. Sixth rule: No shirts, no shoes. Seventh rule: Fights will go on as long as they have to. And the eighth and final rule: If this is your first night at Fight Club, you have to fight."

"You met me at a very strange time in my life."

"I want you to really listen to me. My eyes are open."

"When you have a gun in your mouth, you can only speak in vowels."

"Tyler built himself an army. Why was Tyler Durden building an army? To what purpose? For what greater good? In Tyler we trusted."

"Fight club wasn't about winning or losing. It wasn't about words. The hysterical shouting was in tongues, like at a Pentecostal Church."

"With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything's far away. Everything's a copy of a copy of a copy."

"When you have insomnia, you're never really asleep... and you're never really awake."

"I am Jack's smirking revenge."

"I am Jack's wasted life."

"I felt like destroying something beautiful."

"On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."

"Look, nobody takes this more seriously than me. That condo was my life. Ok? I love every stick of furniture in that place. That was not just a bunch of stuff that got destroyed. It was me!"

"I am Jack's... complete lack of surprise."

"You wake up at SeaTac, SFO, LAX. You wake up at O'Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, BWI. Pacific, mountain, central. Lose an hour, gain an hour. This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time."

"Strangers with this kind of honesty make me go a big blubbery one."

"If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?"

"When the fight was over, nothing was solved, but nothing mattered. We all felt saved."

"People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden."

"Bob had bitch tits."

"Fight Club starts out funny. The first 30 minutes are overwhelmingly perfect. Like the beginning of American Beauty, the opening sequence whirls you through time, taking you in and out of the narrator's (Norton's) yuppie disillusionment. Poor Edward Norton—his character isn't even given a name. For good reason, since his identity consists of what furniture to buy, what shoes match his suit, and which dinette set best fits his non-existent personality. In this yuppie's life, IKEA is synonymous with orgasm. Enter Tyler Durden. Brad Pitt takes on the challenging role of this American psycho—a soap salesman who lives as a squatter, steals a sportscar one day and ditches it the next, and takes random nightshift jobs to survive. Tyler wants "freedom" from yuppie existence and he makes it a point to obliterate any rules with which he comes in contact—he pees in customers' food, inserts frames of nudity into family films at random movie theaters, and, of course, starts a Fight Club with Norton. It happens in a matter of seconds. He asks Norton to hit him as hard as he can and—bam!--shirtless yuppies are pounding each other to bloody shreds in bar basements all over the city. The opening of Fight Club makes it clear that the movie's a satire. It's supposed to be a biting mockery of yuppie angst. The problem, unfortunately, is that Fincher completely underestimates Edward Norton as an actor. If Fight Club is to be a successful satire, the audience can't fall in love with Norton's narrator. We shouldn't see him as the righteous crusader, the man who can do no wrong. Because when we take every punch Norton takes, we lose our sense of detachment. We lose that ironic distance—the distance that makes a movie like American Beauty such a compelling psychological portrait. There's no seeing the forest from the trees here because of Norton's intensity and ability to elicit endless empathy. We're his unconditional ally. But after being pummeled by Fight Club into bloody submission, we're just begging for mercy and an ending that will leave our senses—not our intellect—intact. But there's one other glaring flaw. Unfortunately, it's an actor. Can you guess who it is? Oh yes, Brad Pitt should have been eternally jailed by the acting police after Seven Years in Tibet, Meet Joe Black, etc. etc. The guy has no range. He just yells when he's trying to be profound and adds a slight stutter when he's trying to be subtle. Pitt tries so damn hard not to be a pretty face, but he spends half the movie flexing his muscles and tearing off his shirt. And worst of all, he's self-conscious! Despite his posing, he's not a confident actor. Instead, he's annoying rather than intimidating; dumb rather than deep; an irritating yapper rather than the moral voice of the film. Perhaps if Pitt and Norton had switched parts, it might have worked. After all, we don't feel anything for Tyler Durden and we care far too much about Norton's narrator. But here's the only recourse. I hope David Fincher sits in a crowded movie theater a few times over the next couple weeks to watch audience reaction to his film. Maybe he'll realize that Fight Club isn't as "funny" as he thinks it is. Maybe he'll realize that biting satire often blurs into the irresponsible. Maybe he'll realize he took the "traumatized male" theme one step too far. Or maybe he's still mesmerized by the sheer brutality of it all—the glistening blood spattered on the wall. He's so enthralled by its color, its undeniable immediacy, that he can't see its indelible pattern. And even more dangerously, he can't tell whose blood it is."

"Norton plays Jack, a generic name for a generic guy. He's a mild-mannered corporate drone whose complacently consumerist lifestyle is turned inside out when he encounters one Tyler Durden. The punkishly anarchic Durden (Pitt) is everything Jack would like to be but isn't, his own walking, talking id. Like Terry Southern's Magic Christian, Durden expresses his repugnance of society's materialistic values in a series of actes gratuits of mischievous subversion. Moonlighting as a cinema projectionist, he splices single, subliminally registered frames from pornographic films into bland mainstream fare; moonlighting as a waiter in a swanky restaurant, he pees into the oxtail soup. Bare-knuckled and bare-chested, the two of them start pummelling one another for thrills, only gradually discovering that there's a whole world out there of emasculated American males just waiting for an opportunity to let the sweat, blood and sperm pent up within them ooze out from every pore. Well, why not? It's a promising idea for a film, especially a satirical comedy, which is what Fight Club unambiguously is for its first half-hour. Fincher is a vulgar, flashy film-maker (he directed Seven and The Game) who doesn't so much make films as take them, the way we refer to a photographer taking, rather than making, photographs: he's interested only in surfaces and he likes even grunge to glitter. (The French, as usual, coined the perfect expression for this style: le look.) He's a sharp scriptwriter, however, and Norton's omnipresent voice-off narration, coupled with the subject's sociological relevance (cf Susan Faludi's new book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man), initially sucks one in."

"It's a bridesmaid's dress. I got it at a second-hand store. It was loved intensely for one night.. then cast aside."

"[on the phone, after taking a bottle of sleeping pills] This isn't a real suicide-thing. This is probably one of those cry-for-help things... You're going to have to keep me up aaaall night."

"I've got a stomach full of Xanax. I took what was left in the bottle. It might have been too much."

"Candy-stripe a cancer ward. It's not my problem."

"My God ... I haven't been fucked like that since grade school."

"A condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip one on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, and then you throw it away. The condom, I mean, not the stranger."

"Listen up, maggots! You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world."

"You wanna make an omelet, you gotta break some eggs."

"We're consumers. We are the byproducts of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra."

"I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I'm free in all the ways that you are not."

"First you've gotta know - not fear, know - that someday you're gonna die."

"If we are God's unwanted children, so be it!"

"Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken."

"You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you, never wanted you, in all probability he hates you. It's not the worst thing that could happen."

"The things you own end up owning you."

"Hitting bottom isn't a weekend retreat. It's not a goddamn seminar. Stop trying to control everything and just let go! LET GO!"

"Hi, you're gonna call off your rigorous investigation. You're gonna publicly state that there is no underground group, or, these guys are gonna take your balls. They're gonna send one to the New York Times, one to the LA Times, press release style. Look, the people you are after are the people you depend on: we cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances, we guard you while you sleep. Do not fuck with us."

"You are not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world."

"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything."