Now Showing: Fight Club • The Straight Story

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Fight Club

by Cole Smithey
Misogynist, anti-capitalist, and class-conscious, novelist Chuck Palahniuk’s “Fight Club” takes a Trainspotting brand of glee in dismissing lifestyle mores and materialist limitations of American social existence. The movie plays like a boys-only video game where male audience members are players encouraged to kick over the machine that ate their quarters at the end of the game. For all of the controversy surrounding the movie for fear that young males will begin setting up fight clubs of their own around the world, the idea is countered directly in the movie, as Ed Norton’s nameless character comes to view his dimwitted, class-conscious Fight Club cohorts as complete morons — following the first thing that comes along allowing them the right to be. Indeed the Fight Club cult that Norton sets up under the tutelage of his brutal disenfranchised alter ego/evil-twin, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), digresses into a flesh chewing monument that gets dumped on the floor like so much brain matter of Norton’s closest friend.

From Fight Club’s hyper-science-fiction-inflected credit sequence, underscored by searing punk music, to its post Blade Runner/Mean Streets ending, director David Fincher (Seven, The Game) pulls out every stop in his arsenal of cinematic tricks to deliver walloping cinematic blows. Fincher’s approach is completely aggressive and packed to the surface with such a high sperm count that you can almost see the microscopic swimmers bursting to get free. There’s never a gesture, vocal quality, intention, or motivation from any character (even Marla — Helena Bonham Carter) that isn’t full-bore masculine. And if that means that a pound of anger is coming along for the ride — so be it.

In this story, if you’re a consumer you’re a pussy, and all you have to do is see through the culture of house-wife behavior where free-time is spent imagining and buying things to complete your identity. A greater social repercussion from Fight Club would be a trend where American males just ceased spending money and began hoarding every dime as if they were collecting names on a petition against our snotty soul-crushing corporate government and post-media-feminist existence. However heavily Fight Club relies on extraneous voice-over narration from Ed Norton, the grist of the story lies in his character’s need to follow. Even as it becomes glaringly clear over the course of the movie that Norton’s character is pulling his own strings rather than acting on the suggestions of Pitt’s rock-star perfect persona, it’s the male inclination to be lead that troubles us. Palahniuk seems to be saying that males have such a strong urge to follow another person’s lead that it’s only through pain that a guy can fully realize his own responsibility to himself and the world around him. It’s a stratagem that fits perfectly with Fincher’s previous films and gives nods to films like Taxi Driver, The Graduate, and even the rebellious nature of A Clockwork Orange.

Like the insomniac Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, Ed Norton gravitates to his true nature by exploring society in a heightened state of sleep-deprived accessibility. That Norton’s job as a car company recall analyst demands that he fly into different time zones in cities where he’s treated the same and can buy all the same stuff magnifies his disassociation to other people. Just when he’s finally is able to quell his insomnia by crying at support groups for people with terminal ailments, Norton becomes dogged by Marla (Bonham Carter). Marla shows up at every meeting Norton goes to and her very presence mocks his ability to find refuge in fringe social enclaves. Caught, embarrassed, and exasperated, Norton’s character makes a personal enabling breakthrough. By becoming free of all of his worldly possessions and donning the badges of physical abuse, Norton attains a sainthood status which he can’t help but abuse by misguiding easily influenced males around him to join his cult of social terrorists. The performances, direction, and themes are thickly woven in scratchy wool, not silk. But Fincher never lets you forget what the social loom
looks like.

The Straight Story

by Cole Smithey
For as much of a complete diversion from the signature brutality of director David Lynch’s (Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man) typical fodder, The Straight Story finds Lynch content to play a one-note samba of cinematic droning similar to his last film, The Lost Highway. But it’s Lynch’s flirtation with commercial forces like Disney (the film’s production company) and tractor company John Deere that weigh in heaviest on this sentimental chamber piece, marking it as something other than simply a serviceable rendition of a based-in-fact road movie. The story (written by Lynch’s live-in girlfriend, Mary Sweeney, in collaboration with her childhood friend, John Roach) retraces a journey that Alvin Straight (played by Richard Farnsworth — Misery) took in 1994 to visit his ailing brother. Straight, having no driver’s license, hooked up a small trailer to his John Deere riding mower and tooled on over to Wisconsin from his home in Iowa to rekindle his severed familial ties with a brother he hadn’t spoken to in ten years. It’s reasonable to wonder why a scene where Alvin purchases a John Deere mower sits so prominently in the course of a movie presumably focused on a triumph of accrued wisdom.

Deserted in the tediously paced linear narrative is the film’s most intriguing character of Alvin’s daughter, Rose (brilliantly played by Sissy Spacek). Rose is a bit slow mentally and suffers from an endearing speech defect. After being wrongly held responsible for negligence in a fire which claimed the life of one of her five children, Rose had her surviving progeny taken away from her by the courts. Spacek’s riveting presence bleeds historic relevance into the story and sanctifies the film with a glow of rare transcendent character embodiment. Spacek’s singular aspect shapes the drama of the story until Alvin takes off on his diminishing journey to a brief and bathetic reunion with his brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton). Spacek’s Rose uncomfortably splits the movie into being a compelling drama on one hand and nothing more than a glorified psuedo-documentary on the other.

The Straight Story can be easily viewed as a harbinger of touchy-feely movies yet to come in an American cinema sent reeling from a recent spate of public shootings. I suspect, however, that it is more of a bow by David Lynch to capitalistic gain and inventive bankruptcy on his part. Eraserhead and Blue Velvet stand out as the highest peaks in Lynch’s turbulent career with Blue Velvet as best of the two. That’s not a bad thing, considering that Blue Velvet is an impossibly good film built on such an organic and flimsy structure of stylized fetishism that no other director could have pulled it off. Even if Lynch had only made that one movie it would be enough to put him in the director’s hall of fame for creating one of the best films of the ’80s. Lynch seems to be marking time with The Straight Story, and marking time for someone else’s career is hardly a responsibility cinema audience should be asked to shoulder. However, Lynch fans do get one subtle wink from the director early in the movie when a sound like an off-stage gunshot threatens to reveal a suicide before disclosing that Alvin has merely fallen on the floor of his kitchen. There’s no nasty little secret hiding beneath the grass of Alvin Straight’s home, but one senses that there could be, and maybe even that Lynch wishes that there were.

Hollywood may be crunched into a corner with its tail between its legs, but inventive foreign directors on a par with Lynch’s former aspirations are still grappling furiously with psycho-sexual-political issues. David Cronenberg (Videodrome) and Lars Von Trier (Breaking the Waves) promise to keep the blood blue veins of gutsy filmmaking alive. Perhaps David Lynch deserves a breather — but rest is never an option for the truly wicked.