It’s a terrific comedy, part-satire and part-nightmare
Interviewers routinely ask director David Fincher, who dabbles in dark mysteries like Zodiac, Seven and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, if he will ever make a comedy. He responds that he has already directed one. Guess which film he is referring to.
When Tyler meets the Narrator on a plane about 25 minutes in, he tells him, “You have a kind of sick desperation in your laugh.” That tone of nervous, nasty laughter is how many respond to Fincher’s film, shaking their heads in disbelief at the extremity of what the fight club evolves into, and chuckling at the sharply observed (if not entirely tasteless) stabs of humor at the early support group sequences. Few sequences in this writer’s memory conjure the definition of a dark comedy better than Edward Norton beating himself up in front of his bemused boss (played by the terrific character actor Zach Grenier) as part of a homework assignment.
The film’s walloping of blood and bold ideas probably makes it tougher for its fans to remember the moments of sharply observed humor, including the tongue-in-cheek references to corporate America (Starbucks cups, Ikea furniture, Volkswagen bugs). Derailing the methods of a consumerist society – regarding soap, Tyler and the Narrator are just selling woman’s fat bodies back to them – there is much room to delight in macabre, anti-consumerist humor. The funniest of all is how a film that criticizes the high and mighty was produced by a studio owned by Rupert Murdoch.
However, like Palahniuk’s lurid and clever novel before it, the reason why Fight Club feels so prescient and unnerving is because it is satire. It does not take much imagination to think about a misguided collective of middle-class men uniting around their frustration and starting a neo-fascist group that they take way too seriously. In that way, Fight Club is not just a macabre satire that tackles its targets with a wicked smile and a bloody fist, but a nightmare, envisioning just how desperate people can become when embracing their inner Tyler Durden.