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"Fight Club" directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton is reviewed.

Depending on your sense of humor, your response to Fight Club-the most provocative and controversial release from a major Hollywood studio last year-probably involves taking an extreme position on either side of a love/hate divide. Most viewers, in fact, felt that Fight Club was either wildly funny or morally reprehensible, that it spoke to them in a meaningful way that few movies ever have or that it should be censored and the filmmakers hauled before a congressional committee to answer for what they'd done.

If you're among those who loved Fight Club, you'll be delighted with Fox Home Entertainment's two-disc Special Edition DVD release. One assumes that those who hated the film won't go near this video, but, as an adherent of the former camp, I have fantasized that at least one of the major critics who trashed the film on its theatrical release will screen the DVD, reconsider their critical stance, and-a la Joseph Morgenstern's historic 180-degree reversal on Bonnie and Clyde-publicly and remorsefully confess the obtuseness of their initial pronunciamento in a Variety cover story.

Which leaves us with the few, those happy few, who haven't seen Fight Club and somehow remained oblivious to the critical controversy which raged around the film last fall. First of all, let's be more precise about the required sense of humor. We don't mean Adam Sandler or Pauly Shore funny, but a very dark and decidedly offbeat sense of humor. Fight Club is a pitch-black comedy, an over-the-top, consciously outrageous social satire, characterized by excess and absurdity, and therefore guaranteed to delight or disturb sizable portions of any viewing audience.

The film is a fairly faithful adaptation of the critically acclaimed debut novel by Chuck Palahniuk, which was most often characterized by adjectives such as "unsettling," "caustic," 11 twisted," and "bleakly funny." Indeed, the darkly satiric writings of this thirty-seven-year-old Portland-based author (he has since completed two additional novels, Survivors and Invisible Monsters) have earned him favorable comparisons to other literary chroniclers of the dark and weird side such as Irvine Welsh, J.G. Ballard, Brett Easton Ellis, and William Burroughs.

Narrated in a first-person, stream-ofconsciousness manner, Fight Club chronicles the misadventures of a thirty-year-old corporate nebbish (Edward Norton)-identified only as The Narrator but who eventually refers to himself as 'Jack'-whose dehumanizing job as a recall coordinator for a major U.S. auto firm, combined with a selfconfessed enslavement to lifestyle consumerism, have fueled a six-month-long bout of insomnia and a personal sense of despair so great that he secretly yearns for a plane crash to end his meaningless existence.

'Jack' becomes involved with a pair of eccentric social misfits-Marla Taylor (Helena Bonham Carter), with whom he shares an emotional addiction to attending support groups for the terminally ill, and Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a charismatic free spirit with whom Jack organizes a `fight club' in the basement of a local bar where they and other disaffected young men find temporary physical and emotional release for their pent-up frustrations. The unusual, three-way relationship that develops between Marla, Tyler, and 'Jack' propels the latter on an increasingly violent quest for personal redemption, which, in a bizarre plot twist late in the film, confronts him with a startling self-discovery.

Many critics praised Fight Club, hailing it as one of the most exciting, original, and thought-provoking films of the year. Most writers focused on how director David Fincher imaginatively translated into fresh new cinematic language the novel's abrupt, herky-jerky, stream-of-consciousness voice by employing hyperkinetic camera movements, photo montages, subliminal imagery, freeze frames, terse editing rhythms, and some stunning, computer-generated visualizations of the Narrator's thought processes (including a bravura minute-and-a-half backward tracking shot originating in the protoplasmic fear cells of his brain, an IKEA catalog rendition of his trendy apartment furnishings, and a nightmarish plane crash). He seamlessly connects this disparate array of visual techniques through Edward Norton's voice-over narration, whose mordant humor and intimate reflections allow us inside the skin of its deeply troubled protagonist.

Fincher's stylish cinematic skills, honed through his early work in commercials and music videos, are on prominent display here, and the murky visual style and creepy dramatic quality so evident in his previous features-Alien3 (1992), Se7en (1995), and The Game (1997)-have been carefully calibrated here for comic effect. The film's expressionistic nature has been further heightened by the low-key, largely monochromatic but vivid cinematography of firsttime DP Jeff Cronenweth (son of Blade Runner cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth), an evocative and quirky sound design by Ren Klyce, an unusually effective technopop score, filled with propulsive rhythms and unusual sonorities, by the Dust Brothers (Michael Simpson and Don King), and the fast-paced but remarkably expressive editing style of James Hapgood. The level of technical craft and artistry on display in Fight Club is awesome and becomes more impressively evident on repeat viewings.

The performances in Fight Club, from the top-billed stars to the character actors in bit parts, are absolutely first-rate. Norton's performance, which involves the most extreme emotional trajectory, from whitecollar nerd to rebel leader to responsible adult, is the dramatic and thematic core of this modernist bildungsroman. It's a doubly impressive performance since it's played on at least two levels, involving the interplay between his on-screen performance, which often involves the character's direct address to the viewer, and his voice-over commentary, which adds another layer of irony or insight. Before his messianic self-image takes over, Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden is all carefree attitude and raffish charm, a gonzo libertarian with a bizarre sense of humor and a taste for garish fashion. Helena Bonham-Carter, the Merchant/Ivory heroine, is here brilliantly cast against type as a grunge goddess, complete with wildly unkempt hairdo, sloppily applied eyeliner, a thrift-shop wardrobe, and a lit cigarette perpetually dangling from her lips. These are memorable performances sure to show up in future career-highlights reels for all three actors.

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What truly distinguishes Fight Club, however, is its pungent satire, whose numerous targets include the soul-deadening consequences of excessive materialism, cynical corporate policies based on an indifference to human life, festering workplace discontent, repressed male rage and gender-role anxiety, class resentment, New Age psychobabble, the emotional legacy for a generation of young men of physically or emotionally absent fathers, and a critique of the personality types who are attracted to political cults. In a further departure from the cookie-cutter mode of most studio releases, Jim Uhls's screenplay retains much of the novel's minimalist, modernist style, and refuses to untangle narrative ambiguities or to provide convenient signposts to guide viewer interpretation.

Most notably, the film sustains the novel's single fixed perspective of the Narrator and, notwithstanding several tiny clues that would be picked up by only the most attentive and perspicacious viewer, thereby delivers the maximum surprise effect of its delayed plot twist. Both as social satire and psychological thriller, Fight Club engages and challenges moviegoers on an intellectual as well as an emotional and visceral level, refusing to spoon-feed them an easily digestible moral or lesson, instead insisting that viewers think through for themselves the many provocative themes and issues it broaches.

While Fight Club had numerous critical champions, the film's critical attackers were far more vocal, a negative chorus which became hysterical about what they felt to be the excessively graphic scenes of fisticuffs, which were variously condemned as "ugly," "stomach churning," "morally repulsive," "dangerous," and "macho porn." They felt such scenes served only as a mindless glamorization of brutality, a morally irresponsible portrayal, which they feared might encourage impressionable young male viewers to set up their own real-life fight clubs in order to beat each other senseless.

Generating such a strong response was, to some extent, what the filmmakers intended. Glamorization was definitely not what they had in mind, however, since they consciously chose to avoid the conventionally stylized and physically sanitized barroom fist fights, choreographed like raucous dance routines, so familiar from classic Hollywood Westerns or the martial-arts displays in the contemporary films of Jackie Chan, Steven Segal, Jean-Claude Van Damme, or their innumerable brethren. The far more realistic melees in Fight Club are instead characterized by a lot of awkward grappling, wild roundhouse swings, head butting, kneeing, headlocks, low blows, and other amateurish wrestling maneuvers-the way guys who are not used to fighting would fight.

A surprising number of critics, who suggested that the film's `fight club' encounters were little more than a monotonous repetition of scenes of senseless violence, seemed almost willfully oblivious to the fact that the filmmakers provided a comic or dramatic context for every fight, with each bout functioning in terms of character development or to signal a key turning point in the plot. Many of these scenes are purely comic in tone, such as Jack and Tyler's first tussle in the bar parking lot (after trading their first punches, the exciting adrenaline rush and revitalizing quality of the blows is suggested by their exchanged entreaties-"Hit me again," "No, you hit me"). This same mood figures in the visual hyperbole of one of the film's most hilarious montages, depicting Fight Club members on a `homework assignment' to pick a fight in public with a total stranger, and lose (in one of these, a seminary student is assaulted and, having surprised himself by throwing a retaliatory punch, and poised on the knife edge of the fight-or-flight syndrome, can't seem to decide whether to throw another punch or to apologize and run away).

In this same comic spirit, Fincher goes to great lengths to show the real-life aftereffects of such bare-knuckled violence. Jack, for example, suffers a black eye, bleeding gums, loosened teeth, and assorted cuts and contusions for weeks after-wards. He is easily able to recognize other Fight Club members in public by the bandages or various blackand-blue facial markings they sport. The piece de resistance of this running gag is a bartender who wears an elaborate, immobilizing head and neck brace.

In a broader satirical context, of course, the film is clearly posing in absurd terms the extent to which Jack and other Fight Club members have become so physically impassive, so emotionally anesthetized, and so spiritually numb, that it takes a broken nose, a split lip, or a few cracked ribs to reawaken their deadened nervous systems and to provide them with a meaningful sense of male identity.

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All kidding aside, Fight Club also knows when its scheduled bouts of controlled, consensual violence can go too far. After Jack, for example, becomes concerned that `Angel Face' (Jared Leto), a new Fight Club member, threatens to replace him as Tyler's confidant, he decides to seek vengeance against his rival. During their match, he breaks Fight Club Rule #3 ("When someone says `stop,' or goes limp, the fight is over") by administering a punishment beating. Having thrown him to the floor, Jack kneels astride Angel Face, striking repeated blows to his face in an obvious effort to disfigure him, to "destroy something beautiful," as Jack confesses. The editing of this scene, with Jack's assault repeatedly intercut with the shocked reactions of other Fight Club members, is clearly meant to convey the repellent nature, even in this roughhouse environment, of the encounter. Indeed, Tyler himself expresses his disapproval by calling Jack "psycho boy" and instructing others to get the victim to a hospital.

If Fight Club's critics became morally exercised over the film's mano-a-mano violence, they were absolutely apoplectic about what they perceived to be its 'fascist' politics, involving Tyler's establishment of Project Mayhem, for which he recruits a small army of terrorist guerrillas to carry out bombings and other attacks on corporate targets. The film was denounced as "an apology for fascism," "frankly and cheerfully fascist," and "a fascist rhapsody posing as a metaphor of liberation." These tirades, like the earlier complaints, seem to willfully ignore the film's inherent criticisms of Tyler's terrorist actions, which is consistently expressed through Jack's voice-over narration and the privileging of his increasingly condemnatory point of view.

In addition, the film's portrayal of Tyler's army leaves little doubt about its cultlike nature, revealing the Project Mayhem members as nameless, willful automatons who proclaim their unquestioning loyalty to their cult leader ("In Tyler we trusted") and who mindlessly parrot his slogans. The negative visual connotation of their skinhead coiffure to contemporary neo-Nazi groups is particularly germane. As Tyler proselytizes his troops through a bullhorn, it's clear that they have become as manipulated and dehumanized by their leader as they ever were by the corporate civilization from which he is trying to rescue them.

The multiple commentary tracks on the Special Edition DVD go a long way toward clarifying the filmmakers' intentions. The first disc, a gorgeous transfer of the 2.4:1 anamorphic widescreen film with a vibrant, THX-certified, Dolby Digital 5.1 surround soundtrack, features four separate commentary tracks-the first by David Fincher; the second with Fincher, Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, and Helena Bonham-Carter; the third with novelist Chuck Palahniuk and screenwriter Jim Uhls; and the fourth with production designer Alex McDowell, cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, costume designer Michael Kaplan, and visual effects supervisor Kevin Haug.

Not surprisingly, Fincher tends to concentrate on visual style and technical challenges and defers to the novelist and screenwriter on the film's "sociology." The most illuminating, entertaining, and funny commentary is that featuring Fincher and his actors, who are articulate not only about acting in general and what they were after in their specific performances, but also about the film's satirical approach (Pitt describes trying to find that "fine line between empathy and irony") and its political and philosophical themes (Norton discusses how nihilism seems such an appealing philosophy when you're young but that, as you mature, you recognize the practical limits as well as the hypocrisies to which nihilism lends itself). Palahniuk and Uhls discuss the film's edgy satire, the genesis of the novel and its characters, and the changes made from novel to film. While the commentary track featuring the production personnel is informative, it tends to get overly technical at times, with no effort to explain their professional jargon to the average viewer.

After you've savored every last anecdote and insight from disc one, the following week you can work your way through disc two, which is loaded with supplemental materials, including behind-the-scenes production clips, with alternate camera angles and commentary tracks, for six key scenes (including the airplane crash, the explosion of Jack's condo, and the projection booth), deleted and alternate scenes (including Maria's censored pillow talk), Fincher's storyboards, visual effects stills, and preproduction paintings. A variety of publicity materials is also included, most notably two hilarious Public Service Announcements (one each by Norton and Pitt, which Fox refused to show in theaters), and the film's press kit, presented as a Banana-Republic-- style mail-order catalog of trendy and expensive clothing items and other fashion accessories featured in the film.

As real-world echoes of Fight Club continue to swirl around us, from the current scandal involving numbers crunchers at Firestone who decided against a recall of their defective, life-threatening tires to the Versace fashion show which unabashedly presented a new Fight Club-inspired men's collection, this Special Edition DVD offers the ideal opportunity to reappreciate (or reappraise?) what some critics have referred to as "the first movie of the twenty-first century."