David Fincher
Fight Club

"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!" - Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt)

After the excellent yet bitter "Seven" (1995), David Fincher returned in 1999 to direct the now-trusted Brad Pitt in "Fight Club", a film based on the novel by renowned author Chuck Palahniuk.

The protagonist (Edward Norton), an insurance consultant deeply depressed, attempts to heal his woes by attending support groups for people with incurable diseases, where he meets Marla Singer (Helena Bonahm Carter), who, like him, pretends to be ill to attend these meetings and get free coffee.

During a business trip, however, the protagonist meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), with whom he will start living when he loses his house in a fire; together, they establish the fight club, which soon becomes more than just a simple "association" for underground fights.

In Fight Club fighting becomes the starting point to cast a look at a consumeristic, alienating society, morbidly and excessively tied to images and conventions; in this society, set in a dark and almost oppressive scenario that marvelously renders the film's desired idea of it, man is willing to listen to the beast within, to release it, and to slip into the violence of fighting simply to feel better, to be able to start the daily routine the next day without going insane.

The protagonist, portrayed by an excellent Edward Norton, able not to be overshadowed by continuously sharing the scene with a Brad Pitt in a state of grace, almost unconsciously realizes how what he owned was about to own him precisely at the moment when he loses everything: indeed, right after the fire of his apartment, he finds that state of freedom that puts him almost in antithesis ("together" with Durden) against the society in which he lives, in what can be seen as a relationship of hostility, a state of perpetual war.

This is soon noticed by Marla, well-portrayed by a never so "dirty" Helena Bonahm Carter, with whom the "two" deepen their relationship, and precisely to save the relationship with her, Norton's character decides to stop the madness into which the fight club has inevitably degenerated.

In fact, in its second half, the film proceeds at an increasingly frenetic pace, and the atmosphere that permeates everything becomes increasingly unsettling, almost as if Fincher wants to prepare us for the shocking finale that awaits us. The fight club in the film soon ceases to be simply "a rag" capable of absorbing the basest and most animalistic instincts of its attendees, transforming into an entity almost endowed with a life of its own, capable of escaping the control of its own creator.

Almost to the rhythm of the monologues of a Tyler Durden increasingly pleased with his madness and more comfortable in the role of charismatic leader assumed in the fight club (renamed Project Mayhem), the film assumes increasingly sick, desperate, destructive, and nihilistic connotations, as if moving in step with the protagonist's ideal; an ideal that does not propose an alternative value system to the one it wants to destroy, but which simply aims to remind man that he is nothing more than the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world, to lead him to what could be defined as a utopian "state of nature".