Five Deadly Venoms

May 27, 2018May 25, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Five Deadly Venoms (1978)

Dir. Chang Cheh

Written by: Chang Cheh, Kuang Ni

Starring: Sheng Chiang, Chien Sun, Phillip Chung-Fung Kwok, Meng Lo, Pai Wei, Feng Lu

Five Deadly Venoms is a classic of grindhouse cinema, one of the most memorable and celebrated martial arts films of the late 1970s, and one of the most seen classic kung fu films in the West. The movie comes relatively late into the body of work of the prolific and respected Hong Kong filmmaker, Chang Cheh, who had cut his teeth in the 1960s making popular Wuxia films before transitioning to the kung fu genre. Five Deadly Venoms shows the influence of the swords and spectacle aesthetic of the Wuxia tradition, and is an unusual blend of the two styles, featuring the period setting and unattainable physical feats of the Wuxia, as well as some gritty hand-to-hand combat set pieces. It features several great martial artists showcasing different styles of kung fu, as the five venoms all specialize in a different variant based on the attacking style of an animal. Plus it has an unusual mystery structure, making its plot a bit more engaging than the typical derivative kung fu films of the time. Taking these elements into consideration, it isn’t surprising that Five Deadly Venoms has risen above the pack of martial arts films of its time to become a midnight movie staple.

The film opens with aging Master Yuan (Feng Ku) explaining to his final pupil, Yang Tieh (Sheng), that he fears that the other pupils he taught in the past may have begun using the skills he taught them for evil rather than good. Yuan took on five pupils in his younger days and he taught each of them a specific, and devastating, style of kung fu. Yuan asks Tieh, who he was taught a hybrid of all five styles, to seek out the five masked pupils – Centipede (Feng), Snake (Chi), Scorpion (Chien), Lizard (Kwok), and Toad (Pai) – and to kill any who are using his teachings for the purposes of evil. Yuan gives Tieh a tip that the poison clan, as his former pupils are referred to, may be plotting a robbery and Tieh tracks them to the town where their target lives. Tieh has a difficult time identifying the venoms, as their identities are a closely guarded secret, but eventually they all come to the surface during a murder investigation. Tieh teams up with Lizard, who is now a police officer, and Toad, to try to take down Centipede and Snake, who have murdered an entire family in their search for a rumored treasure, but the identity of Scorpion remains a mystery until the very end.

That rudimentary plot synopsis doesn’t do justice to the fun mystery that’s at the core of Five Deadly Venoms. At least in my experience, its plot structure is fairly unique among the kung fu films of its time period. I can remember my first time watching the movie, thinking that it was actually a bit confusing, with a decent-at-best English language dub and a subpar image transfer making it difficult to pick up on some characters’ identities and some of the more nuanced plot points. Mistaken and double identities abound, with one character not revealing his true nature until immediately before the film’s climactic battle. The venoms are all intriguing characters, and their variated kung fu styles keep the action fresh and exciting throughout the film. In many kung fu films of the time, the plot was a thin construct only used to propel the action from one set piece to another, but in Five Deadly Venoms, action often takes a backseat to intrigue, as there is genuine mystery about the identity of several of the venoms, and as to the motivations that each character has regarding the hidden treasure that Centipede and Snake have killed to find. This deeper plot structure also helps to heighten character identification, and the scenes that feature the once-invulnerable Toad broken and tortured are genuinely emotionally moving, something that more run of the mill kung fu films can rarely claim. The richness of the plot and the characters makes Five Deadly Venoms a satisfying rewatch, and it’s likely the reason that I’ve returned to this film much more frequently than the other martial arts classics in my collection.

The other reason that I might return to Five Deadly Venoms more readily than the Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan movies in my collection is that it provides the perfect combination of action, campiness, and tradition that I learned to embrace when I was a teenager starting to discover Hong Kong martial arts films. I’ve written before about my experience raiding my friend’s father’s VHS collection and watching 1970s and 1980s kung fu and action movies that he had taped off of HBO when I would stay at their house. The movies that I discovered there were often the stereotypically campy kung fu classics, complete with incomplete or inaccurate English dubbing, bad editing, and grainy image quality. As such, I came to love these qualities about this subgenre of action films. I sought out movies that would check off these boxes, further coming to love the B-movie quality of the genre when I saw the way that Quentin Tarantino lovingly spun those seeming shortcomings into a perfect homage in Kill Bill. I started to see the cinematic interconnections in kung fu movies, Westerns, pulp detective movies and novels, and, to a lesser extent, comics. I started becoming aware of a “high culture”/”low culture” dichotomy and realizing that I had little interest in separating types of art from one another, as I realized that works of art, by nature, form a mesh that informs one another, as well as informing the tastes and viewing patterns of fans. I enjoyed Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but its aspirational “artfulness” (and it is a beautiful, moving, and artful film) didn’t speak to me in the same way that the rawness of movies like Five Deadly Venoms did.

After the first couple of years of college, Five Deadly Venoms, along with the rest of the kung fu films in my collection, found itself seemingly permanently anchored to its place on the shelf. My last couple of years of college were dominated by Westerns and arthouse cinema, and my free time to watch movies for fun was greatly diminished. After dropping out of graduate school, I felt a need to disengage with movies almost entirely, experiencing an overload and a burn out that was overwhelming. After a year or two of really not enjoying watching movies, and going out of my way to find excuses not to see the newest releases or rewatch old favorites, I started allowing myself some indulgences. Five Deadly Venoms was one of the first of these forays back into really watching movies for pleasure that I can distinctly remember. One morning in early 2010, some 18 months after I had left graduate school and probably nearly a year after a DUI car crash that derailed my sense of self for several years, I found myself alone in my house, listening to one of my favorite albums, the undeniable debut album by the Wu-Tang Clan, Enter the Wu-Tang. I listened to the album a lot back then, and I still do, but for some reason on that morning, upon hearing the opening sample to “Da Mystery of Chessboxing,” which is partially culled from Five Deadly Venoms, I felt compelled to stop the music and dig up my old DVD copy of the movie and pop it in. I sat down on the floor of my room and watched it from beginning to end, remembering just how fun it could be to get lost in a great story for a couple of hours. It was a great experience and I can remember feeling a bit lighter after having watched a movie that I really enjoyed.

I’ve since watched Five Deadly Venoms a few times, and it doesn’t disappoint. Martial arts movies are a frequent pick-me-up for me, when I want to elevate my mood before heading to work for the evening, or when I want to totally push any thoughts of responsibility out of my head for a while. I stream a lot of stuff, but Five Deadly Venoms is the DVD most likely to come off of my shelf for a rewatch. Unlike the rest of the low quality bootlegs that comprise a large portion of my kung fu collection, I don’t mind the grainy textures and variant sound quality, which only seem to be exacerbated by modern televisions. There’s something about that quality and this movie that seems fitting and even charming. It probably isn’t my favorite kung fu movie, but it is emblematic of a certain type of kung fu movie, and reminiscent of a time in my life when I needed to be reminded that the opportunity to watch a good movie is something of value, to be enjoyed and savored. I think that more and more it’s become difficult for people to really unplug, and that being too busy to enjoy a decent quality of life has become the norm for so many people I know, and that isn’t a healthy way of life. One of the things that I’ve most valued about working on this project is that it has forced me to find the time to sit down and really watch and enjoy at least one movie each week. Even though I look at keeping my posts updated regularly as important work, I find it rewarding, and that satisfaction, along with an honest desire to approach all of these movies with an air of critical curiosity, has kept me working through. Five Deadly Venoms is, objectively, not the best movie that I’ve written about for this project, but it is one of the most fun, and often movies that are just plain fun are the ones most worth watching.

Fists of Fury (The Big Boss)

May 20, 2018May 17, 2018 / andrewmisk / 1 Comment

Fists of Fury AKA The Big Boss (1971)

Dir. Lo Wei

Written by: Lo Wei, Bruce Lee

Starring: Bruce Lee, Maria Yi, James Tien

Bruce Lee’s first major film, The Big Boss (mistakenly released in America as Fists of Fury), is far from the best showcase of Lee’s star power and his physical prowess, but it does hint at some of the exciting things to come. The film was initially written as a vehicle for James Tien, but when a change in director was made, Lee was given the role of the main character, Cheng, and the film went on to become a massive success, turning Lee into the most famous martial artist in Asia. The Big Boss was the first step in relaunching Lee’s career in Hong Kong, as he had left America following the cancellation of the cult TV show Green Hornet, on which he played the sidekick, Cato. It was the first in a pair of films Lee would star in, and serve as the driving creative force behind, for upstart film studio Golden Harvest. Lee’s presence helped to give the new production studio credibility, while Golden Harvest offered Lee the creative control that he was unable to achieve while working in Hollywood. The Big Boss would be the worse of the two films that Lee would complete for Golden Harvest, but the partnership helped to break him into the Hong Kong cinema world in a big way. However, Lee’s earliest Hong Kong films only scratch the surface of the potential that he would later fulfill as an action star when given a proper budget and the opportunity to work with a more competent film crew.

In the film, Lee plays Cheng Chao-an, who leaves mainland China to live with his cousin, Hsu Chien (Tien) in Thailand. Hsu Chien has secured Cheng a job working with the rest of his family at an ice factory, but when Cheng starts working at the factory, he realizes that the boss is using the ice blocks to smuggle drugs. Shortly after this discovery, Cheng’s cousins begin disappearing one by one, which leads Cheng and the rest of the workers at the factory to go on strike, demanding to know the whereabouts of Hsu Chien and the rest of their coworkers. When the boss’s thugs try to break up the strike, Cheng jumps into the fray to defend his friends, breaking a vow made to his mother before leaving China that he would not get into any fights or trouble in Thailand. In an effort to reconcile with his workers, the big boss makes Cheng the factory foreman, but this only leads to him getting closer to discovering the true nature of the factory’s business and putting him into direct conflict with the big boss and his cronies.

The Big Boss isn’t a bad movie, but, as I alluded to, it definitely suffers from low production values and a lack of focus. It is obvious that the film had a somewhat fraught production. On-set injuries, poor shooting conditions, a revolving door of crew members, including the director, and, at times, disagreements between Lee and Wei on the vision of the film all added up to make the end result a bit of a mess. The film’s first half gets started much too slowly, with the focus primarily on Hsu Chien rather than Cheng, perhaps a holdover from the original intention for the film to be a vehicle to escalate Tien’s existing popularity in Hong Kong. Using the narrative excuse that Cheng promised his mother that he would avoid violence, Lee’s character is largely brushed to the side while Tien gets all of the fighting scenes. While Tien grabs the spotlight, Lee plays out a mildly incestuous and totally unnecessary romantic hero side plot with his only female cousin, Chiao Mei (Yi). When Cheng finally breaks his vow to his mother and Lee gets to showcase some of his fighting skills, it’s very obvious that he is a much better martial artist than Tien, and it’s hard for me to accept not having enjoyed the clinic that Lee puts on in the film’s second half for the full runtime.

Unfortunately, even when Lee is allowed to fully showcase his kung fu, his skills are undercut by the film’s persistently bad editing. During fight scenes, Lee is rarely shot in full shot, instead his movements are implied by a series of quick cuts from insert shots and close-ups. The shooting angles are often disorienting, and the camera movements lack any fluidity making many of the fights featuring Lee difficult to really follow and enjoy. I’m sure that most of the jarring cuts in the film’s fight scenes were efforts to hide the fact that during production Lee was shooting through both illness and injury, but that doesn’t make the lack of any coherent flow or rhythm to the fight scenes any less obtrusive. Add to this the fact that the beginning of the film hardly features Lee in an action role, and The Big Boss is rather disappointing as a martial arts film, on the whole. Lee and Wei would correct some of these mistakes and turn out a much more enjoyable and consistent effort with their next film, but The Big Boss still has the marks of a partnership that is being felt out, and a star persona that is just beginning to emerge.

One of the factors contributing to my disappointment in rewatching The Big Boss might be the absolute terrible quality of the transfer on the DVD that I have in my collection. I can remember purchasing this DVD, which is essentially a decently-packaged bootleg from a foreign distributor, when I was about 19. Around that time, I started finding and purchasing very inexpensive copies of kung fu movies online, but the quality of the image and the presentation, in general, was highly variable. This movie is packaged as Fists of Fury, which was the incorrect title that The Big Boss was released under in America, hence its position here in the alphabetical list of my collection, and the disc contains no special features or booklet, just a poor quality copy of the official theatrical release cut of the film. It’s only audio track is the poorly dubbed English-language version, which I actually prefer for these types of old school kung fu movies, but it would be interesting to watch the film in its native language. I understand that by now there have been several remastered official home video releases of The Big Boss and Lee’s other Hong Kong films, so I would be interested to check out a better looking copy of the movie and see if it changes my opinion of it at all.

I don’t mean to paint The Big Boss in too negative a light, because it is still a pretty fun kung fu movie in its own right. Despite its shortcomings, fans of the genre will absolutely find plenty to enjoy about the movie. It checks off all of the correct campy boxes, features a few fun fights, and, obviously, it’s still a Bruce Lee movie. Lee’s relatively small body of major work remains the gold standard in martial arts films for many people, and it would be hard to argue with that sentiment. Lee was the perfect combination of skill, athleticism, and charisma to break martial arts into the mainstream in the West, and the building blocks of his style are on display here. One thing that I did think about when I was watching The Big Boss was how remarkable Lee’s progression as an actor and star was from this first feature to his later films, Way of the Dragon and Enter the Dragon. There are less than two years separating the Hong Kong release of The Big Boss and Lee’s untimely death, and to think that his career had progressed so quickly and positively in that time is incredible to me, especially having recently watched Enter the Dragon for this project. It’s hard to predict where Lee’s career would have gone after the success of that film, but his rise to fame started with The Big Boss, and even if it doesn’t feature Lee at the height of his powers, it’s worth at least a watch.

A Fistful of Dollars

May 13, 2018May 10, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

Dir. Sergio Leone

Written by: Victor Andrés Catena, Jaime Comas, Sergio Leone

Starring: Clint Eastwood, Marianne Koch, Gian Maria Volantè, José Calvo

Often credited with being the first Spaghetti Western, A Fistful of Dollars, the first film in Sergio Leone’s seminal “Dollars Trilogy,” is undoubtedly one of the most famous examples of that mode of Western, and one of the best of the early period of these Italian-made takes on the Western. Leone’s film isn’t without precedent, but his partnership with Clint Eastwood became the blueprint for European Westerns, and was the first to make a splash in the American market, solidifying the viability of these cultural imports and sparking a torrent of imitators of varying quality. Adapted as it was from Akira Kurosawa’s samurai film Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars also points to the cultural universality of these tales, and the malleability of the Western genre to fit into various settings and cultural motifs. Leone’s and Eastwood’s epic final collaboration, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, was my first experience with the Spaghetti Western, and I quickly sought out the first two chapters in the trilogy. A Fistful of Dollars lacks the budget and flair that Leone’s later films would come to embody, but plenty of the director’s trademarks are on display here, and the film obviously points to further great work to come. Maybe A Fistful of Dollars falls short of the masterpiece designation that I have readily given to Leone’s later work, but it’s a great film in its own right, and likely more cinematically important than any other Western of the 1960s.

In A Fistful of Dollars, Sergio Leone filters the influence of the great American Western auteurs John Ford and Howard Hawks, throws in a dash of world cinema influence, bakes it all under the Spanish sun and adds a transgressive, violent flair, resulting in a Western movie that would set the paradigm for a new form of the genre. The film opens with a lone rider, Joe (Eastwood), arriving in the town of San Miguel. Upon his arrival, Joe meets Silvanito (Calvo), the town saloonkeeper who tells him that San Miguel is controlled by two feuding gangs, the Rojos, a family of outlaws, and the Baxters, headed by Sherriff John Baxter (Wolfgang Lukschy). Though Silvanito warns the stranger that he should leave town, Joe sees an opportunity to fortuitously position himself by playing both sides of the fence in the feud between the Rojos and the Baxters, and begins to clandestinely sell information to both sides. Though his motives seem to be purely financial, Joe meets a woman, Marisol (Koch), who is being held prisoner by Ramon Rojo (Volantè), and he tries to help her. He frees Marisol and gives her and her family the money that he has gotten from the Baxters and Rojos, and tries to make it appear that it is the Baxters who have freed her. When Ramon realizes that it was Joe who freed Marisol, he captures and tortures him, and in the meantime, the Rojos murder the entire Baxter family, who they believe are protecting Joe. Joe escapes the Rojo compound and is smuggled out of town in a coffin by the undertaker, Piripero (Joseph Egger). With the Rojos searching high and low for Joe, the stranger takes time to convalesce and plan in a cave on the outskirts of San Miguel, but when he finds out that Silvanito has been captured by the Rojos, he must return to town to face off against the gang and save his friend.

I don’t know that I could narrow my list of favorite filmmakers down to something like a personal Mt. Rushmore, where I chose even half a dozen of my favorites to be immortalized, but I do know that Sergio Leone would have a place on that monument, almost regardless of its size limitations. Besides David Lynch, Leone has been one of the most constant presences in my life as a cinephile. Despite his relatively scant feature output, Leone’s work has had a seismic impact on my taste in and appreciation of film. From the first time I was introduced to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly when I was 17 until earlier this year when I finally got around to watching and writing about Leone’s final Western, Duck You Sucker, I have been enamored with his parched, fly-bitten, primal vision of the American West. I discovered Leone, at least partially, through my teenaged obsession with Quentin Tarantino. The former video store clerk famously wore his cinematic influences on his sleeve, liberally “borrowing” from his favorite filmmakers, and championing B-movies, pulp cinema, and foreign films along the way. I discovered a lot of movies and filmmakers this way, but Leone was the one who stuck with me. I saw The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly independently, but after having seen the second half of Tarantino’s Kill Bill, and the way that that film aped the Spaghetti Western aesthetic, I started seeking out the rest of Leone’s movies.

A Fistful of Dollars was the next Spaghetti Western that I encountered, and I have to admit that the first time I watched the movie I was a little bit disappointed. When compared to Leone’s epic later work, his debut seems slight. In hindsight, of course, I can recognize the importance of the film, both in terms of propelling the Western genre forward in a different direction, and in launching the career of an immensely important and visionary filmmaker. All of Leone’s soon-to-be familiar directorial tropes are on display in A Fistful of Dollars. This fully formed vision is likely a result of a career working as an assistant director in the Italian film industry that stretched back to the 1940s, providing Leone with the technical chops and industry know-how to deliver unique, artful feature films from the outset. A Fistful of Dollars, with its minimalist dialogue, heavy reliance on extreme close-ups, whiplash editing, and heretofore unseen violence, became the blueprint not just for Leone’s continued work, but for a new vision of the Western, in general. Shortly after the film’s release, European filmmakers across the continent, but particularly in Italy, were attempting to recreate the film’s aesthetic and mood, in hopes of capturing lightning in a bottle, to varying success.

While some of these copy-cat Westerns are interesting in their own right, most are forgettable, at best, and unwatchable, at worst. Most of the studio directors working in the genre in Italy lacked Leone’s singular vision and visual flair, but what they all lacked was the undeniable star power and screen presence of a young Clint Eastwood. Eastwood wasn’t Leone’s first choice to play Joe in A Fistful of Dollars, but it’s impossible to imagine the film and its sequels without Eastwood as the lead. Though he is explicitly named (differently) in each of these films, Eastwood’s character(s) in Leone’s Westerns has frequently come to be referred to as “The Man With No Name,” perhaps because of Eastwood’s tight-lipped, minimalist performances in the films. His iconic performances in these films set the standard for a new type of cowboy, emerging from the shadow of straight-laced, moralistic defenders of virtue embodied by Henry Fonda, Gary Cooper, and, of course, John Wayne. Eastwood’s Joe is a quiet, cold, and efficient instrument of violence. His line delivery in the film is clipped, and the dialogue is terse, giving the impression that Joe has little regard for other people, or for human life, barely deigning to open his mouth when he communicates, even with those he seems to like. Eastwood’s Joe isn’t a nihilist, however, as he obviously shows care for Marisol, even hinting that he has a past when he remarks that he is helping her because he “knew someone like [her] once and there was no one there to help.” These brief glimpses of emotionality give the character an unexpected depth, as does the natural humor that Eastwood imbues Joe with. Throughout the film, he makes wry, offhanded retorts and observations, but the humor never feels shoehorned, despite its existence in the brutal universe of Leone’s West. This multifaceted performance as a complex anti-hero turned Eastwood into a bona fide star, and helped to raise A Fistful of Dollars head and shoulders above its imitators.

Another major factor in the success of A Fistful of Dollars is its source material, with the film being an adaptation of Yojimbo. Though Leone denied that Yojimbo is the sole inspiration for his film, and quite obviously it is not, there is no denying that that film is at least the primary influence at work here. The two films share a symbiotic kind of bond, with Yojimbo retroactively being thought of as a Western, due to its influence on A Fistful of Dollars, and examination of Kurosawa’s samurai films reveals the obvious influence of the American Western. One of the things that I like so much about A Fistful of Dollars is that it is a great example of the cultural cross pollination that cinema can provide. The movie is a Western directed by an Italian, shot in Spain with a cast of Spanish and German actors, starring a barely-known American television actor, adapted from a traditional Japanese samurai film, which was, in turn, influenced by American pulp novels and Westerns. The 1950s and, particularly, 1960s became a boom period for international cinema as film industries in Europe began to rebuild after the devastation of World War II, and the arthouse movement in America began to open up American eyes to movies from around the world that differed significantly from the stories being produced by the recently-abandoned Hollywood studio system. Though it was dismissed as campy and schlocky, nihilistic and excessively violent, by critics upon its American release, A Fistful of Dollars was a major hit with audiences, and it has come to be seen as an important film, aesthetically and culturally, in the broader conversation of the history of world cinema. The cinematic interconnections made here, and throughout Leone’s body of work, indicate the kind of cultural universality that makes great cinematic texts so valuable and so relatable across cultures. A great movie is a great movie, regardless of its language or its visual and cultural aesthetic, and the kinds of pleasures that people take in the visual telling of a great tale are universal.

As I’ve alluded to, Leone would go on to make bigger, better Westerns and movies that I enjoy more than this one, but without A Fistful of Dollars none of those films would likely exist. A Fistful of Dollars changed the landscape of the Western genre, with the once-quintessential American film being reimagined by an outsider. Leone embraced many of the traditions of the classic American Western, but rejected those parts of the genre that he saw as fallacies, replacing them with a more real, more raw, more savage West, peopled by men of dubious character and duplicitous motivation and painted with buckets of bright red blood. This gritty realism would come to inform the revisionist Westerns of the later 20^th century, as well as the hardcore action films of the 1970s. There’s no understating the importance of this movie on the Western genre, helping as it did to revitalize a form that had probably gotten too mired in its own tropes and pretenses by the end of the 1950s. Without this movie we might not get The Wild Bunch, and certainly wouldn’t get Unforgiven, but we also might never get movies like Pulp Fiction or Taxi Driver whose creators were sparked by the unique vision of Sergio Leone. I’ll always prefer The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly for its maximalist impact, and because it was my first foray into the world of a filmmaker whose entire body of work I celebrate, but when I don’t have three hours to truly immerse myself in that epic, A Fistful of Dollars is a perfectly fine substitute. While the later film expands upon all of the best tropes of the Spaghetti Western, Leone’s debut establishes them, concentrating them down into their most essential qualities, and providing a blueprint for the rest of the genre to come.

Fight Club

May 6, 2018May 1, 2018 / andrewmisk / 4 Comments

Fight Club (1999)

Dir. David Fincher

Written by: Jim Uhls (from the novel by Chuck Palahniuk)

Starring: Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham-Carter

Over the years, media collections have always served as markers of an individual’s personal tastes. An album collection, a bookshelf, or a list of favorite movies can be a representation of one’s personality and interests that they can cultivate and put on display for the world to see, a Rosetta stone to unlock the mystery of someone’s cultural affinities. The media that we choose to collect and value can make an important statement about our personal identities. While much of my collection is probably a testament to my overall movie snobbery, there are certain movies in it that are so culturally universal and so definitive of a time and a place in American cinematic cultural history that they fail to reveal much about my actual personal tastes. Just like “Rubber Soul” or “Four Way Street” in my mother’s album collection, there are simply certain movies that it seems like everyone who was alive and consuming mass culture during a certain time can agree upon, and seems to have a copy of floating around in their collection somewhere. Fight Club is one of these universal movies for people, such as myself, who came of age in the late 1990s.

Despite being only a modest box office success, Fight Club is the movie that helped put both David Fincher and Chuck Palahniuk on the cultural map in a big way. Fincher already had a few features under his belt, including his helming of a major misstep in the Alien franchise, and his redemptive efforts in directing the cult hits The Game and Se7en. Palahniuk became a household name after the film adaptation of his first novel became a cult hit and a cultural touchstone. Fight Club’s story of disaffected, displaced masculinity, embodied by the Narrator (Norton), came to resonate with a generation of young men who identified with the film’s anti-corporate message and with its ultraviolent content. The film sees the Narrator leave a comfortable white collar job after a chance meeting with Tyler Durden (Pitt), a misanthrope and social provocateur who comes up with the idea for a secret club that can help men struggling with a perceived loss of agency in the face of societal change. Tyler and the narrator found Fight Club, a secret underground fighting league in which men can vent the frustrations of existing in a post-Industrialist, post-Feminist world through brutal fist fights. The fights help these aimless men feel alive and vital, giving them a sense of belonging and purpose, and Fight Club begins to spread across the country, with its adherents praising Tyler like a cult leader. Eventually, Fight Club begins to change into a more organized and militant force, Project Mayhem, as Tyler’s devotees begin to engage in more bombastic, socially motivated acts of vandalism and anti-corporate mischief. The Narrator starts to worry that Project Mayhem has gotten out of control, but there doesn’t seem to be much he can do to stop the momentum that Tyler has built in creating an army.

I can remember watching Fight Club for the first time with one of my best friends when we were sophomores in high school, a year or two after it had been out in theaters. We watched the movie on VHS and I was taken in by its highly stylized visuals and its hip, sardonic take on modern workplace culture. I clung to Tyler Durden’s sloganeering in the film, taking phrases like “How can you know anything about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight,” and “You are not your fucking khakis,” to heart and starting to turn them into the building blocks of my nascent teenaged personality. I found Fight Club’s anti-corporate, anarchic sensibilities to be mature and enlightened viewpoints, and the film’s overall theme of rejecting societal expectations in favor of a return to a primal sort of self-exploration truly resonated with my developing worldview. Eventually, I bought the movie on DVD, and I became totally obsessed with it. I watched it over and over again, listening to various commentary tracks, watching deleted scenes and behind-the-scenes vignettes. Even though I already knew the outcome of Fight Club’s famous twist ending, I didn’t care, and I reaped just as much enjoyment from my tenth viewing of the film as I had from that first time watching it. Fight Club was exactly the sort of smart, stylish, edgy movie that boosted my credentials as a fan of ”important” movies, and when I moved to Pittsburgh for college, I chose to display my tastes for the world to see by purchasing a Fight Club poster and tacking it to the wall of my first dorm room.

It’s easy to see why Fight Club became such a hit with a generation of movie watchers. The movie is perfect for the DVD era, with its dense and twisting narrative rewarding repeat views. Its cutting edge visuals, for the time, were eye-popping in the relative high fidelity that DVD offered, and lent themselves well to the types of supplemental material that were popular on the prestige DVD releases of the early 21^st century. These qualities, and the increasing affordability of collecting DVDs, led to Fight Club’s ubiquity in millennials’ movie collections and helped turn a box office disappointment into a run-away cult success that has garnered praise as one of the best films of its period. Though it tells the story of disaffected members of Generation X, who came of age in a rapidly changing world where the workplace success and stable domestic life that seemed to be enjoyed by their predecessors was rapidly eroding, Fight Club’s sloganeering and paint-by-numbers approach to societal discord and extreme civil disobedience made it a perfect movie to be adopted by the next generation of young people who were actually coming of age upon the film’s release. These teens and preteens took the movie’s simplistic politics to heart and many started to form an identity based around the primal, uber-macho points of view that are embraced in Fight Club. Just like the members of Project Mayhem who mindlessly parrot Tyler’s screeds and credos back to him and to each other, Fight Club’s fans were having the film’s messages drilled into their heads through repetitious viewing at home.

Of course, Fight Club is a work of satire and its politics and social commentary should be taken with a grain of salt. I recognized the film as such, and while I never espoused the macho posturing in the film, I was taken in by many of its more pointed social critiques, particularly its examination of the inability of the modern American worker to exist as anything other than an undifferentiated cog in a heartless, brutal corporate machine. I took to heart Tyler Durden’s warning that “the things we own end up owning us,” and tried to eschew materialist or corporatist urges, but I didn’t need a movie to tell me that big businesses and corporations were bad for individuals, and that working people are endlessly exploited by a profit-hungry system of Capitalism that values them only for their productive capacity and not for their creative or humanistic qualities. Watching a movie like Fight Club helped to crystallize some of my beliefs, but as I got older, I started to see the fallacy in living your life by movie quotes or by letting a piece of pop culture become a guiding or defining part of your life and personality. I still enjoyed Fight Club as a movie, but eventually the poster came off of my wall, and my viewings of the film became fewer and more far between. Changing tastes and a broadening world view shifted my interests towards more intellectually rigorous and nuanced films, but Fight Club still existed in the background of my cinematic excursions, an old favorite waiting to be rediscovered in a new light, or simply to be returned to as a form of filmic comfort food.

While I have watched Fight Club a handful of times since it ceased to be a very important movie to me in my late teens and early twenties, I think that watching it for this project must have been my first time really sitting down and engaging with the movie in a deep and relevant way in close to a decade. The experience didn’t disappoint, and, if anything, I found Fight Club to perhaps be more relevant today than it was when I first saw it almost twenty years ago. Watching a movie that attempts to explore the fragility of modern, white-collar, White American masculinity in the age of the Me Too movement and the resultant backlash from so-called “Men’s Rights” advocates was an interesting experience, to say the least. It was difficult for me to watch Fight Club without coming to the realization that perhaps this ubiquitous movie could be, at least partially, to blame for a subset of the male population in my age group who seem bent on creating grievances and blaming the world, and particularly women, for their own shortcomings or disappointments in life. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of these Men’s Rights types held Fight Club in high esteem, while certainly missing the movie’s satirical critique of the macho culture that it depicts. Tyler Durden, and the club that he creates, are responses to the perceived marginalization of the White American male, in the face of increased visibilities and opportunities for women, people of color, and other traditionally marginalized groups. In the film, the formation of a heterosocial group, in which physical assault is the only outlet for these men to feel alive or to come into contact with their own conflicted, and conflicting, emotional centers, is celebrated as a return to some sort of male primacy. However, as the film shows, embracing that vicious, violent form of machismo has deadly consequences for many of the characters, and leads to a series of counterproductive and empty revolutionary gestures. Fight Club should be read as a cautionary tale for men against letting too much of the Id control our behaviors, but instead I think that there is a large portion of the movie’s fandom that sees it as a primer and a call to arms against societal strictures that are “emasculating” a generation of men.

I guess the question that I was left with after rewatching Fight Club and thinking about the movie in the context of its potential role in creating, or at the very least reaffirming the beliefs of, a group of vile, hateful men, was whether or not the film’s positive qualities outweigh the connection that I’ve now made between the movie and a real world ethos that I find incompatible with my own point of view. In the end, I think that I still enjoy Fight Club. Although I’ve found Palahniuk to be something of a provocateur in his own right, I find it hard to believe that either he or Fincher would support the reading of this text that I’m imagining some fans clinging to. Perhaps because the film isn’t ostensibly branded as a comedy, its satirical point of view is easier to lose, but I think that most viewers will very easily realize that Tyler is the film’s antagonist, rather than an idol to be worshipped. As a movie, Fight Club still holds up visually in spite of two decades of technical progression since its release. The film’s gritty, grimy visual aesthetic is perfect, and finds Fincher expanding on the visual aesthetic of his earlier films to incorporate limited CGI, and employing some flashier camera work and editing than he had previously in his feature films. Its twisting, non-linear narrative is still a joy to unpack, and the film’s pacing is spot on, with its lengthy runtime seeming to fly by. Fight Club is a movie that is indelibly of its time, both in terms of its larger context and its role in my own personal development as a film viewer, but like other great movies it remains culturally and cinematically relevant. Great art should be a mirror for the society that produces it, and Fight Club uses its violent, satirical narrative to great critical effect, but there’s often no accounting for the ways that an audience will warp and distort that reflection based on their own prejudices and predilections.

Drew's DVD Project

12 Monkeys to Zodiac

Month: May 2018

Five Deadly Venoms

Fists of Fury (The Big Boss)

A Fistful of Dollars

Fight Club