FIGHT CLUB @ 25

A white collar drone who has just turned thirty lacks purpose in his life of work and consumption that his conscience has given him insomnia. By inadvertent recommendation, he finds that attending support groups for people with real problems forces emotional catharses from him and, by their release, he sleeps like a baby. Returning from one business trip to find his apartment has been blown up he calls the strange guy he met on the plane who offers to put him up for as long as he likes on one condition that they fight. If the misery groups got him sleeping again, they as nought to the power of violence. Rapidly, the word gets out and each city starts its own fight club. The disaffected men are on the rise. All that energy and aggression and nothing to do ...

Fight Club had almost the same kind of viral campaign as Blair Witch back in 1999. No one was as canny as the team from that one but when ads for Tyler Durden's soap appeared in community papers with some fine print about the movie, you could say the campaign was in the spirit of the pranksters in the movie. Then when it arrived we felt its intensity, thrilled to its audacity and sharp humour and were left reeling by its violence. It worked and worked better than expected. That, oddly enough, reminded me of waiting all year for the Sex Pistols album, tempering my anticipation, to find that it was much better than expected. I was still laughing at some scenes weeks afterward (particularly the priest scene) but had a growing concern about how it played with the kind of men's groups that made me feel uncomfortable. Tyler Durden has a plan. It's not the movie's plan but its articulate and forcefully stated.

The more obviously satirical aspects are not a problem. The guy hates his job and the culture of consumers that it feeds, the micromanaging bosses and the falsehood of order in the greater world. The constant wit in his narration. His parasitic relationship with the support groups is an extension of that consumerism and his rival in the leisure activity, Marla, is happy to make it clearer: it's cheaper than a movie and there's free coffee. And then, when the fight clubs start with their rules and rationales things take turns, heading to a momentous conclusion. Some of that would find unanimous agreement from the audiences and that is woven tightly in with the more violent and megalomaniacal thoughts. The tough paternalism of the clubs houses gristly narcissism and the notion of cultism comes out of the shadows.

The film makes no bones of this. If it were remotely interested in earnestly nurturing real fight clubs it would work harder to avoid ridiculing them to the extent that it does. I recall in one of the Usenet groups I was part of that a major contributor reacted against the film by saying he'd never felt like that without once considering that it was neither directed at him nor, after it ramps up, to anyone outside of its cult mindset. Add that to how ugly the violence is with its splattering gore and unglamorous injury.

So where are all the women? Her name is Marla Singer and she does a lot of work. A sexy self-survivalist and funster, she is everything that the modern city can accommodate. As the pranky fight club members are hardening their gluteal muscles and shaving their heads, she's having wild and wonderful sex with their leader, drinking however much she wants, gargling with coffee on the morning after and walking across traffic. She is in neither the white collar salary drudge nor the oiled bicep brigades and never will be as long as her life grasping strength shall serve her. The fight clubs cannot admit her with all that potential threat she brings. If Fincher were to be tokenistic and suggest that only men would be stupid enough to want to join such cults the attempt would fail its audience. That she would see through their bullshit immediately is more to the point.

The thing that struck me the most about the Space Monkeys as they emerge from the fighting basements as militant operatives, is that, while this played as whacky comedy in 1999 but increasingly has come to resemble ultra-right men's movements around the world. In the U.S.A. alone, the new decade has featured the raising of the profile of extremist groups who recruit from the disaffected, the majorities who cry victim, anyone weakened by the turning world of capitalism, Nazis, Incels, barely veiled fascists. Tyler Durden's soliloquy about returning to killing your own food and dressing in its skins feeds straight into the vein of fantasists. The film presents this as delusional (I'm not going to spoil quite how) but if you're watching and hearing the bits you want to hear ...

I can recall, early the following year, hearing of midnight screenings of Fight Club at local art house cinemas and immediately thought: the first cult movie of the century is for a real cult. Really, though, I have no idea; it might well have been some of those support groups going along to feel communal. I do know the thought amused rather than frightened me.

Perhaps I've just ranted here. I should close with some appreciation of the film itself. David Fincher had more than proved himself equal to the task of producing thrilling cinema with the likes of Seven up his sleeve. Fight Club is a marvel of constant information feed with subliminal flashes both alluded to in the screenplay and demonstrated on screen, as well as a sales catalogue of cheeky sleights, audio cues, pop culture references ("run, Forest, run!") and contemporary culture canniness. While some music cues are obvious, most of the score rests below the action as an endless carpet of trip-hop flavoured cool. The ironic use of the Pixies track in the finale is as perfectly judged as the opening rush through the brain under the opening titles. Everything visual, from lighting effects, colour timing, crank speed seems judged frame by frame to both appear deliberate and unnoticeable. Fincher's M.O. to stuff as much as he could into the confines of the screen and the air that the speaker system moves.

But there's something else I noticed this time. My resolutely ok home system more than acquitted itself in this latest screening but I understood something this time that I hadn't before. Fight Club was made for cinema viewing, for crowds of strangers in the dark connecting through belly laughs and gasps. On the screen as the projected film did display the "cigarette burn" indicators of the ends of reels you were free to notice the meta reference. The office is paper heavy in a way that real offices already were not. It's another film from the '90s which would be changed by mobile phones. The Y2K issue was at its eleventh hour yet not alluded to in the story (which might have solved a lot of problems for the Space Monkey campaigns). For a film that encouraged the use of its techniques into the future, Fight Club is yet a farewell to the era about to end with the old century.

The film gave the leading trio of Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter signature roles that they could retire on. At the time, these were absorbed by filmgoers as a kind of comedy group as their performances were so effectively funny. That is not forgotten about Fight Club. While it is never quite promoted as a comedy, nor is it sold as a political thriller. Either might serve but in a year of genre bending and breaking it worked on its own terms as a display of cinematic virtuosity and a bloody funny satire.

BEING JOHN MALKOVICH @ 25

Craig is a self employed puppeteer married to Lotte who wants a baby and needs Craig to get a paying job. He does, at the bizarre business led by Dr Lester from the 7 1/2 floor of the Mertin-Flemmer business, winning the job for his nimbleness with his fingers which helps with filing. During his job induction he is immediately smitten by the beautiful and sassy Maxine. One day a folder he needs falls behind the cabinet and, moving the cabinet to retrieve it, he discovers a small door. It opens on to a tunnel which his curiosity cannot resist. Once in, he is suddenly propelled into the brain of John Malkovich. Craig is a passive observer of Malkovich's experience, seeing him read the newspaper and crunch on morning toast. After a few minutes, he is ejected and falls on a patch of grass on the New Jersey Turnpike. He tells Maxine about this, hoping to interest her in him. She immediately thinks business. The pair, with Lotte who is suddenly and mutually smitten with Maxine. That's all in the first half hour and I'm leaving things out.

Even less of it was in the trailer and every time I saw it or even recounted it to others, I'd laugh just at the ideas. 1999 was a year of game changing with the likes of The Matrix, Fight Club and the Blair Witch Project adding bold new approaches to narrative and film making that are still resonant. Being John Malkovich was the feature debut of writer Charlie Kaufmann and director Spike Jonez both of whom had had a very good '90s with noticeable tv jobs and some standout music videos. Kaufmann's ideas had led him to write his own screenplays for challenging source material like Phillip K. Dick, among others, favouring approaches with strong mind bending narratives. BJM began life as a love story. It's still that, just a very peculiar one.

The casting and its presentation were also key to this convoluted story's works. Teen star turned dramatic lead John Cusack uglied down for his depressing Craig, having a boyish enthusiasm that never gets to override his dowdiness. Catherine Keener, an indy star who usually played poignant characters with quiet intellect, is credibly inverted as the loud and sexy Maxine. Cameron Diaz, the decade's edgy sex pot is unrecognisable under an explosion of frizz and layers of jumpers and trackie dacks. And John Malkovich himself goes exponentially beyond sporting in the title role of the shell of celebrity who, when he is confronted with a feedback loop of identity plays everyone in a restaurant, reacts with the horror we realise it would create but hilariously.

The management of this, making extraordinary ideas acceptable, is about pacing and depth of performance as much as effects or technical film making. While there are hints by the second in the few introductory scenes they fall flat as quirk until the characters interact with real stakes, until the movie really kicks in, it feels like it could collapse under its own cuteness. This is why Cusack and Diaz have to look so plain and unlovable and communication at the office is so frustrating, we need to want to change everything to something, to anything else. So far, that's pretty standard for a rom com but Maxine's glamour is so toxic that the scheme cannot work without the first couple trying to break it. That is what forms the plot when it does start and then gets to the extent that it must be done through control of living third party. That and its drama and its comedy is why this film with its cosmos of tiny weird ideas still feels like a classically narrative movie: the strangeness isn't being smuggled in, it's the big loudly screeching exoskeleton on the surface.

When I saw this with friends at a cinema in 1999, I was as receptive as anyone around me in the dark to its weird ideas (that trailer really had done its work properly) and I was invaded by its near constant brilliance. We couldn't stop talking about it at drinks afterwards and it was one of the movies of that year that stayed with us. But then I found that I couldn't watch it a again. I'd start it and think I had to laugh out loud in those first few minutes which seemed to fall flat reliably. This effect went deep enough for me to shut it down and remember the first viewing and let it stay as funny as it had been. Watching it again for this anniversary review, I had to course through the whole thing and did. Yes, it not only works but if you start it dropping the expectations of a comedy, you'll get a lot more out of it.

Kaufmann and Jonez never quite repeated this triumph. Kaufmann found a match in Michel Gondry but Eternal Sunshine's melancholy rises too early and strongly to approach the genreless Being John Malkovich. Jonez has made a mass of music videos and perfectly good features but nothing as dizzying. The pair's second and so far final collaboration Adaptation is fine but should be allowed to be different. There's no great tragedy here. Being John Malkovich is an exalted one-off and would only be diminished by comparison as though every thing every artist did needs scrutiny for standards they didn't declare themselves. All I'll say to that is that Kaufmann's directorial debut had him plunge into the kind of feedback distortion that gave us the restaurant scene in Being John Malkovich but was presented unironically as a constantly unfolding despondency which turns two hours into what feels like four. But for this moment, surrounded by other great moments that formed one of mainstream cinema's best years.