Fight club - 1999

I watched this movie for the second time, and I understood it better but am still unsure about the ending. It's a cool movie, and it has a strange charm. It's very well done. Not my usual kind of film, plotwise, but it was very well done and I enjoyed it. It's narrated by the protagonist, and this is the clever detail that, first time I watched it, made me overlook the fact that we didn't know the name of the leading character! It's a story of mental disorder, solitude, isolation, social values, consumerism, rebellion, 'growing-up', etc etc. There's more to it than just men fighting. It's a liiiittle bit a case like 91/2weeks, which had characters and a story but all people remember (and saw) is Kim Basinger's striptease, and people who haven't seen it are now convinced it was an adult movie. I mean, it was for adults, but not in that way. It was a drama, not a porn. Fight Club too has many sides to it (many more actually) and many people only remember the first rule making it look like, to those who haven't watched it, nothing more than a soul-less macho movie. There's a lot to say about it. Edward Norton plays (greatly) the narrator-with-no-name  (so I'll refer to him as EN). He has a job he doesn't like, in an office he doesn't like, with people he doesn't care for. He seems to be alone in the world, and he surely lives alone adn tries to 'fill the void' by filling his house with Ikea stuff to give an appearance of the perfect place where satisfied dynamic people live their happy lives. He has insonnia and never sleeps, and of course without sleep everything is not only more difficult but also plainer and tasteless. He asks a doctor for help, something to help him sleep, but this unsympathetic doctor doesn't take him seriously, doesn't believe he really has a problem. Maybe he thinks that EN is one of those people that takes pills for everything, he surely doesn't believe he has a real problem and simply suggests exercising more. He doesn't believe he's in pain and tells him to go see the testicular cancer victims reunited at a support group meeting to see what real suffering is.
This is the first thing that calls for anger, in a way, because he doesn't even try to understand. Two days without sleep and I'm a zombie; EN never sleeps. That's a kind of torture, definitely not good for the body and even less for the mind.
EN goes to the meeting and at first you think he's criticizing or mocking the people there, then you realize he's not, he's enjoying the 'support' part of the meeting, and when this man Bob (Meat Loaf) hugs him and tells him to cry and get it all out, because he believes him to have cancer too, EN finds himself crying in his warm embrace. Obviously that night he is finally able to sleep: a good cry does this for you. He becomes addicted to it because it's the only thing that works for him. Every night he has a different meeting, a different nametag; he never actually says to be ill, I think, it's just that since he attends the meeting and keeps quiet, people assume he has a sad story inside. Every night the meeting helps him, until he notices Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter). He has seen her many times so he knows she's not ill, and this disturbs him. It ruins it for him, because she's like him and in a way she has no place there as he hasn't. He confronts her and his speech is quite something because every word applies to him too, he's also a fake, and she says so: 'you expose me and I'll expose you'
It's not clear why she goes to the meetings, but she's also troubled: the way she walked across that road was something, not caring at all about all the cars that could hit her, she showed a sad indifference. They talk and make a deal to attend different meetings and exchange numbers. Unfortunately the whole blessed thing has been spoiled for him and his insonnia claims him back.
He has to travel a lot for work, and all that traveling is depressing, until he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) who makes and sell soap and is so very different from him.
EN is , or was, uptight, a slave of convention and society and consumerism, but Tyler is free, he doesn't care, he says what he wants to say and how he wants to say it.
When EN finally gets home, he finds his apartment has been destroyed by an explosion and he has lost everything. For a moment he thought of calling Marla, but then he called Tyler; they went for a beer together, and Tyler made his first speech about how society has made us slave of useless, insignificant things. It was a very true, meaningful speech, it's a shame that Pitt's now so so famous I couldn't avoid thinking of his huge collection of motorbikes, fact that kind of ruined the whole thing.
Anyway, Tyler can't believe that after three beers En still can't ask for his help, meaning a place to stay, and so he makes him ask. It seems like the two of them are already friends. Tyler has the attitude of a man who is always comfortable, anywhere, who doesn't care about things or rules, someone who does whatever crosses his mind. Tyler asks him to hit him, and after he insists for a while they do indeed fight, and afterwards they feel better and share a beer. From now on his whole life changes. What happens is: they are always together and they often fight for fun, until they are seen and other men ask to join in, then they find a place where they can meet and fight without being seen. They create the Fight Club, and it slowly attracts more and more men. Tyler sets the rules and becomes a sort of God/leader.
One night Marla calls saying she took too many pills in an attempt of suicide, EN seems not to care but Tyler goes to her and in the morning she's in their home. EN is annoyed, he's all 'what are you doing here? this is my house, go away' and first time I watched it her reaction didn't make much sense, but I guess one accepted it on the account that she was weird. He said 'what are you doing here?' and she was surprised/angry when she replied 'what?!?'  and the first time I saw it I thought his question was kind of legitimate but when you realize the truth you understand her.
I admit that the first time I watched it I was totally surprised at the switch, and had not even noticed that he appeared to sleep regularly now.
EN seems jealous of Tyler now, and also unable to control him. EN has changed and can't cope with his office job anymore. He's more and more sloppy and uncaring, day after day, until he talks to his boss blackmailing him with what he knows of their job in order to get his money without having to go to work. If anyone had any doubt that EN was out of his mind, here is the proof: when his boss calls security, EN starts hitting himself hard (and the narrator voice says that 'somehow' that reminded him of his first fight with Tyler: very true, since it was exactly the same thing); when the security men arrive, he's on his knees, his face a mess, all bloody, saying 'don't hit me anymore' so he gets what he wanted!  Tyler starts recruiting people, and these men are completely devoted to him, following their leader whatever he asks of them, obeying every rules and completing every task he gives them.
EN seems often surprised, in the morning, seeing what kind of enterprise he put together. They do a lot of work in the house, and also various acts of sabotage as planned by Tyler. During one of these actions the men are caught by the police and Bob, slower than the others, is shot and killed. EN takes it very badly. . After that he's scared of that whole thing and wants to stop it but can't. He tries to find out what Tyler is up to and when he can't find him he travels around to every place Tyler has been, and finds out that there are fight clubs in all those places, and also that people know him. When he confronts a man about it, we are told as well as he is that he is Tyler Durden. that he created the clubs.  A call to Marla right before Tyler magically appears in his hotel room reveals to him the unbelievable truth that he himself is Tyler, and the one played by Pitt is but a projection of his mind. He's the one who's been sleeping with Marla and planning sabotages. When EN thought he was sleeping, 'Tyler' would take over! Afraid that she might be an obstacle to their plans he sends Marla away then goes to the police, but the men there are part of the organization too and follow his rules to the letter so he has to escape!! He tries to disarm the bombs but 'Tyler fights him' to stop him, and finds himself in a room, at a higher floor, with Tyler pointing a gun at him until he realizes that since they are the same person he's actually the one holding the gun, so to get rid of Tyler he puts the gun in his mouth and shoots, and we see a hole in Tyler's head when he 'dies', but EN is not dead, he only has a hole through the (left I think) cheek but he's alive, and when a bunch of members bring Marla in, he apologizes to her saying she met him in a strange-messy period (unfortunately I don't remember the words) then they hold hands and watch all the buildings around them collapse one after the other, and the movie ends.
Not clear to me where he is: will his building collapse too? Probably not, since there's a lot of members there and they know he's there too, so this means that 'Tyler' transported him to another building, not just to a upper floor, because the building he had tried to enter was one of those set to explode, right?
There were scenes where EN took actively the role of narrator and the actor turned to the camera to explain what was going on, like in the restaurant to tell us how these men do things like peeing in the soup and more.
I like the movie mostly because it is very well done: well written, well directed, well played. Everything works.
There were disgusting scenes like EN and Tyler going to retrieve human fat, wastes of liposuction operations, to make the soap. Disgusting, I had to close my eyes.
Amazing the revelation that it was all EN, all along, everything was him: he created the clubs, founded the Project Mayhem, planned the whole thing. The only detail that leaves me sort of confused is the real birth of the club itself. At first it was believed that people saw these two friends having fun fighting each other and asked to join in, but now it's clear that he was fighting himself, he was alone there, so these men asked to join in after seeing him punching himself hardly on the face?? They didn't think: this one's nuts, better stay away, no, they felt attracted to him! Well, anyway, the best detail of the 'revelation' is that he regarded himself, and showed it to us, as a kind of 'loser' when compared to Tyler, and then it turns out that he had the girl, he had the devotion, the ideas, the 'control', although he didn't know that.
'Tyler' had destroyed his apartment, meaning that he had destroyed his own, to force himself to change his life.
There's a lot of anarchic speeches, against this age that wants us as mindless-careless consumers, only interested in consuming and accumulating, but there's a lot of good speeches and messages in movies, and yet the world keeps going on the same way, where people try to save money on many things like food but then there's a big queue when a new i-phone comes out. Things they often don't need, but they want it simply to have it, to show that they have it, because there's always a lot of talk about being rebels or different or transgressive but in the end they try to be the same as everyone else, buying/wearing the expensive things that will make them cool and so conforming to the rest. Sometimes it seems to me the only way to be transgressive nowadays is not having a tattoo, or stuff like that...