The race to see which celebrity has the best Halloween costume officially began last night when Cindy Crawford showed up to a party dressed as Amy Winehouse. Heidi Klum usually owns Halloween, but Cindy Crawford is far and away the early winner. Especially since she gets extra points for making me say “Amy Winehouse” and “oral sex” in the same sentence.
And here’s Amy Winehouse on her way to the hospital on Saturday where she’s reportedly being treated for a chest infection:
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Fight Club SUCKS!
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It's Too “Macho”
Fight Club is, at least partly, a film about masculinity, and how modern men – still vaguely driven by an ancient undefined caveman impulse – feel emasculated by the new wave of “sensitive guys” that has leaked into the culture in 1990s America. They act out their impulses by beating each other. The masculine posturing in this movie, however, is just as empty and as risible as the beefcake photos the characters scoff at. Is what the men doing really masculine, or is it just another version of dumb, pathetic “macho” posing? I'd say the latter.
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It Celebrates What it Claims to Decry
Fight Club is one of the most misinterpreted films of all time. Like people who watch Sid & Nancy to increase their own appetite for heroin, fans often look to Tyler Durden as a model of freedom. And it's easy to see why. Tyler Durden is cool. Indeed, all of Fight Club is slick, stylized, and really cool-looking. That style, however, seems to mute, dampen, and completely snuff out the screenplay's message: THIS STUFF IS BAD STUFF. Tyler Durden is an evil force, the men are terrorists, and the desperate grab for masculinity is a futile one. This is a film about how tough-guy masculinity has always been something of a churlish myth, but the film presents it as a cool and fun thing. It's the funnest ride to oblivion ever made.
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It's Choppy
Fight Club has three acts that practically stand independently of one another, and don't really flow thematically or logically. The first act is about an insomniac who must attend random support group meetings to sleep. The second act is about living in squalor and regaining your manhood by punching other guys in the face. The third act features a famous twist that is, when considered deeply, included for mere trickery. We have three unconnected movies here. It would be nice if we have more grace.
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No Broken Hands?
When you punch someone in the face, you hurt their face, but you also hurt your hand. A single, well-placed closed-fist punch to the jaw can crack one of your knuckle bones. The men in Fight Club are often seen wandering around with bloodies noses, bruised faces, and black eyes. Fair enough. Not one of them ever says “I can't fight tonight because my hands are both sprained.” The fights are not real, hefty fights about actual men fighting, but the usual movie fights we see in usual action movies, just with slightly more blood than usual.
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It's Immature
Tyler Durden's philosophy is a distressing mish-mash of old-world nihilism that any and all teenagers doodle in the margins of their notebooks. Tyler manages to attract a wide swath of white collar men to join his ranks and become a terrorist group. Are none of the men he talked to – none of them – familiar with fascism? With Nietzsche and Camus? Surely some of the guys must have stopped at some point and said “Isn't this Tyler guy just repeating snippets of older books and creating a fascist terrorist regime? Isn't his philosophy behind all of this kind of flimsy?” Surely some of Tyler's “followers” were college-educated, and had come to the realization that his adolescent preaching was, well, adolescent.
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It Hates Women
There is one (1) notable female role in this film full of men, and she is a suicidal, drug-addicted, lying sex maniac. Not that suicidal drug-addicted lying sex maniacs can't be perfectly decent human beings, but Marla strikes me as a weird sort of male sex fantasy more than a fully-realized character. She is someone that you can wow in bed, be filthy with, and then push out of your life whenever it's convenient. This is a film that is so obsessed with masculinity that its female presence is marginalized. Some have said that Fight Club is misogynistic. There might be something to that.
