 Does the author feel Fight Club is an original concept?
Boys Do Bleed Fight Club is silly stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash and transporting piece of moviemaking, like Raging Bull on acid. Fight Club careers from one resonant satirical idea to the next without quite deciding whether its characters are full of crap or are Gen X prophets. Jack and Bob subscribe to a new form of male bonding: They cling to each other and sob. When Jack's apartment mysteriously explodes--along with his carefully chosen IKEA furniture--he moves into Tyler's squalid warehouse and helps to found a new religion: Fight Club, in which young males gather after hours in the basement of a nightclub to pound one another (and be pounded) to a bloody pulp. "Self-improvement," explains Tyler, "is masturbation"; self-destruction is the new way. Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, seem to think they've broken new ground in Fight Club , that their metaphor for our discontents hits harder than anyone else's. But 20 years ago, the same impulse was called punk and, as Greil Marcus documents in Lipstick Traces , it was other things before that. But there's something deeply movie-ish about the whole conceit, as if the novelist and director were weaned on Martin Scorsese pictures and never stopped dreaming of recapturing that first masochistic rush. The novel, the first by Chuck Palahniuk (the surname sounds like Eskimo for "palooka"--which somehow fits), walks a line between the straight and ironic--it isn't always clear if its glib sociological pronouncements are meant to be taken straight or as the ravings of a delusional mama's boy. But onscreen, when Pitt announces to the assembled fighters that they are the "middle children of history" with "no purpose and no place"--emasculated on one hand by the lack of a unifying crisis (a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as promised by television--he seems meant to be intoning gospel. "We are a generation of men raised by women," Tyler announces, and adds, "If our fathers bail, what does that tell you about God?" F ight Club could use a few different perspectives: a woman's, obviously, but also an African-American's--someone who'd have a different take on the "healing" properties of violence. Is it that he's a materialist or that the materials themselves (i.e., IKEA's lacquered particle boards) don't measure up to his fantasies of opulence?
 No, it feels like a mixture of Johnny Rotten, Jake La Motta, and Jesus.
 Yes, the film points to new possibilities in storytelling.  No, but voice-over narration is back in style.  No, it feels like a mixture of Johnny Rotten, Jake La Motta, and Jesus.  No, it feels like corporate-subsidized art.