Fighting Talk - Fight Club - David Fincher's film - Edward Norton, who stars - Interview

GF: Clearly the movie has to be understood at that metaphorical level. It's going to be interesting to see how many people, beginning with the mainstream press, will be willing to do that. I suspect there will be a major tendency to take ideas like the fight club and the bombing of skyscrapers literally.

EN: I've always felt that the dialogue between art and the critical community is one of mutual responsibility. The critical community is always calling for films that are less formulaic, not soporific in their lack of substance or mindless in their violence - that are unfamiliar, challenging, literate, and provocative. But when anyone makes an attempt to do anything that is more sophisticated, then the responsibility shifts back to the critics to grant it a more sophisticated response - in this case to acknowledge its metaphoric or allegorical nature. It will be very easy for people to take potshots at Fight Club, to reduce it to a film that espouses violence or anarchy, but that's too superficial a way to look at it. It would be extremely lazy, for example, to tie the film directly to the climate around the bombings and shootings that have occurred in the last few years just because, on a brisk, superficial viewing, you could draw that connection. I don't actually think that's what this film is about. I don't even think it's about the exploration of the idea that frustration should be manifested as aggression toward other people. It's much more about people who are exploring modes of self-liberation through aggression that's directed at the self, and the idea of stripping away one's presumptions and fears until you're free of them.

GF: Did you and Fincher and the producers discuss whether the film would be perceived as irresponsible?

EN: Yes. But we all knew what our intention was, and we had to proceed with that intention. You can't not pursue a creative statement because of the fear it will be misinterpreted. If you did, nothing of any substance would get done. When I worked on The People vs. Larry Flynt and Gloria Steinem attacked the idea that the film got made at all, I thought that was an astonishingly retrograde critique from a liberal commentator; it smacked of a fascistic kind of censoriousness. To say, for instance, that it was a film that presented only a certain side of a man whose life also involved these other complicated issues would have been a legitimate critique, but to say that it was an invalid subject matter to make a film about was a much more dangerous statement than anything the film came up with.

I feel that way about Fight Club, too. Many of the things that have been called subversive are regarded as classics now, including much of Oscar Wilde. Because some men pursue their sexual obsessions with young girls, does that mean Nabokov shouldn't have written Lolita? Should Martin Scorsese not have made Taxi Driver because there was the potential that someone like John Hinckley would use it as the excuse for his particular pathology? I think the answer to that is definitely no. Art has an important role in holding up a mirror to the things that are unhealthy in a culture.