The number one rule of Fight Club...

I have to say that this movie did a tremendously better and more entertaining job of capturing my attention than what my notoriously low expectations were...uh...expecting. As good-looking as he is, I have never really been a fan of his acting. To me, it is very "movie-star generic." Neither good or bad. You do not come to a Brad Pitt flick to see how well he is going to mold himself into a role. Let's be honest...you come to see how smoldering he is going to be up on the big screen. Anyway, Pitt does well in his film as the imaginary, kick-ass, alter ego of the narrator's split personality, but the true star of this film is of course, the narrator. He represents the outer shell of painless, numb, routine-driven drones that most people become (including myself) and weirdly finds emotional freedom from going to a series of support group meetings initially and later on, getting pummeled for sport.

Now while this is cinematic extremism at its finest, this is one of the things films do best.
They show us the most intense "out-there" situation and while we, the audience, "ooh" and "ahh" at it, by the end of the movie, the film is really showing us a mirror that is reflecting our stories, our dreams, and most entertainingly, our insecurities. While I doubt any of us have alter egos of our own split personalities, the narrator's situation is not all that uncommon. Look at the common reasoning of addiction: escapism, be someone else-ism. (LOL! Sorry, I just had to put that in there) When you are dancing in a dark club with music blasting and drinking alcohol, I highly doubt you are the same person you are when you are sitting in class, answering your professor's questions. Of course not! Because when you are that uninhibited person, you know deep down that this person cannot survive in this routine-driven, capitalistic world. So you save them for a place where they can survive. And that's what the narrator did in a schizophrenic and sadistic kind of way. This film capitalizes on what makes all good films indeed "good": relationships. Whether it is a relationship with ourselves, our imaginary friend, our support group-abusing lover, or our bitch tits-having sob mate, films teaches us that there is a relationship to any and everything around us - through story and the actual technicality of the technology films use.

One of the things that keeps people watching movies over and over again is that movies gives us a chance to develop our view of the world This brings me to Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". In section XIII, he explains in so many words that technology have burst open the lives that have had us "locked up hopelessly." That no matter how many times you have seen an action being done, through film and its effects, you can begin to see it the way a newborn sees it. Through film, we learn the relationship between the subject and our inanimate environment. With slow-motion, we learn how far the sweat drips off of our face during a workout to the ground that it will eventually splatter on. Through close-ups, we can see the detail of our fingers as we type each keystroke in what seems like a fraction of a section. Through wide shots, we can see our beloved planet Earth from a point of view that only astronauts are lucky enough to see. I believe Benjamin said it best: "The camera introduces us to unconscious optics..."