I am Jack's critical eye...When I first saw The Sixth Sense I went in knowing there was supposedly a "clever twist" and saw it as a challenge to try and second guess the plot. I got the twist about 30 seconds after Bruce Willis was shot, and spent the rest of the movie looking for clues to support my theory.
It's easy to take this same approach with David Fincher's Fight Club, and if you're looking for the clues they're right there on the screen, hidden in plain sight. But when I first went to see Fight Club at the cinema I knew absolutely nothing about it - except the names of the stars (the perfect way to fully appreciate any film, but sadly increasingly hard in this modern age of information overload).
It would be easy - and probably rather dull - to ramble on about how, in that first viewing, Fight Club became my single, favourite film of all time; how I was genuinely knocked for six by the 'twist'; how almost every line is a potential T-shirt quote; how clever the script is; how brilliant every performance is in it and so on.
As I said to Rachel, in introducing it to her for Film Night: "This is my Dirty Dancing!"
Sadly, while she didn't know what the twist was, over the years she heard enough about the film to know there was a twist and so watched the film with the same eye that I had going in to Sixth Sense.
Will it ever be possible for a new generation of viewers to experience the visceral thrill I did when I first discovered the brutal, anarchic, magnificence of Fight Club?
The first rule of Fight Club is: you don't talk about Fight Club!
woha!
ReplyDeleteYou think as I do!
The first time I saw it I can not stand and called some friends and got into a basement and we started fighting.
were not so funny after 4 weeks with a broken arm that had to take my best friend.