Fight Club may be the most important film of the second half of the twentieth century. Granted, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton give it blockbuster status, and Helena Bohnam Carter adds the credibility without which this film might otherwise have been relegated to obscurity or even an outright blacklisting. But Fight Club does a lot more than captivate and entertain. A generation of young people disillusioned with life in a mechanized and computerized society, deadened to all the possibility that life is supposed to offer, can find a voice in the schizophrenic personality of the nameless, therapy-addicted main character. Even feminists regretful of the irreparable damage they have unintentionally done to a generation of young men cite Fight Club as the expression of rage that unavoidably follows from denying to anyone their right assert their humanity. Luddite themes echo throughout every scene of the film--from the dissatisfaction of insurance company employees resigned to life on a predetermined course in which the only guarantee is that survival will increasingly approach zero to an ultimate showdown with a global financial corporatocracy. All anyone wants is for the time in between to mean something.

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