The art of self defense, it's like a remake of the Fight Club organized to celebrate its twentieth anniversary

In the new Riley Stearns movie The art of defending yourself, a solitary office drone with gentle manners has an experience that requires him to reassess his modest place in a supposedly civilized society. He joins a group with a charismatic leader who encourages the recovery of traditional masculinity built around a physical conflict that transcends borders. He meets a woman of the same spirit and develops with her an unconventional relationship, not quite romantic. Finally, he ends up suspecting that the charismatic leader uses dangerous extremist methods to defend a megalomaniac cause, leading to a final confrontation. If this description seems familiar to you without knowing more about this new movie, you may have seen the movie Fight Club, who will be 20 years old this fall. At the hour, The art of defending yourself feels like an unofficial remake.

Stearns does not explicitly position his new film as a response to David Fincher's beloved adaptation, Chuck Palahniuk. On the one hand, his gathering of desperate and lonely men is much more socially acceptable than the group of barefoot brawlers Fight Club. In Art of defense, the sweet Casey (Jesse Eisenberg) simply joins a karate class in a local dojo, presided over by a discreet domineering sensei (Alessandro Nivola). Stearns also takes a more discreet, more impassive approach to hardware. It does not monkey Fincher's wild stylizations, which include sardonic aspects of the camera, imaginary hallucinations (such as a detailed visualization of an airplane crash) and the intensive use of blueprints. procedurally-driven procedural close-ups, such as zooming on the bowels of a stove to show the cause of an explosion.

But while avoiding the noisy techniques, Stearns explores a similar territory. He studies a man frustrated by the fear and anguish that accompanied him in his meticulous attempts to conform to the rules of society. Casey, like the nameless narrator played by Edward Norton in Fight Club, lives sequestered from physical violence. Once he enters his world – by an assault on the street, rather than Norton's initial panic with Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) – he wants to participate. He can not wait to finally feel like a real man.

The two decades since Fight Club have made Fincher's film look both dated and realistic. The year 1999 was long enough – before the Presidencies Bush, Obama or Trump; before September 11; before the conversations about white fragility were so frequent or pointy – that it now seems quite strange that so many movies of that time were so anxious in front of the dilemmas of straight, white and well-off men. (For viewers who do not fit these categories – and the empathic viewers who do – "quaint" can not cover it, a "ridiculous" power could.) Movies like Fall, Fight Club, and American beauty have satirical dimensions and can not endorse the most egotistical or authoritative views of their characters. But they share an implicit understanding that the feeling of alienation of their protagonists is well founded.

Photo: Bleecker Street

In Art of defenseKearns clearly understands that this concern is retrograde. Maybe that's why he sometimes placed it near Fight ClubThe Liberation. Just as Fincher's film does not name its main frame, Auto defense does not offer a particular place or period. But judging by his computers (present, but not ubiquitous and clumsy), his phones (answering machines are still present) and his methods of congregation (in person, no Reddit forums or group discussions based on applications) this probably happens in the future. This is both a wise and suspicious way of making the sensei's regressive views of gender and masculinity more believable, even if they have a lack of caricatural subtlety.

The impassive style of the film also serves this purpose, highlighting its absurdity. After the initial controversy about Fight ClubViolence and irreverence having disappeared, it was later appreciated and became a case study that could be misinterpreted. The film's transformation into Tyler Durden's identity works as a reversal, in part because it coincides with the narrator who realizes how "Tyler" has hardened his philosophy into total fascism. For the first half of the film, Tyler Durden can be read as a charismatic and funny badass. He is always ready to bromide on the glory of "hitting the bottom" in a fearful consumer society – a society he considers emasculating, rather than, say, inherently misogynistic. The revelation that he shares the body and the brain with the narrator is disconcerting because, at this stage of the film, he is also more or less the villain.

Photo: Twentieth Century Fox

Watch again Fight Club in 2019, this reversal seems less revealing, especially because Brad Pitt has become a stronger and quieter actor since, giving a clearer relief to the intentional discretion of his Tyler Durden. (It is also possible that 20 years of life experience will cause many viewers to fall back on Durden's proto-human rights style.) But, given what we now know about incars, MRAs and the growing popularity of open fascism, it is always easy to see. how a certain audience will always be supported by the catchy rhetoric of Palahniuk.

This could be the reason The art of defending yourself missing a character from Tyler Durden. The unnamed sensei of Nivola has a certain intense charisma, but the film observes it closely. Although Casey is a clear figure of public identity and his seduction in the world of sensei of steel masculinity and brutal trust is understandable, the sensei still looks a little silly of the # 39; outside. It's hard to imagine that the most confused public ever confused him with a true iconoclast in the vein of Tyler Durden. The character is a little more dignified, and certainly more cruel, than, for example, the character of Danny McBride in the grumpy comedy The way of foot fist. But he is not far.

Photo: Twentieth Century Fox

Is this the future of the satire of toxic masculinity? Make sure as many viewers as possible understand that a toxic male character is supposed to be stupid to never have the wrong idea? (It is possible to get a misconception of the character of Nivola, of course – Art of defense There are many twists and turns – but Stearns never lets him read as particularly heroic.) The debate rages on whether it is better to explore the incinerate mentality in an uncomfortable depth or stop paying so much attention to the injured men. As recently as this spring, Under the lake of money has been criticized for both glorifying his male character and for hammering his toxicity too soon and too harshly.

But as similar as The art of defending yourself is of Fight Club In its objectives and in its general form, there is no creative reason to do the same as its beloved predecessor, and it would be absurd to claim that nothing has changed in the 20 years since the film of Fincher. D & # 39; moreover, Fight Club It's not an irreproachable satire. Although his narrator ultimately rejects Tyler's reductive and destructive vision of the world, his increased sense of empathy equates being less of a fool to the woman of his life at the last minute. The film is always from Tyler's point of view, no matter what path he takes to get there. This makes multiple personality a rare case of trope that is truly intelligent and rich in themes, even for those who see it coming.

Nothing in The art of defending yourself is so gnarly, making it a cleaner and less interesting movie. There is less room for disastrous misinterpretation because it hardly requires an interpretation at all. superficially, the film is troubling, but its ambiguities are tangential mysteries of what he really thinks of gun culture. (The Sensei, the scariest and most macho character of the movie, hates them.) Stearns has made a rigorous, funny, well-played and sometimes hurtful film, but it's also a film that looks like to a closed system, which is not likely to distort thinking or produce a checkered heritage and hotly debated. Fight ClubThe moment may have passed, but the film itself remains like a scar. It may take another 20 years to determine whether it is better or worse.