by Cláudio Alves

Fight Club is an exhausting film. Years of heated discourse and malicious fandom have made it so, its miscalculations laid bare by the legacy it has earned. Inheriting the pulp narrative of Chuck Palahniuk's source novel, the movie is a failed satire, critique made incoherent by cinematic idioms where the visceral appeal of style is at odds with necessary intellectual remove. The love many feel for it is still easy to understand, whether it's masked by irony or proudly defended. David Fincher's bravura filmmaking makes toxicity seem cool, kinetic and self-aware. Though, Fight Club seduces too well and, in the end, is unable to bat away its lovers with some feeble pretension of dissected masculinity.

If 4chan had a cinematic embodiment, here it is, as gloriously enraged as it is putrid and entitled, shallowness dressed in a costume of depth. Quite frankly, it's even exhausting to write about the thing. Maybe because so much has been written already. After so much discussion of its theme, intent and Mephistophelean stylings, I propose we discuss an element of the picture that's rarely examined – the art of acting Fight Club…