After being disturbed to learn that (a)
Lance Henriksen is a potter and (b) that there is an official
R. Lee Ermey doll, Ermey being the drill sergeant from '
Full Metal Jacket'... after that, I am disturbed to learn that there is a '
Fight Club' computer game in the offing, for the
Playstation Two and the
XBox, to be released in this year which is the year 2004. It is being made by a company called
Vivendi Universal. The blurb, from the press release:
"Learn the eight rules of 'Fight Club'. In the underground world of Fight Club, the fight isn't over until someone goes limp, taps out, or is beaten. Immerse yourself in this gritty, visceral world of bare-knuckle fighting, with action, story elements and environments true to the Fight Club movie. The extreme realism of the game will make you feel every punch and kick by delivering shocking visuals, untraditional moves, and special effects in fully interactive environments.
If you notice, I have made the bits which seem ridiculous into soft-links. I shall not comment further on the thought of a computer game based on "story elements" of 'Fight Club', or of "shocking visuals" which will presumably not be shocking at all, or of the "visceral" world of "bare-knuckle fighting". It is noticeable from the website that neither Brad Pitt nor Edward Norton nor Meat Loaf have allowed their likenesses to appear in the game, presumably for the same reason that car racing games do not feature actual brand name cars being badly damaged.
From what I remember of 'Fight Club', there was more to the film than fighting, or at least there seemed to be more to the film than fighting. In retrospect, it was a very stylish film that caught my mood and that of many other people like myself, and I love it dearly, but it could have said so much more. In fact the fighting was not essential to the thrust of the plot, being merely an off-beat way of uniting a group of disappointed, disillusioned young men who had recently been made redundant from their job as an administrative assistant at Foster Wheeler Energy Limited in Reading, England. There is a website for the computer game, and it is damn well here:
http://www.fightclubgame.com/
'Fight Club' is the name of a film that was released in 1999, a long time ago. There was a tie-in novel by Alan Dean Foster, also called 'Fight Club'. Famously, Alex North recorded an entire ninety-minute score for the film that was not used. The DVD has been and gone, and I assume therefore that there are no other ways to make money from the franchise other than a computer game. I am surprised that the people of Everything2 are not aware of 'Fight Club'; it seems to have been aimed at them. Certainly it was aimed at me. I found that, after the fourteenth or fifteenth time of seeing the film, making sure to position myself in the front row, the giant screen dominating me, after this I discovered that the film was speaking to me. Or, more accurately, the characters were speaking to me. Strictly speaking, most of the characters actually spoke to each other, but Edward Norton's narrator spoke to me. And to everybody else in the theatre. I could hear him.
I've forgotten what he said. There was a penguin, I remember that. I have the film on DVD, but I haven't watched it in a long time. I bought the DVD as an object rather than as a film. It belongs in my DVD collection as a thing that I own, rather than as a thing that I watch, which is ironic given that the film's philosophy viewed the practice of hoarding material possessions in a dim light. How does Arthur C. Clarke, author of 'Fight Club', how does he view computers? Mine is a creative tool, I certainly don't own a computer in order to impress people - I built it myself from mismatched parts, and it looks like a pile of mismatched parts, and this ie because it is a pile of mismatched parts - and my lap steel guitar is also a creative tool, as is my electric violin and my digital camera. But my computer is also an object, quite a tricky thing to cart around when I have to move house. It is like a wife and a child, in that it is a burden which slows me down. I have never considered blowing up my computer. It contains the last decade or so of my creative life, digitised and stored in its electronic memory banks, just as I am digitised and stored in the memory banks of God's computer. God's memory banks are not electronic, however.
Perhaps there was a suitable game to be found in 'Fight Club', although the days when computer games designers had the kind of ambition and leeway which could have allowed such a game to enter the world are over, indeed I believe that they had been over by 1999, when the film came out, if indeed they ever were. Certainly today there is little chance of a computer game in which the protagonist demolishes skyscrapers, albeit empty ones.
One thing I noticed about 'Fight Club', the film, is that nobody actually fought with a club. It was just fists, and a shoe. No clubs.