Fight Club in its odd disjunctions, its radical rethinking of film form and language is something entirely new.

Tyler has invaded the life of the protagonist/narrator (who is possibly named Jack) setting up a conflict with a violent, potentially murderous being – ultimately the metapsychological shadow of the protagonist. Jack is a depressed recall co-ordinator with terrible insomnia, a corrosive wit and a dissociated perspective on his sterile Ikea life. Tyler encourages him to turn his frustration and internalized rage into action. Through his relationship with Tyler Jack begins to perceive of a world beyond Swedish furniture and designer clothes. The first stage in Jack's self discovery is the creation of Fight Club. Organized under Tyler's auspices Fight Club gathers a group of men in the basement of a bar. The men pair off, and one pair at a time, fight bare-fisted. Each fight lasts until one participant surrenders. Tyler the self-styled anarchist establishes the code of conduct.

Tyler Durden: First rule of Fight Club: you do not talk about Fight Club. Second rule of Fight Club: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club. Third rule of Fight Club: when someone says "stop" or goes limp, the fight is over. Fourth rule of Fight Club: only two guys to fight. Fifth rule of Fight Club: one fight at a time. Sixth rule of Fight Club: no shirt, no shoes. Seventh rule of Fight Club: fights go on as long as they have to. Eighth and final rule of Fight Club: if this is your first night at Fight Club you have to fight.

Everything is allowed short of killing your opponent. Fight Club proves so seductive as an idea/experience that it begins to generate its own momentum – independent of Tyler and Jack – soon Fight Clubs are established in basements and parking-lots all over the city and then in other cities across the country.

Jack: It was right in everybody's face, Tyler and I just made it visible. It as on the tip-off everybody's tongue Tyler and I just gave it a name.

Through Fight Club, Jack is able to recuperate an essence of his own identity.

Jack: After fighting everything else in your life's got the volume turned down.

The male body is feminised through masochism. Shot in crepuscular supersensory half-light, that gilds male bodies as they assault each other, the Fight Club sequences are seductively such a perfect balance of aesthetics and adrenaline that they seem a solution to the mind/body division.

Tyler Durden: How much do you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight.

The men who become members of Fight Club are victims of the de-humanizing and de-sanitizing power of contemporary society, inhabiting an essence of identity marketed by consumer culture. The only way they can regain a sense of individuality is by locating the primeval and "barbaric" instincts of pain and violence.

Tyler Durden: We were raised by television to believe that we'd be millionaires and movie gods and rock-stars – but we won't. And we're learning that fact. And we're very very pissed off.

Tyler Durden: We don't have a Great War in our generation, or a Great Depression. But we do, we have a Great War of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The Great Depression is our lives. We have a Spiritual Depression.

Jack moves into Tyler's house after his perfectly appointed condo is destroyed in a mysterious explosion. Tyler inhabits a disintegrating, archaic mansion on the edge of a toxic-waste dump. Tyler seems to be completely free from any inhibition, able to acquire anything he wants through sheer force of will – he has many ways of disrupting the social construct. A terrorist of the food industry, he works as a waiter in up-market restaurants where he urinates in the soup. Moonlighting as a projectionist, he splices single frames of pornography into otherwise innocuous family-films. Tyler also sells his own brand of soap to up-scale department stores. In one of the film's most memorable scenes, Tyler and Jack raid the waste bins of a liposuction clinic in order to obtain fat. Once they have fat in their possession, they render it with lye to make soap. In a feat of twisted brilliance they sell wealthy women's fat back to them in the form of twenty-dollar bars of soap.

The visceral impact of Fight Club begins well in advance of the on-screen violence. Fincher demonstrates a cinematic ability of stunning audacity and imagination; the film is studded with visual set pieces of unparalleled brilliance. Fincher's skill is to reflect the disorientation at the story line's core with a series of mind-bending narrative and visual devices. Jack's caustic voiceover aphorisms: "I felt like putting a bullet in the eye of every panda that wouldn't screw to save its species" provide an interior monologue shaping the context, and relating an increasingly freaked-out commentary.

The narration-line starts with its end-Jack with a gun in his mouth – and subsequently re-implements its animated vitality in his insomnia. Even the penumbraic nighttime desolation that haunts Jack's first cure for sleeplessness – his slumming in victim-support groups (for AIDS/alcoholism/drug abuse/testicular cancer) - is dislocated with jolting low-view perspective shots, extreme close-ups and deranged sound effects. The arrival of Helena Bonham Carter as Marla Singer a Goth-queen with the opalescent skin of a heroin addict and a belligerent attitude, another group therapy junkie "tourist", disrupting Jacks sense of "security", is announced with a variety of sultry poses that jams the corners of the frame.