It goes without saying that when a genuinely interesting movie
comes out in America, that the film critics and media organizations
will attack it and lie as hard as they can about what it is about in
order to minimize the number of people who see it. That is the job
of the media in our oppressive society. Whereas when we have a stupid
movie like Avatar, everyone gets damp about it even though it has no
content. So I heard for years that Fight Club (1999)
glorified violence and so forth and so on and never had any desire to
see it. Well I happened to see it the other day, and guess what, it
has nothing whatsoever to do with what they said it did.
But
we are not here to talk about content, or about the repression of
truth, or about how shallow and superficial our civilization is. We
are here to talk about something more important. Which is to say,
visual effects.
What
is the role of the artist? The role of the artist is to manufacture
consumer products in order to maximize shareholder value of course.
And it turns out that one artist that I knew quite well was the
artist who blew up the buildings at the end of Fight Club. My
friend Doctor Baily of Image Savant, under the direction of
visual effects supervisor Kevin Haug and director David Fincher, blew
up those buildings.
Richard "Dr" Baily of Image Savant
Furthermore,
eschewing “photorealism”, that grossly abused and misunderstood
term, the buildings blow up in a poetic and dreamlike fashion, thus
contributing to the telling of the story. As we do not know if
those buildings really did blow up, since by that time we are quite
sure we do not know what is real and what is the perception of a
disturbed individual.
And
to do so a mere two years before the real buildings blew up at the
World Trade Center! How wonderful for him, to have actually
predicted and, symbolically at least, participated in the single event that has
caused so much war and misery in our world.
Rarely
does visual effects have such an impact.
Fight Club on IMDB
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