Fight Club is cinematic Neitzsche; Luddite revivalism; a screaming anti-capitalist tantrum; a sucker punch in the face of reason, faith, redemption, and, well, God. In Fight Club, anti-capitalist fascist terror becomes the liberating fellowship of alienated, conscienceless, drifting men banded together in a bond of violence, envy and death.

Jack the Narrator, played with rollercoaster energy by Edward Norton, is an alienated insomniac who worships IKEA furniture. I say "worships" because he's even memorized the holy text, the stupid catalogue. Jack the Narrator describes to us his boring, aimless life revolving around consumer pressures, personal anxiety and sneering orders from his boss. "Everything's a copy of a copy of a copy," Jack intones. "We used to read pornography, now it's the Horchow Collection. The things you own end up owning you." Ah Ha! Consumerism kills. That must be the point of this movie.

Despite the appearances of personal peace and affluence, Jack just can't shake his anomie. So off to the doctor he goes. Doc is not one bit sympathetic with Jack's afflictions, and hits him with that great classic nearly every parent has used in one form or another: "You wanna see pain?! Swing by the Methodist Church Tuesday night. Guys with testicular cancer. That's pain!" Jack sits in the deeply depressing support group, realizing near the end he may actually have to tell his story. He may need to cry to remain believable. It's not easy acting, but Bob (played by old rock and roller Meatloaf) zeros in on Jack, "sharing" his own odd saga of steroid use leading to divorce, cancer, loss of his testicles ("manhood") and massive breasts. Ah Ha! So this movie is really about the emasculation of confused men in an urbanized, consumerized world. Maybe.

Jack then becomes addicted to multiple self-help groups, attending tuberculosis groups, intestinal parasite groups, cancer groups. You name it and Jack finds disease and fakes participation. God has been exorcised from Jack's world, but seeing people much worse off provides a salvation of sorts. "I was the warm little center that the world revolved around ... Every evening I died, and every evening I was born again and resurrected," he says. That theme is repeated: Man drifting in a meaningless universe. Complete isolation. Complete self- absorption.

During his nightly addiction group forays, he spies a woman apparently playing the same game. Marla (played with snooty emptiness by Helena Bonham Carter of A Room With a View and Howard's End fame) is an oddly kindred soul, but Jack confronts her, telling her the fake 12 Step world is his turf, not hers. They come to a negotiated agreement, trading nights at the TB Group with sessions at the Intestinal Parasite Group, as if talking about baseball cards.

This hum drum existence continues until Jack meets Tyler Durden (played with edgy tension by Brad Pitt) on a plane flight. His life explodes when his perfectly ordered apartment is mysteriously dynamited and destroyed, leaving Jack homeless. "It was not just a bunch of stuff. It was me," he bemoans. Jack calls Tyler who embodies all that Jack secretly desires: no conscience, reckless, uninhibited sensuality. Jack finds tense refuge with this libertine in his ramshackle, leaking hovel of an urban townhouse. There Tyler introduces Jack to the liberating power of life-as-dung and freedom through beating the living daylights out of each other. "You are the same decaying matter," the mentor says. "The same compost heap ... We are all part of the compost ... How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?" he taunts. From their bloodlettings, Fight Club is born. Soon, white collared, proper young men around the country begin meeting secretly to fight and bloody each other in dank basements and abandoned warehouses. "Nothing was settled, but nothing mattered ... Afterwards we all felt saved." They discover the secret of life that was somehow lost on Augustine and Descartes: "I bleed, therefore I am."

OK. So this movie is really about the meaninglessness of life and the ultimacy of feelings and personal experience? Maybe.

Before long, Tyler reveals "The Vision": a network of anti- capitalist fascist groups selected from Fight Club participants. Individuals are lost in the identity of the terrorist plan entitled "Project Mayhem." No questions asked. No individuality. Christianity must go too. "F--- damnation! F--- redemption!" is his cry. Here the makers of Fight Club are right in line with the Godfather of Postmodernism, Friedrich Nietzsche. As philosopher Bertrand Russell said, "Neitzsche is nauseated by repentance and redemption, which he calls folie circulaire." Tyler and Jack also speak in the authentic accents of Dostoyevsky's character in The Brothers Karamazov, who taught if God is dead, all things are permissible. "On a long enough timeline, everyone's survival goes to zero ... First you have to know someday you're gonna die ... It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything."

(Warning: Plot twist revealed.)

Only at the end does the viewer see the trick: Tyler (Brad Pitt) is completely imaginary. Tyler was a figment all along. All the organizing of the anti-capitalist fascist underground has actually been done by Jack. Fight Club ends with Marla and Jack holding hands as they gaze, not into a sunset, but into the nighttime cityscape, while credit card, bank and insurance buildings explode before them as Project Mayhem bears its rotten fruit. "Most importantly, I'm free," Jack says. "They trust me ... Everything's gonna be fine." Yeah, "fine" if murder is your norm.

Why is this movie so dangerous? The key to cultural destruction is to condition a few generations to believe that absolutes, reason, liberty, Truth and God are relative terms. In The Great Liberal Deathwish, Malcolm Muggeridge wrote, "Some future Gibbon, writing about the decline of our Western Civilization, is likely to be greatly intrigued by this 'liberal' salvage operation that turns out to be a demolition squad; this deathwish fulfilling itself in terms of utopianism whereby slavery comes to be enforced in the name of liberation." If God is gone, then transcendent Truth is nonexistent. If no Truth exists, then we "create our own reality," as postmodernists say. When we make up truths, we look for others who will agree with our myths, whether sexual, political, or artistic. When we find a "tribe" that agrees with our myths, we must organize to wield power. If it's not us in authority, it will be someone else.

Muggeridge said The Great 'Liberal' Deathwish is "directed at the destruction of the very values it purports to uphold. To seek to bring about the very authoritarianism it ostensibly finds abhorrent; and generally to encompass the overthrow of any regime that might be expected to provide conditions in which it could continue to be upheld." Muggeridge continues, "We western people are still powerful, and prosperous, and influential in the world. But our power, and our wealth, and our influence would avail us not at all because we have lost our awareness of good and evil." Muggeridge further accented the danger when men and women "persuade themselves that they can shape their own lives and their own destiny in the dimensions of their own mortality. Looking for freedom in this world's terms, we infallibly fall into the servitude of self- gratification or collectively into one form or another of Gulag Archipelago."

Fight Club is a Postmodern curse on America in which God, revelation and reason are all demolished. When they're gone all you have left are "feelings," groundless passions, eXtreme whatever, and the thrill of defying death. If Jack/Tyler have their way, there will be a lot of Gulags for those who still believe there is truth, rationality, liberty and God. As Postmodern-prophet Professor Stanley Fish of Duke University once sneered, "Someone is going to be restricted next and it is your job to make d--- sure that someone is not you."

As I watched Fight Club, I couldn't get out of my mind that moving speech given last year by Hollywood dynamite stick Alec Baldwin on The Late, Late Show with Conan O'Brian: "If all of us together would go down to Washington," Alec screamed at the top of his lungs, "and we would stone Henry Hyde to death. We would stone him to death." In case viewers missed the first two calls to arms, he let loose again, beet red, arms flailing, "We would stone Henry Hyde to death. Then we would go to their homes and kill their wives and their children. We'd kill their families." Fight Club is Alec Baldwin's fantasies brought to celluloid. It is a wild-eyed, adrenelin- drenched, testesterone-soaked tirade dressed in a low key, respectable all-black uniform of neo-fascism.