They're flip sides of the same coin, proof versions of the best of young Hollywood: Brad Pitt, the hunky, charming Midwesterner, and Edward Norton, the erudite, chameleonic Ivy Leaguer.
United on screen in "Fight Club," Pitt and Norton have reteamed to promote it. They're comrades in arms in the publicity wars, finishing each other's sentences and acting as reciprocal shields.It's not surprising that they seem a bit on the defensive. "Fight Club" garnered advance buzz for its intense depiction of violence. But the story of an IKEA-addicted, white-collar drone (Norton) who joins a charismatic soap salesman (Pitt) in forming an anarchic, underground male society that espouses bare-knuckles fighting has less to do with violence than with healing.
"It's absolutely metaphoric," says Norton. "What's being proposed is not 'deal with your frustration and your numbness by exercising it outward against other people,' it's about inwardly directed violence and radicalism.
"I think 'Fight Club' is a metaphor for punching through the insulation that you've put up around yourself and experiencing pain . . . as a way of starting to connect with the fact that you are not defined by things around you, that you are capable of experiencing pain and living through it and the empowerment of that."
"Fight Club" is based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk and directed by David Fincher, who worked with Pitt on "Seven." Both the film and the book speak for a generation, says Norton, who turned 30 in August, and Pitt, who'll be 36 in December.
"I think we are qualitatively different from previous generations in the consumer culture in that we have been raised from the cradle on television," says Norton. "And we are the first generation to have that as a component in our lives" -- "as the teacher," interjects Pitt , -- "yeah, as the teacher and as the arbiter of the value system," finishes Norton.
The disparity between real life and the ideals touted in TV's constant barrage of advertising has led to the breakdown depicted in "Fight Club," the actors tell reporters gathered for an interview at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills.
"All the things that had been promised by that advertising/marketing culture as a means to happiness will not provide happiness" is what he and his peers are beginning to recognize, Norton says. Because of that "you have this whole generation having a midlife crisis in its 20s."
"Further than that, (the film is) saying that we've become spectators," says Pitt. "That unknowingly, we sit and watch other people play. We root for the people playing in the game, but we're not in the game ourselves."
Norton says Palahniuk's book and the script adapted from it capture the pulse of his generation, "much more than I had felt with these baby-boomer-created 'Reality Bites' visions of us as reductive, aimless, angst-ridden slackers."
"It was the first thing I'd read that I thought could really be like 'The Graduate' was for that generation, or 'Rebel Without a Cause' -- something that really rooted around in the dynamics of these frustrations," says Norton.
Norton and Pitt hardly seem candidates for frustration and angst. Oklahoma-born, Missouri-reared Pitt was catapulted into stardom by his performances in "Thelma & Louise," "A River Runs Through It" and "Legends of the Fall" and earned an Academy Award nomination for supporting actor for "Twelve Monkeys."
New Englander Norton, a graduate of Yale, has two Oscar nominations, supporting and lead, to his credit (for "Primal Fear" and "American History X"). He has earned raves for his eclectic work, which also includes Woody Allen's "Everyone Says I Love You" and Milos Forman's "The People vs. Larry Flynt."
Pitt concedes that many might see him as living the TV dream and scoff at his condemnation of materialism.
"No one wants to hear that from me," he says. "There's a definite freedom with money, no question. . . . But you look at so many people who, once they've made it, check out or can't carry on. It's then, 'What do you do?' You're stuck with yourself, and you realize, 'These things aren't gonna add up.' "
For Pitt and Norton, making films like "Fight Club" amounts to their "fight club" -- fulfilling their creativity. And critics should get over their knee-jerk reaction to the violence, they say.
Betsy Pickle writes for The Knoxville News-Sentinel in Tennessee.