The view: Would Fight Club cure your blues?

All smiles ... Edward Norton and Brad Pitt in Fight Club. Photo: 20th Century Fox
While I'm still not certain of the time that needs to elapse before the cutting edge works its way through passé and finally emerges as retro, the latest once-white hot cultural relic to do so looks to be Fight Club. Already over the course of the summer, much of its vague nihilistic charge has been re-purposed in the painfully thick Wanted; now, it's also the subject of a nostalgic tribute from Scanners' Jim Emerson, one notable not least for an unusual twist - citing the film as having helped ease his clinical depression, leaving him "convulsed with laughter [at seeing] the truth of my own inner experience reflected back at me in its funhouse mirror."

Likably doubling as film appreciation and a mini-memoir of time spent with the black dog, Emerson's post did surprise me all the same. For one, there's the idea of any film as a tonic for depression, even one as neurologically-inclined as David Fincher's sardonic romp; personally, and I'm probably the one out of step here, I've always found the thing about the depression is that it all but disables the suspension of disbelief, so that the most flawless masterpiece seems like hokum.

As for Fight Club... while Emerson makes a neat stab at claiming Fincher's "hyper-glossy/faux-grimy style" as a meta commentary on the film's own themes, I'm not so sure it isn't because (at least until Zodiac), that was simply how Fincher rolled. Also: for over-privileged white men of a certain age (like me), is Fight Club now just, however incendiary it seemed at the time, faintly akin to looking back at photos of your worst teenage haircuts?

Still on matters of mental health, Emerson also justly recommended an old but pertinent post from critic Michael Atkinson at his blog Zero for Conduct, dealing with a former suicidal episode. A stark and powerful piece of work, it's also one that adds a welcome perspective to the self-conscious "darkness" of, oh, I don't know, the greatest film in movie history. Incidentally, without wanting to recapitulate the whole IMDb saga, I would point anyone interested towards Reverse Blog's excellent take on the way in which the highly-watchable-but-really-let's-not-get-carried-away likes of Dark Knight and Hellboy II are now routinely treated as objects of profundity: "Talking faux-seriously about juvenilia has become a marvelous way to avoid talking seriously about the serious."

Anyway, the morbidity continues at Bright Lights, where Erich Kuersten writes about his current "death obsession", in particular with the suicides of film-maker Theresa Duncan and her boyfriend Jeremy Blake. As a case, it was a tragedy with a naggingly inexplicable centre; as such, Kuersten's post deserves a first-hand reading rather than a nutshelling here, so I can only point you in its direction and hope for the best.

Such is the pall hanging over the world of the blogs that even the one post that caught my eye this week initially seeming untouched by it was, I later realised, not so after all: the item being an early video of Paul Thomas Anderson, and the hypnotic opening titles of Anderson's Punch Drunk Love having, it then dawned on me, been created by the aforementioned Jeremy Blake. In any case, it was Bright Lights again who unearthed the near-forgotten promo Anderson directed for ex Fiona Apple's John Lennon cover Across the Universe, a tune actually lifted from the soundtrack of the unremarkable time travel dramedy Pleasantville. Watch out for John C Reilly's cameo near the end, and have a happy weekend...