Mon. Feb. 8

 Beaten up anybody recently? Enjoy watching people gettin' the crap kicked of them? A big UFC fan are you? (Check out the profile of UFC kingpin and former local boy Dana White in the current Esquire.) We've always professed profound ambivalence to what they call "the sweet science" - boxing - and we slid further down the repulsed/attacted pole when Ultimate Fighting came into being about 10 years ago. Human cockfighting, Sen. John McCain called it, and we were thinking for once, we might agree with the old man. Is this not Rome before the fall? And, yet, yet ... Well, hell, we're still ambivalent about this most bloody of bloodsports, but we also realize it's a massive mainstream crossover, the biggest hit on Spike TV and a huge draw among that key 18-34 demo of both genders. That's a long lead-in to the Coolidge Corner Theatre’s Science on Screen movie Monday Feb. 8, a presentation of the cult favorite "Fight Club," paired with a pre-screening talk by biological anthropologist and primatologist Richard Wrangham, co-author of "Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence." 

David Fincher’s big-screen adaptation of the novel by Chuck Palahniuk was one of the most talked about films of the 1990s for its controversial takes on violence, manhood, and consumer society.  Edward Norton plays the unnamed narrator, an alienated insomniac stuck in a dull white-collar job who finds temporary emotional release by attending disease support groups.  A chance encounter with Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a subversive soap salesman, frees him from the banality of his existence.  The two become friends and roommates, bonding over their mutual disgust for consumer culture and their unusual weekly ritual: they fight each other for fun. 

Soon they form Fight Club, an underground group where frustrated young men channel primal aggression into brutal, bare-knuckled brawls that leave them feeling exhilarated and alive. The concept catches on, with secret fight clubs forming in other cities until a sensuous eccentric (Helena Bonham Carter) gets in the way and ignites an out-of-control spiral toward oblivion.

Now,Brad Pitt and Edward Norton are fine specimens of mankind and bear little resemblence to apes. So you would think. Yet, the DNA of humans and chimpanzees is nearly 99 percent identical, and both species share a suite of behaviors.  According to Wrangham, violent social behavior is common among our closest male primate relatives and deeply rooted in male human genes.  Dr Wrangham has spent decades studying chimpanzee cultures in the wild and comparing those cultures to human ones.  In his book, he describes how male chimps, in ways that sound eerily familiar,  jockey for status and power, fight one another for access to females, carry out border raids, and beat and kill members of rival groups. 

Starting at 7, before the film, Dr. Wrangham - the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University - discusses why men like to fight, what makes human violence distinct compared to other primates, why we are wired to relish certain kinds of aggression more than others – and why we should not presume that male violence is inevitable.

Tickets: $9.75.
 
290 Harvard Street in Brookline,617-734-2400 www.coolidge.org/science