Fight Club : A Retrospective

I know this will make me sound like a smug and nostalgic Gen-Xer, but the 1990s were bloody great, weren’t they? It was a time when you could afford a big night out with your mates without facing financial ruin, and footy was readily accessible without subscribing to 10 different channels. It was a cracking decade for movies and music, too, and we bought our favourites on VHS and CD. Sure, it cost a bit, but actually owning physical media felt far more special than just mindlessly downloading stuff. And then there was this novel concept called the internet, which was tons of fun but it had yet to take over our lives.

Overall, it was an exciting time when it felt like the future held real possibilities for everyone. Yet for all the feel-good vibes, a certain anxiety started creeping in as the millennium approached. In many ways, that feeling was encapsulated by fears of the Y2K bug – come midnight on 31st December 1999, would civilisation come crashing down around our ears? We all held our breath with trepidation until… nothing happened. Of course, decades tend to blend into one another and 9/11 came along and shook the Western world to its core, a cataclysmic event that changed everything and indicated the true end of the ‘90s.

Along with The Matrix, the movie that summed up this turn-of-the-century angst most was David Fincher’s Fight Club. Adapted from Chuck Palahniuk’s scathing novel, it tapped into the general malaise that lay just beneath the surface of a decade buoyed by post-Cold War optimism, booming pop culture, and relative affordability. Sure, it said, you might have enough money left from your monthly salary to go out and buy yourself some nice designer togs, but what does that say about you as a person? Does it complete you, or take something away? Especially, as one of the story’s main threads goes, you are a person who was born with a penis but feel emasculated by the world around you?

That nagging sense of navel-gazing disillusionment is personified by our Narrator (Edward Norton), a solitary corporate drone working a job he hates to fund his empty consumerist existence. Suffering from chronic insomnia, he starts dropping into a range of support groups for ailments and problems he doesn’t have. Being around such honest soul-searching gives him an emotional release and enables him to sleep soundly, but things are ruined when another “tourist”, Marla Singer (Helena Bonham-Carter), also starts showing up at the sessions.

While on a business trip, the Narrator meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), an artisan soap maker just brimming with pithy observations about capitalist society. Returning home to find that his apartment has been destroyed in a suspicious blaze, the Narrator is left out on the street and only has two people to tap for a place to stay: Marla and Tyler. He opts for the latter, who is happy to have him move into his dilapidated house in the middle of an abandoned industrial district. But Tyler has a favour to ask in return: To hit him as hard as he can.

This scrap in a pub car park is the genesis of Fight Club, a secretive weekly event where men gather to beat the snot out of each other in the dingy basement of a bar. For Tyler, it’s a way for blokes to rediscover their dormant masculinity and actually feel something in a neutered world, not to mention a platform to spout his anti-capitalist philosophy.

Meanwhile, our mismatched duo’s manly domestic bliss is thrown into disarray when Tyler begins a very noisy fling with Marla, much to the dismay of the Narrator. With membership growing despite its first two sacred tenets (you know the ones), Fight Club also expands to other cities and evolves into Project Mayhem. Initially starting out as prankish homework assignments, the group’s activities escalate into something far more sinister as Tyler builds a private guerrilla army of brainwashed “space monkeys”. The Narrator suspects something big is coming but finds himself shut out from the plans. Fearing the worst, he embarks on a madcap cross-country trip to find out what is afoot, only to discover the shocking reality about his ultra-hip anarchist friend…

After the entertaining but comparatively throwaway The Game, Fight Club was a return to the grungy aesthetic and challenging story-telling of Seven for David Fincher. Armed with a bursting screenplay by Jim Uhls and re-teaming with Brad Pitt as he approached his peak as a superstar, Fincher’s adaptation was slick, sick, unwieldy, obnoxious, and absolutely packed with ideas.

Much like Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Palahniuk’s satire of consumerist culture is so darkly deadpan that readers might not necessarily notice unless they’re looking out for it. Although Uhls and Fincher sanded off some of the novel’s nastier edges, the same can be said for the film. Perhaps this is why, like Tony Montana in Scarface before him and the Joker in The Dark Knight after, Tyler Durden has become a poster boy for a certain demographic of guys.

There’s so much to unpack in Fight Club, and getting a decent handle on it is tricky because it’s the kind of movie that shifts around as your perception changes with age and experience. When I first saw it in the cinema as a 21-year-old, I fully bought into Durden’s notions on a surface level and strode from the theatre feeling like I wanted to throw things or break something in a kind of ill-defined protest against the comfy world around me, perhaps flipping off the usher on the way out.

When I reviewed the film about 12 years ago for another website, however, my viewpoint had totally changed. I called it “pop anarchy and designer nihilism”, taking issue with the inherent hypocrisy of an anti-consumerist, anti-corporate, anti-capitalist, anti-everything  message wrapped up in a modishly grungy $60 million movie released by 20th Century Fox, which was then owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

One thing we can confidently say about Murdoch is that he isn’t the kind of chap who is likely to urge his customers to overthrow capitalism. So smash the system, the movie said, but not really. Just enjoy the cathartic idea of smashing the system after you’ve bought a ticket and equipped yourself with an officially licensed Fight Club T-shirt bearing a quote like “The things you own end up owning you” or some such. Then carry on consuming as normal.

After a re-watch for this article, I still lean towards the latter viewpoint, but I think the movie is more nuanced than it appears on its showy, in-yer-face surface. And it is in-yer-face; this time around, I was instantly reminded of the meme showing a schoolgirl pinning her mate’s head to the wall with the bell of her tuba. Because the vibe of Fight Club is: I’ve got something to say and you’re effing-well going to listen.

It is a bit more layered than that, however, particularly in relation to the nature of the Narrator’s affliction. The first time I saw it, I was a bit disappointed with the twist because (spoiler alert) I’ve always found the split personality trope to be a cop out, an easy escape route for a storyteller who has perhaps written themselves into a corner – it’s one down from “I woke up and it was all a dream” for me. I still don’t like it, but it does make the movie more interesting on closer inspection. Without it, the ending simply turns into a standard race to save the day from the deranged bad guy.

On the face of it, the idea of erasing everyone’s credit score and completely levelling the playing field doesn’t sound too bad. I’m still paying off my student loan from around the time Fight Club was released, so it’d be great if somebody could make that go away. But the big question is, what exactly would Tyler’s brave new world look like?

The escalating narrative tests the viewer: Where do you personally draw the line? The movie starts off by encouraging us to nod along and maybe shouting “right on!” at Tyler’s wry critiques of society, such as the “illusion of safety” provided by the emergency instructions in passenger jets. But Tyler’s theories get more extreme as he becomes an increasingly fascistic leader of Project Mayhem – the other shoe drops when Bob (Meat Loaf) is killed during an act of domestic terrorism and the Narrator realises that the Space Monkeys are fully tanked up on Durden’s Kool-Aid.

As much as I’d like to escape the debt cycle that powers our economies, I’m also not too keen about his fantasy of humankind reverting to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the ruins of modern society. Most people can probably agree (maybe even more so now that everything has been monetised until it squeaks) that rampant consumerism could perhaps be reined in a little. But grinding out a subsistence-level Cro-Magnon existence of toil and hardship is likely to make even the most staunch anti-capitalist think: “Hang on a minute, that might be going a bit too far.”

All this becomes more fascinating when you watch Fight Club again with full knowledge that the Narrator and Tyler Durden are the same person. All those neat little slogans are from the Narrator himself, but his brain has put them in the mouth of a subversive imaginary friend who is a product of the societal pressures that have caused his mind to split in the first place. I really noticed it this time when Tyler and the Narrator spot a Gucci advert on a bus depicting a perfectly-sculpted male torso and the Narrator sneers: “Is that what a man looks like?”

Yet in the very next scene, we see Tyler shirtless with an absolutely ripped body almost identical to that of the man in the advert. Tyler embodies all the things the Narrator wants to be and voices all the gripes that he wishes he could say, but he is still moulded by the all-pervading forces of his society. Much like the movie itself.

The fact that Brad Pitt plays Durden in arguably his most iconic role adds a sly meta slant to the film’s critique. Late in the movie, the Narrator and Marla are arguing in the street in front of a cinema screening Seven Years in Tibet, another big Hollywood movie starring none other than Brad Pitt. Of course, films often contain these cheeky little references – there is a similar billboard in Dirty Harry advertising Play Misty For Me, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. But this little Easter egg feels more meaningful in Fight Club because it plays into the notion that the Narrator’s subconscious has cast Brad Pitt as his idealised alter ego because his imagination is shaped by the very system he’s railing against.

What makes it even more interesting is that the Narrator also appears to incorporate certain elements of Marla into Tyler Durden. She irks him at first but it’s clear almost right away that he’s into her, and she represents a kind of carefree nihilism that he admires – not to mention sharing the same kind of thrift store chic that Tyler rocks throughout the film. Her attitude mirrors Tyler’s, most notably in the complementary scenes where Marla stands in the middle of the road not caring whether she gets run over, and the car crash Tyler instigates in his pursuit for rock bottom with the Narrator.

So there’s a lot going on in Fight Club that rewards multiple viewings to fully absorb, and how much you buy into it largely depends on your own view of the world. I appreciate that choose-your-own rebellion aspect of the film more each time I see it.

Less comfortable is the male characters’ attitude towards women. It becomes even more glaringly obvious on a re-watch with knowledge of the twist that the Narrator/Tyler is absolutely awful to Marla. You may cite his mental illness as an excuse, but this is still a bloke who uses her for sex one minute then kicks her out of the house the next. And Tyler’s screeds against women sound increasingly wrong-headed, bemoaning “a generation of men raised by women”. It is clear that these guys feel emasculated by modern society and women are a secondary target of their ire.

It’s problematic, but this aspect of the film has gained more texture over time. Now we’re more attuned to the notion of toxic masculinity, it’s easier to see Fight Club as a satire of that particular mindset. We can view the Narrator as a dissatisfied Beta Male imagining a virile and super-cool Alpha to take him under his wing – no doubt Tyler would be a big fan of Joe Rogan if the movie was made more recently. Perhaps Durden’s sneering comments about women are why some inhabitants of the “manosphere” have identified so strongly, seeing it as a kind of manifesto for setting the world to rights.

Interestingly, some of these guys have also adopted a phrase from the other 1999 movie I mentioned at the top of the piece, The Matrix. Advocates of the misogynist Red Pill (and the subsequent Black Pill) ideology believe that men are inherently superior but are cowed by a female-dominated society, and some more extreme members think that violence is the only way to correct the balance.

It’s all proper death-of-the-author stuff, and David Fincher has even publicly kicked back against the incel community adopting Fight Club. Such individuals generally tend to lean into far-right attitudes including homophobia, and the way Fincher depicts the brawls suggests that he was ahead of his time satirising a strain of misogyny that hadn’t fully entered the mainstream consciousness yet. In their desire to reassert their masculinity, the members of the club engage in highly homoeroticised bouts that finish with both competitors cuddling in something like post-coital euphoria.

Love it or hate it, Fight Club is one of the great pub debate movies and it continues to generate lively conversation today. The inconsistency of its messaging and the baked-in hypocrisy are part of its fascination. So while I find it a bit self-important and I dislike the sinister way it has been embraced by groups I fundamentally disagree with, it’s still the kind of film I like best: something that takes a huge swing, makes you think, and provokes strong opinions, rather than generic Hollywood entertainment that’s forgotten about almost as soon as the credits roll.

So there you have it, our look back at David Fincher’s Fight Club. Where do you stand on the movie? Let us know!