Seth Lamey
You met me at a very strange time in my life.
The final words in Fight Club delivered by The Narrator/Jack (Edward Norton) to his estranged lover Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) are still weirdly ambiguous, 25 years after the film’s release. The 1999 neo-noir psychological thriller adapting the hit 1996 Chuck Palahniuk novel of the same name leaves the audience with much to digest, and the film’s impact continues to evolve. Its legacy defined auteur filmmaker David Fincher’s career trajectory, shaped its lead actors’ collaborative choices, and left a clouded and complicated cult following of both good- and bad-faith interpretation and praise. All of these converge to make Fight Club one of the most important and impactful films from the end of the 20th century.
Adapting the source material of Fight Club was no easy task, but Fincher was a perfect choice to helm the project. After an ugly departure from his first feature Alien 3, Fincher found himself working once again with 20th Century Fox despite his reluctance. Coming off of the success of psychological thrillers Se7en and The Game, Fincher was in his prime to tackle the chaos and anarchy of Fight Club. Centering a bored and pathetic protagonist “Jack/Narrator,” the film explores the doldrums of middle America in the mid to late 1990s. Searching for meaning and connection, Jack visits self-help groups for patients dealing with cancer, tuberculosis, and other life threatening ailments. He meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a charismatic chaos agent who lives with the abandoned freedom that Jack so wishes in his life.
Eventually Jack and Tyler extend their philosophical talks into outwards aggression and violence, aptly naming these bouts under their “fight club” umbrella. That growing club turns into “Project Mayhem” an underground terrorist group committing acts of ironic violence and sending messages to their perceived puppet master. The key revelation to the film happens in the third act, when the bombshell drops that Tyler Durden isn’t real, merely a schizophrenic personality of Jack himself. Durden is the amplified, crude, sex-fueled person that Jack wishes he could be. Homoeroticism and psychological narcissism ooze from the film as its two protagonists awaken an ugly truth inside the men in the film looking for more meaning to life.
It takes a skilled hand to not only not give away a major revelation like this but also to craft enough perspective and leave enough bread crumbs to create something fulfilling and rewatchable on repeat viewings. Fincher was then and has since showcased to be a very good storyteller, matching substance with his immensely codified control of cinematic language. The first two acts of Fight Club have an acute subjective perspective from Jack’s POV, as the audience sees/thinks/feels everything that he does. Narration does the heavy lifting for his inner monologue, injecting exposition and bits of humor for the audience. Single frames glimpses of Pitt’s Durden scatter the first twenty minutes, foreshadowing that the mental fracturing of Norton’s Jack is leading to a psychotic breakdown. Only in the third act does the audience and Jack feel what I’ll call “post-rut clarity” as he doesn’t interact with Tyler until the final scenes and his confused state unearths all the destructive plans that Project Mayhem has hatched.
It can be said that Fincher has better films in his filmography, but few are better directed than Fight Club. Every frame and scene are directed within an inch of their lives, with carefully placed mise-en-scene pairing Jeff Cronenweth’s diverse cinematography with James Haygood’s whiplash editing tie-ins. Cronenweth contrasts the sterile and clean setting of Jack’s workplace/IKEA filled apartment with the dirty and dark lairs of Tyler Durden’s run-down house and the sweat filled shadows of a fight club basement. Sound effects of fists hitting faces are interjected with the monotoned nature of a copier making copies of in an office cubicle. It all comes back to storytelling for Fincher, showing one man’s descent in hitting rock bottom and the violence and destruction manifests both internally and externally.
As expert as the film’s technique may be, some of Fincher’s best work in the film comes with his actors. Edward Norton was breaking out in the late 90s starting with his film Primal Fear and American History X. He would go on to collaborate with interesting film makers but have a reputation for being difficult to work with. Brad Pitt was already a main cog on Fincher cast sheets, acting in Se7en and again star in Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. He would find his groove as an actor not as a leading man but as a character actor in the films of other auteurs Tarantino, Malick, and Gray. Pitt’s Durden is often the mouthpiece of many of the dangerous but tantalizing ideas and monologues in Fight Club, and his charm and good looks exemplify the Id portion of Jack’s subconscious leading men who feel alone, abandoned, or exploited by the corporations and capitalist overlords they think control society. Bonham Carter would go on to work with her then partner-director Tim Burton’s films, for which her gothic and nihilistic turn as Marla Singer would be a good trend-break from her period drama phase on the 1990s.
Fight Club has had a complicated legacy since its release. It was a box office bomb and mixed with the critics. Audiences thought it was just a bare-knuckle brawl film and some of its bigger ideas either glossed over them initially, or turned critics off as angry reactionary drivel. The film earned a cult following as it aired on premium movie channels and home media distribution exploded in the 2000s with DVD and Blu-Ray. Palahniuk and Fincher aimed to showcase Fight Club as a cautionary tale, a mirror held up to society in general and GenX specifically in the ’90s. With ideas as explosive as anarchy and chaos to fight back in an anti-authority faction, you’ll have those who take those ideas too literal and misunderstand their purpose. Increasing bad-faith takeaways of the film’s politics have been adopted by the “alt-right” or “men’s rights activists” who see Durden’s pontifications as gospel instead of satire. Fight Club is a prime example of what can go wrong when the lessons and caution spelled out in a film’s text are exploited in immoral ways.
Obsession with physical violence as a coping mechanism or branch to enlightenment is taking the wrong message away from the film. Fight Club escalates to Project Mayhem with intentions of domestic terrorism and public anarchy. Toxic Masculinity has since been discussed and dissected, and Fight Club highlights it at its most absurd. A similar misreading of satire has happened to Martin Scorsese, where his gangsters in Goodfellas and corrupt stock broker Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street are seen as heroes to the media illiterate. Scorsese says in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter he is “beyond bored” with debate over moralization of bad behavior in his films. Some may say this is a failure on the parts of those sending the messages, that with their over stylized techniques Fincher and Scorsese condone such behavior. While Fincher may think there are kernels of truth in some of the bad-boy shenanigans of Fight Club, he also hopes he doesn’t need to qualify or spell morality out to his audiences. He told The Guardian recently: “I’m not responsible for how people interpret things…Language evolves. Symbols evolve.”
In the twenty-five years since its release, Fight Club has endured many ups and downs with audiences and critics alike, but as a film it still showcases just how good of a director David Fincher is. There are few films in the late 1990s that capture the pulse and energy of that pre-9/11 anxiety, and foreshadow the very reactionary movements that would take the wrong lessons from the text of itself. The final shot showing towers falling in a 1999 film during the turn-of-the century “Y2K scare” and on the brink of the WTC tragedy has an eerie sense of irony. Fight Club remains as biting and edgy as ever, with stylish highs that fit along with Zodiac and The Social Network in Fincher’s resume and laud being one of the best film makers from Gen X.
