David Fincher’s subversive comedy-drama Fight Club turns 25 this year. Its blackly comic exploration of toxic masculinity, released when Andrew Tate was still an impressionable 12-year-old, continues to divide opinion. It was gloriously misunderstood upon its initial release in the United States in October 1999 — Roger Ebert wrote of Fight Club that it was “the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since Death Wish, a celebration of violence in which the heroes write themselves a license to drink, smoke, screw and beat one another up.” He was on firmer ground with the film’s homoeroticism, saying “It’s macho porn — the sex movie Hollywood has been moving toward for years, in which eroticism between the sexes is replaced by all-guy locker-room fights.” But to read his review is to see a great, usually incisive critic missing the point entirely.
Yet even Ebert had to concede that “it is very well made and has a great first act.” For the uninitiated, the film begins in the style of Woody Allen on Quaaludes. The nihilistic, jaded, and anonymous narrator (Edward Norton) has taken to attending support groups for terminal illness and addiction for entertainment, the darker the better. He then falls under the charismatic tutelage of soap salesman Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), to the confused disbelief of his fellow misery tourist Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter, cast gloriously against type), who rails against the way in which men of their generation have been castrated by society and technology alike. The solution? Create an underground fight club in which men can batter each other stupid in the name of unleashing their inner beast.
As this potted synopsis might suggest, Fight Club, based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, is not intended to be a serious piece of cinema. It’s extremely funny, intentionally, and the dynamic between the Norton and Pitt characters owes a great deal to Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann’s similarly codependent relationship in Withnail and I, one of Fincher’s favorite films — not that those two effete characters would ever find the cojones to man up and punch each other, or anyone else for that matter. Fincher is a filmmaker with a rare sense of jet-black comedy: Who could forget the moment in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which, when Stellan Skarsgaard’s dastardly serial killer is preparing to torture and murder Daniel Craig’s journalist, he puts on Enya’s blameless “Orinoco Flow” to accompany his vile antics? And Fight Club is full of the kind of you-can’t-say-that one-liners and unspeakable moments of comic invention that firmly establish its credentials as a cult film.
Yet cult status by itself is not enough. It was not a commercial success when it was released, following a disastrous premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Pitt later recalled that “for some reason, [Norton and I] thought it would be a good idea to smoke a joint before. The movie starts, first joke comes up, and it’s crickets — it’s dead silence. Another joke, and it’s just dead silent. … This thing is just not translating at all.” He was unabashed.
“The more it happened, the funnier it got to Edward and I. So we just start laughing. We’re the assholes in the back laughing at our own jokes. The only ones laughing.” When it concluded, Pitt said to Norton, proudly, “That’s the best movie I’m ever gonna be in,” to which his colleague responded, “Me too.” This was affirmed amid the sound of outraged boos and walk-outs. Pitt remarked, “It was almost like if no one was booing we hadn’t pushed it far enough.”
Ebert aside, the reviews were generally positive, if bemused. The marketing campaign, masterminded by Fincher, revolved around a bar of soap — blackly amusing if you understood its significance in the film, mystifying if you did not. For the picture’s initial legion of admirers, it was nothing less than a rallying cry, a statement of intent for its dispossessed wage-slave viewers. Its poster became an essential decoration in college dorm rooms and urban flatshares alike. The Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind,” which soundtracks the amusingly bleak, inadvertently 9/11-anticipating closing shot, was now essential listening for any dispossessed young man. 1999 proved to be a bracing experience for the impressionable as far as cinema that year went: Firstly, The Matrix told them that reality did not exist, and then Fight Club informed them that the only way to reclaim their dulled masculinity was to punch other men in darkened basements. As a hat trick, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut suggested that Satan and Saddam Hussein were in a homosexual relationship: no great surprises there.
Yet a quarter of a century later, Fight Club is no longer the rallying cry that it once was. Viewed today, it is a strange, successful mash-up of two distinct styles: Fincher’s sturm und drang visual technique, using all manner of CGI-enhanced camera tricks to create set pieces of awesome complexity — witness, for instance, the single-shot fantasy scene of a plane crash from Norton’s perspective — and a sharp, witty screenplay, adapted by Jim Uhls and an uncredited Andrew Kevin Walker from Palanhiuk’s novel, rich in cynical one-liners and audience-baiting monologues.
When Durden declares, “Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables — slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. … We’re very, very pissed off,” many eager viewers took it as gospel, missing the ironic import behind it.
Durden is not supposed to be a messianic figure inspiring the dispossessed and downtrodden. As the film makes very clear in its witty concluding twist, Tyler Durden does not even exist. He is as much a piece of advertising bulls*** as the slogans and jingles that the film sneers at. His gospel of empowerment and freedom through violence is a false doctrine that only the terminally incurious and gullible can swallow unironically. Fincher himself sighed, “It’s impossible for me to imagine that people don’t understand that Tyler Durden is a negative influence. … People who can’t understand that, I don’t know how to respond and I don’t know how to help them.”
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Where Fight Club still holds up so well today is not so much in its treatment of consumerism and masculinity in crisis but in its wit. Norton and Bonham Carter make an extraordinarily sparky screen couple — Annie Hall with an STD — and the dynamic between Norton and Pitt is perfectly judged. It remains a shame that Norton has somewhat receded as a film actor and that Pitt’s constant cinematic companion is George Clooney, as the two have such successful chemistry that they are a joy to watch on screen together. Fincher’s sensibilities, hinted at previously in the sheer delirious bleakness of Se7en, are appropriately macabre for the material, and the whole thing is a gloriously demented blast.
But if you’re watching the picture for profundity, forget it. The central theme is less masculinity in crisis and more the absurdity of what the microwave generation has chosen for their entertainment and distraction: single-serving friendships, single-serving fun, and single-serving fiction. Fight Club is no longer a shocking film, although seeing the youthful beauty of Jared Leto undefaced, then defaced, still brings a gasp, but it remains a prescient one, full of wisdom and jet-black humor. The message that its viewers should take away from it, then and now, is a simple one — less “Get in your basement and get online,” but a despairing, admonitory one: “Grow up”. Hopefully, its legions of admirers have taken such advice on board over the past quarter-century. The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.
Alexander Larman is the author of, most recently, The Windsors at War and an editor at the Spectator World.