Director Report Card: David Fincher (1999)

5. Fight Club

When “Fight Club” came out in 1999, it was a box office disappointment. Author Chuck Palahniuk had not acquired much of a reader base yet. Mainstream critics largely disliked the movie. The studio had trouble marketing the film, not even Brad Pitt's star power being considered enough to overcome the off-putting premise. Of course, “Fight Club” found an audience eventually. The film soon became the beloved favorite of edgy film-bros everywhere. Being a teenage boy when I first saw the movie, I thought it was one of the best things I had ever seen... But my relationship with “Fight Club” soon became more complicated than that. The toxicity of the film's frat-boy fan-base and my disillusionment with Palahniuk's shock value writing caused me to declare the movie overrated. Yet wisdom comes with age and my opinion on David Fincher's fifth feature has continued to evolve over time. 

An insomniac man works an unfulfilling job in an office building. When burying himself in a consumerist life-style doesn't make him happy, he goes to different support groups for different illnesses he doesn't have. That's where he meets Marla Singer, a woman who is doing something similar. His coping strategy ruined, he next meets Tyler Durden. The charismatic Tyler lives an anarchic life of petty pranks and anti-consumerism speechifying. Soon, Durden is organizing gatherings in basements, where men fight. These fight clubs soon escalate into a terrorist group, known as Project Mayhem, with Tyler as its leader. Our unnamed narrator is soon racing to stop the series of events Tyler has set into motion.

Owing to its popularity with young dudes who overthink shit, there's been roughly ten thousand interpretations of “Fight Club” in the two decades since its release. When there's so much noise around a movie, sometimes the best thing you can do is go back to the source. David Fincher describes the movie as a coming-of-age story for 30-year-olds. The Narrator constantly references his dysfunctional relationship with his parents. Dads, always absent, are mentioned throughout the movie. Tyler references a generation of men raised by mothers alone. They are angry at their dads and resent their moms. The men of “Fight Club” are a collection of people who were never taught how to actually grow up and are now stumbling towards maturity in violent, self-destructive ways.

Dudes lashing out at themselves, each other, and society, obviously, is a breeding ground for toxic masculinity. The Narrator – let's call him “Jack” – first lashes out in anger when he sees Marla at his support groups.... In other words, when a woman first steps foot into what he considers his exclusive domain. While women are never specifically the target of Project Mayhem's scorn, Tyler's rhetoric regularly disparages the women who raised them. The members of Fight Club want to regain a masculinity they feel they've lost. Which apparently they do by beating the shit out of each other in dingy basements. These guys associate their own masculine identities with punching and beating other people. The premise takes the macho obsession with violence to an extreme conclusion.

Anybody watching “Fight Club” in 2021 is going to pick up on this. The movie is as subtle as a punch to the face. Yet the movie can't help but seem prescient from a modern perspective. Disaffected guys forming male-exclusive spaces, where they can developed their own weird rules and lingo, where they rage against society, describes the incel movement and the other corners of the “man-o-sphere.” As the reality of these groups have taught us, it's a short-throw from clubs like this to violence. “Fight Club” understands this too, depicting a keen understanding of how radicalization works. Durden's Fight Clubs creates a place where its members can express themselves, express feelings they can't express anywhere else. This gives them fidelity to the group and rewires how they see the rest of the world. Soon, their secret club is the only place they feel understood, so they'll go along with any crazy thing that's preached there. Cults work this way, hate groups work this way, and Fight Club works this way.

It's also really, really gay. Never forget that Chuck Palahniuk, coiner of the right-wing's favorite insult, is a gay man. That homoeroticism is impossible not to notice in “Fight Club.” This is, after all, a movie frequently devoted to footage of sweaty, shirtless dudes wrestling with each other. A description of the fights, that vividly talks about male flesh slapping against each other, could accurately describe gay porn too. The movie is preoccupied with masculine body parts. It begins with the phallic image of a gun barrel shoved down someone's mouth and concludes with an on-screen cock shot. References are made throughout to testicles, either to them being removed or regained. Ultimately, it's the relationship between Tyler and the Narrator, of two men living together. Notably, it's sex with a woman that starts to break them up.

That last detail characterizes “Fight Club” as a pretty obvious satire of toxic masculinity, something misunderstood by critics of the movie and fans who take everything at surface value. Yet this, it turns out, is not the biggest obstacle “Fight Club” faces in 2021. Instead, the movie's incredibly smug writing is what threatens to turn an audience against it. Chuck Palahniuk's writing, which breaks everything down into pithy statements, seems clever when you're fifteen. The script maintains a lot of Palahniuk's original words, via the extensive narration. The hyper-verbal writing is also reflected in the film, which jumps wildly between episodes. Sometimes, “Fight Club” is a take-down on corporate culture or about airports or insomnia or full of bullshit “true” facts about oxygen mask or car safety. It can't help but come off as immensely self-satisfied, of the style of writing that is desperate to “blow your mind” but seem smart and clever in a distinctly above-it-all manner. (This might be why Palahniuk's writing has become less and less interesting over the decades, as this is essentially the only trick he really has.)

Yet, no matter how close “Fight Club” comes to disappearing totally up its own smug asshole, the movie remains incredibly interesting and entertaining. Part of what makes it work so well is that Tyler Durden's message is seductive. Not so much the part about how modern man is neutered and need to punch each other to feel whole again. Instead, the movie's critique of an American culture that replaces vital life experiences with buying stuff, replaces relationships with people with relationships with brands, remains vital. Just to make sure the audience knows not to take these ideas too seriously, Fincher crams as much of the movie with corporate logos as possible. Starbucks, IKEA, Pepsi, Coke, Calvin Klein and more are targets of the movie but also paid product placement. “Fight Club” is a product of the same culture it's criticizing, so obviously it is not meant to be taken too seriously. (Not that this stopped people from wanting to adopt Tyler's ideas in real life.)

In fact, that smart-ass sense of humor is what really keeps “Fight Club” fleet-footed and entertaining. This is a really funny movie. That teenage boy sense of snot-nose nihilism runs through the various pranks Burden and his followers design. Like antagonizing a priest into a fight with a water hose or riding a bike through the lobby of a office building. Or an amusing prank that involves feeding a horde of pigeons right above a fancy car dealership. Personally contaminating food in an upper-class restaurant or splicing porn into innocuous movie reels – something that both is and isn't possible in our digital age – speak to the smart-ass way the film is about upsetting societal norms. So do the oversized gross-out gags, like carrying bags of liposuctioned human fat over a gate or the Narrator burying his face in Bob's matronly bosom. 

“Fight Club's” funniest moments also tend to be its most surreal. Such as the cartoonishly dilapidated conditions the protagonist lives through in Tyler's crumbling home. Or an inane magazine article becoming Jack's re-occurring comedic line of dialogue. The highlight of this dream-like streak is Jack's visit to his spirit cave, featuring a talking penguin, and the utterly delirious final act. The film grows increasingly surreal, as the Narrator becomes a man attempting to outrun a cycle he started. “Fight Club” is almost madcap in these scenes, the protagonist racing from city to city but always being one step behind Tyler Durden. By this point, the Project Mayhem cult, nestled into every corner of every city, has reached absurd proportions.

The ultimate example of “Fight Club's” absurd tendencies is its twist ending, which pushes the story completely out of the realm of believability. That dramatic reveal, that “Jack” and Tyler Durden have been the same person all along, blew plenty of minds in 1999. Yet, in retrospect, it's surprising it caught anyone off-guard. The movie telegraphs the twist so far in advance. There's subliminal flashes of Durden early on. Marla is pointedly never in the room with both of them at the same time, her dialogue clearly only being directed at one person. The same can be said for the interactions Durden has with the Project Mayhem members. The twist is nowhere near as clever as the movie thinks it is. The deception is best taken as another of “Fight Club's” pranks, this one directed at the audience. That's certainly how the manic fight scene between Tyler and Jack, partially shown via CRT monitors, comes off.

Even if you think its writing is self-satisfied, its plot is ridiculous, and its themes full of shit, there's something else about “Fight Club” absolutely worth admiring. David Fincher pushes his style further than ever before. The music video slick visuals have been refined to a science, producing a perfectly gritty but satisfying looking movie. His editing has never been tighter either, “Fight Club” rolling along at a rapid-fire pace that matches its hyper-verbal narration. The addition of computer effects allow Fincher to stylized his approach even more. A love scene is turned into a kaleidoscopic swirl of body parts. A pan around an apartment is turned into a living IKEA magazine spread, as product names and prices appear on-screen. The camera pushes into impossible places, into the crevices of a stove top or the interior of a drain pipe. It's exhilarating filmmaking.

The movie's two main players could also not be better cast. Edward Norton – who Fincher had to fight for, as the studio did not consider him a box office draw – is the perfect sardonic voice to bring Chuck Palahniuk's particular prose to life. He has just the right mixture, of smug and disaffected, of self-loathing and scorn for the rest of the world. After watching this movie, it's pretty much impossible not to imagine all of Palahniuk's writing narrated in Norton's voice. Norton also gives an incredible physical performance, seen in the absolutely thunderous sequence where he beats the shit out of himself. That's not the kind of things a lot of actors could pull off and is a highlight of the film. 

If Norton is the ideal mix to play Palahniuk's deeply unhappy protagonist, Brad Pitt is the obvious choice to play the idealized version of himself. That sculpted, sex symbol physique is put to good use, representing everything Jack wishes he could be. Pitt also knows exactly how to spit a witty one-liner or fierce monologue, sometimes directly towards the audience. The willingness with which Pitt throws himself into this role is best displayed in one moment. When the owner of the bar the Fight Club is operating out of confronts Tyler, he eventually ends up battered and spitting blood in the man's face while cackling like a lunatic. It's a scene that is both hilarious and unnerving, Pitt shedding all movie star prestige to embody this film's very particular version of “cool.”

While Norton and Pitt undeniably make a powerful duo, the secret weapon of “Fight Club” is Helena Bonham Carter as Marla. Oddly sexy even with her twisted hair and perpetually strung-out face, Carter creates the kind of woman who can reduce a man to rubble simply with a well-timed word. She's the atrophied heart at the center of the film's story, vulnerable even under all the wilting sarcasm and bullshit-eviscerating wit. “Fight Club” also makes excellent use of the limited range of Meat Loaf. The rock icon weeps in an exaggerated manner in the first half, while sporting a pair of giant rubber breasts, before showing an almost child-like glee in the second half. 

Propelled by a electronic rock score that is as eccentric and funny and propulsive as the movie around, “Fight Club” remains utterly energizing movie-making. You can debate whether it is as deep as it thinks it is or if it's, in fact, deeper than the fan boys and detractors both realize. People will continue to argue about the film's merits for years to come. That's what happens when a movie has a reasonable claim to the title of reigning cult movie of the 2000s. Regardless, “Fight Club” is incredibly entertaining, brilliantly assembled, with enough intriguing layers to spark conversations of all sorts. I might not think it's the Coolest Shit Ever but it's still pretty damn good. [Grade: A]