When David Fincher‘s Fight Club hit movie theaters in 1999, Baby Boomer critics such as Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times deemed the film “fascist macho porn”, while the Observer’s Rex Reed wrote that Fight Club was a film with no redeeming value. Yet, ten years later, The New York Times dubbed Fight Club “the defining cult movie of our time”, followed by Rolling Stone counting Fincher’s picture among the 25 best cult movies ever made.
As for Ebert, Reed, and others of their ilk, Fight Club wasn’t for them, obviously. On that note, consider the scene at Fight Club‘s halfway mark where Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden, pacing the concrete floor in the dank basement of Lou’s Tavern, offers a speech to the bloodied and bruised faces encircling him, addressing fellow members of Fight Club as “the middle children of history”, a clear reference to Generation-X.
Apart from garnering a moment of mass media attention in the 1990s, Gen Xers (born roughly between the mid-1960s and late 1970s) developed a reputation as the “forgotten generation”, overshadowed by the more prominent cultural narratives of the Baby Boomers and Millennials. In American culture, these “middle children” were the first generation communally raised “from the cradle” on television’s false promises. They were further distinguished by their sense of disconnection from established norms and “family values”. Indeed, that sentiment existed as a politically conservative rallying cry of the 1990s, one that many Xers found laughable given how they bore the immediate impact of no-fault divorce.
Then Fight Club came along, capturing and building on how many alternative movements and subcultures of the 1990s – from grunge to psychobilly – emerged from an intra-generational search for connection and purpose. The wrinkle here, though, is that Fight Club explores the need for subculture from an emphatically masculine perspective.
Fincher’s film adapts Chuck Palahniuk‘s 1996 novel. Like the protagonists in most Palahniuk stories, Fight Club‘s narrator evades the truth about himself until he overuses his coping mechanisms to the point of breakdown and must confess the truth. Edward Norton’s “Jack” (as Fincher’s film adaptation, for logistical purposes, lulls us into calling him) leads a numbingly bland life, stranded on “Planet Starbucks” as a “recall campaign coordinator” for an automobile manufacturer. His high-rise condo resembles a walk-through IKEA catalog, and he lives a purposeless existence, realizing he has no self-identity and has never truly invented himself.
Ebert and Reed’s generation could lay claim to films like Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967), where a future of possibilities paralyzes the everyman. Fight Club, however, inverts that story. Jack doesn’t live in that world. He’s done everything he’s supposed to, yet, as Fincher explains, the character does not have a world of possibilities and cannot imagine a way to change his life. In a sequence that lampoons 1990s therapy culture, Jack momentarily escapes his social isolation and chronic insomnia as a support group addict, a “tourist” taking on the role of a suffering individual, feigning the corresponding illness, altogether emphasizing his need for a different identity and foreshadowing the arrival of the trickster character, Tyler Durden.
In Jungian fashion, Durden is the narrator’s shadow-self, a projection of his subconscious— something that Jack and the audience discover together in Fight Club‘s dénouement. In other words, Jack’s existential crisis is so profound that he must invent his own savior, and that savior leads him into a violent underworld. Durden is the man defined by nothing beyond himself, a warped version of Nietzsche’s Übermensch (the character’s anarchism sort of disqualifies him), initiating Jack’s spiritual awakening by destroying his trendy condo. One thing that Durden and Jack have in common is that they came of age with absent fathers, even discussing what it would be like to fight their fathers. At Durden’s insistence, they fight one another, leading to the formation of an underground, bare-knuckle boxing club where men build camaraderie through physical confrontation.
Fortuitously, Fight Club landed in theaters the same month Susan Faludi’s Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man landed in bookstores. In Stiffed, Faludi examines a collapse of traditional American masculinity catalyzed by the erosion of World War II definitions of manhood, where men once demonstrated their worth as rugged individualists and breadwinners, conquering frontiers and defeating clearly defined enemies.
Yet contemporary American men, Faludi argues, feel displaced by a moving of the goalposts, by socio-cultural and economic shifts that have altered traditional notions of masculinity— such as evolving gender roles, mergers and layoffs, the decline of the manufacturing economy, and the subsequent feminization of labor. Recall how one of the first people Jack meets through a men’s support group is a former bodybuilder who has lost his testicles. Fight Club further caricatures the emasculated man by way of the narrator’s IKEA obsession and the scene where airport baggage handlers suspect that Jack’s carrying a vibrating dildo rather than an electric razor in his suitcase.
Accordingly, Tyler Durden surfaces as the embodiment of hyper-idealized machismo, guiding Jack and the members of Fight Club – meeting weekly in the basement of a rundown bar – toward reclaiming primal masculinity. Speaking to the kind of men that Susan Faludi writes about, Pitt’s character sermonizes, “We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives”. However, the Fight Club reminds these men of the power they still have through shared experiences of violence, a ritualistic means to achieving self-definition. The group even mirrors a religious congregation with its own set of rites and rituals. The bare-knuckle brawls encourage men to confront existential fears, analogous to religious practices that involve trials or suffering to achieve spiritual enlightenment.
Durden’s philosophy takes a sharp turn when he creates the paramilitary Project Mayhem, though the film adaptation muddles Project Mayhem’s political philosophy somewhat. In Palahniuk’s novel, but missing from the film, Durden suggests contemporary men are increasingly held accountable for violence accumulated across human history and have become the “slaves of history”, expected to “clean up after everyone”. Thus, the novel’s rendition of Project Mayhem targets a museum since men of the narrator’s generation must learn they possess “the power to control history”.
Meanwhile, the film retains Durden’s conviction that Western civilization’s shift from a pre-industrial, agrarian culture to a modern industrialized culture has robbed men of their identities. So Durden resolves to take humanity back to zero, ushering in “a cultural ice age”, a post-industrial age resembling hunter-gatherer civilization. Setting this cultural reversal in motion, members of Project Mayhem engage in guerilla street theater, acts of sabotage aimed at destabilizing modern socio-economic structures, before moving onto bomb-making and hatching a terroristic plot hauntingly prescient of 9/11. Ultimately Durden’s demagoguery, his anarchic vision, forces Jack’s hand, and the narrator symbolically destroys part of himself to stay alive.
Leading to the film’s theatrical release in the Fall of 1999, 20th Century Fox marketed Fight Club as the American version of Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996), confounding moviegoers. By mid-October, big-name reviewers experiencing flashbacks of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) preoccupied themselves with what effect the film would have on angry young men. Also, Fight Club was released into an atmosphere of techno-cultural anxiety surrounding the year 2,000. Yet the film underwent a change in status, spawned partly by its DVD release, which coincided with the advent of internet discussion platforms. Fight Club defied the conventions of cinema enough to inspire a cult following, gaining a reputation independent of the mainstream press.
The film not only seemed a fitting end to a decade in America that hosted the rise of anti-government, paramilitary militia groups and the Unabomber (an anarcho-primitivist, like Durden), offset by Promise Keepers and the Million Man March, but Fight Club has never stopped lending itself to reinterpretation. Occupy Wall Street (a 2011 populist movement) had a familiar ring, then came the reemergence of alt-right movements. Perhaps no film feels as ominously prefigurative of the January 6, 2021 U.S. Capital riot, the culmination of rhetorical echo chambers convincing disenfranchised men (mostly) of the power they still have. Gavin Smith of Film Comment couldn’t have imagined how correct he was in 1999 when he called Fight Club the first motion picture of the 21st century.
The film’s ongoing resonance certainly validates the work, but one can’t help but imagine that a segment of the male population missed what critic Jesse Kavaldo calls “the Palahniuk paradox”, in that the novel and film give voice to the disenfranchised angry male, only to criticize him humorously, relentlessly, and morally. Still, after all these years, we’d rather be Tyler Durden than Jack. There’s only one problem: he isn’t real. As Fincher explains in a 1999 interview, Tyler Durden “is everything you would want to be, except… he’s not living in our world”. That’s not a bad takeaway from a film with no redeeming value.
Works Cited
Kavaldo, Jesse. “The Fiction of Self-Destruction: Chuck Palahniuk, Closet Moralist.” Stirrings Still: The International Journal of Existential Literature, vol. 2, no. 2. December 2005.
Keesey, Douglas. Understanding Chuck Palahniuk. University of South Carolina Press. September 2016.
Smith, Gavin. “Inside out: David Fincher”. Film Comment, no. 35. September/October 1999.
Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. W.W. Norton. August 1996.