The first rule of Fight Club (1999) is that its fans talk about it constantly. They talk in public places, extolling the film’s edgy virtues to anyone within earshot, and they talk on online forums with the blinds tightly shut. Possibly, they talk about it more today – with more passion and excitement – than they did when the movie was released more than a quarter of a century ago. One can’t help but wonder whether this is a good thing or not.
Still, if you can’t beat them, join them – let’s say a few words about David Fincher’s Fight Club. It's a film that lends itself to different readings. It tests and teases the viewer much as its anti-hero, Tyler Durden, tests its unnamed sad-sack hero. Ed Norton plays the white-collar wage-slave who measures his sorry existence with a range of IKEA home furnishings. Brad Pitt co-stars as his galvanising agent of irreversible change, a soap salesman and red-pill revolutionary who preaches a gospel of liberative primal urges. Tyler’s first big idea is to arrange a series of bare-knuckle brawls in which emasculated beta-men can feel like gods for 10 minutes. His second big idea is to blow up the whole city. Ground zero, clean slate. That should separate the men from the boys.
How’s this for sweet karma: Fight Club itself was a bomb. It was made for $100m, clawed back $60m and led to the resignation of Bill Mechanic, the Fox studio boss who had seen fit to greenlight it. That should have been that, and most times would have been, except that the film subsequently found its sweet spot in the home entertainment market, where a fresh generation of fans could commune with it in private. That makes it a sleeper, an unruly late bloomer. The New York Times called it “the defining cult movie of our time”. I’m guessing that’s good, although it probably depends on the cult.
“You are not your job,” Tyler says, addressing the film’s nameless narrator, and presumably thousands of others just like him. “You are not your khakis. The things you own end up owning you.” Taking its lead from Chuck Palahniuk’s source novel, Fight Club proceeds to mount its bait-and-switch critique of consumerism and conformity. Fincher’s film neatly identifies the condition (misery, lack of purpose, a crisis of masculinity), provides a quick-fix cure (Tyler’s self-empowering fight club) and then points out where this leads – towards terrorist violence and societal meltdown. It’s a “cautionary tale”, the director has said, and no one would argue with that. Opinions differ, however, as to what it’s cautioning against.
Fight Club’s critics at the time saw it as wildly irresponsible, variously anarchistic and fascistic, all but banging the drum for a campaign of civil disobedience. It was “a film without a single redeeming quality”, according to the New York Observer’s Rex Reed. It was “a Nazi piece of work”, declared the headline of the Evening Standard’s review. Obviously the Standard meant this as a criticism, a reason to steer clear. It feels important to clarify this, given the subsequent movement of the Overton window and the political leanings of some of Fight Club’s new recruits.
Modern man has been cheated, Tyler tells us. They’ve been sold a lie and are right to feel angry. Tyler sympathises with their plight, and I think Fight Club does as well, although the film is more thorny and complex than its boneheaded supporters would have it. They’d prefer to view the explosive final scene (the lovebirds at the window; the city in flames) as an unashamed happy ending; a rallying cry for milksop men to stand up and hit back.
It’s no surprise to hear that Pete Hegseth – the US secretary of defence – is reputedly a big fan. Nor that Fincher’s film has become a touchstone for incels, doomers and men’s rights groups; a kind of self-help Eat, Pray, Love for the average toxic All-American. It’s possible that it was also the inspiration (I use the term loosely) behind Andrew Tate’s “war room” sessions at a Romanian boxing gym and the “Activate Your Alpha” bootcamps, which now flourish in Appalachia and Texas. So it’s a curious narrative arc that this movie has travelled. Fight Club was first hated for being fascist and then loved for being fascist, and never mind the fact that it’s never been fascist at all.
Fincher’s picture is currently back in cinemas in a gleaming 4k restoration print. Hopefully, fresh exposure will restore its reputation as well. If Fight Club has dated and degraded with the passage of time, it’s only in its sense of style (the off-the-peg Nineties grunge; the studiedly cynical stance). In every other respect, this still feels fresh and fast, almost dangerously so, feinting one way and shimmying in the other, daring the viewer to keep up or bail out. It swaggers like Tyler and it seethes like the narrator, but it’s always one step ahead of them, too. It’s hard to be a free-range primal man and remain a citizen of the world. Sooner or later, something has to give.
It’s not Fincher’s responsibility to police how people see his film. But is Fight Club purely blameless? Has the red-pill crowd totally and utterly misread it? Well, perhaps not entirely, because Fight Club is ever so slightly seduced by the behaviour it condemns. Like other works of this ilk – Taxi Driver (1976), Joker (2019) and Scarface (1983) spring to mind – it’s a film that’s excited by violence and thrilled by social transgression, much as a smart teenager might be thrilled by alcohol and cigarettes. So it’s an ambivalent movie, maybe a compromised one, but it’s on the side of the angels, if only by a whisker. I love it and it bothers me. I’m wary but want to trust it. It’s probably useful, on balance, to continue talking about Fight Club. It keeps us all engaged and connected. It helps us figure out ourselves.
