The 1999 Retrospective - Part 2: Fight Club
In which I break not only the first rule, but also the second rule of Fight Club
I have never been able to escape Fight Club. As a pre-teen, when I’d go to church camp, the other boys and I would take turns hitting each other with pillows and shoving each other into cushions. The adult chaperones would call this event “Fight Club” and allow it to continue because it would tire us out before bed. (Were they allowed to do this? [Whatever, my dad was one of the chaperones, so I’m sure it’s fine.]) As a high schooler, I’d get called a “snowflake” for having radical political beliefs like “Maybe someone who brags about sexually assaulting women on tape shouldn’t be the President of the United States.” In college, I made a friend named Tyler Durden. Instead of selling soap, he would sell a meal replacement drink called Soylent. I’m still not 100% sure if this was part of a multi-level marketing scheme, but Tyler remains my friend.
It was not until after graduating from college that I finally watched Fight Club for the first time. It instantly stuck with me. Since then, I’ve begged my book club to read the Chuck Palahniuk novel that the film was based on, to no avail. Eventually, I resigned to reading it alone, and it did not disappoint. The film was released in theatres in 1999, and when I started this project, I knew I would end up reviewing it.
I have split this review into four sections, each based on a thought I have about Fight Club. I prefer to go as in-depth as possible when I write about things I love. However, Fight Club has an ingenious and well-executed plot twist that I’d rather not spoil for anyone. Suppose you have somehow gone nearly twenty-five years without spoiling Fight Club for yourself. In that case, I recommend reading only the section titled “A Brief Spoiler-Free Review of Fight Club” before watching the film (and/or reading the novel) and then reading the remaining three sections of this review. If you have seen Fight Club, feel free to read the entire review; just don’t talk about it…
A Brief Spoiler-Free Review of Fight Club
Fight Club (1999) is a David Fincher-directed film adaptation of the Chuck Palahniuk novel of the same name. It stars Edward Norton as an unnamed protagonist, Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden, and Helena Bonham Carter as Marla Singer. The film’s protagonist is an insomniac disillusioned with the numbness of the American consumerist society of the 1990s. He has a cushy job determining whether or not a car recalls would be profitable for his corporate overlords and lives in a decent apartment full of IKEA furniture.
While complaining to his doctor about his lack of sleep, his doctor recommends he visit a testicular cancer support group to see what real pain is like. The protagonist attends this support group, along with many others, to experience emotions and help himself sleep. At these support groups, he meets Marla Singer, a young woman attending support groups for similar reasons. The two form a rivalry, and after the protagonist’s insomnia returns due to Marla’s presence, they agree to split support group nights.
On a plane ride, the protagonist meets Tyler Durden, a dauntless soap salesman. They both carry the same briefcase and share a conversation that interests the protagonist. After the protagonist returns home, he finds that his apartment exploded, destroying the center of his cushy life and all his IKEA furniture. As an act of desperation, the protagonist calls Tyler Durden. The two go out for drinks, take turns throwing fists with each other, and decide to room together in an abandoned house Tyler has been squatting in.
Tyler and the protagonist continue to fight with each other in the bar’s parking lot, forming their “Fight Club” as more men begin to spectate and participate. What happens past the formation of Fight Club, I will leave for other sections of the review so as not to ruin the movie for readers who have not yet seen it.
What Fight Club captures so well in the film, especially early in the movie, is the cold, nihilistic loneliness of being in your twenties. The color palette is dark and green. Scenes flow in and out of each other like someone stuck between a dream and a restless night. The narrator has a decent life but lacks any meaning or direction. Unfortunately, that’s something many young men can relate to, especially now, almost twenty-five years after the film debuted.
As the movie builds, this loneliness shifts into a more sinister darkness. The dark palette still permeates the film after the narrator moves in with Tyler. The house they live in is disgusting. It constantly floods, and there are holes throughout it. The script is full of edgy lines, the best of which are lifted straight from the book. The entire film screams 90s edge, but that edginess never seems to be there for its own sake. It’s all there to carry the themes of the story.
Another element that makes Fight Club such a quintessential 1999 movie is that the script is hilarious. Especially if you’re in on the joke, which, unfortunately, many people are not. I will discuss this phenomenon further in the section of this review titled “This is NOT a Good Adaptation,” but suffice it to say that if you have a moderate understanding of topics like toxic masculinity, groupthink, or criticisms of capitalism, the dialogue will make you laugh. Even if you DON’T understand the aforementioned topics, this movie will make you laugh, albeit probably not for the intended reasons.
My favorite element of Fight Club is its central plot twist and how David Fincher builds tension leading to its reveal. It is a reveal that makes the entire film click, and I wouldn’t dare spoil it for someone who has not seen the movie. If you’ve seen Fight Club before, you know exactly what I’m talking about, and if you haven’t, this is the point at which I recommend you close this article and watch the movie yourself.
Community in Response to Isolation & Consumerism
The aforementioned loneliness of American consumer culture is at the forefront of what Fight Club is trying to critique. In response to his meaningless and lonely life, the narrator finds a fleeting sense of meaning in the fight club he creates with Tyler Durden. As the fight club grows, a twisted sense of community emerges between its members. Members of Fight Club begin to recognize each other on the street without acknowledging it publically.
In this way, Fight Club gets half the answer to how to deal with turn-of-the-millennium loneliness right. The issue is that rather than a community formed on the bonds of friendship, solidarity, or faith in anything more significant than themselves, Fight Club rallies behind the ideology of nihilism, violence, and hyper-masculinity. Rather than using the community they’ve created to lift themselves and other men up, Fight Club serves as a way to feel alive by tearing each other down. Tyler clarifies this ideology by telling the narrator, “Self-destruction is the answer.” For Tyler, there is no meaning in life, and the community he’s created exists merely as a means to lash out at everything around him. This isn’t a lashing out driven by any righteous anger with numbness of American consumer society, but simply for the sake of destruction itself.
This nihilism and violence come to a head in the creation of Tyler’s aptly named “Project Mayhem,” an evolution of Fight Club that’s essentially a terrorist cell that he’s the leader of. The group causes mayhem by vandalizing and destroying property for seemingly no discernable purpose (with the exception of a target I will bring up in this review’s final section.) On the surface, Project Mayhem may seem like an anarchist faction causing chaos on behalf of social change. However, with a central leader like Tyler Durden, requirements that members give up their names and their identities, and rules like “don’t ask questions,” Project Mayhem is more akin to a fascist militia.
In my opinion, this is the central idea that Fight Club is trying to satirize: Anger and rage at “the system” without solidarity or guiding principles is nothing more than a toddler throwing a tantrum. While a toddler might be lashing out because its needs are going unmet, without the knowledge and language it needs to express those feelings, all it can do is destroy everything around it. This is Tyler Durden’s ideology: destruction for destruction’s sake and meaningless made manifest.
Tyler Durden is My Personal Nightmare
Since the readers who haven’t seen Fight Club are (hopefully) gone, I will address the elephant in the room. The narrator is Tyler Durden. The “Tyler Durden,” played by Brad Pitt, is a figment of his imagination and appears the way the narrator would like to see himself. When the narrator falls asleep, his “Tyler Durden” persona takes over, resulting in the insomnia he has been experiencing. The moment of this reveal is when Fight Club becomes a psychological horror movie for me personally.
When I was a teenager, I was diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. While it may be known as “the organized disorder” (lmao) or “washing-your-hands disease,” in reality, it’s characterized by thought patterns consisting of obsessions and compulsions. Obsessions are reoccurring intrusive thoughts that are usually disturbing and create feelings of fear in the person having them. Compulsions are ritualistic behaviors that someone performs to quell obsessive thoughts temporarily. For example, someone might continually and excessively wash their hands in an attempt to get rid of a deadly bacterial infection they are convinced they will contract. These behaviors create a positive feedback loop as the brain thinks the compulsion has protected the subject from the obsession, resulting in increased feelings of constant dread.
One night, as a child, when I stayed up too late, I heard noises coming from my little sister’s room. When I checked on her, I found her going from her toy box to her bed, placing her stuffed animals on the bed individually.
“Kyah? What are you still doing awake?” I asked.
There was no response.
“Kyah, are you alright?”
I moved closer to her, hoping to make eye contact. Her expression was utterly blank. It was like my sister was gone, and her body continued to be moved around by a distant animating force. The reality of seeing someone I love moving around with all of the life sucked out of her terrified me. Who was controlling her? Not the Kyah I knew. This is what we in the business call “unlocking a new fear.”
In the following weeks, months, and years, I became obsessed with sleepwalking. I’d ruminate in fear of the idea of my body moving around, maliciously interacting with others, in situations where I was no longer in the driver’s seat of my mind. I had no idea what could happen to me when I fell asleep. I could become someone else entirely, wreaking havoc on everyone and everything I love, only to awake to find it was too late to protect the people I cared about. This may sound silly, and it is, but the fear these thoughts created was very potent and real.
Before I would go to bed, I would make sure to take into account where I’d left all the objects in my room, and when I awoke, I’d make sure everything was just where I left it. These were the measures I felt were necessary to make sure nothing would take over me while I slept and that nobody else would have to suffer from the actions of whatever force controlled the sleepwalkers.
That is to say, seeing one of my deepest fears manifest as a plot point in “a movie about a bunch of guys who punch each other” was weirdly fascinating. It was not where I expected the film to go when I first watched it. Strangely, it made me feel less alone. Someone out there had come up with the same idea I had, and instead of letting it drastically reduce the quality of their life, they turned it into an engaging plot twist in a work of fiction. Maybe I should turn some of my obsessions into plot points…
This is NOT a Good Adaptation
As much as I loved Fight Club when I first watched it, after reading the novel and re-watching the film, I can’t help but think that it flat-out fails as an adaptation. On the surface, the film seems to follow the novel pretty closely. It’s the details where Fight Club changes. While these details may seem small individually, they change the story’s theme entirely.
In the novel, it’s evident that Tyler Durden is a villain. He kills multiple characters throughout the book, and Project Mayhem is mostly one giant vanity project. As I said earlier in the review, he represents destruction for destruction’s sake.
A few fundamental changes in the film turned him into a different character thematically. For starters, he’s played by Bratt Pitt. It’s hard to represent loneliness and nihilism when you’re played by one of Hollywood’s hottest actors. The more drastic changes occur in the script. Tyler’s violence is significantly reduced. He never kills anyone in the film, and he makes sure the credit card buildings are clear of any people before blowing them to smithereens. He is also given a somewhat noble goal. Instead of simply causing mass chaos, Tyler attempts to destroy the credit card buildings to wipe away the debt, setting people free. With these changes, Tyler changes from a villain to an anti-hero, muddying the waters of the story’s original satiric message.
Because of my fears above, Tyler being the villain was abundantly clear to me. Unfortunately, viewers with lower levels of empathy and media literacy have interpreted Tyler as a hero. This has led to a world where Fight Club is a “film-bro” movie, angsty teenagers comment things like “literally me” under TikTok edits of Tyler Durden, and the character has been labeled a “sigma male.”
Before reading the novel, I blamed this phenomenon mainly on a lack of media literacy, but now I’m unsure. The film’s writers and David Fincher made some intentional choices to reframe how Tyler interacts with the narrative. At least some of the blame for Fight Club being a deeply misunderstood film lies with them.
However, despite this revelation, I did not actually enjoy the act of watching Fight Club any less. It’s still a masterfully made, fun, and thrilling movie. It’s just not as smart as I once thought it was. On the other hand, the novel is as smart as I thought the film was the first time I watched it, maybe even more so. Its ending is entirely different, and it’s one that more effectively closes the narrative. It would not translate as well to a screen as watching the world crumble as “Where is My Mind” by Pixies plays. If you’re even remotely enjoy the film, give the novel a chance. It’s an easy read and a perfect companion piece to this movie.