After Twenty-Five Years, Does Fight Club Still Matter?
Fight Club is twenty-five years old. I went to a special anniversary showing to see if it still held up.
HUGE SPOILER WARNING…. for a quarter-century-old movie. This article contains details of the plot of Fight Club. Duh!
The year 1999 was a stellar one for films. In that year alone, American Beauty, 10 Things I Hate About You, The Green Mile, She’s All That, The Blair Witch Project, Notting Hill, American Pie, South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, The Sixth Sense, Eyes Wide Shut, and, of course, The Matrix all arrived.
They were joined by another picture. One based on a brutal and clever little novel by American writer Chuck Palahniuk.
It was called, Fight Club and it became a phenomenon.
I recently attended a 25th-anniversary screening of Fight Club in Edinburgh. Going in, it was difficult to know what to expect. While it regularly features in the top 10 movie lists I’d make when the subject comes up in the pub or over dinner, I hadn’t sat down to watch it for years.
Would Fight Club turn out to be something from my younger years that still holds up, like Get Your Own Back and Blink 182, or would be it the source of nervous embarrassment and regret, like some episodes of Friends and the Lost Prophets?
Fortunately, the next two hours and 19 minutes passed very quickly as I returned to the grotty, grimy, and nihilistic world of the Narrator, Tyler, and Marla Singer. From the moment the ear-splitting, pounding opening music by the Dust Brothers hits, to the devastating finale, perfectly underscored by The Pixies’ Where Is My Mind?, Fight Club remains a masterfully made film.
If you’ve come this far, you’ve probably seen it already but just in case, here’s a summary of the plot of Fight Club.
We meet our unnamed, insomniac Narrator (Edward Norton) as he tries to find help to get a good night’s sleep. He eventually discovers an unorthodox cure for his sleeplessness involving attending support groups for people with illnesses he doesn’t have. When the authenticity of the experience is interrupted by acerbic goth chick Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) and a suspicious fire at his home, he is soon driven into the arms of the enigmatic and egomaniacal Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt).
What follows is a pitch-black adventure featuring underground combat clubs, unreliable narrators, sex, terrorism, mistaken identity(ish), and cold questions asked about modernity.
In one of cinema’s greatest twists, it is revealed that our Narrator and Tyler are the same person. It’s a modern-day Jekyll and Hyde story… if Hyde made soap from liposuction waste and explosives from that soap, had sex with the platonic ideal of a depressed pixie dream girl, and was a terrorist intent on destroying American capitalism. Fight Club is a film that does a lot with its runtime.
There’s been quite a bit written about Fight Club throughout the years. Some call it Neo-Noir, others a black comedy, while others still interpret it as a critique of Fascism. There’s something to each of these interpretations and it depends on what you’re looking for and the lens in the magnifying glass you’re using to find it.
As a movie, it’s a mixed-up, variety jumble of ideas, concepts, issues, points, and examples, of the kind that requires multiple viewings.
That may be Fight Club’s biggest strength; it brings a bag of ideas (including misogyny, disenfranchisement, alienation, violence, sex, identity, sexuality, and memory) into the room, dumps them on the table, and asks the viewer to make sense of them. It’s a film that poses more questions than it even thinks about trying to answer. Fight Club is, at its core, a provocation piece, in more than just the sex and violence stakes.
In thinking about what Fight Club means to a modern audience, I’m reminded of the novel, The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger’s book was also controversial at the time and has been since. It has earned its slot in the discussion, alongside Huck Finn and Gatsby, of the great American novel. Fight Club holds a similar position in conversations around great American cult movies and also has its devoted fans and vehement detractors.
There are many similarities between Catcher and Fight Club; not limited to the themes of growing up, sex, masculinity, sanity, and violence present throughout. However, for me, there is something personal bout experiencing them both at different times of my life.
I first encountered Catcher as a teenager and, as most middle-class white boys do, identified immediately with Holden Caulfield. To my adolescent eyes, Holden was an insightful, brave, clever, and shrewd young man who saw through the “phoney” people out there and called them out on it. He was prophetic, unrepentant, unapologetic, and able to see that not only was the emperor naked, but that he was slapping us all in the face with his cock.
Then, I grew up a little and rediscovered Catcher while I was a university student.
I was shocked.
Where I had expected to find James Dean in a red hunting hat sticking his middle digit up to the world, an urban slam poet spitting truth and cutting down the people who deserved it, instead, I found a whiny asshole.
Here was a kid who had everything. He was from a rich family, living in the centre of the world, and with parents who had the resources to send him to prestigious schools.
He could afford to live in New York, by himself, for a weekend before needing to ask anyone for money. He was young, rich, and free, and was still complaining about how hard it was for him while living in a world made for him. Honestly, I thought, “fuck you Holden.”
Then, I grew up further and realised that Holden is a child who has been abused or neglected by every single adult who should have taken care of him and supported him. Despite his background, he’s a victim and nobody seems to care about him. The length of time he spends alone and his doing everything but screaming out for connection is upsetting and those adults who do take advantage of or neglect him are the real villains of the book.
I recalled this experience vividly when watching Fight Club again. Like Catcher, I experienced it first when I was a teenager. When I did, I saw the Tyler Durden character as something to emulate. Tyler’s description of himself resonated with me at the time:
“I look how you wanna look, fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable and, most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not.”
I then grew up and revisited it. As I did with Catcher, I found myself expecting to find a tragic hero with a bold “fuck you” for all the “phonies” out there; but instead, I found a scathing critique of the trope that we need hurt and damaged men to rescue society from itself.
I found a black comedy sending up ideas of traditional masculine duty and the kind of nascent ideology that would eventually become the ‘red pill’ and other ‘manosphere’ ideas that had become common. It was a damning assessment of the state of modern men, at the time.
However, predictably, more time passed and, just as predictably in hindsight, I found yet another angle to look at Fight Club by attending the recent showing celebrating the 25th anniversary of this excellent film.
Similarly to Holden Caulfield going from icon, to joke, to victim, the men who are at the centre of what Fight Club is about do likewise. In a world of skyrocketing suicide rates, declining mental health, and depleted opportunities, it is perfectly reasonable for men to see the world as being against them, making them feel like the “all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”
We need support, engagement, compassion, dignity, strength, competence, independence and self-respect; that’s what keeps us from knocking each other’s heads against the concrete floor of a bar basement.
This is just one man’s very subjective view of what a film means to him. However, what was beyond dispute from the packed cinema and the chatter I overheard as I left the theatre, at nearly midnight on a Monday evening, is that Fight Club still provokes strong emotions and discussions and for that reason, never mind its strong script, innovative technique, and great performances by Norton, Pitt, and Bonham Carter, it still holds up.