Fight Club

The Book

Author: Chuck Palahniuk (b. 1962)

First published: 1996

The Film

Year released: 1999

Director: David Fincher (b. 1962)

Screenplay by: Jim Uhls

Starring: Ed Norton, Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham Carter, Meat Loaf

Context

Chuck Palahniuk’s debut novel, Fight Club, was published in 1996. It received positive reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus. “This brilliant bit of nihilism succeeds where so many self-described transgressive novels do not: It’s dangerous because it’s so compelling,” a reviewer for the latter wrote. Still, several years passed before the novel gained in popularity. The idea for Fight Club—about an insomniac who forms an unlikely friendship, and a secret club in which members pummel each other to exhaustion, with an anarchic prankster—grew out of a short story Palahniuk wrote for a writing workshop with author Tom Spanbauer. Spanbauer teaches a concept called “dangerous writing,” which encourages writers to access the most frightening parts of themselves in their work. Palahniuk, Spanbauer’s most successful adherent, wrote Fight Club as a rejoinder to publishers who found his first, rejected novel too disturbing. Buoyed by the release of the film, the novel has inspired a cult following; Palahniuk’s diehard fans literally refer to themselves collectively as the Cult. Palahniuk has since written many other books, including Choke (2001), a novel about a sex addict who pays for his abusive mother’s hospital expenses by pretending to choke on food at expensive restaurants. The Good Samaritans who save him inevitably offer to give him money. Choke was made into a film in 2008, starring Sam Rockwell.

Producers Ross Grayson Bell and Josh Donen bought the rights to Fight Club soon after it was published, though Palahniuk’s agent warned him not to get his hopes up about it getting made. Screenwriter Jim Uhls and director David Fincher, who had already made the blockbuster crime drama Seven, starring Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman in 1995, acquired the book around the same time. Given the green light to develop the project, Uhls wrote a first draft of the screenplay before Fincher made The Game (1997), starring Michael Douglas. In 1997, Fincher hired Pitt (sharply increasing the film’s budget) and Edward Norton to play the lead roles, and shooting began in 1998.

Despite its star-studded cast and visceral, violent appeal, Fight Club remains as difficult to quantify as the novel on which it was based. Ads for the film ran during World Wrestling Federation (WWF) matches, but the official poster featured Pitt, bafflingly to those unfamiliar with the story, holding a pink bar of soap. It was pitched to Fox executives as a 1990s version of the lightly subversive coming-of-age satire The Graduate (1967). Inevitably, those same executives were taken by surprise upon being shown the film’s final edit. Fight Club inspired deeply divided responses from critics and audiences. Some of those responses, particularly on the positive end, were quite extreme. Palahniuk occasionally meets fans who proudly proffer their lye burns for his inspection. Twenty years later, the cult classic continues to provide fodder cultural critique.

Film Analysis

The film follows the same trajectory of the book. It even adheres to Palahniuk’s clever structure in which the story opens at the end, with Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) shoving a gun inside the mouth of the unnamed narrator (Edward Norton). But other aspects of the film are quite different from its source material. The basic plot of Fight Club—as if anything about the story were simple—follows the tribulations of an unnamed thirty-something first-person narrator. He works a boring, white-collar job for a car company, assessing whether faulty parts need to be recalled. He lives comfortably in his meticulously furnished high-rise apartment, but he has a problem. He cannot sleep. Inspired by an exasperated remark from his doctor, he begins attending support groups for people with terminal illnesses. He meets Robert “Big Bob” Paulson (Meat Loaf) at a support group for men with testicular cancer. He also meets Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), an emotionally unhinged chain-smoker and support-group “tourist” like the narrator. Most important among the story’s other characters, though, is Tyler, a raffish prankster who lives in a dilapidated old house on a vacant street. In the book, the narrator meets Tyler on a nude beach; in the film, the two men meet on an airplane. After the narrator’s apartment explodes, he moves in with Tyler. Eager for emotional connection and, perhaps, gain a sense of community, the men found an underground boxing club called “fight club.”

At its inception, fight club consists of one-on-one bare knuckle brawls, but Tyler has a larger purpose. The single gathering grows to a large event, and gradually results in the creation of multiple "fight clubs" around the country; eventually, it evolves into a prank-oriented terrorist endeavor called Project Mayhem. The narrator becomes increasingly uncomfortable with Tyler’s methods and aims, only to discover at the story’s climax that he is Tyler. Tyler is not a flesh-and-blood human being but rather the narrator’s more self-assured alter ego. The story returns to the scene in which Tyler is threatening to kill the narrator. In the film, the narrator shoots himself, surviving, but effectively “killing” Tyler, or rather, successfully silencing that part of himself that Tyler once embodied. However, the book offers a slightly different ending. The narrator shoots himself and wakes up in a mental institution, convinced he has died and gone to heaven. All the orderlies are members of Project Mayhem who call him Mr. Durden, and say, in the book’s last line: “We look forward to getting you back.”

The idea for Fight Club came in part from the Cacophony Society, a real group of which Palahniuk is a member. The Cacophony Society was based on the West Coast in the 1980s and 1990s. Creators of chaos, they aimed to shake people out of complacency by orchestrating large-scale spectacles and pranks, or as Palahniuk likes to call them, “liminoid events.” Burning Man, an annual temporary desert city founded by Cacophony members, could be described as a liminoid event, or one that occurs spontaneously and upends the current order. The fight club in the book is also a liminoid event, Palahniuk told Kathryn Borel for Believer magazine. Like Burning Man, or even the Occupy movement of the early 2010s, the fight club franchises of the book “were small social experiments where people could try out a different way of being.” In the film, the fight club comes to fulfill Tyler’s militantly anticorporate, anticonsumerist vision. Among the many philosophical musings he offers the narrator: “The things you own end up owning you,” and “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.” Tyler’s vision of self-improvement is realized through self-destruction.

In the film, Fincher sets up a visual dichotomy between the narrator’s sleek but drab corporate environs—the office, interchangeable hotels and airplanes, his apartment furnished with mass-produced furniture—and the bloody, sweaty, muddy, chaotic world of Tyler. Fincher, with cinematographer Jeff Cronenworth, unites the two worlds with a very specific style and “lurid” colors, as he said in an interview with Gavin Smith for Film Comment magazine. He went on to cite an unusual source of inspiration. “We didn’t want to be afraid of color, we wanted to control the color palette. You go into 7-Eleven in the middle of the night and there’s all that green-fluorescent. And like what green light does to cellophane packages, we wanted to make people sort of shiny.” Fincher also found a way, again visually, to mimic Palahniuk’s choppy, purposefully jumbled narrative. He told Film Comment that he wanted the first half of the film, and the establishment of the plot, to move at “the speed of thought.” The beginning of the film, for instance, leaps from the gun-in-the-mouth scene back in time to the introduction of Bob and then back even further, as the narrator says in voice-over (a controversial choice that Fincher advocated for), to the introduction of the narrator himself.

Significance

The revulsion of film executives presaged the film’s reception by critics. Few liked Fight Club, and some found the film outright repellent. Roger Ebert described it as “macho porn,” writing that it contained “some of the most brutal, unremitting, nonstop violence ever filmed.” At the heart of his critique was the frustration that audiences would not understand that Tyler Durden is not the film’s hero. “Although sophisticates will be able to rationalize the movie as an argument against the behavior it shows, my guess is that audiences will like the behavior but not the argument,” he wrote. It received a rare positive review from Janet Maslin for the New York Times. “‘Fight Club’ sounds offensive from afar,” she wrote. “If watched sufficiently mindlessly, it might be mistaken for a dangerous endorsement of totalitarian tactics and super-violent nihilism in an all-out assault on society. . . . It means to explore the lure of violence in an even more dangerously regimented, dehumanized culture. That’s a hard thing to illustrate this powerfully without, so to speak, stepping on a few toes.”

Fight Club was booed when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival, and though it enjoyed a strong audience its first week in theaters, it was ultimately deemed a box-office flop, earning only half the amount of money it cost to make. But the film soon found its audience through DVD sales and went on to become a cult classic. In 2015, Palahniuk began publishing a series of graphic novels called Fight Club 2, in which Tyler Durden strikes again. Visceral reactions to the film and its philosophy, particularly its commentary on masculinity and violence, continue to make it a cultural touchstone.

Fight Club's graphic violence and controversial themes have led to censorship of both the book and film. For example, in early 2022, viewers on Chinese streaming service Tencent Video noticed that the film's dystopian ending depicting the destruction of multiple office buildings had been cut. In its place, censors had added a title card revealing that police had managed to foil the bomb plot, which some viewers felt represented a pro-government message. Fincher harshly criticized the censorship of the film's ending, but Palahnuik's response was more nuanced; while he initially mocked the altered ending, he did point out that it more closely reflected the ending of the book, and felt it was hypocritical to call out Chinese censorship of the film while ignoring attempts to ban the book in the United States. Amid this outcry, Tencent Video restored most of the original ending in February 2022.

Bibliography

Ebert, Roger. Review of Fight Club, directed by David Fincher. RogerEbert.com, 15 Oct. 1999, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/fight-club-1999. Accessed 1 Mar. 2019.

Ives, Mike, and John Liu. “‘Fight Club’ Ending Is Restored in China After Censorship Outcry.” The New York Times, 8 Feb. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/02/08/world/asia/china-fightclub-censorship-tencent.html. Accessed 4 Mar. 2022.

Maslin, Janet. “Film Review; Such a Very Long Way from Duvets to Danger.” Review of Fight Club, directed by David Fincher. The New York Times, 15 Oct. 1999, www.nytimes.com/1999/10/15/movies/film-review-such-a-very-long-way-from-duvets-to-danger.html. Accessed 1 Mar. 2019.

Review of Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk. Kirkus, 1 June 1996, www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/chuck-palahniuk/fight-club. Accessed 1 Mar. 2019.

Lambie, Ryan. “The Difficult History of David Fincher’s Fight Club.” Den of Geek, 15 Oct. 2018, www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/fight-club/239904/the-difficult-history-of-david-finchers-fight-club. Accessed 1 Mar. 2019.

Naughton, John. “Fight Club: An Oral History.” Men’s Health, 2 Feb. 2016, www.menshealth.com/uk/building-muscle/a755460/fight-club-an-oral-history. Accessed 1 Mar. 2019.

Palahniuk, Chuck. “A Conversation with Chuck Palahniuk.” Interview by Kathryn Borel. The Believer, 1 May 2014, believermag.com/a-conversation-with-chuck-palahniuk. Accessed 1 Mar. 2019.

Smith, Gavin. “Inside Out: David Fincher.” Film Comment, vol. 35, Sept.–Oct. 1999, pp. 58–68.