1999 was a big year for movies. It was the year that The Matrix‘s slow-motion bullet influenced action movies for years to come. It was the year American Beauty won Best Picture at the Academy Awards and Oscar fans have been arguing about it ever since. It was the year Pokémon jumped from Gameboys and TV to the big screen. And worst of all, it was the year that disappointed a generation of Star Wars fans with the release of The Phantom Menace.
To celebrate that landmark year in film’s 20th Anniversary, The Pop Break continues its year-long retrospective of 1999’s most influential (at least to us) films with writer, Matthew Widdis, reexamining the controversy around Fight Club.
In 2019, we grew concerned about the release of the film, Joker. When there is a character study about a frustrated and unstable man becoming a violent criminal, does it risk being seen as sympathetic to nihilism, toxic masculinity, and feelings of entitlement? Could it inspire those who might identify with such a character to realize the fictional path from the film? In 1999, Chuck Palahniuk’s best-selling and début novel was brought to the screen. Some asked similar questions upon its release. Others lauded David Fincher’s direction and editing when bringing the story to the screen. Today, it is hard to name a film that has shaped the contemporary male thought process more. I am Jack’s 20-year retrospective on Fight Club.
One guy, living a regular and unremarkable life, struggles to find purpose, fulfillment, and identity (Edward Norton in the film). He has nice things. He makes good money. He feels terrible. He only feels complete when he attends support groups and talks and empathizes with people suffering from terminal or debilitating illnesses such as men surgically castrated … neutered … literally emasculated … to save them from cancer.
He meets a fellow “tourist” at these groups, Marla (Helena Bonham Carter). They can’t stand each other and have to make arrangements to continue attending meetings separately to avoid conflict and exposing themselves as psychological vampires. Then, after his apartment explodes, destroying all his worldly possessions, the narrator finds himself in a bar with a charismatic and thought-provoking Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). Tyler is willing to let the narrator stay at his house on one condition: they fight first. When they do, Tyler’s question of, “How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?” is answered. And then things get interesting.
Through a series of misadventures, Tyler constantly challenges the narrator to re-evaluate his priorities, his values, and himself. Materialism is offered as blame for his lack of contentment. Retail therapy isn’t a thing in Tyler’s opinion. A lack of inspiration by a father figure, even in a higher power, is given as a cause for identity crisis. Our fathers or Our Father, who’s to say if any of them care? But, most of all, the search for comfort and the avoidance of pain and loss come to be seen as the reason his life is lacking joy. To Tyler, struggle is the key to growth because “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”
When Marla calls during a suicide attempt, the narrator ignores her but Tyler happens upon the call by chance and saves her, bringing her into the house and becoming her lover. This disrupts the narrator and Tyler’s co-dependency. Like Marla, Tyler is brutally nihilistic, a trait that the narrator finds attractive and frightening in both. Tyler brings chaos to the world around him. Marla has a world of chaos inside her. None of the three seem to be able to get what they want from each other.
The fight clubs that they’ve been holding in the basement of the bar where they first met expand to new nights and other locations, which the narrator never approved or even knew about until they begin to take on the form of a cult. The soap that Tyler creates from stolen medical waste is no longer enough to self-sustain Fight Club until the narrator manages to exit a disciplinary meeting with his supervisor in a desperate but unique and successful way.
The plot twist *Spoiler alert for a twenty-year-old movie!* comes not when we discover that Tyler is an anarchist that has been mobilizing the cult to commit criminal and often dangerous acts of chaos. It comes when the narrator discovers that he is and has been Tyler Durden all along. Tyler is an idealized version of himself, separate from his anxieties that, “looks like he wants to look, f***s like he wants to f***, and is smart, capable and, most importantly, free.” As this alter ego, the narrator blacks out occasionally to create and run a terrorist plot called “Project Mayhem” and destroy the headquarters of various credit card companies and banks. With his own safety and Marla’s at risk, the narrator attempts to stop the destruction by stopping Tyler–himself–by any means necessary and, in doing so, finds peace. I am Jack’s overblown existential crisis given grandiose scale.
Much like Fight Club’s unnamed narrator, Chuck Palahniuk began attending fiction writing workshops, volunteering at homeless shelters, and transporting hospice patients to support groups in order to find purpose and connection with others. It was from these workshops that he was inspired to write his first novel, Invisible Monsters, while working as a diesel mechanic. When Invisible Monsters was rejected by publishers for being too disturbing, he set out to write something far more so in order to make the publisher uncomfortable. Drawing some inspiration from his involvement in the mischievous prank club, The Cacophony Society, this became Fight Club. Since then, he has written over thirty novels, short stories, non-fiction works, and screenplays including the screenplay for Fight Club and the comic book sequels to the original novel. Coming out as gay in 2008, he lives outside of Vancouver, WA, with his long-time partner, whom he has described as having a similar blue-collar past.
For Brad Pitt, playing Tyler Durden was another moment in a journey of superstardom. Since Fight Club, he has been nominated for dozens of awards and earned an Oscar as a producer of 12 Years a Slave. Edward Norton was already (in)famous in Hollywood for his re-editing of his previous film, American History X, and has continued in front of the camera and behind the scenes in everything from the dark comedy cult hit, Death to Smoochy, to blockbusters like The Incredible Hulk to producing the documentary By the People: The Election of Barack Obama. Helena Bonham Carter, in addition to playing Beatrix LeStrange in the Harry Potter series and no less than eight collaborations with former husband, Tim Burton, has found enough time for turns as everyone from Morgan LeFay to Elizabeth Taylor for BBC television. Director, David Fincher waited nine years to team up with Brad Pitt a third time with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and gained accolades for films like The Social Network and Gone Girl.
But neither cast, nor creators have been as affected by Fight Club as the Generation X audiences that gave it life as a cult classic. It’s become a part of our collective consciousness. Try explaining the rules of pretty much anything without someone in the group suggesting that the first rule is not talking about it. This is, of course, followed by the second rule being the same. It goes deeper than a simple running gag, though.
Concerns about “copycat” behavior found validation. Dozens of “gentlemen” fight clubs are believed to have popped up around the country, from Silicon Valley to Princeton University, following the movie’s release on DVD. Many acts of violence around that time, including those by “Midwest Pipe Bomber,” Luke Helder, were likened to the actions of Project Mayhem. But, to Fincher and Palahniuk, these people missed the point of the film as a cautionary tale of the dangers of nihilism, anarchism, and glorification of violence.
And, for many fans, the lasting appeal doesn’t come from emulating Tyler Durden’s zealous rhetoric but the introspection and inspiration gained by the narrator. Regardless of faith or cultural origins, a personal truth, found in a state of doing and being who and what we want, works for many of what was supposed to be a lost generation of “slackers” who, while moving away from religion and national identities, determinedly struggle to keep consumerism from filling that void. The tiny house movement. The emphasis on travel and experiences over possessions and status symbols. The artisan…everything we see crafted by people who chose to leave their cubicles or undergrad studies to pursue their passions. Whether directly influenced by Fight Club or not, these things can be related to the truth in lines like, “The things you own end up owning you,” and a very real fear in spending our all-too-short lives, “working at jobs we hate to buy things we don’t need.”
That brings us to the big one. The line that defined the movie: “How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?” Everyone has “a fight.” Even those of us who go to great lengths to avoid conflict in our day-to-day lives. But Tyler/the narrator force us to look at ourselves individually, as a generation, and as a culture to examine what our relationship is with violence and who controls that paradigm and why. To protect our homes? Not always. To resist tyranny? Define tyranny (depending on election cycle). To settle an argument? Ridiculous unless you found a cop to play referee on the streets of Seattle.
In retrospect, I now believe that I wasn’t unusual when I personally became drawn to contact sports and martial arts from a young age as a way to deal with chronic social anxiety. I couldn’t be funny all the time. I couldn’t be anxious all the time, either. But I could get beat up, made to run wind sprints, and have to face the reality of victory or defeat every single day. I didn’t like any of those things but, if I could take that, the imagined opinions of public and peers could be taken as well.
Fast forward to adulthood and I have trained in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu/MMA on-and-off for almost twenty years. During this time, I have met doctors, lawyers, artists, construction workers, housewives, students, and police officers who got into, “the hobby where you meet new friends and try to strangle each other.” They do this for fitness and for fun and for fear. It is in getting out of one’s comfort zone, physically, artistically, socially, whatever, that fear is realized, understood, and dealt with so that the person can grow. In a world of drive-thru coffee orders and pet medications delivered to our doorstep, it is up to us to challenge ourselves more and more. I am Jack’s self-actualization, made manifest by a sense of accomplishment.
