Fight Club

Fight Club, American drama film, released in 1999, that was directed by David Fincher and adapted from Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel of the same name. The film tells the story of an alienated office worker and a charismatic nihilist who start an underground club at which disaffected young men violently fight each other. Under the nihilist’s direction, club members begin committing acts of vandalism to challenge society’s focus on consumerism and materialism. Eventually, the club spreads to other cities, and the members’ activities escalate into terrorism that is meant to destroy all societal institutions and norms. Fight Club has acquired a cult following despite an enduring critical response that is split between those who feel it celebrates violence and promotes fascism and others who view it as a subversive critique of consumerism and toxic masculinity.

Plot and characters

Central to Fight Club’s structure is the narrative voice-over of its unnamed central character (played by Edward Norton). The Narrator is a loner who hates his office job and tries to find fulfillment by buying frivolous items from catalogs to furnish his condominium. Seeking relief from his chronic insomnia, he sees a doctor with the hopes of being prescribed medication, telling the doctor that he sometimes nods off and wakes up in strange places without knowing how he got there. Instead, the doctor advises him to get more exercise. After the Narrator pleads, “Come on, I’m in pain,” the doctor tells him to visit a support group for men with testicular cancer if he wants to see what real pain is. The Narrator begins attending support groups for all kinds of illnesses that he does not have in order to make emotional connections with others and eventually meets another support group “tourist,” an acerbic, dark-eyed, chain-smoking young woman named Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter). He is attracted to her but will not admit it to himself, much less to Marla.

During a work trip the Narrator meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a brash and conventionally handsome man who makes an impression on him. They become friends, and the Narrator moves into Tyler’s derelict house on the edge of town after a mysterious explosion in the Narrator’s condo. At Tyler’s instigation, the two friends start having fistfights with one another in a parking lot. This strange pastime soon grows into the formation of the secretive Fight Club, which begins holding its meetings in a bar basement. Introducing new members to the club, Tyler informs them of the club’s sacred rules, which begin, “The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club.”

The club attracts many men who are dissatisfied with their lives and helps them feel better about themselves, despite the horrific injuries that they sustain. Like the Narrator, they are drawn to Tyler, who tells them, “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy [things] we don’t need.” Bemoaning his generation as “the middle children of history,” he says that modern life has made them promises that it has not kept about the rewards they will reap if they follow all of society’s rules.

Tyler begins a sexual relationship with Marla, but he treats her with disrespect. The Narrator becomes jealous of their relationship but attempts to disguise his feelings by showing Marla disgust or indifference, which confuses and enrages her. Meanwhile, Fight Club has spread across the United States, and Tyler shapes the clubs into an organization that carries out acts of vandalism and arson as part of a plan to disrupt society called Project Mayhem. The increasingly dangerous and cultlike nature of Fight Club’s activities begin to alarm the Narrator. When Tyler suddenly disappears, the Narrator travels to the clubs around the country to find out what he has been plotting.

In a surprising twist, the Narrator realizes that Tyler is just a hallucination, which means that he, the Narrator, is the person who founded Fight Club, became involved with Marla, and concocted Project Mayhem. The Narrator also discovers that, under his leadership, Fight Club has launched a domestic terrorist plot to blow up credit card companies’ headquarters to throw the country’s financial system into chaos. The Narrator tries to stop the plot and rid himself of the Tyler persona by shooting himself in the mouth. He successfully kills off Tyler but fails to stop the plot. The film’s final scene shows the Narrator holding hands with Marla as they watch the city’s skyscrapers fall.

Box office and reception

Prior to the film’s release its violence and ultra-dark humor made even its creators nervous. In his memoir What Just Happened? Bitter Hollywood Tales from the Front Line (2002), producer Art Linson recalls a mixed reaction during a screening among film executives, who were “either rapt or stunned or both.” Fight Club premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 1999 and was released a month later in U.S. theaters. With a budget of $63 million and returns of approximately $100 million, the film did not meet expectations at the box office, but it increased its profits and grew its reputation after a successful DVD release. Fight Club was nominated for an Academy Award for sound effects editing.

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Reviews of the film reveal its polarizing impact. Some critics saw it as a successful critique of capitalism and toxic masculinity. In The New York Times Janet Maslin wrote that the film “builds a huge, phantasmagorical structure around the search for lost masculine authority” and praised its performances, cinematography, and editing. Yet she cautioned against viewing the film mindlessly, because “it might be mistaken for a dangerous endorsement of totalitarian tactics and super-violent nihilism in an all-out assault on society.”

Indeed, other critics expressed concern that the character of Tyler was so charismatic and his criticisms of modern society so compelling that audiences might not fully comprehend his extremism. Giving the movie only two stars, Roger Ebert called Fight Club “the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since ‘Death Wish.’ ” Ebert and other like-minded critics pointed out that even though the Narrator rejects Tyler’s ideology in the end and tries to stop the violence, his final actions may not be the ones that many viewers remember. Ebert wrote:

Although sophisticates will be able to rationalize the movie as an argument against the behavior it shows, my guess is that audience[s] will like the behavior but not the argument.

Legacy

Fight Club continued to be controversial in the 21st century, gaining fans not only among film buffs but also among some alt-right groups that have taken Tyler Durden’s male-supremacist philosophy to heart. In response to such fandom, the film’s director David Fincher told The Guardian in 2023, “We didn’t make it for them, but people will see what they’re going to see in a Norman Rockwell painting, or [Picasso’s] Guernica.” He also said, “It’s impossible for me to imagine that people don’t understand that Tyler Durden is a negative influence.”