Fight Club

Fight Club is a 1999 American film directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter. It is based on the 1996 novel Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. Norton plays the unnamed narrator, who is discontented with his white-collar job. He forms a "fight club" with a soap salesman, Tyler Durden (Pitt), and becomes embroiled with an impoverished but beguiling woman, Marla Singer (Bonham Carter).

Palahniuk's novel was optioned by Fox 2000 Pictures producer Laura Ziskin, who hired Jim Uhls to write the film adaptation. Fincher was selected because of his enthusiasm for the story. He developed the script with Uhls and sought screenwriting advice from the cast and others in the film industry. It was filmed in and around Los Angeles from July to December 1998. He and the cast compared the film to Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and The Graduate (1967), with a theme of conflict between Generation X and the value system of advertising.

Studio executives did not like the film and restructured Fincher's intended marketing campaign to try to reduce anticipated losses. Fight Club premiered at the 56th Venice International Film Festival on September 10, 1999, and was released in the United States on October 15, 1999, by 20th Century Fox. The film failed to meet the studio's expectations at the box office and received polarized reactions from critics. It was ranked as one of the most controversial and talked-about films of the 1990s. However, Fight Club later found commercial success with its home video release, establishing it as a cult classic and causing media to revisit the film. In 2009, on its tenth anniversary, The New York Times dubbed it the "defining cult movie of our time."

The unnamed Narrator, who struggles with insomnia and dissatisfaction with his job and lifestyle, finds temporary solace in support groups. As his insomnia worsens, he discovers that expressions of emotional vulnerability help him sleep, leading him to join multiple groups for people facing emotionally distressing problems, despite his expressions being fraudulent. His efforts are thwarted when Marla Singer, another impostor, joins the same groups. The Narrator cannot present his fabricated struggles as genuine, or divert his attention from her presence as an impostor, causing his sleeplessness to return. He arranges for them to attend different sessions to regain his ability to sleep and, under certain circumstances, to exchange contact information, to which she reluctantly agrees.

On a return flight from work, the Narrator meets a soap salesman, Tyler Durden. After an explosion destroys the Narrator's apartment, he moves into Tyler's decrepit house. They become friends and start an underground fight club in a bar basement. Tyler also saves Marla from an overdose, initiating a sexual relationship between them, while the Narrator remains cold to her.

The Narrator quits his job, blackmails his boss for funds, and grows the fight club, attracting new members, including his cancer support group friend, Bob. Tyler morphs the club into Project Mayhem, committing vandalism to disrupt the social order. Feeling sidelined, the Narrator confronts Tyler, who admits to orchestrating the explosion in the Narrator's apartment and then goes missing. Bob is killed by the police during a mission, prompting the Narrator to attempt to stop the project and look for Tyler. Discovering the project's nationwide reach and being called Tyler Durden by Marla and other people, he realizes he and Tyler are split personalities.

Learning that Project Mayhem plans to erase debt records by blowing up the headquarters of credit-card companies, the Narrator unsuccessfully warns Marla and goes to the police, some of whom are also Project Mayhem members. He attempts to disarm the explosives, but Tyler attacks him. The Narrator shoots himself in the mouth, killing Tyler. Marla arrives and she and the Narrator hold hands as they watch the targeted buildings collapse.

Fincher said Fight Club was a coming of age film, like the 1967 film The Graduate but for people in their 30s. Fincher described the narrator as an "everyman"; the character is identified in the script as "Jack", but left unnamed in the film. Fincher outlined the Narrator's background, "He's tried to do everything he was taught to do, tried to fit into the world by becoming the thing he isn't." He cannot find happiness, so he travels on a path to enlightenment in which he must "kill" his parents, god, and teacher. By the start of the film, he has "killed off" his parents. With Tyler Durden, he kills his god by doing things they are not supposed to do. To complete the process of maturing, the Narrator has to kill his teacher, Tyler Durden.

The character is a 1990s inverse of the Graduate archetype: "a guy who does not have a world of possibilities in front of him, he has no possibilities, he literally cannot imagine a way to change his life." He is confused and angry, so he responds to his environment by creating Tyler Durden, a Nietzschean Übermensch, in his mind. While Tyler is who the Narrator wants to be, he is not empathetic and does not help the Narrator face decisions in his life "that are complicated and have moral and ethical implications". Fincher explained, "[Tyler] can deal with the concepts of our lives in an idealistic fashion, but it doesn't have anything to do with the compromises of real life as modern man knows it. Which is: you're not really necessary to a lot of what's going on. It's built, it just needs to run now." While studio executives worried that Fight Club was going to be "sinister and seditious", Fincher sought to make it "funny and seditious" by including humor to temper the sinister element.

Screenwriter Jim Uhls described the film as a romantic comedy, explaining, "It has to do with the characters' attitudes toward a healthy relationship, which is a lot of behavior which seems unhealthy and harsh to each other, but in fact does work for them—because both characters are out on the edge psychologically." The Narrator seeks intimacy, but avoids it with Marla Singer, seeing too much of himself in her. While Marla is a seductive and negativist prospect for the Narrator, he embraces the novelty and excitement that comes with befriending Tyler. The Narrator is comfortable being personally connected to Tyler, but becomes jealous when Tyler becomes sexually involved with Marla. When the Narrator argues with Tyler about their friendship, Tyler tells him that being friends is secondary to pursuing the philosophy they have been exploring. When Tyler implies that Marla is a risk they should remove, the Narrator realizes he should have focused on her and begins to diverge from Tyler's path.

The Narrator, an unreliable narrator, is not immediately aware that he is mentally projecting Tyler. He also mistakenly promotes the fight clubs as a way to feel powerful, though the Narrator's physical condition worsens while Tyler Durden's appearance improves. While Tyler desires "real experiences" of actual fights like the Narrator at first, he manifests a nihilistic attitude of rejecting and destroying institutions and value systems. His impulsive nature, representing the id, is seductive and liberating to the Narrator and the members of Project Mayhem. Tyler's initiatives and methods become dehumanizing; he orders around the members of Project Mayhem with a megaphone similar to camp directors at Chinese re-education camps. The Narrator pulls back from Tyler and arrives at a middle ground between his conflicting selves.

Fight Club examines Generation X angst as "the middle children of history". Norton said it examines the value conflicts of Generation X as the first generation raised on television: this generation had "its value system largely dictated to it by advertising culture", and was told one could achieve "spiritual happiness through home furnishing". His character walks through his apartment while visual effects identify his many IKEA possessions. Fincher described the Narrator's immersion, "It was just the idea of living in this fraudulent idea of happiness." Pitt said, "Fight Club is a metaphor for the need to push through the walls we put around ourselves and just go for it, so for the first time we can experience the pain."

Fight Club also parallels the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause; both probe the frustrations of the people in the system. The characters, having undergone societal emasculation, are reduced to "a generation of spectators". A culture of advertising defines society's "external signifiers of happiness", causing an unnecessary chase for material goods that replaces the more essential pursuit of spiritual happiness. The film references consumer products such as Gucci, Calvin Klein, and the Volkswagen New Beetle. Norton said of the Beetle, "We smash it ... because it seemed like the classic example of a Baby Boomer generation marketing plan that sold culture back to us." Pitt explained the dissonance, "I think there's a self-defense mechanism that keeps my generation from having any real honest connection or commitment with our true feelings. We're rooting for ball teams, but we're not getting in there to play. We're so concerned with failure and success—like these two things are all that's going to sum you up at the end."

The violence of the fight clubs serves not to promote or glorify combat, but for participants to experience feeling in a society where they are otherwise numb. The fights represent a resistance to the impulse to be "cocooned" in society. Norton believed the fighting strips away the "fear of pain" and "the reliance on material signifiers of their self-worth", leaving them to experience something valuable. When the fights evolve into revolutionary violence, the film only half-accepts the revolutionary dialectic by Tyler Durden; the Narrator pulls back and rejects Durden's ideas. Fight Club purposely shapes an ambiguous message whose interpretation is left to the audience. Fincher said, "I love this idea that you can have fascism without offering any direction or solution. Isn't the point of fascism to say, 'This is the way we should be going'? But this movie couldn't be further from offering any kind of solution."