Synopsis
“People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden,” narrates a young man we will know only as The Narrator (Edward Norton) as someone holds a gun barrel in his mouth. Minutes before he’s about to witness dozens of other office buildings explode in a controlled demolition, he explains how he got here. Sleepwalking through life as an insurance claims adjuster for a major car company and gripped in what he refers to as “the Ikea nesting instinct,” he comments, “I’d flip through catalogs and wonder, ‘What kind of dining set defines me as a person?’” Unable to sleep or to feel anything, the Narrator crashes support groups for testicular cancer, blood parasites or sickle cell anemia, finding that people really listen when they think you have a terminal disease.

The Narrator’s catharsis is threatened by the appearance of another faker, Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), who attends group therapy because “It’s cheaper than a movie and there’s free coffee.” The Narrator’s job sends him across the country investigating fatal car crashes to determine if a recall would be cost effective for his company. He dreams of a midair collision to break the monotony, but finds himself seated next to Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a soap peddler who demonstrates how ridiculous the emergency landing procedures on an airliner are. When he returns home to find his apartment has mysteriously exploded, the Narrator meets Tyler for a drink. His new buddy points out the Narrator’s dependence on consumer culture. “The things you own end up owning you.”

In the parking lot, Tyler asks the Narrator for a favor. For no reason other than they’ve never been in a fight, the men wail on each other before calling it a night. The Narrator suggests they do this again sometime. Sharing a decrepit house Tyler lives in, the boys’ nocturnal fisticuffs outside the bar soon draw the attention of other disaffected young men. Tyler gives it a name – Fight Club – and sets the ground rules. “The first rule of Fight Club is that you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club.” Marla re-enters the Narrator’s life when she and Tyler meet and engage in round the clock, rambunctious sex in the house. Tyler then hatches a plan to expand the social anarchy of Fight Club from the basement to the streets.

Production history
Chuck Palahniuk was working on freight trucks and writing service procedures in his hometown of Portland. During “dead times” at work, in laundromats or the gym, he was writing novels. On a trip to the Pacific Coast Trail, a dispute with some campers over the volume of their music led to the author getting pummeled in a fight. Returning to the office, Palahniuk recalled, “My face was so awful and so trashed that nobody would acknowledge it. Because to acknowledge it somehow they would have to find out something about my private life they did not want to know.” Palahniuk used his newfound affinity for brawling to write Fight Club over a three-month period in 1995, basing most of it on stories his friends had told him.

Within weeks of Palahniuk sending a first draft to his agent, the galleys came to the attention of Raymond Bongiovanni, a literary scout for Fox 2000 in New York. He phoned president of production Laura Ziskin, who recalled, “He was very excited about it, not sure it was a movie, but sure he had read the work of an exciting new voice. Thirty six hours later I was sitting on the edge of my bed in the middle of the night reading passages of the book out loud to my husband.” After several producers passed on the material, Joshua Donen and Ross Bell responded. Ziskin wasn’t convinced Palahniuk’s first person narrative was a movie, so Bell gathered a group of actors to stage a reading. When Ziskin heard the tape, she took out a $10,000 option on Fight Club.

Donen zeroed in on David Fincher to direct, imploring him to read Fight Club. Amid protests that he was too busy, Fincher finally gave in. “It’s sardonic, it’s sarcastic, and naïve, and cynical and funny. I knew Marla. I knew the Narrator, I knew the Narrator’s attraction and repulsion to Marla, I knew his need for Tyler. I knew why he looks up to Tyler. I just knew it.” Despite turmoil with Fox over his first feature film – Alien³ - Fincher was urged to meet with Ziskin. “I told Laura we could do the movie a number of different ways. We could do it for $3 million on videotape, a sort of Anarchist Cookbook version. Or we could really go for it, try to embrace everything in the book, like the scene with the plane exploding in midair and the car crashing.”

Fincher proposed developing a script on his own, without taking any money, and without management at Fox looking over his shoulder. After eight months working with screenwriters Jim Uhls and Andrew Kevin Walker and producer Art Linson, Fincher came back to Fox with a script, a $60 million budget, a schedule - including stages on the studio lot that Fincher wanted to shoot in – and two leading men, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. Fincher’s steep budget earmarked $5 million for Digital Domain to execute the film’s cutting edge special effects, including an opening credits sequence that would take the audience through the Narrator’s cerebral cortex, at a cost of $800,000. Fincher gave the studio three days to decide whether they were in or out.

Fox chairman Bill Mechanic had become a vocal supporter of Fight Club. To afford Fincher’s vision, he reached out for $25 million from Arnon Milchan and his New Regency Enterprises. In order for Fincher to get his budget – which had climbed to $67 million – he’d surrendered final cut to his financiers, but Milchan still wanted the director to bring his budget down to $62 million, arguing that Rupert Murdoch – the media tycoon who owned Fox – would not see this as a good investment. Fincher dug in. “That $5 million is not going to come from Eastman Kodak, it’s not going to come from Teamsters, it’s going to come from visual effects, it’s going to come from sets, from costumes, it’s going to come right off the screen. It’s going to come from the moments they want in the fucking trailer.” Milchan passed on co-financing the picture.

In June 1998, Fight Club commenced a 100-day shooting schedule around Los Angeles. Once he got a look at three weeks of footage Fincher had shot, Arnon Milchan changed his mind about getting involved in the film; he agreed to split the risk with Fox. In early 1999, after ten weeks of editing, Fincher screened a cut of Fight Club for the top brass at the studio. The screening was not met with enthusiasm. Mechanic delivered the news to Fincher: the movie was simply too long and too violent. Ziskin recalled, “I was afraid of it. I thought it was really smart, it had real ideas in it, and that’s hard. I was afraid. Could we sell it? I was always afraid of that.” Many at the studio had a far stronger reaction. Mechanic recalls, “There were people who abhorred it. They’d walk up to me and say, ‘I hated it.’”

When Fight Club premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 1999, the bad taste was amplified among critics. Kenneth Turan with the L.A. Times: “What’s most troubling about this witless mishmash of whiny, infantile philosophizing and bone-crunching violence is the increasing realization that it actually thinks it’s saying something of significance.” Anita Busch with the Hollywood Reporter: “The film is exactly the kind of product that lawmakers should target for being socially irresponsible in a nation that has deteriorated to the point of Columbine.” Roger Ebert wrote that Tyler Durden came off “sounding like a man who tripped over the Nietzsche display on his way to the coffee bar in Borders. In my opinion, he has no useful truths. He’s a bully - Werner Erhard plus S&M, a leather club operator without the decor.”

Mechanic later mused, “I had wanted the Pauline Kaels of today – and there isn’t one – to provide a context for understanding the film. Forget about whether you liked it or not. There should be people who see things in a broader context, and there aren’t. I understand not liking the movie. I don’t understand not understanding the movie, or not thinking that it’s an important film.” Laura Ziskin was also one of the few supporters of Fight Club left in the film industry. “A lot of people condemned the movie without seeing the movie. But it is a scary movie. I think that’s right. It was at the crest of something.” Fight Club came and went from theaters in the U.S. with $37 million in grosses. Even after adding $63.8 million overseas, it was deemed a commercial failure.

But on college campuses and in repertory theaters, screenings of Fight Club were selling out. A few journalists started rethinking their reaction to the film. In the independent student newspaper of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Samuel McKewon wrote, “Fight Club is an essential movie for the 21st Century - one of the few out there - that skewers materialism with such a bold, fierce bravado, and certainly, you wonder what all the fuss over American Beauty was for. The latter has ice water running through its veins; it’s detached, damning, judgmental. Fight Club has hot, black blood running through its two-hour-plus running time. It judges by showing.” By the time the DVD arrived – with four commentary tracks and subversive menus - even Entertainment Weekly ranked Fight Club #1 on its list of “The 50 Essential DVDs.”

Opinion
Mixing brooding atmosphere, wildly inappropriate information – “Did you know if you mixed equal parts of gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate you can make napalm?”- perversely twisted black comedy and a wry mockery of the consumer culture that most of the viewing audience participated in daily, Fight Club was the film version of a Molotov cocktail being lit. Almost ten years later, it’s still riled up about the state of the planet; the only difference is that after 9/11, Enron, Martha Stewart’s fall from grace and Britney Spears’ ascension to near royalty, audiences seem to have caught on with what Palahniuk was getting at in the mid-1990s. Going back to watch Fight Club again is like downloading Nostradamus to a techno vibe.

From script to David Fincher’s visionary direction, casting to music (The Dust Brothers composed the electric synthesizer score), editing to sound, the film hits a 9.0 to a 9.5 in virtually every routine it puts on the floor. There’s not really a flaw exposed in the entire film. Marla Singer may be the only female character, but her morbidly creative heroine is anything but eye candy, expressing herself in wonderfully kooky ways, like talking on the phone with the cord wrapped around her throat. Gleefully sardonic moments like that demand the film be seen at least twice, if for no other reason than to savor the terrific plot twist an hour and fifty minutes in and how it rewires the viewing experience. If Fight Club isn’t a masterpiece, I’m not sure what is.

Lisa Skrzyniarz at Crazy for Cinema writes, “Fight Club is about one man’s vision of how to change the world, I just wish it was a better one. I was also disappointed that they wasted the talent of such a fine actress like Bonham Carter on what was little more than the regular useless girlfriend role … Fincher’s direction is amazing as always. He just needs to focus a little more on the story than the execution. If you’re unhappy with your cubicle existence this film will probably speak to you. If you’re happy with your capitalistic life, it will probably be the worst film you’ve ever seen. This is not a film everyone will enjoy. It’s also way to long for its own good. A little editing would have gone a long way.”

Gil Jawetz at DVD Talk writes, “One day people will be talking about how it was a defining masterpiece of its moment like Taxi Driver, A Clockwork Orange, and The Manchurian Candidate. The ideas and images created in Fight Club are original and feverishly intense. This is a film that requires at least three viewings. Give yourself a chance to develop your own ideas and theories and decide that everything that I’ve said is wrong. The only real message of the movie that everyone can agree on is that all people should be able to think for themselves and not follow the norm blindly. That outlook can easily be applied back to the film itself and you should give it the attention it deserves.”

© Joe Valdez