Christian has already gotten most of why I didn’t like this movie, but let’s also point out that Fincher, the genius, just made a bit of Oscar-courting pap that could easily fit in among Fight Club’s targets. This stuff is rich people humoring themselves. Fincher has considerable formal gifts, but, like many of his generation, he hasn’t put them to much use.

Rob: The only Chuck Palahniuk book I’ve tried to read was Lullaby, which seemed to have little graphic violence, but made me nauseous nonetheless. I think a lot of people had the same reaction to Fight Club. There have been far more violent movies that were blockbusters, but none that assaulted the values we take for granted. I’m glad you got so much out of a mere movie.

Daniel: Thanks so much for that compliment and for chiming in. Fight Club was released in the wake of Columbine, when there was concern that violent movies, music or video games were responsible for kids in the suburbs going crazy and killing each other. As a result, I think a lot of adults went into competition over who could go to the media and be more outraged by pop culture with violent, renegade content. I’m glad plenty of people have since been able to discover how great Fight Club is on their own without the politics of the day getting in the way.

Eric: “Films like this turn out to be more of a commentary on those who do not understand it rather than the themes presented in the film itself.” Terrific observation. Fight Club — like Kill Bill — is a taste test movie for me. I respect peoples right to their own opinion, but if you dislike those movies, bye-bye. Thanks for commenting!

Christian: I’m the flip side of the coin on most of the stuff you mentioned. Personally, I don’t see Fight Club as commenting on immasculinity or violence. The bare knuckled boxing is not anything I can relate to at all. What I see the story doing so supremely well is examining the effect a culture has on one man’s complete emotional and mental unraveling. And I haven’t read into any comments David Fincher has made, but can’t say he’s irked me at all, as Paul Thomas Anderson does virtually every time he opens his mouth. Terrific comments by you. Thanks for chiming in!

And Fincher always bothers me. How does a guy who makes advertising for the biggest corporations on Earth get to dictate society’s materialist woes? Fincher revealed himself when the talk of a FIGHT CLUB musical came up and he said he thought it hilarious that people would pay 100 bucks for a FIGHT CLUB musical as if they didn’t get the point of the film. Hilarious. Fincher later amended the remarks when he realized it made him look the hypocrite.

And Anderson was dead on about FIGHT CLUB. The film glorifies the brutality — hence the real-life FC’s that have sprung up across America. No irony at all!

I’ve always considered Fight Club nothing less than revolutionary. So impressed am I to this day, both from repeated viewings and generational experience, that I find myself literally unable to understand any criticism of it.

Great post, as usual. I thought I’d offer a couple of comments about Fight Club, the novel in relation to Fight Club, the film and the idea of adulthood in the flick.

The story seems to work, at least to me, much better on the screen than on the page. A major caveat to this claim: I wasn’t able to get through the novel (which is saying something given my indiscriminate binge reading habits). From what I remember though, the entire novel is written in first-person narration and has a somewhat distanced feeling, as if the narrator is describing his experiences as he’s observing them or as if they’re happening to another person. Another way to say it: as if he’s watching a movie.

I’ve heard people describe psychotic experiences in these terms and given the narrator’s schizoid psychosis, it might be fair to make the assumption that this narrative strategy reinforces novel’s thematics (something also found in the “I am Jack’s…” lines and its variations).

But it’s damn boring! The narrator of the novel is simply a camera with commentary minus the visuals of a film. By contrast, consider Graham Greene’s novels or the more literary novels of Simenon. Greene was essentially a screenwriter in this sense as well, but there seems to be a deeper dimension of description and reflection that make his novels worth reading; Simenon’s style, even in translation, makes his novels more than simply films without the pictures (though not much more in some cases).

But where Fight Club, the novel seems impoverished by its camera-like qualities, Fight Club, the film seems to improve upon the novel by adding cinematic touches the novel can’t pull off. I’m thinking of the furniture and labels that appear in “Jack’s” apartment giving it the appearance of a page from an IKEA catalog, the slow motion/windtunnel effects of the plane crash, the slow motion of the tooth going down the drain, the incongruity of the rubber gloves (and goggles?) in the Tyler/Marla sex scene, etc. Plus the film has the added bonus of dipping into the first-person whenever it wants.

I guess it’s a difference between what you can imagine and what you can’t. You can imagine, as a reader, the “slide” scenes, but I don’t think you can imagine the cinematic effect of the IKEA catalog scene when reading about IKEA furniture in the novel. I’m currently reading R.L. Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae which is told through first person narration and can’t imagine a film doing it justice. But why read Fight Club?

As an aside, I had the opposite experience the other day when I saw Up (in 3D no less…my girlfriend’s choice). I didn’t see anything in the film that I don’t think couldn’t have been done better by a good children’s book that left more to the imagination. Neither the animation, nor the the “third dimension” really added anything to the story. It wasn’t a bad flick; but it was strangely flat. It was preceded by a preview for Cloudy, With a Chance of Meatballs which looked even flatter.

I guess I found Palahniuk’s writing to be kind of imagination killing in the same (but opposite)way a film that is better left as a children’s book can be imagination killing as well. It’s strange. I haven’t yet caught a case of the Benjamin Buttons, but I’d be curious to read the Fitzgerald story and compare it to the film in these terms.

You also touched on the therapeutic aspects of the story which got me thinking. Rather than setting up an either/or between the disease support group therapeutic model and the Fight Club therapeutic model, it seems to be both advocating for and criticizing both.

Maybe we can think of the story as positing two poles that we all (especially those of us of the characters’ generation) seem to live between: complete, childish conformity to or complete, childish anarchy outside of social norms; childish, mollycoddled acceptance or childish, violent rejection of social norms; the total loss of self (childish submission to authority) or the total assertion of self (childish me-ism, the Nietzschean fallacy).

Perhaps the trick for us is to live within the tension of these extremes without falling into the kind of (again, childish) complacency that the totality of one or the other leads to.

The funny lines about Tyler’s father “setting up franchises” and being a “generation raised by women” distracts us, perhaps, from the issue the scene (and film) really deals with: What does it mean to be an adult (not simply a man) in the world (and responsible for and to the world) we find ourselves born into? I think the commentary between Fincher, Norton, and Pitt might address this someplace, but I can’t quite remember where or how.

Those who don’t get the movie, or who criticize it (or celebrate it) for its violence possibly don’t see the essential tension between the two poles the film sets up.

Just some idle speculation. Thanks for the thought-provoking opportunity to hallucinate a little!

But, Sarris disliked the Coen’s “NCFOM,” as well as their more recent “Burn After Reading”. So, take from him what you will. I’ve never been too large a fan of him, myself. Or Kael.

Amanda: I believe the erudite quote you enjoyed should be attributed to Yale grad Edward Norton, not David Fincher. Fincher’s alma mater was Aerosmith, who he directed music videos for. Thanks so much for commenting.