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R6| ARTS O THEGLOBEANDMAIL| SATURDAY,OCTOBER19,2019

‘O

h, I get it. It’s clever.
How’s that working out
for you? Being clever?”
So asks Brad Pitt’s Tyler Dur-
den of Edward Norton’s name-
less narrator about 15 minutes in-
toFight Club. The wink-nudge ex-
change, one of countless fly-by
witticisms laced into Jim Uhls’s
adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s
novel, highlights the narrative
bobs and weaves yet to come in
director David Fincher’s film. But
the line also acts as an uninten-
tional pre-emptive meta-query
ofFight Club‘s own legacy. As in:
How has that cleverness worked
out, exactly, 20 years later? The
answer: far better, and messier,
than anyone could have possibly
imagined.
Released two decades ago this
week, on Oct. 15, 1999,Fight Club
didn’t so much pummel Holly-
wood as get beaten down by it.
Its world premiere at the Venice
Film Festival was greeted with a
chorus of boos. (“Literally the
guy running the festival got up
and left,” Pitt recalled years lat-
er.) The industry media was
openly hostile, with the Holly-
wood Reporter running a co-
lumn that said the film “will be-
come Washington’s poster child
for what’s wrong with Holly-
wood. And Washington, for once,
will be right.”
Critics across the approval ma-
trix slammed it (the Los Angeles
Times called it “a witless mish-
mash of whiny, infantile philoso-
phizing,” while The Wall Street
Journal, perhaps more predict-
ably, complained that the film
“reeks with condescension”).
First-run audiences mostly ig-
nored it, with the film opening to
US$11-million, only narrowly
beating the fourth-week gross of
the Ashley Judd thrillerDouble
Jeopardy.Fight Club, intended to
be the triumphant re-teaming of
Pitt and Fincher, whose serial-

killer thrillerSevenwas a world-

wide sensation just four years

earlier, would leave theatres

barely earning back half of its

US$63-million budget.

Timing, though, is everything.

The deeply dark satire, focusing

on an office worker bee (Norton)

who teams up with a charismatic

radical (Pitt) to start an under-

ground fighting society that

quickly morphs into an anarchist

movement, came into the world

with the nihilistic violence of Co-

lumbine fresh in the cultural

memory. Studio Twentieth Cen-

tury Fox, then in the midst of cor-

porate war games, mismarketed

the work as a fist-pumping ac-

tion movie. (“I had close friends

say to me, ‘I haven’t seen it yet –

I’m not into boxing movies,’ ”

Uhls recently told journalist

Brian Raftery, author ofBest. Mo-

vie. Year. Ever: How 1999 Blew Up

the Big Screen.) And the film’s de-

tractors were loud, ruthless and

unafraid of spoiling its crucial

third-act twist. (Rosie O’Donnell

gave the game away on her pop-

ular afternoon talk-show, a move

Pitt later called “unforgivable.”)

But it didn’t take that long for

Fight Clubto build an enthusias-

tic, disparate, often philosophi-

cally-at-odds membership. I

should know – I was one of them.

At 16, I was working in a sub-

urban Toronto multiplex, sweep-

ing away popcorn and tearing

ticket stubs, a mindless job that

afforded me plenty of opportuni-

ties to see the same movies, over

and over – an especially sweet

job perk if said movies were re-

stricted to those 18 years and ol-

der. DuringFight Club’s first few

weeks, I must have watched the

movie a dozen times. Much of its

subversiveness flew over my

head–Iwastoomuchofa

goody-goody to glom onto any of

its coarser politics, and too

young and dumb to realize it was

critiquing the violence it was si-

multaneously revelling in – but

the film’s eagerness to shock and

appall was instantly appealing.

And that twist! I spent so very

many hours of my life pulling

apart the reveal that (two-dec-

ade-old spoiler alert) Tyler and

the Narrator were the same per-

son, poring over the (actually

overwhelming) evidence that

Fincher literally spliced into the

film. Were I to have a dorm room

at the time, you can bet that a

Fight Club poster would’ve

adorned at least one of its walls.

When the movie was released

on DVD in the summer of 2000, I

was waiting outside my local

HMV to buy a copy. As were,

eventually, six million others

around the world, who would

help makeFight Clubone of the

most successful home-entertain-

ment releases ever – and one of

the most popular, misunder-

stood and prescient films of the

20th century.

In so many ways,Fight Club

has both predicted our current,

toxic zeitgeist, while at the same

time being directly, if uninten-

tionally, responsible for it. So-

called men’s rights activists and

their “red pill” awakenings; the

anti-snowflake far-right move-

ment; the troll-in-jester guise of

swampy online forums such as

4chan; the virulent ascendancy

of the “involuntary celibate”

crowd: All were foretold byFight

Clubin one way or another. And

all can, with particular blinders

affixed, find common cause with

Fight Club, too.

The intensely charismatic,

highly styled and perfectly

sculpted Durden spends much of

the film whispering anti-consu-

merist slogans – “We’ve all been

raised on television to believe

that one day we’d all be million-

aires and movie gods and rock

stars, but we won’t” – that are at

once sincere and self-satirizing,

coming as they are from the

mouth of, well, one of the world’s

biggest movie gods. Throughout

the film, there is an intense, and

hilarious, push-pull tension be-

tween who modern men are ex-

pected to be and who they ac-

tually are – the cracked result of

one privileged and selfish gener-

ation’s neglectful shattering of

another. But the film is, from all

points of conception, a comedy.

Think of the moment when Dur-

den is being slugged by the car-

toonish mobster Lou – the

punches keep coming until our

presumed hero is laughing ma-

niacally, spitting blood in the

face of his foe and the audience.

You think that this society is a

joke? Well, that’s because it is.

Yet, sinceFight Club’s release,

the film’s satirical backbone has

been cracked and reshaped

through a series of reappraisals

and misinterpretations, with the

darkest of the internet’s corners

treating Durden’s faux provoca-

tions as gospel. The character

was conceived by Palahniuk as

an effortlessly cool manifestation

of the Narrator’s worst impulses,

a prank of the mind that eventu-

ally becomes uncontrollable and

psychopathic. As Durden begins

to radicalize the impressionable

young men in his orbit, and as

his ideals take the physical form

of guns and bombs, audiences

are not meant to identify with

this rabid dog of a prophet, but to

become repulsed, as is the Narra-

tor’s response. Project Mayhem,

Durden’s endgame, sticks a fork

in the eye of not only the huge

corporations undoubtedly mak-

ing life worse for the modern

man, but also those who are na-

ive enough to think that burning

everything to the ground is the

answer. But by pointing a finger

at their audience, Fincher and

company didn’t realize that so

many would flip the bird right

back at them, or at least their ide-

als and intentions.

The filmmakers are not entire-

ly off the hook here. A recent re-

watch – my first in about five

years – revealed how frequently

the film slips into just the kind of

juvenile bro humour it otherwise

repudiates. Remember the vul-

gar mammaries of eventual Pro-

ject Mayhem casualty Bob

(played, quite affectingly, by

Meat Loaf)? Or the sick liposuc-

tion scheme at the heart of Dur-

den’s soap empire? Or the news-

paper clips trumpeting, say, the

“molestation” of a performance

artist? All immature and gross

moments that play just outside

the film’s satirical bull’s eye.

Briefly, it feels, Fincher is giving

his audience permission to laugh

at someone else, and not our-

selves – the laziest route of come-

dy.

Mostly, though,Fight Clubres-

onates today precisely because it

refuses to do things the easy way.

It is messy, and uncomfortable,

and relentless in its thematic and

aesthetic ambitions (it’s as-

tounding to think of just how

much time and energy was spent

on so many of its throwaway se-

quences, such as the Narrator’s

visit to his imaginary ice cave

complete with CGI penguin, or

the five-second scene where he

fantasizes about a midair colli-

sion). Placed next to a more re-

cent effort in distilling male an-

ger – say, Todd Phillips’sJoker–

and there is no comparison at all.

I’m just as sure that we’ll still be

talking and arguing aboutFight

Clubin the year 2039 as we will

have also by then cycled through

at least three more iterations of

the Clown Prince of Crime.

Fight Clubhits you as hard as it

can. Twenty years later, the

bruise hasn’t faded.

ThelingeringculturalbruiseofFightClub,20yearslater

DavidFincher’sfilmhasbothpredictedourcurrentzeitgeistandisalsodirectly,ifunintentionally,responsibleforit

BARRY
HERTZ

OPINION

ThesatireandfauxprovocationsinFightClub,starringEdwardNortonandBradPitt,havebeenaccepted

asgospelinthedarkestcornersoftheinternet.