If you ever watched David Fincher’s electrifying 1999 movie Fight Club and thought, “We should start a fight club!” then congratulations, you have missed the point of Fight Club. When the film was released 25 years ago, it was a lukewarm success at the box office, garnering only $100 million worldwide off a $63 million budget. However, thanks to the burgeoning DVD market, Fight Club quickly found its audience thanks to one of the best DVD releases of all time packed with special features along with a message that resonated with audiences. However, that message has been misinterpreted over the years, and that could be due to Fincher’s desire to make Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) so appealing that some folks didn’t see what the larger movie was going for.
What Is ‘Fight Club’ About?
For those who need a brief recap, David Fincher’s movie, based on Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel of the same name, follows an unnamed narrator (Edward Norton) who suffers from insomnia. Initially able to prey off support groups for the emotional catharsis they provide, that outlet is ruined when he encounters Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), who’s also a “faker.” She holds a mirror to the narrator’s own lies, completely disrupting the fantasy that allowed him to access his emotions and offer him sleep. Once again cursed with insomnia, the narrator eventually crosses paths with Tyler Durden (Pitt), a handsome and charismatic soap salesman who lives the way the narrator wishes he could live. After the narrator’s apartment explodes due to handmade dynamite, he asks for help from Tyler, and Tyler agrees to take him in on the condition that he “hit him as hard as he can.”
This interaction blossoms into Fight Club, which transforms into increasingly destructive acts against society, dubbed “Project Mayhem.” The narrator eventually realizes that he is Tyler Durden, and he’s been interacting with a figment of his imagination all while forming and directing these underground clubs that were becoming increasingly self-sufficient. He shoots himself in the head, killing Tyler but only hitting the narrator’s cheek. The narrator finally accepts that he loves Marla and needs to be rid of Tyler, while Tyler’s actions destroy the credit card companies around them, potentially setting off a worldwide financial panic and the collapse of society. This leads to Fight Club‘s most mesmerizing scene, as the narrator and Marla stand holding hands against the city skyline, watching the city crumble before their eyes.
Why Is ‘Fight Club’ So Easily Misunderstood?
The reason Fight Club is so easy to misunderstand is that David Fincher’s movie effectively sets up both the narrator’s depression and Tyler’s appeal. The narrator is a victim of capitalism, unable to forge real human connections, so instead he meticulously fills his life with materialistic junk. Then you have Tyler, who, at the outset, espouses an alluring philosophy. Tyler represents “freedom” from the modern world. He isn’t dependent on anything. He steals the fat he needs for soap and works odd jobs that allow him to pull juvenile pranks on the world. Tyler has everything figured out and speaks to a post-capitalist malaise where men are trapped by crummy jobs and “cheated” out of the things they were “promised” (being millionaires, movie gods, and rock stars), can only feel alive by beating the crap out of each other in darkened basements. Pitt’s performance naturally has a large hand in making Tyler’s lifestyle so enticing. His dry yet witty delivery paired with an unrelenting confidence as he rattles off anti-capitalist jargon just itches all the right spots in your brain.
Tyler also taps into the existential dread that accompanies the constraints of expectations and milestones while living in a capitalist economy. His adrenaline-driven proposal thus becomes a point of contrast with the daily grind of the narrator’s dull and colorless office life. There is something inherently appealing about Tyler’s form of nihilistic anarchy, where pain and blood become substitutes for promotions and yin-yang tables. Tyler doesn’t just package this as a form of escapism, but as a unique lifestyle that plays on the more traditional tenets of masculinity; he is selling his own brand of primal meditation that opens up the club members’ more aggressively cathartic chakras.
These elements — the grotesqueness of the narrator’s existence coupled with the appeal of Tyler’s offer — are meant to bring us to the understanding of why anyone would find a fight club interesting in the first place. Fincher puts our sympathies with the narrator, which makes sense since he’s the protagonist. We have to go where he goes and Fincher knows that the audience isn’t just going to automatically accept living in a dilapidated home and punching other dudes for jollies. If Fight Club has a problem, it’s that Fincher makes that lifestyle so interesting that some audience members don’t follow the turn into rejection and see why Tyler’s philosophy is so deeply flawed.
What Is Wrong With Tyler Durden’s Philosophy in ‘Fight Club?’
Tyler Durden’s philosophy is essentially one that pinpoints a real problem — the disconnect of the postmodern age fueled by capitalism and alienation — and offers a child’s solution. The narrator is offered a connection with someone real who is actually on his wavelength, Marla, and he rejects her like a small boy who kicks a girl in the shins because he can’t express that he likes her. Instead, he retreats to the childish impulse of a group of immature men hitting each other in a private club while in their spare time they play pranks on the world under the banner of “rebellion.”
Where the reaction to Fight Club falls apart isn’t that the film is “unclear” (I don’t think Fincher should have to hold the audience’s hand when he and screenwriter Jim Uhls are fairly direct in what they’re trying to do), it’s that there are some audience members who can’t tell the difference between condoning the actions of Tyler and his cronies and condemning them. Because Tyler’s initial criticism lands perhaps too well, we’re supposed to follow him wherever he goes rather than seeing him for the maniacal cult leader he is. Tearing down society completely, so you can have a pair of leather pants that lasts you the rest of your life is what a teenage boy thinks about changing the world. It’s not a real solution, and Tyler has no solutions. He just offers violence, chaos, and self-destruction and calls it wisdom.
What Is ‘Fight Club’ Really About?
If a group of people consistently misses the point of Fight Club, does that make Fight Club a bad movie? Does it undermine its core theme? I don’t think that it does because it’s not like the film is universally misunderstood or that Fincher and Uhls didn’t know where they wanted to take this story. In an interview with Independent UK, Fincher admits that the film has become a “touchstone” for incel media, but further explains that they “didn’t make it for them.” Though Tyler has become idolized for all the wrong reasons, Fight Club, at its core, is still a piece of satire that dramatizes the way capitalism and masculinity can interact. Tyler’s maxim, “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything,” sounds tempting, but it’s a line about freedom for the sake of self-indulgence rather than responsibility toward others. That’s why the narrator’s arc works at the end. He rejects this mewling, selfish sensibility to open himself up to Marla.
Fight Club doesn’t offer answers to the struggles of the world, but a critique. It’s not a celebration of directionless men, but rather that the modern world has commoditized everything to the point where toxic masculinity becomes a brand. Time has proven that assessment is disturbingly prescient as groups like incels lash out at a world they feel owes them something while failing to look at their own noxious behavior. What Fight Club understands is that the modern male is in an incredibly tenuous place when he becomes disconnected from his own emotions and healthy ways of expressing those emotions. The narrator starts the film not looking for violence, but simply for an emotional outlet and, in a darkly comic fashion, goes to a support group. He later finds a caricature of it in Tyler Durden, who never once offers an emotional connection, but merely the illusion of it after a physical beating.
The “primal catharsis” Tyler is promising his club members is really just a regression into childish instincts, where the idea of boys fighting boys was simply labeled “boys being boys.” Fight Club brings attention to the toxic behaviors cultivated in boyhood through the regression in the men’s behavior — all borne out of the traditional idea of masculinity which denies a man’s right to access his emotions in a healthy and regulated way. The men easily revert to these familiar behaviors because it is the only way they know how to deal with the existential dread. But these attitudes become unsustainable and unstable, leading to the more hyperbolic acts in the film’s finale, where Tyler’s initial playful anarchy becomes a directed terrorist attack against capitalism, becoming far more destructive than even he could control. All the narrator is trying to do throughout the film is find an emotional connection, and while a fight club may offer memorable rules, it offers neither truth nor understanding, only violence.
Fight Club
- Release Date
- October 15, 1999
- Runtime
- 139 minutes
Fight Club is available to watch on Hulu in the U.S.
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