We’re Still Living in a <em>Fight Club</em> World

Fight Club, David Fincher’s arch 1999 study of disaffected men, presents male rage as a subculture. The layered neo-noir film, adapted from Chuck Palahniuk’s novel of the same name, offers angry young men rituals, language, and an origin story for their fury. “We’re a generation of men raised by women,” pronounces Tyler Durden, a peacock of a character played by Brad Pitt. The line is true of all generations, but Tyler, a soap salesman who becomes the spiritual leader of these aggrieved dudes, delivers it as a revelation.

Though the film addresses the woes of Gen X, in the 25 years since it was released to polarized reviews and low ticket sales, Fight Club has burrowed deeply into American culture. Its dialects of secrecy (“The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club”) and insult (“You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake”) have seeped into casual conversation and politics. Pitt’s sculpted physique remains a fitness ideal, and his virile performance is worshiped by pickup artists and incels. And of course, actual fight clubs have sprung up, stateside and across the world.
Fight Club’s insights about the consequences of men rallying around resentment remain apt today, a period in which Donald Trump’s grievance politics and the growing swamp of the manosphere are shaping American masculinity. Amid its frenzied storytelling, the film offers a cogent theory of modern masculinity: Men suck at communicating. We see this idea most clearly in the constant evasions of the unnamed Narrator, an insomniac office worker played by a haggard and numbed Edward Norton; a cipher throughout the film, he eagerly adopts Tyler’s macho swagger to avoid facing his insecurities. The famous twist, that he and Tyler are one and the same—and that Pitt’s character is a mirage—is the culmination of his deception. The Narrator is so unused to expressing himself that he doesn’t even recognize his own desires and fantasies. He has to sell himself his own anger.

The film quickly establishes the Narrator’s emotional reticence. Prone to digression and omission, the Narrator is elusive despite his constant chattering. His wry descriptions of his IKEA furniture, business travel, and chronic sleep deprivation establish the detached mood of the film, which presents late-20th-century America as an immersive infomercial. His irony-tinged voiceover, which Fincher pairs with images inspired by commercials and music videos, is more performance than disclosure. The capitalist fog of the Narrator’s life is so thick that he struggles to tell his own story, channel surfing through his memories.
In the beginning, the Narrator briefly escapes his insomnia by attending gatherings of people with terminal and debilitating illnesses. Always bearing a name tag with an alias, an early indicator of his evasive nature, he keeps mum as he sits among people with testicular cancer, sickle-cell anemia, and brain parasites. His silence makes them assume he’s at death’s door and shower him with affection—which helps him get the best sleep of his life. This holds him over until he realizes Marla, a fellow attendee played by a quirky and gothic Helena Bonham Carter, is also a phony leeching off the unwell, a discovery that breaks his morbid simulation of intimacy. He confronts her and learns she, too, is lonely and depressed, but decides to push her away rather than bond over their mutual ennui. When they exchange numbers to divide up the meetings so they never see each other, the Narrator tellingly does not share his name. He fears vulnerability.

[Read: TV’s best new show is a study of masculinity in crisis]

The Narrator seems to open up when he befriends Tyler, whom Pitt plays as a dotty sage. They first meet on a flight and reconnect after the Narrator loses his painstakingly furnished condo and a cherished wardrobe of DKNY and Calvin Klein duds to a freak explosion. Tyler’s garish outfits and lucid maxims (“The things you own end up owning you”; “self-improvement is masturbation”) cut through the dreary consumerist haze of the Narrator’s life and encourage him to let go, live a little, start over. Key to Tyler’s wisdom is violence, which becomes the pair’s lingua franca after they slug each other outside of a bar. They are so smitten after that first bout that the Narrator moves into Tyler’s decrepit house, trading a bourgeois life for monkish minimalism. That this apparent enlightenment leads to bloody basement fistfights is among the film’s core ironies.

Fight Club, as the two deem it once other men begin to join their weekly bare-chested scraps, is supposed to offer catharsis and connection. It’s meant to free participants from the monotony and humiliation of wage work. But it worsens their marginalization. Instead of learning to express and maybe resolve their anguish, they revel in it, beating each other senseless and flaunting their scars and bruises to the uninitiated; they graduate to juvenile acts of vandalism and, ultimately, terrorism. To its detriment, Fight Club is a fraternity of silence: With its rigid rules and subterranean locations, it constricts its members’ ability to express themselves.

The Narrator’s realization that he and Tyler are the same person—even though the connection is right in front of him—changes how he sees Fight Club. There are hints throughout the film, from moments in which Tyler blips into a scene before he’s introduced, to winking lines of dialogue like, “The liberator who destroyed my property has realigned my perceptions,” which Tyler, the culprit, tells the Narrator to say to a detective investigating the condo explosion.

The biggest tells are Tyler’s insistence that the Narrator never let Marla know about Fight Club, and the fact that she and Tyler never appear in the same room. She seems to threaten Tyler’s flashy machismo. She’s not closed off, like the men of the story. She actually says when she’s flustered, or happy, or aroused—an openness that’s anathema to the stoic Fight Club code. When the Narrator “kills” Tyler by shooting himself in the mouth, the target is very intentional. “You met me at a very strange time in my life,” he tells Marla when she sees the wound. He’s smiling though, happy to, finally, be speaking for himself.

Despite the Narrator’s tragic arc, the allure of Fight Club for many of its male viewers has always seemed more rooted in its gauzy depiction of bros letting loose than the pitfalls of emotional repression. When the film first came out, both positive and negative reviews focused on its violence: One critic described the film as “dangerous” because of the “extremely seductive” Fight Club scenes; another called it “nasty, impossible to turn away from.” In a pan, Roger Ebert called it “the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since Death Wish … macho porn.”

That reception is inseparable from major events of 1999. The film came out months after the Columbine school shootings and the disastrous Woodstock ’99 festival, two high-profile instances of male violence. That year, entertainment became a scapegoat for America’s “culture of violence,” as then-President Bill Clinton frequently described it. The other—and often unstated—reason that the film seems to have made some critics tug their collars is that the Fight Club participants are mostly white. Their open bloodlust, shaved heads, and clandestine rituals evoke many strains of white supremacy, from neo-Nazis to skinheads to frat houses to citizens’ councils. The film certainly plays with fire.
That laddish appeal is misdirection, though. Fincher makes clear that this loser subculture is self-destructive and uncool. The bouts are brutish and styleless. The movie doesn’t offer the feats of wonder of sports or martial-arts films, where characters use techniques and disciplines to unlock their potential. Nor does it offer the adrenaline rush of action cinema. The story spends more time in Tyler’s house than in the ring—a domesticity suggested by the Narrator when he winkingly notes that outside of Fight Club, “We were Ozzie and Harriet.” That cohabitation heightens the irony of men never learning to speak up or adopt a language other than violence.

Most of the film’s odes to brotherhood and spiritual awakening are mocking in this way. One of Tyler’s best (and least quoted) lines from Fight Club lays out his dopey masculine idyll:

In the world I see, you’re stalking elk through the damp canyon forest around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison in the empty carpool lane of some abandoned superhighway.

Ah yes, corn, hunting, leather, ruins, skyscrapers—now, that’s manhood!
Why do so many men embrace these tired scripts and props? One of the strengths of Fight Club is that it rejects the idea that men are pathologically distressed and inclined toward violence. Although the Narrator does technically commit self-harm throughout the film, he’s never diagnosed with anything other than insomnia. As real as his alienation is, the implication is that he chooses to withdraw into himself and push away the people who might care for him. Fight Club is his man cave.

[Read: The changing sound of male rage in rock music]

Underscoring his willed isolation is the fact that Fight Club intentionally seems to take place nowhere. Though it was clearly filmed in Los Angeles, the addresses shown on documents in the movie are obviously bogus, listing a six-digit zip code or “Bradford, UN” as their city and state. The name of the local police department is simply “Police Department”; likewise, a regional bus line is just titled “Direct Bus.” This ambient obscurity suggests masculinity is less a rulebook and more a state of mind, a mood, a feeling. The Narrator finds a more benign form of connection by the end, clasping Marla’s hand in the final scene. But his wayward journey to that moment is hilarious and telling. Unlike Tyler, Marla was there the whole time.

Fight Club is at heart a dry roast of masculinity, a burlesque of the models and habits with which men define and often destroy themselves to avoid emoting or being vulnerable. The film, like The Matrix, another 1999 bugbear, might be forever doomed to be misread, but it still resonates. The movie understands both the appeal of male angst and the hollowness of building a life around it. There’s a whole spectrum of other emotions, a wide range of activities beyond trading blows, and far more versions of manhood than “alpha,” “beta,” or “sigma.” Feeling distressed? It’s okay, dude; we can talk about it.