What Fight Club did right

There are three major creators of popular human art working in Hollywood today – Michael Mann, Christopher Nolan and David Fincher – and all three work with broadly the same materials: male identity, the violence that comes with it, and post-industrial societies in which there is no place for it either. Mann's neon-noir aesthetic focuses on status, be it James Caan's safe-cracker Thiefwith his $150 pants, silk shirts and $800 suits, or Jamie Foxx Securitywho dreams of running his own limousine company, but only inactively because he has long since sunk into his calming routine as a night taxi driver.

Nolan's theme is personal darkness, be it Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne Dark Knight trilogy or Al Pacino's sleepless LAPD detective insomnia. Fincher is the cool, clinical student of obsession, and his all-American boys are the leads – Brad Pitt in the lead role SevenJake Gyllenhaal in Zodiac – become so consumed by their pursuit of evil that they lose themselves and those around them. All three directors have male anti-heroes stare into the darkness long enough until they finally recognize themselves.

In Fight clubwhich celebrates the 25th anniversary of its release, Fincher packs all of these themes into two of the most stylish hours of filmmaking to emerge from the 1990s. Based on the novel of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk, Fight club follows Edward Norton's narrator Jack, whose job assignment is to help a major automobile manufacturer limit liability when one of its defective cars winds itself and an unsuspecting family around a tree. Jack is an insomniac who can only achieve emotional release by sneaking into group therapy and feeding on the pain of strangers. He meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a cool, charismatic anarchist who describes himself as a soap salesman but also works as a cinema projectionist, stitching together individual porn pictures into family films, and as a hotel waiter, where he adds various bodily fluids to culinary fare . (Whatever you do, don't order the cream of mushroom soup.)

After Jack's apartment explodes in a fireball, he and Tyler move into a damp, dirty house that appears to have adopted decorating tips from the toilet scene Trainspotting. After a late-night brawl in the parking lot, the two found Fight Club, an underground network of amateur boxing clubs in which lost and disoriented men beat each other bloody just to get something out of it. The first (and second) rule of Fight Club is: “Don't talk about Fight Club,” but someone has to babble, because soon the number of visitors increases like a hematoma and the members recognize each other in their nameless city by the cuts and The bruises they leave behind beautify their newly strengthened faces. However, Tyler has bigger plans in mind. It doesn't just give bored suits an outlet for their frustrations. He is building an army for Project Mayhem, a corporate sabotage campaign that culminates in a plan to blow the Financial District to pieces. The unconventional twist that arises naturally from the story reveals that Jack is a decidedly unreliable narrator.

Published in 1996, Fight club became a staple of men's culture in the late 1990s, reflecting that generation's dissatisfaction On the way And Catcher in the Rye the generation before did it. The novel bounced around in the school bags of many young people and on the reading lists of many students. On occasion it may even have been broken into. Fight club came at just the right time, as leftist sentiment found new, post-Soviet expression in anti-globalization politics and Starbucks' contempt for corporations and consumers. Jack is the pinnacle of conspicuous consumption and rebels against it. At the start of the film, he searches his apartment as if he were browsing through an Ikea catalog – under 30, ask your parents – and when the apartment is blown up, he mourns the loss of his prized possessions (a stereo and high-quality ones) with a sigh Clothing): “I was close to being complete.”

This theme is evident in a rallying cry that Tyler delivers to Fight Club:

Advertising makes us chase cars and clothes, take jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We don't have a Great War, a Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our life.

It was a biting dialogue in a movie, but it was also a cultural warning sign that all was not well with American men.

As a piece of filmmaking, Fight club is an intimate spectacle of unrepressed violence, a bone-crushing romance between a desk-bound soybean oil boy and the buff superhuman he wants to be. The film is told with a satirical and sexy style, thanks largely to the career-defining performances of Norton and Pitt, but it is Fincher's tirelessly curious camera that delves beneath the surface into the psychology of Generation X male discontent. Commentary in 1999 was less focused Fight clubIt's more the cinematic qualities than the perceived politics. The Chicago Sun TimesRoger Ebert called it “macho porn” and “the most open-hearted and joyously big-star fascist film since.” Death wish', a feeling that comes from the New YorkDavid Denby said it was “a fascist rhapsody masquerading as a metaphor for liberation.”

The film invites liberal contempt with its protagonists who fetishize physical strength, find meaning in organized violence, and conclude that “the loss of all hope means freedom.” There is an unmistakable echo of Zarathustra's instructions for building a superhuman race: “Overcome, you higher men, the petty virtues, the petty politics, the grain of sand consideration, the anthill Trump, the pitiful ease, the “happiness of.” the largest number”. And rather despair than submit.' In the subtext, alongside Nietzsche, there is an apparently anti-feminist view circulating. Fight club is obsessed with emasculation. The punishment for attempting to hinder Project Mayhem is castration. Jack's favorite therapy group is a weekly meeting of testicular cancer survivors called Remaining Men Together.

The only female character of note, Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), is a fellow tourist who visits support groups, but her presence hinders Jack's ability to derive satisfaction from the meetings. Women as thieves of masculinity are hinted at in a bathroom conversation between Jack and Tyler about their fathers, with Tyler remarking, “We are a generation of men raised by women.” Some critics interpret a homoerotic sadomasochism into the basement spanking sessions. They can just as easily be interpreted as a replacement for the authoritarian patriarch, a figure denied them by social and industrial changes that placed women at the head of the American family and men behind tidy desks in tiny cubicles in air-conditioned offices.

Fight club stands in a proud tradition of men's films that provoke hysteria among critics and the liberal intelligentsia more broadly. The fear that Tyler Durden would turn young men into fascists is part of the same elite paranoia that believed Patrick Batemen was the role model for a new generation of dapper misogynists and that Arthur Fleck would inspire MAGA hat-wearing instigators to go on shooting sprees. Liberals will always be annoyed by films that have something to say to men, because if the film understands men, what it has to say will not be liberal. However, it does not follow that Ebert and Denby were right Fight club is a Gen-X Triumph of the will. As critic James Berardinelli argues, Tyler's followers are “victims of the dehumanizing and desensitizing power of modern society” who have “become cogs in the wheel” and can only “regain a sense of individuality” by “coming into contact with society step”. “primitive, barbaric instincts for pain and violence.” Review of the film in TimeThe late, great Richard Schickel said it spoke to “that illiberal, godless, inarticulate fringe that threatens the complacent American center with a fury that cannot be explained.” These shots come closer to what the film is trying to articulate than the suggestion that David Fincher is secretly a Nazi. Fight club is a diagnosis, not a manifesto.

The diagnosis was prescient, highlighting ideas and cultural shifts that were unformed or controversial at the time but are now well established: masculinity has been battered and bruised by constant criticism, deconstruction and denigration; that therapy is conceptually too feminine to address men's mental health; that the repression or suppression of masculinity only creates the worst men, whether Tyler Durden or Andrew Tate. For fight clubs, read the message boards and group chats where men's social lives, opinions and humor have been banned. Read about the rise of populists left and right and the electoral uprisings against a distant elite for Project Mayhem. For the basement-dwelling dissatisfied of Clinton's America, read the deplorables, alt-rights, groypers and very online traders of Biden's America.

Fight club was a rare piece of pre-9/11 entertainment that signaled that history was not over and that democratic liberal capitalism was not as safe as its proponents assumed. However, its durability is not due to its prophetic themes alone. David Fincher's mastery of form and his talent for making the subconscious visible explain the film's longevity. He created a compelling, disturbing piece of cinema that continues to captivate and disturb today.