Fight Club (1999)

“Slide”

4 years after releasing Se7en, Fincher and Brad Pitt were back together! By this point Fincher was fully invested in his perfectionism. Fight Club was shot over 138 days & had 200 different locations w/ multiple CGI sequences. Chuck Palahniuk, who wrote the book, thought the movie streamlined his narrative, but it’s still a convoluted tale about a very lonely man trying to be remembered.

Fincher successfully captures the visceral decay of this universe. The blood is dark & thick, the house is rotted & grimey. Cigarette smoke is everywhere, you can almost smell it coming out of the screen. The characters are absolutely iconic and it’s fascinating to watch Edward Norton’s sniveling “nice guy” simp over Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden. + Has there ever been a better character intro than Helena Bonham Carter’s Marla Singer?

Though Fight Club has been co-opted by pick-up artists & incels, Palahniuk has sorta pushed back against criticism calling it inherently misogynistic, saying he wrote about a feeling of frustration that men don’t have places to be a community together 🤔 What’s on screen though, whether or not intentional, is the inherent lie of misogyny & fascism — B an individual by joining this cult where u have no identity, ur bad feelings r good actually, fill the void of capitalism with terrorism. The narrator has every opportunity to express himself, instead he finds joy in acting like an emotional vampire, feeding all his worst impulses. While this may have seemed edgy in 1999, his white man/gen-x anxiety looks quaint to me in 2021.

So many people love to quote this movie, especially Durden’s pop-psychology, but they forget that Durden is a liar. He lies to you, the audience, constantly. He gets joy from deceiving you, and feeds off your discomfort. The incel crowd seem to also miss the extremely gay relationship between the narrator & Tyler Durden. “We’re a generation of men raised by women” waxes Durden as he bathes next to the narrator. “I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.” These men act like they are finding themselves by embracing pain and violence, but instead they are sacrificing their humanity.

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