When Fight Club was released in 1999, there was a strange marketing plan to promote the film. Most advertising largely relied on Brad Pitt's sex appeal and macho action scenes. Pitt was at the height of his heartthrob status, and his marriage to Jennifer Aniston made him a part of the hottest couple in Hollywood. Aniston even hosted SNL and there were quite a few references made to the film. Moviegoers that were looking for Pitt to be some action hero were disappointed as they watched Fight Club. David's Fincher's masterpiece is about the dangers of consumerism, modern masculinity, and spiritual bankruptcy. Book author Chuck Palahniuk was even quoted as saying that he liked the film's ending more than the one he wrote. But despite the themes and messages that Fincher and Palahniuk were trying to convey, the film was widely misunderstood, and created a strange culture of fans that loved the movie for all the wrong reasons.
I saw Fight Club around 2004 or 2005, when I was in high school. There's a continuum that goes along with your understanding of this film, based upon the age you first see it (disclaimer, this pertains to men only; women do like Fight Club but for different reasons than men):
10-14: Any kid that sees the movie during these ages probably has parents that don't care whether or not their son grows up to be a psychopath.
15-24: Violence=cool. "Dude we should totally start a Fight Club" has been uttered thousands of times by idiotic young men. A much smaller number actually started a Fight Club, and an even smaller amount got smacked in the face and realized that underground bare-knuckle boxing is kind of stupid.
25-40: This is the sweet spot where you actually pick up on the themes of the film. Recommended.
41+: Why does Brad Pitt have to remind me that he is chiseled from stone and I can't throw a football without my arm falling off the next day? (Come on, you know I jest!)
Luckily for me, despite seeing the movie for the first time in the dangerous 16-24 range, I never started a Fight Club. I did however, totally miss the point until I got a bit older. Unfortunately this range of men has created a sort of macho bro'ed out vibe around this film. And shocked critics seeing the movie in 1999 didn't do it any favors either. They focused on the ultra-violent fight scenes and the characters seemingly cathartic association with violence. But like countless songs, movies and literature that has come before, this totally misses the point.
In the trailer for the 2012 film Project X, we see flashes of a giant party and one high schooler's quest to destroy his parents home. The trailer makes the movie look like one huge party scene, making kids everywhere think "why couldn't I be there"? Prominently playing over the trailer is Kid Cudi's "Pursuit of Happiness". This song is decidedly not about how "cool" partying is. It's a very tongue in cheek song about the emptiness of the party lifestyle. Yet the producers of the film just grabbed it anyway and put it in the trailer without any sense of irony. Same goes for those Wrangler commercials that played Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son" as they flashed close ups of Real American Men wearing Real American Jeans. Never mind the fact that "Fortunate Son" is an anti-war song that is anything but a Patriot's anthem.
Why do I mention these examples? Because of misappropriation, people now associate these songs with the complete opposite sentiment that their artist tried to convey. Fight Club has been met with a similar fate. Because of the critics initial shock at the violence, as well as the 15-24 year old boys that all stupidly tried to start a fight club, a large number of people think it glorifies violence. But it's the exact opposite. Edward Norton's character (the unnamed "Narrator") seeks any sort of emotion in his life after years of being beaten into submission by corporate and consumer life. His (spoilers ahead!) alter-ego Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) uses fighting to elicit this response, giving the Narrator a rush that he's been so desperately seeking. However, by the end of the film, he realizes that all of this senseless violence wasn't what brought him back from the dead- it was a real, emotional connection with similarly lost soul Marla (Helena Bonham Carter). Durden's methods were wrong, but his message was right: give up your pretension, give up your hopeless attachment to material goods, and just let go. The Fight Club aspect of the plan ultimately balloon's out of control on the narrator. The film leaves you with the message that your spiritual bankruptcy cannot be solved by materialism, a good job, or on the opposite end, going to extremes to "feel alive". The message is that real, human interaction is the ultimate high for humankind. (As a side note- the message here is partly right. Materialism and extremism won't bring you fulfillment, and human connection does play a large role in spiritual health. However, the ultimate healer, Jesus Christ, is the missing ingredient that the film goes nowhere near. Not that I expected this, but it's interesting that Christianity and Fight Club share common beliefs when it comes to material wealth).
It's unfortunate that this wrongful aura exists around Fight Club, because it's an absolute classic. It is thought provoking, visually compelling, and has one of the biggest twist endings in film history. It has a firm position in my top 10 films of all time. I may get some unfair judgments for placing it this high, because there are plenty of dude-bro's that have it in their top 10 as well. It's just for vastly different reasons.
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