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Fight Club
File:Fight club ver4.jpg
Fight Club theatrical poster.
Directed byDavid Fincher
Written byChuck Palahniuk (novel)
Jim Uhls (screenplay)
Produced byArt Linson
Ross Grayson Bell
Cean Chaffin
StarringEdward Norton
Brad Pitt
Helena Bonham Carter
Meat Loaf
CinematographyJeff Cronenweth
Edited byJames Haygood
Music byDust Brothers
Distributed by20th Century Fox
Release dates
October 15, 1999
Running time
139 min.
Country United States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$63 million
Box office$100,853,753 (worldwide)

Fight Club is a 1999 feature film adaptation of the 1996 novel Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, adapted by Jim Uhls and directed by David Fincher. Fight Club explores themes of psychological emasculation in modern society, with Edward Norton playing a disillusioned white-collar everyman who meets a woman similar to him (Helena Bonham Carter) and a soap salesman (Brad Pitt). The two men establish a club for men to express themselves through fist fights, eventually evolving into countercultural missions.

Fight Club performed below expectations at the box office in the United States. It initially received lukewarm reviews from major news outlets during its theatrical run. When the film was released on DVD, it received belated praise from its viewers and gained recognition as a cult film.

Plot

Template:Spoiler The narrator (Edward Norton) is a nameless automobile company employee who travels to accident sites for the company. Suffering from insomnia, he goes for a check-up to request medication. The doctor refuses to write a prescription, and instead recommends natural sleep. When the narrator protests that he is in pain, he is advised to visit a testicular cancer support group in order to appreciate real suffering. The narrator attends the group and is able to find catharsis, sleeping soundly without a problem. He begins compulsively attending other support groups, silently allowing others to assume that he is dying. However, he notices another faker, Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), whose presence disrupts his ability to sleep. He confronts her, and they make a deal to schedule their group attendances so that they never meet.

File:Fight Club main characters.jpg
Left to right: Tyler Durden (Pitt) and the narrator (Norton) leave the bar, where Tyler asks the narrator to hit him

During a flight for a business trip, the narrator meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a flamboyant soap salesman. When the narrator arrives home, he finds that his apartment has been destroyed by an explosion. He calls Tyler and meets him at a bar, where Tyler permits the narrator to stay at his place. Leaving the bar, Tyler asks the narrator to hit him. The narrator reluctantly complies, and the two end up enjoying a fist fight. The narrator moves in with Tyler at an abandoned house, and they continue fighting outside the bar, attracting a crowd and eventually establishing a 'fight club' in the basement. More clubs spring up around the country.

Marla Singer, who overdoses on Xanax and then calls the narrator, is ignored by the narrator but instead rescued by Tyler Durden. The two begin a sexual relationship, and Tyler forbids the narrator from talking to Marla about him. Eventually, Tyler's fight club grows to become Project Mayhem, which commits acts of anti-corporate vandalism in the city. The fight clubs become a network for Project Mayhem, and the narrator is left out of Tyler's activities with the project, feeling disturbed about their actions. During an argument between Tyler and the narrator while driving on a rainy night, Tyler purposefully crashes the car, and then disappears from the scene.

When a member of Project Mayhem, Bob (Meat Loaf), dies on a mission, the narrator decides to take action to shut down the project. He tries to trace Tyler's steps, traveling all over the country and feeling a sense of déjà vu wherever he travels. Puzzled, he calls Marla Singer, and asks her to say his name. When she responds "Tyler Durden," he realizes the truth – Tyler is an aspect of his own split personality. Tyler appears in his room and explains that he is in control of the narrator's body whenever he is asleep. The narrator falls unconscious, and he wakes to find phone calls made during his blackout. He tracks Tyler to the downtown headquarters of major credit card companies, which Tyler plans to destroy in order to collapse the consumerist financial system. The narrator, attempting to disarm the explosives in the building basement, is confronted by Tyler, knocked unconscious, and taken to the upper floor of another building to witness the impending destruction.

The narrator, who is held by Tyler at gunpoint, realizes that, sharing the same body with Tyler, he really holds the gun. He finds himself holding the gun and fires it into his mouth, shooting through the cheek without killing him. The illusion of Tyler collapses, with an exit wound to the back of his head. Members of Project Mayhem, who still see the narrator as Tyler, bring Marla Singer to him and leave them alone, despite being shocked over his wound. Marla, who was warned to leave the city by the narrator, concernedly asks what happened. The narrator explains that he shot himself and tells her, "You met me at a very strange time in my life." They watch as the buildings explode in a collapsing skyline outside the windows, standing side-by-side and holding hands.

Production

Development

In 1996, a galley proof of Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club was sent by a 20th Century Fox book scout to creative executive Kevin McCormick. A studio reader wrote coverage for the book that discouraged a film adaptation of the material, but McCormick passed the proof on to producers Lawrence Bender and Art Linson. Bender and Linson rejected it, and producers Josh Donen and Ross Bell expressed interest in the project. They arranged unpaid screen readings with actors to determine the length of a script from the book, which initially lasted 6 hours. After cutting out sections to reduce the running time and recording the dialogue, Bell sent the book on tape to Laura Ziskin, head of the division Fox 2000. After hearing the tape, she purchased the rights to Fight Club for $10,000.[1]

To adapt the story into a screenplay, Ziskin initially considered hiring Buck Henry. Ziskin thought that Fight Club was similar to The Graduate, which had been adapted by Henry. A new screenwriter, Jim Uhls, began lobbying Donen and Bell to be hired to write the adapted screenplay, and the producers chose Uhls over Henry. Bell began seeking directors, of which he had four in mind: Peter Jackson, Bryan Singer, Danny Boyle, and David Fincher. Bell, considering Jackson the best choice, contacted the director, but Jackson was too busy filming The Frighteners (1996) in New Zealand. Singer received the book, but did not read it. Boyle met Bell and read the book, but he pursued another project. Fincher was approached, and the director expressed interest in Fight Club. Fincher, though, was hesitant to work with the studio again after the failure of Alien³ (1992). The director met with Ziskin and studio head Bill Mechanic, restoring his relationship with the studio. Mechanic and Ziskin initially planned to finance the film with a $23 million budget.[1] In August 1997, Twentieth Century Fox announced that Fincher would helm the film adaptation of the novel.[2]

Casting

Bell met with actor Russell Crowe as a candidate to portray Tyler Durden, while at the same time producer Art Linson, later brought on board, was negotiating with Brad Pitt for the same role. Due to Linson's seniority, Pitt was cast over Crowe.[1] Pitt, who sought a new project after the failure of his previous film, Meet Joe Black (1998), was hired with a salary of $17.5 million by the studio, who believed that Fight Club would be more commercially successful with a major star.[3] Fincher also sought to cast Edward Norton as the narrator based on the actor's performance in The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996),[4] though the studio desired a "sexier marquis name" like Matt Damon to improve the film's visibility. Sean Penn was another candidate for the role of the narrator. Norton had also been approached by other studios for leading roles in films like The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) and Man on the Moon (1999). Norton ultimately pursued Runaway Jury (2003), but the project fell apart. Fox offered Norton a salary of $2.5 million to lure him away from the other projects. Before Norton could accept, he owed Paramount Pictures a film. To be legally released to film Fight Club, Norton signed a new contract with Paramount for a lesser salary, eventually and unwillingly being cast in The Italian Job (2003).[3] In January 1998, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton officially joined the project to portray Tyler Durden and the nameless narrator, respectively.[5]

Actresses Courtney Love and Winona Ryder were considered to portray Marla Singer.[6] The studio desired to cast Reese Witherspoon, but Fincher considered the actress too young.[3] Ultimately, Helena Bonham Carter was cast into the role based on her performance in The Wings of the Dove (1997).[7]

Norton and Pitt took lessons in boxing, taekwondo, and grappling to prepare for their roles.[8] The actors also took soapmaking classes from boutique company owner Auntie Godmother.[9] For his role, Pitt voluntarily visited a dentist to have pieces of his front teeth chipped off, and the teeth were restored after filming concluded.[10]

Writing

Producer Ross Bell had a first draft from which screenwriter Jim Uhls worked. The draft lacked a voice-over due to the industry's perspective at the time that the technique was "hackneyed and trite". When Fincher joined the project, he disagreed with the approach, believing that the film's humor came from the narrator's voice.[3] Fincher described the film without the technique as seemingly "sad and pathetic".[11] The director and Uhls developed the script for six to seven months, creating a third draft by 1997 that reordered the story and left out several major elements. When Pitt came on board, the actor expressed concern that Tyler Durden was too one-dimensional. Fincher sought the advice of writer-director Cameron Crowe, who suggested giving the character more ambiguity. Fincher also hired screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker to rewrite the script. Fincher and Walker invited Pitt and Edward Norton to collaborate on the script, which was completed after a year of work and five resulting drafts.[3] The narrator was written to be nameless in the film, though he is identified in the script as Jack. The narrator's choices of names for his aliases in the support groups that he attends were based on characters from Planet of the Apes and Robert De Niro roles of the '70s.[12]

Author Chuck Palahniuk expressed praise for the faithful film adaptation of his novel Fight Club and applauded how the film's plot was more streamlined than the book. Palahniuk also described how there was contention over the believability of the novel's plot twist for film audiences. Director David Fincher kept the twist and said, "If they accept everything up to this point, they'll accept the plot twist. If they're still in the theater, they'll stay with it." Palahniuk was annoyed by the change of a single ingredient in the film's explanation of making napalm to render the recipe useless, since the author had researched the components extensively.[13] Palahniuk's novel also contained homoerotic overtones, which the director purposely included in the film as part of his plan to make audiences uncomfortable and thereby surprised by the film's twists and turns.[14] The scene in which Tyler Durden bathes next to the narrator is an example of the overtones, though Durden's insight in the scene, "I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need," was meant to suggest personal responsibility rather than homosexuality.[15]

At the end of the novel, the narrator is placed in a mental institution.[16] In the film's ending, the narrator instead finds redemption in rejecting Tyler Durden's dialectic. Norton described the film's redemptive parallel to The Graduate, as the protagonists of both films find a middle ground between the division of two selves.[17] The director also considered the novel more infatuated with Tyler Durden and altered the ending to pull away from him. "I wanted people to love Tyler, but I also wanted them to be OK with his vanquishing," Fincher said.[16]

Filming

When production first began, the budget escalated from $50 million, half of which was paid by New Regency, to a peak of $67 million. New Regency's head Arnon Milchan petitioned for Fincher to reduce the budget by at least $5 million, but the director refused to reduce costs. Milchan contacted studio head Bill Mechanic saying that he would back out. To bring back Milchan's support, Mechanic sent him tapes of dailies. After three weeks of shooting, Milchan returned his support, financing half of the production budget.[18]

Filming lasted 138 days,[19] during which Fincher shot over 1,500 rolls of film, three times the average for a Hollywood film.[8] Filming locations were in and around Los Angeles and on sets built at the studio's location in Century City.[19] Production designer Alex McDowell constructed over seventy sets.[8] The exterior of Tyler Durden's home on Paper Street was built in San Pedro, California, while the interiors were built on a sound stage at the studio's location. The interiors were designed to possess a sense of decay that reflected the deconstructed world of the characters.[19] Marla's apartment was based on photographs taken at the Rosalind Apartments in downtown L.A.[11]

Makeup artist Julie Pearce, who collaborated with the director on The Game, worked on the actors in Fight Club. For her tasks, Pearce studied mixed martial arts and pay-per-view boxing. She also designed an extra to have a chunk missing from his ear, for which she cited Mike Tyson's bite as inspiration.[20] To create sweat on cue, two methods were devised: spraying Evian water over a coat of Vaseline, and using straight Evian for "wet sweat". Meat Loaf, who plays a character that has "bitch tits", wore a 90-pound fat harness that gave him large breasts for the role.[8] He also wore 8-inch lifts in his scenes with Norton, being shorter than the lead actor.[15]

Cinematography

To perform the cinematography for Fight Club, director David Fincher hired Jeff Cronenweth, the son of the late cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, with whom Fincher had collaborated for Alien³ (1992). Fincher and Cronenweth drew from elements of the visual styles that Fincher had begun exploring with Se7en and The Game. For the narrator's scenes without Tyler Durden, the look was purposely bland and realistic. For scenes with Tyler, Fincher chose a look that was "more hyper-real in a torn-down, deconstructed sense - a visual metaphor of what [the narrator's] heading into." Heavily desaturated colors were used in the costuming, makeup, and art direction, and the crew took advantage of as much natural and practical light at filming locations as possible. The film was shot in the Super 35 format to give the director maximum flexibility in composing shots. The director also took various approaches to take advantage of lighting situations in the film's scenes. Several practical locations were chosen due to the city lights' effects on the shots' backgrounds. Fluorescent lighting at practical locations was also embraced to maintain an element of reality and to light the prosthetics of the characters' injuries appropriately.[19] Fincher also ensured that scenes were darkened enough to reduce the visibility of the characters' eyes, citing cinematographer Gordon Willis's technique as the influence.[15]

The majority of Fight Club was filmed at night, with daytime shots taking place in purposely shadowed locations. For scenes in Lou's basement, which hosted the first indoor fight club, the area was lit by $2 work lamps from Home Depot to create a background glow. The director also chose to film fight scenes in the basement from a more objective view, purposely avoiding stylish camerawork and placing the camera in a fixed position. As the fight scenes in the film progressed, the camera moved from a distant observer to the point of view of the fighter.[19]

Scenes of Tyler Durden were staged to conceal the film's twist. The character was not filmed in two shots with a group of people, nor was he included in any over the shoulder shots. Durden also appeared in single frames of the narrator's scenes before the narrator actually meets Durden.[11] Regarding these subliminal frames, Fincher explained, "Our hero is creating Tyler Durden in his own mind, so at this point he exists only on the periphery of the narrator's consciousness."[21] In addition, Durden was often captured in the background and out of focus, like a "little devil on the shoulder."[15]

Visual effects

Director David Fincher hired visual effects supervisor Tod Haug, who had collaborated with him for The Game. Fincher chose to illustrate the nameless narrator's perspective with a "mind's eye" view and to create a myopic framework for the film's audience. Haug divided the visual effects work among several facilities, choosing to have them separately address the CG modeling, animation, compositing, and scanning. According to Haug, "We selected the best people for each aspect of the effects work, then coordinated their efforts. In this way. we never had to play to a facility's weakness." Fincher previewed Pixel Liberaton Front's previsualized footage of challenging main-unit shots and visual effects shots. The director considered the preview a problem-solving technique to avoid mistakes from being made during actual filming.[21]

Fincher chose to design a ninety-second pullback scene from the fear center of the narrator's brain as the title sequence to represent the thought processes initiated by the narrator's fear impulse.[11] The sequence was designed on a separate budget from the film, but the studio later paid for the sequence based on Fincher's expert direction of the film.[15] For the visual effects of the sequence, Fincher hired Digital Domain and its visual effects supervisor Kevin Mack, who had won an Academy Award for Visual Effects for What Dreams May Come (1998). The computer-generated brain was mapped using an L-system,[22] and the design was detailed using renderings by medical illustrator Kathryn Jones. The passage through the brain included the presence of action potentials and a hair follicle as the shot drew out from within the skull. Haug explained Fincher's artistic licensing with the shot, "While he wanted to keep the brain passage looking like electron microscope photography, that look had to be coupled with the feel of a night dive - wet, scary, and with a low depth of field." The depth of field was accomplished with the process of ray tracing.[21]

One of the beginning scenes in which the camera surveys the destructive equipment of Project Mayhem in the streets and building parking lots was a 3D composition of nearly a hundred photographs of Los Angeles and Century City by photographer Michael Douglas Middleton. The final scene of the buildings being demolished was designed by Richard Baily of Image Savant, who worked on the scene for fourteen months.[21]

The director pursued a lurid style to influence the color palette of the film, choosing to make people "sort of shiny", such as Helena Bonham Carter wearing opalescent makeup for her character to create a "smack-fiend patina" that would portray her romantic nihilistic character best. The director and his cinematographer, Jeff Cronenweth, were also influenced by American Graffiti (1973), which applied a mundane look to nighttime exteriors while simultaneously including a variety of colors. When Fight Club was processed, several techniques were applied to alter the footage. The contrast was stretched to be purposely ugly, the print was adjusted to be underexposed, resilvering (lower-scale enhancement) was used to increase density, and high-contrast print socks were stepped all over the print to create a dirty patina.[11]

Fincher included the cue mark sequence in which Durden points out the "cigarette burn" flash to serve as a thematic element. The director described the film's initial progression as a "fairly subjective reality" for audiences, with the sequence foreshadowing the coming break in which the reality is subverted. "Suddenly it's as though the projectionist missed the changeover, the viewers have to start looking at the movie in a whole new way," explained Fincher.[21]

Musical score

The director sought to find a band who would perform film music for the first time, out of the concern that bands who had experience performing film music would be unable to tie the film's themes together. Radiohead was pursued as a possible band,[15] but the alternative rock producer duo Dust Brothers was ultimately chosen to score the film. The Dust Brothers created a post-modern score that included drum loops, electronic scratches, and computerized samples. According to Dust Brothers performer Michael Simpson, "Fincher wanted to break new ground with everything about the movie, and a nontraditional score helped achieve that."[23]

Themes

Values

"I feel that Fight Club really, in a way... probed into the despair and paralysis that people feel in the face of having inherited this value system out of advertising."
— Edward Norton[24]

Fight Club is a black comedy that applies heavy satire.[15] The director chose to temper the film with humor to avoid a sinister nature, keeping it as "funny and seditious".[16] Norton described the film to be a "dark, comic, sort of surrealist look" at young people's failures to interact with the value system of which they are expected to be a part.[25] Fight Club parallels Rebel Without a Cause by probing into the frustrations of the people that live in the system.[24] The people had been reduced to "a generation of spectators", having undergone societal emasculation.[26] The culture of advertising had defined society's "external signifiers of happiness", causing an unnecessary chase for material objects where the pursuit was supposed to be for spiritual happiness.[27]

The violence of the fight clubs serve not to promote or glorify the notion, but as a metaphor for feeling.[28] The fights are physical representations of resisting the impulse to be cocooned in society.[26] Norton explained that the fighting between the men stripped away the "fear of pain" and "the reliance on material signifiers of their self-worth", leaving them to have really experienced something valuable.[24] When the fights transform into revolutionary violence, this dialectic by Tyler Durden only serves as one-half of the film's dialectic, with the narrator pulling back from Durden.[17] Fight Club purposely shapes an ambiguous message that is left for the film audiences to interpret.[29] Described Fincher: "I love this idea that you can have fascism without offering any direction or solution. Isn't the point of fascism to say, 'This is the way we should be going'? But this movie couldn't be further from offering any kind of solution."[16]

Characters

In Fight Club, the nameless narrator is an everyman who lacks a world of possibilities and initially cannot find a way to change his life. The narrator finds himself unable to match society's requirements for happiness and embarks on a path to enlightenment, which involves metaphorically killing his parents, his God, and his teacher. At the beginning of the film, the narrator has killed off his parents but still finds himself trapped in his false world. The narrator meets Tyler Durden, with whom he kills off his God by going against the norms of society. Ultimately, the narrator has to face killing his teacher, Tyler Durden, to complete the process of maturity.[11]

File:Marla Singer and Jack.jpg.jpg
The narrator (Norton) confronts Marla Singer (Carter) for similarly faking symptoms to attend support groups

The narrator also seeks a form of intimacy, but he avoids this at first with Marla Singer, seeing too much of himself in her.[15] Though Marla presents a seductive and negativist prospect for the narrator, he instead embraces the newness that Tyler Durden has to offer him. The narrator finds himself comfortable having the personal connection to Tyler Durden, but he becomes jealous when Marla becomes sexually involved with Tyler. When the narrator argues with Tyler about their friendship, Tyler explains that the relationship between the two men is secondary to the active pursuit of the philosophy they had been exploring.[17] Tyler also suggests doing something about Marla, implying that she is a risk to be removed. When Tyler says this, the narrator realizes that his desires should have been focused on Marla and begins to part from Tyler's path.[15]

The unreliable narrator is not immediately aware that Tyler Durden is also him.[11] The narrator also unreliably advocates the fight clubs as a way to feel powerful. Instead, the narrator's body worsens throughout his fights, while Tyler Durden's self-image instead improves due to the narrator's idealistic perception of him. The transformations were reflected in production with Norton losing weight and Pitt working out and becoming tan.[25] Tyler Durden, who initially embarks on a journey with the narrator in desiring "real experiences" like actual fights,[24] becomes a Nietzschean model in possessing the nihilistic attitude of rejecting and destroying institutions and value systems.[29] Tyler, who represents the Id with his impulsive nature,[15] conveys an attitude that is seductive and liberating to the narrator and the followers. Eventually, Tyler's initiatives approach the point of being dehumanizing,[29] with Tyler using a megaphone to order around members of Project Mayhem in a similar fashion to the approach of Chinese re-education camps.[15] The narrator pulls back from Tyler and retreats from what Tyler is going toward. Instead, the narrator ultimately arrives at a middle ground between his conflicting selves.[17] Template:Endspoiler

Pre-release and marketing

In early 1999, after filming concluded the previous December, David Fincher edited the footage to prepare Fight Club for a preliminary screening with senior executives. They did not receive the film positively, expressing concern that there would not be an audience that would watch it. Two months later, Fight Club was screened to second-tier executives, who also negatively responded to the film.[30] Fight Club was originally slated to be released in July 1999,[31] later changed to August 6, 1999. The studio delayed film's release again to autumn due to a crowded summer schedule and a hurried post-production process.[32]

Marketing executives at Twentieth Century Fox observed difficulties in marketing Fight Club. They considered the film primarily geared toward male audiences, and that the presence of Brad Pitt in the film would still not attract female filmgoers based on the film's violence. Research testing showed that the film appealed to teenagers. The marketing executives also considered marketing Fight Club as an art film. Fincher refused to let the posters and trailers focus on Brad Pitt, encouraging the studio to hire Weiden+Kennedy, an advertising firm, to devise a marketing plan. The firm came up with a bar of pink soap as the film's main marketing image, which was considered "a bad joke" by Fox executives. Fincher also released two early trailers that were faux public service announcements presented by Pitt and Norton, which the studio did not find appropriate to open the movie. Instead, the studio financed a $20 million large-scale campaign to provide a press junket, posters, billboards, and trailers for TV that highlighted the film's fight scenes. Fight Club was also advertised on cable during World Wrestling Federation broadcasts, which Fincher protested, believing that the placement created the wrong kind of context for the film.[30]

Release

The film held its world premiere at the 56th Venice International Film Festival on September 10, 1999.[33] Fight Club commercially opened in the United States on October 15, 1999 and earned $11,035,485 in 1,963 theaters over the opening weekend.[34] Fight Club placed #1 for its opening weekend, ahead of Double Jeopardy and The Story of Us, a fellow weekend opener.[35] The gender mix of audiences for Fight Club, initially argued to be "the ultimate anti-date flick", was 61% male and 39% female, with 58% of audiences below the age of 21. Despite the top placement, its opening reception had fallen short of the studio's expectations.[36] The following weekend, Fight Club dropped 42.6% in revenue and earned $6,335,870.[37] The film, whose production budget was $63 million, went on to gross $37,030,102 during its domestic run. Fight Club earned $100,853,753 in theaters worldwide.[34] The underwhelming domestic performance of Fight Club soured the relationship between studio head Bill Mechanic and media executive Rupert Murdoch, eventually leading to the resignation of Mechanic in June 2000.[38]

For the UK release of Fight Club on November 12, 1999, the British Board of Film Classification removed two of the film's scenes that had involved "an indulgence in the excitement of beating a (defenseless) man's face into a pulp." The film was awarded an 18 certificate, limiting the release to adult-only audiences in the UK. The BBFC did not censor any further, having considered and dismissed claims that Fight Club contained "dangerously instructive information" and could "encourage anti-social (behavior)". The board noted of the film: "The film as a whole is -- quite clearly -- critical and sharply parodic of the amateur fascism which in part it portrays. Its central theme of male machismo (and the anti-social behaviour that flows from it) is emphatically rejected by the central character in the concluding reels."[39]

Fight Club has spawned several fight clubs in America since its release. A "Gentleman's Fight Club" was started in Menlo Park, California in 2000 and has members mostly from the high tech industry.[40] Teens and preteens in Texas, New Jersey, Washington state, and Alaska also initiated fight clubs and posted videos of their fights online, leading authorities to break up the clubs. In 2006, a fight club in Arlington, Texas injured an unwilling participant from high school, and the DVD sales of the fight led to the arrest of six teenagers.[41]

Critical reaction

On Rotten Tomatoes, Fight Club received 80% overall approval out of 123 reviews from critics, with a Cream of the Crop rating of 65% out of 23 reviews from major media outlets.[42] On Metacritic, Fight Club received 66% approval based on 35 reviews.[43] Janet Maslin of The New York Times praised Fincher's direction and editing of the film. She also noted that Fight Club carried a message of "contemporary manhood", and if not watched closely, the film could be misconstrued as an endorsement of violence and nihilism.[44] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called Fight Club "visceral and hard-edged", as well as "a thrill ride masquerading as philosophy" that most audiences would not appreciate.[45] Jay Carr of The Boston Globe thought that the film began with an "invigoratingly nervy and imaginative buzz", but that it eventually became "explosively silly".[46]

American anarcho-primitivist philosopher John Zerzan has considered Fight Club a film that reflects the rise of alternative consciousness and anti-culture thinking.[47] Rosie O'Donnell called it the worst film she had ever seen,[48] and spoiled the major plot twist on her television talk show.[49][50]

James Crawford of the independent film journal Reverse Shot pointed out that only three "major" female speaking parts exist throughout the movie with Marla Singer, Chloe, and the therapist. Crawford observed that both Chloe and the therapist are ridiculed, while Marla fills the role of the narrator's primary antagonist.[51] Dr. Henry Giroux described the pathology of Fight Club as an intensely misogynistic representation of women, and an advancement of the theory that the intense expression of violence is the only means by which men can be cleansed of feminism. Some of the symptoms of the feminist culture Tyler Durden rails against include consumerism, indecision, a general weakening of masculinity, and an inability for males to find purpose in their lives. The major female character, Marla Singer, represents the nameless narrator's antagonist and the primary vehicle through which Tyler Durden channels his sexual aggression. It is only after the narrator meets Marla that loses control, essentially going totally insane, triggering a downward spiral in his life, and setting the stage for the release of his violent and misogynistic alter ego. The film uses expressions of violence to define the male identity against everything feminine, and a strong female character ultimately sends the narrator "over the edge."[52]

Awards and nominations

Fight Club was nominated for the 2000 Academy Award for Sound Editing, which it lost to The Matrix.[53] The film was also nominated a Golden Reel Award for Best Sound Editing, but also lost to The Matrix.[54] Actress Helena Bonham Carter won the 2000 Empire Award for Best British Actress.[55] The Online Film Critics Society also nominated awards to Fight Club for Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor (Edward Norton), Best Editing, and Best Adapted Screenplay.[56] Though the film won none of the awards, the society listed Fight Club one of the top ten films of 1999.[57] The soundtrack for Fight Club was nominated for a BRIT Award, but lost to Notting Hill.[58]

In 2004 and 2006, Fight Club was voted by Empire readers as the ninth and eighth greatest film of all time, respectively.[59][60] The UK film magazine Total Film ranked the film as "The Greatest Film of our Lifetime" in 2007 during its tenth anniversary.[61] In 2007, Premiere selected Tyler Durden's line, "The first rule of Fight Club is you don't talk about Fight Club," as the 27th greatest movie line of all time.[62]

DVD release

File:Fightclubdvdscan.jpg
Front cover of the Fight Club two-disc special edition DVD

The DVD for Fight Club was one of the first to be supervised by the movie's director.[63] The film was released on two DVD editions. The single-disc edition included four commentary tracks,[64] while the two-disc special edition included these tracks, multiple behind-the-scenes clips, deleted scenes, trailers, public service announcements, the promotional music video "This is Your Life", Internet spots, still galleries, cast bios, story boards, and publicity materials.[65] The film found more revenue after its theatrical run, grossing $55 million in video and DVD rentals.[66] Fight Club won the 2000 Online Film Critics Society Awards for Best DVD, Best DVD Commentary, and Best DVD Special Features.[67]

Entertainment Weekly ranked the film's two-disc edition #1 in its 2001 list of The 50 Essential DVDs, giving top ratings to the DVD's content and technical picture-and-audio quality.[68] The positive reception of the DVD, despite the film's lukewarm domestic box office performance, transformed Fight Club into a cult film.[69] Newsweek described Fight Club as a cult movie that would potentially have "perennial" fame.[70]

In March 2007, another two-DVD edition was released in the UK. It features four audio commentaries and restores two scenes cut by the British Board of Film Classification.[71]

There is a view that the DVD with its special features intentionally "dissuades the viewer from acknowledging the film's homoerotic elements as representing homosexual experience,"[72] though this is only a preliminary reading.[73]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c Sharon Waxman (2005). Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System. HarperEntertainment. pp. 137–151. ISBN 0060540176. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  2. ^ Michael Fleming (1997-08-19). "Thornton holds reins of 'Horses'". Variety. Retrieved 2007-03-23. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  3. ^ a b c d e Rebels on the Backlot, 175-184.
  4. ^ Peter Biskind (Aug. 1999). "Extreme Norton". Vanity Fair. {{cite news}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Check date values in: |date= (help)
  5. ^ Chris Petrikin (1998-01-07). "Studio Report Card: Fox". Variety. Retrieved 2007-03-23. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  6. ^ "Palahniuk: Marketing 'Fight Club' is 'the ultimate absurd joke'". CNN. 1999-10-29. Retrieved 2007-03-26. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
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  72. ^ Robert Alan Brookey and Robert Westerfelhaus (March 2002). "Hiding homoeroticism in plain view: the Fight Club DVD as digital closet". Critical Studies in Media Communication. 19 (1): 21–43. Retrieved 2007-04-29.
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Further reading

  • Kevin H. Martin (January 2000). "A World of Hurt". Cinefex.
  • Damon Wise (December 1999). "Menace II Society". Empire.
  • Gavin Smith (September/October 1999). "Gavin Smith goes one-on-one with David Fincher". Film Comment. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  • Christopher Deacy (2002). "Integration and Rebirth through Confrontation: Fight Club and American Beauty as Contemporary Religious Parables". Journal of Contemporary Religion. 17 (1): 61–73. 1353-7903. Retrieved 2007-04-28. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  • Sharon Waxman (2005). Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System. HarperEntertainment. ISBN 0060540176. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  • Art Linson (2002). "Fight Clubbed". What Just Happened? Bitter Hollywood Tales from the Front Line. Bloomsbury USA. pp. 141–156. ISBN 1582342407. {{cite book}}: |format= requires |url= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  • Henry A. Giroux (2001). "Ikea Boy Fights Back: Fight Club, Consumerism, and the Political Limits of Nineties Cinema". In Jon Lewis (ed.). The End of Cinema As We Know It: American Film in the Nineties. New York University Press. pp. 95–104. ISBN 081475161X. {{cite book}}: |format= requires |url= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  • Henry A. Giroux (2001). "Brutalized Bodies and Emasculated Politics: Fight Club, Consumerism, and Masculine Violence". Breaking in to the Movies: Film and the Culture of Politics. Blackwell Publishing Limited. pp. 258–288. ISBN 0631226044. {{cite book}}: |format= requires |url= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  • Ken Windrum (2004). "Fight Club and the political (im)potence of consumer revolt". In Steven Jay Schneider (ed.). New Hollywood Violence. Manchester University Press. pp. 304–317. ISBN 0719067235. {{cite book}}: |format= requires |url= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

External links

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fight_Club&oldid=132294538

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