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My Enduring Intellectual Love Affair With Fight Club
Or, why everything you *think* you know about a (supposedly) violent and misogynistic work of art is probably wrong.
1999 was a simpler time. You could get on an airplane without having to remove half of your clothes. Most people were eating gluten and didn’t seem to care. There was Nu metal. I could go on…
Also in 1999, you could make a movie where a rag-tag group of (mostly white male) ne’er do wells in trench coats and ski masks plan to blow up buildings while beating each other to a bloody pulp, and barely an eyebrow was raised. There was also no Facebook and Twitter to host outrage-fueled rants about the film’s nearly pornographic violence. Everybody won!
All kidding aside, 1999 was also the time when David Fincher’s cinematic interpretation of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club was released. The reviews — as they sink into the annals of cinematic history — are decidedly mixed.
It is not difficult to find scathing, but well thought-out, reviews of the book and film. It’s also not difficult to find reviews praising it as a masterwork of cultural criticism. Like so many works of art, it has been as divisive as it was impactful.
