Twenty-five years ago, the ultimate bro film came out; it is now rereleased for the anniversary. David Fincher’s bone-splintering, soft-tissue-pulping Fight Club is the ultraviolent hipster-fantasy about a depressed white collar nerd befriended by a supercool alpha male and inducted into a secret bare-knuckle combat cult whose purpose is to restore real masculinity. It was adapted by screenwriter Jim Uhls from the uncompromisingly pessimistic novel by Chuck Palahniuk and, after a slow commercial start, became the movie that launched a million gags about all other clubs whose first rule was that you couldn’t talk about them. It is a comic meme which survived into Emma Seligman’s recent comedy Bottoms.
I was unconvinced at the time, even though being unconvinced about this critically adored film was not a respectable position – chiefly because of the notorious denunciation launched at the time by the Evening Standard’s Alexander Walker in a splenetic notice that David Fincher loved. Then, as now, I think it’s a film with a brilliant premise, a great first act, but the violence is in fact as unreal and consequence-free as a cartoon and bearing every sign of being conceived and performed by people who’ve never been in a fight in their lives. And there’s an unendurably protracted cop-out ending: an ungainly and disappointing twist, outclassed in ingenuity that same year by The Sixth Sense – even if M Night Shyamalan’s later film Split owed something to Fight Club. It really is very very long; watching it like going to an all-night movie show where the only film is Fight Club.
Yet it’s tremendously directed and performed with brio. Edward Norton is the insomniac self-hating office-worker who achieves emotional closure by fraudulently attending therapy support groups, parasitically thrilling to everyone’s emotional agony. Brad Pitt is the sinister, charismatic Tyler Durden, wearing a series of sensational outfits. Helena Bonham Carter triangulates this relationship as Marla, another fake therapy-groupie, whose cynical presence prevents Norton from enjoying the spectacle.
The mood of Fight Club is in one way a zeitgeist-time-capsule for the drifting, self-questioning late 90s, a self-indulgent reverie with hints of JG Ballard, Douglas Coupland and Bret Easton Ellis. There is indoor smoking, payphones and the hissing, fizzing, twanging sound of dialup internet. But it’s also a premonition of what was to come, starting with the horror of 9/11, which this film appears to foretell in its final sequence. The fight club itself is an obvious forerunner of men’s rights and incel-ism in decades to come, and our two hero-combatants and their followers clearly have it in their heads to Make Manhood Great Again. The film’s acid rage against consumerism, conformism and the futile aspiration of careerism still has a snap to it; the goofy slacker dialogue is funny – especially the conversations about which celebrities they’d like to fight – and Tyler’s own aphorisms can still zing: “This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.”
Fight Club was in its way also a forerunner of the phantasmagorical adventures of Charlie Kaufman and might even have played its part in preparing the way for the superhero boom, though Fight Club is DC rather than Marvel. The indulgence is way too much, but it lands some punches.
• Fight Club is in UK cinemas from 15 March.
