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.
