Yahoo Movies Fight Club's complex legacy as 90s classic turns 25
David Fincher's thriller about a troubled man and his bond with the macho leader of an underground fighting movement remains as controversial as it was in 1999.
A quarter of a century ago, Fight Club hit the world like a sledgehammer to the jaw. David Fincher's grungy adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's button-pushing novel attracted very little at the box office and got a mixed response from critics. But really, was it ever going to be any other way?
The genius of Fight Club is in its inherently dislikeable tone. The world of the film is as intolerable to the audience as it is to Edward Norton's unnamed protagonist, which means we're every bit as open to the swaggering seductions of Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt at the peak of his sex symbol rise to fame) as he is.
25 years after it first split critics, Fight Club is now more divisive than ever. Its legacy has become a fight club in its own right, with some of the movie's biggest fans seemingly taking a different slant on its central ideas to what the creators intended. Often, social media discussions around "films that are a red flag for men" see Fight Club come up over and over again. How did this happen?
It's easy to see how Fight Club won this problematic audience. If you don't look too deeply, it's a movie about disaffected blokes finding solace in punching each other while also expressing rage against "the machine" through the terrorist group Project Mayhem. It's the sort of base philosophy that all manner of undesirable online communities, from the far-right to incels to the "manosphere" that birthed the likes of Andrew Tate, can flock around.
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However, this is a gross misreading of the movie. The concept of Tyler Durden is very literally spelled out as being the malign influence of the narrator's raging id. His ideology is explicitly shown to lead to death and destruction, without achieving any of the very amorphous stated aims of Project Mayhem. When the narrator realises that he himself has the power to stop Tyler, he's willing to shoot himself in the face to do so.
If your response to all of that is to nod your head and go start a fight club of your own or try to blow up a coffee shop — all things that reportedly happened in the wake of the film's release — then you probably need to watch the movie again. Tyler Durden is the villain, not the hero.
Fincher himself has been asked about the response to the film over the years. In 2023, he told The Guardian: "It’s impossible for me to imagine that people don’t understand that Tyler Durden is a negative influence. People who can’t understand that, I don’t know how to respond and I don’t know how to help them."
"I’m not responsible for how people interpret things," he further said. "We didn’t make it for them, but people will see what they’re going to see in a Norman Rockwell painting, or [Picasso’s] Guernica."
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Fight Club is at the epicentre of the age-old debate about "depiction vs. endorsement". By showing audiences the antics of Tyler Durden and his twisted political ideology, the film isn't suggesting that it agrees with them or that anybody watching should. On the contrary, Tyler is clearly presented as a bad guy responsible for manipulating the vulnerable, fractured psyche of the narrator from within.
The film very much sits as an artefact of its time. Its visual style is peak 90s grunge and the "screw the authorities" politics is very much cut from the same cloth as things like the "Attitude Era" in pro wrestling at the time. So it's no wonder that the film feels much less dangerous as a cultural product today than it did when it first steamed into cinemas on a wave of body odour and cheap lager.
What does feel dangerous is the way people have interpreted Fight Club in the years since. It has now become difficult to appreciate and admire the film without being drawn into the unpleasantness of some of its more devoted fans. In some ways, it has become a red flag.
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And that does a disservice to a film that has far more to say than it has been given credit for. 25 years after it first graced screens, it merits another chance from audiences.
The killer twist might hit less hard than it did back in 1999, but Fincher's work overflows with style and all three of the central performances — from Norton, Pitt, and Helena Bonham Carter — are among the best things those actors have ever done. Fight Club deserves to be divorced from its loudest and least intelligent fans in order that we can continue to celebrate a 90s thriller that came at the world with real bravery, bombast, and brilliance.
Fight Club is streaming in the UK on Disney+.
