BREAKING THE RULES
David Fincher didn’t think Fight Club was violent enough. At least, not until he started showing it to people. “They were alternately horrified and titillated,” he tells Empire . “Depending on which side of the hallway you stopped after the screening, you were either getting, ‘I was really not expecting this and I was taken with it,’ or, ‘Oh my God, what have you done ?’”
A lot of critics took the latter view. The gleefully acerbic story of an office drone (Edward Norton’s Narrator) inspired by Arctic-cool anarchist Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) to feel through fighting, it smacked eminent noses out of joint. Legendary US critic Roger Ebert called it “the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since Death Wish”. The Evening Standard’s Alexander Walker labelled it as “anti-capitalist, anti-society, and, indeed, anti-God”. It went down like death at the 1999 Venice Film Festival. Taking their cue from the poor notices, audiences stayed home.
And yet… word spread.
The film became like a secret to be shared — perhaps because it told us not to talk about it, perhaps because it simmered with pre-millennial tension, perhaps because, beating up others and himself and grinning out sly, nihilistic aphorisms, Brad Pitt just looked really fucking cool. And it still distils the zeitgeist today. “I don’t know why we’re still talking about it,” admits Fincher. “If Chuck [Palahniuk, who wrote the novel]photographs and artwork, breaking the first two rules once again. A blown-up version of Walker’s damning review hangs on the wall — a reminder of how a consumerist satire and critique of toxic masculinity was taken, by some, as a celebration of it. And, well, a reminder that Fincher quite enjoys provoking people. “I remember fondly going to work to make something we knew people were gonna take issue with,” he says, with smile. “It was a fun act of sedition…”
