The film Fight Club came out in 1999. Upon its release, director Paul Thomas Anderson (whose film, Magnolia came out the same year) wished testicular cancer on David Fincher.
“I saw 30 minutes of it only because our trailer is playing in front of it,” Anderson said of Fight Club at the time. “And I would love to go on railing about the movie, but I’m just going to pretend as if I haven’t seen it. It’s just unbearable. I wish David Fincher testicular cancer, for all of his jokes about it, I wish him testicular fucking cancer.”
Flash forward 20 years, Fincher addressed Anderson’s spirited words about his film.
“Cancer’s rough. It’s a fucking horrible thing. As far as Paul’s quote, I get it. If you’re in a rough emotional state and you’ve just been through something major…My dad died, and it certainly made me feel different about death and suffering [pauses]. And my dad probably liked Fight Club even less than Paul did.”
I remember an article by Roger Ebert where he describes how much he loved La Dolce Vita as a young reviewer for its depiction of a glamorous, decadent Rome life. But when he re-watched it years later he realized it was a withering attack on the emptiness and vanity of that glamour.
That’s how I feel about many, MANY takes on Fight Club. On first viewing, it appears to be a disruptive, nihilistic film that takes a hammer to social conformity. Later viewers realize The Narrator is a pathological mess and wonder why they were supposed to identify with him at all. At this point, many become angry at the film. But the next level of understanding is to realize that you were never supposed to find The Narrator or Tyler Durden sympathetic characters. They wallow in misogyny, narcissistic anti-consumerism (that is, they were rebelling not because of the social and moral problems of consumerism, but because mass-produced goods didn’t make them feel special enough), and violence as the only way to resolve negative emotions. The film is the story of The Narrator’s slow realization that his solutions are even worse than the original problems and the terrifying recognition that hundreds, maybe thousands, of rudderless young idiots would happily march along with him. He ends up blowing out part of his brain to force a change. If anyone identifies with that, it’s on the viewer not the film. It is not an explicit instruction manual.
The theme — that people need a sense of purpose and meaningful connections with other people, and that if they cannot find that in their everyday life and mainstream society, the search for it can send them down some very dangerous paths — is as relevant as ever, in my opinion.
Fincher’s response to PTA is a masterclass in emotional intelligence. I guess I’m so used to today’s endless, vapid Twitter take downs that I wasn’t expecting it. David Fincher interviews always make him seem like a smart, humane guy. For whatever reason, it’s the well-adjusted guys who make the serial killer movies. Makes you wonder about the ones who direct socially responsible drama, doesn’t it? And look, if you can only make movies that can’t be misunderstood by morons, then there will never be a good movie again.
–Dagobot
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