Fight Club
Forgive me, for I am about to break the first rule of Fight Club.
David Fincher’s pitch-black comedy turned 15 last week, but sometimes it feels like no time has passed at all.
In many ways, Fight Club has proven to be an oddly prescient work. The film predated 9/11, the war on terror and everything that has followed, but it remains one of the most insightful movies about terrorism. The film’s uproarious and deeply disturbing first half captures the allure of a destructive, nihilistic worldview with an alarming amount of success.
Fight Club’s characters and their perpetual feeling of male disenfranchisement have manifested through the years as everything from terrorists to anonymous hackers. Tyler Durden’s hypermasculinity and swagger could be felt in the antics of the infamous LulzSec and, more recently, in the back half of GamerGate.
Project Mayhem, in particular, feels like a direct predecessor of Internet trolling. But instead of hosing strangers, egging cars or picking real fights, people now snipe anonymously on various forums and nether regions of the Internet. GamerGate and its disastrously misogynistic and homophobic third act could have easily been orchestrated by Durden and his merry band of Space Monkeys.
Perhaps because we continue to live in turbulent times, filled with social upheaval, economic uncertainty and a general feeling of spiritual decay, Fight Club still resonates. Maybe we are a little less materialistic than Edward Norton’s character, or maybe we’re even more so, just in different ways.
Not everything in Fight Club has weathered the years perfectly. The movie is a distinctly analog creation birthed to an increasingly digital world. Not even Chuck Palahniuk or Fincher could have predicted how radically the Internet, social media and the smartphone would change the world.
Were Norton’s character in the real world today, he’d probably lurk the dark corners of Reddit rather than haunting support groups.
Project Mayhem would probably launch denial-of-service attacks rather than blowing up buildings. As for soap, well, liposuction feels like a distinctly 1999 punchline.
These, however, are the superficial details of Fight Club. Even if you change or shuffle them around, you’d still retain the black, diseased -yet-beating heart of the film.
Fight Club was never a great piece of art, nor did it aspire to be. Instead, Fight Club was and still is a fractured and distorted mirror of ourselves, of the world as it existed in 1999 and as it does now.
