Summary
- Fight Club gained a cult following despite its initial box office failure, and has recently become popular among far-right groups.
- David Fincher, the director, acknowledges the film’s popularity within these groups but is confused by their idolization of the negative influence character, Tyler Durden.
- Chuck Palahniuk, the author of the novel, finds it fascinating that these groups identify with Fight Club.
David Fincher’s directorial debut Fight Club has had quite the ride. The satirical drama follows two men who form an underground fight club for men that evolves into much more. When the film premiered in 1999, it failed to meet expectations at the box office and received mixed reviews from critics. Despite that, the film gained a cult following, with many publications still analyzing the film’s cultural impacts and themes. In recent years, the film has become a favorite among far-right groups and incels (member of an online community of young men who claim to be involuntarily celibate), who relate to the movie’s unification of unsatisfied men rising against modern American culture.
In a recent interview with The Guardian, Fincher spoke about the film’s popularity within these groups:
“I’m not responsible for how people interpret things…Language evolves. Symbols evolve.”
While the filmmaker acknowledges that Fight Club has an expanding base of alt-right fans, he is confused by the idolization of Tyler Durden.
“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.” He continues: “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.”
Author Chuck Palahniuk Addresses the Far Right’s Love for Fight Club
Fight Club stars Edward Norton and Brad Pitt (as Tyler Durden), and Helena Bonham Carter, and is based on the 1996 novel of the same name by best-selling author Chuck Palahniuk. In the 2004 non-fiction book Stranger Than Fiction, Palahniuk detailed his inspiration for Fight Club (his first novel) by saying:
“[Fight Club is] less a novel than an anthology of my friends’ lives. I do have insomnia and wander with no sleep for weeks. Angry waiters I know mess with food. They shave their heads. My friend Alice makes soap. My friend Mike cuts single frames of smut into family features.”
The author has also recently spoken out on Fight Club’s resonance with the men who feel weakened by modern society’s standards. In a recent interview with Esquire promoting his new novel Not Forever, But For Now, the author laughed when questioned about the book’s far right fandom. With Fight Club, Palahniuk was more interested in what would happen if men had a version of Joy Luck Club or the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (but with violence).
It’s not the first time the author addresses Fight Club’s recent admirers. In a 2018 interview, Palahniuk said he found Fight Club‘s significance within these groups to be representative of something else:
“It’s fascinating that the group that can’t get laid is now adopting the same language. It shows how few options men have in terms of metaphors: a skimpy inventory of images. They have ‘The Matrix’ – there’s a lot of red pill, blue pill stuff – and they have ‘Fight Club.’ The only other thing is ‘Dead Poets Society,’ where men go into a cavern and say poems to each other, and they’re not going to adopt that.”
David Fincher can next be seen at the helm of The Killer, which is scheduled to be released on Netflix on November 10, 2023.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
