BP’s Top 100 Movie Challenge #100: Fight Club, by Sarah Brinks

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8 Responses

  1. Eric Cheung says:

    I didn’t think the film was an endorsement of Tyler Durden’s philosophy. I always interpreted it to be a cautionary tale against the cult of personality, that while the problems he cites are valid (globalism has left generations adrift), his solutions are terrible. But, like Mad Men, so many have romanticized the film as some kind of plan of action. It became the thing it railed against, but I don’t think it was the fault of Palahniuk or Fincher.

  2. Caleb says:

    It’s been said before (I think Tyler and David have discussed it multiple times, along with GoodFellas) but I think the big problem with Fight Club is that fans have taken its surface themes and ideas for truth and missed any satire. You can say Fincher and co. are partly to blame for laying the style on so thick that it’s easy to get lost in the gloss and energy of it all, but to call the film misogynist is – I think – to misinterpret the film in the other direction.

  3. Juhani Kenttä says:

    I fall in the camp of thinking the execution ultimately fails but probably not for a lack of good intentions on Fincher’s part. Just judging by the results, I think it shares a similar tone-deafness to Snyder’s Watchmen adaptation, although admittedly not as egregious, which is a shame because I do believe Snyder to have been genuinely misguided whereas I’d like to give Fincher the benefit of the doubt.

  4. FictionIsntReal says:

    Your note on its take on gender reminded me of Vox Day’s essay (more about the book than the film), which claimed the homoerotocism was so overt it shouldn’t even be called subtext. Of course, he wrote that after Palahniuk had already been outed, and there’s no way to verify his claim that he’d deduced as much by the first chapter.

  5. Franco says:

    As you go through the films please keep a ranking so that at the end you’ll have your own top100.

  6. Eric says:

    I agree with the previous commenters who point out the movie is NOT sympathetic to Tyler Durden. The Narrator’s journey takes him from one extreme (consumerism and materialism) to the other (nihilism and anarchy). The fact that Tyler Durden is just another element of his personality is not a cheap “gotcha” moment; it’s a reflection of the fact that the Narrator tries to solve his problems by turning within, rather than reaching out for a human connection, as represented by Marla.

    Admittedly I haven’t seen the film in probably a decade, but even when I was in high school I think I recognized the fact that Durden was not representative of any kind of solution to society’s woes and should not be accepted as such, at least not wholesale. His philosophizing was sexy but immature and overly simplistic and Fincher counts on the audience to parse that out for themselves rather than telling them what to think.

  7. NTP says:

    So the movie isn’t that of value to you just because there is only 1 female character? Did you seem to forget that the 1 female character plays one of the most significant parts in the movie? Funnily enough, the movie is also a critique on masculinity, while you have heavily implied that the movie is “macho” and “misogynism”. The true message of the movie is heavily misunderstood, which is what also makes fight club such a piece of art of a film.

  8. Tim Gosnell says:

    This is such a horrible take lol.

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