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by Chuck Palahniuk ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1996

This brilliant bit of nihilism succeeds where so many self-described transgressive novels do not: It's dangerous because...

Brutal and relentless debut fiction takes anarcho-S&M chic to a whole new level—in a creepy, dystopic, confrontational novel that's also cynically smart and sharply written.

Palahniuk's insomniac narrator, a drone who works as a product recall coordinator, spends his free time crashing support groups for the dying. But his after-hours life changes for the weirder when he hooks up with Tyler Durden, a waiter and projectionist with plans to screw up the world—he's a "guerilla terrorist of the service industry." "Project Mayhem" seems taken from a page in The Anarchist Cookbook and starts small: Durden splices subliminal scenes of porno into family films and he spits into customers' soup. Things take off, though, when he begins the fight club—a gruesome late-night sport in which men beat each other up as partial initiation into Durden's bigger scheme: a supersecret strike group to carry out his wilder ideas. Durden finances his scheme with a soap-making business that secretly steals its main ingredient—the fat sucked from liposuction. Durden's cultlike groups spread like wildfire, his followers recognizable by their open wounds and scars. Seeking oblivion and self-destruction, the leader preaches anarchist fundamentalism: "Losing all hope was freedom," and "Everything is falling apart"—all of which is just his desperate attempt to get God's attention. As the narrator begins to reject Durden's revolution, he starts to realize that the legendary lunatic is just himself, or the part of himself that takes over when he falls asleep. Though he lands in heaven, which closely resembles a psycho ward, the narrator/Durden lives on in his flourishing clubs.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-393-03976-5

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996

DYSTOPIAN FICTION | SCIENCE FICTION | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY

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New York Times Bestseller

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

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THE HOUSE IN THE CERULEAN SEA

by TJ Klune ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.

A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children.

Linus Baker loves rules, which makes him perfectly suited for his job as a midlevel bureaucrat working for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, where he investigates orphanages for children who can do things like make objects float, who have tails or feathers, and even those who are young witches. Linus clings to the notion that his job is about saving children from cruel or dangerous homes, but really he’s a cog in a government machine that treats magical children as second-class citizens. When Extremely Upper Management sends for Linus, he learns that his next assignment is a mission to an island orphanage for especially dangerous kids. He is to stay on the island for a month and write reports for Extremely Upper Management, which warns him to be especially meticulous in his observations. When he reaches the island, he meets extraordinary kids like Talia the gnome, Theodore the wyvern, and Chauncey, an amorphous blob whose parentage is unknown. The proprietor of the orphanage is a strange but charming man named Arthur, who makes it clear to Linus that he will do anything in his power to give his charges a loving home on the island. As Linus spends more time with Arthur and the kids, he starts to question a world that would shun them for being different, and he even develops romantic feelings for Arthur. Lambda Literary Award–winning author Klune ( The Art of Breathing , 2019, etc.) has a knack for creating endearing characters, and readers will grow to love Arthur and the orphans alongside Linus. Linus himself is a lovable protagonist despite his prickliness, and Klune aptly handles his evolving feelings and morals. The prose is a touch wooden in places, but fans of quirky fantasy will eat it up.

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-250-21728-8

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Tor

Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | FANTASY

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by TJ Klune

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October 15, 1999 FILM REVIEW 'Fight Club': Such a Very Long Way From Duvets to Danger Related Articles The New York Times on the Web: Current Film Video Selected Scenes and Trailer From the Film 'Fight Club' Forum Join a Discussion on Current Film By JANET MASLIN f the two current films in which buttoned-down businessmen rebel against middle-class notions of masculinity, David Fincher's savage "Fight Club" is by far the more visionary and disturbing. Where "American Beauty" hinges on the subversive allure of a rose-covered blond cheerleader, Fincher has something a good deal tougher in mind. The director of "Seven" and "The Game" for the first time finds subject matter audacious enough to suit his lightning-fast visual sophistication, and puts that style to stunningly effective use. Lurid sensationalism and computer gamesmanship left this filmmaker's earlier work looking hollow and manipulative. But the sardonic, testosterone-fueled science fiction of "Fight Club" touches a raw nerve. In a film as strange and single-mindedly conceived as "Eyes Wide Shut," Fincher's angry, diffidently witty ideas about contemporary manhood unfold. As based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk (and deftly written by Jim Uhls), it builds a huge, phantasmagorical structure around the search for lost masculine authority, and attempts to psychoanalyze an entire society in the process. Complete with an even bigger narrative whammy than the one that ends "The Sixth Sense," this film twists and turns in ways that only add up fully on the way out of the theater and might just require another viewing. Fincher uses his huge arsenal of tricks to bury little hints at what this story is really about. "Fight Club" has two central figures, the milquetoast narrator played by Edward Norton and his charismatic, raging crony played by Brad Pitt. The narrator has been driven to the edge of his sanity by a dull white-collar job, an empty fondness for material things ("I'd flip through catalogues and wonder what kind of dining set defined me as a person") and the utter absence of anything to make him feel alive. Tormented by insomnia, he finds his only relief in going to meetings of 12-step support groups, where he can at least cry. The film hurtles along so smoothly that its meaningfully bizarre touches, like Meat Loaf Aday as a testicular cancer patient with very large breasts, aren't jarring at all. The narrator finds a fellow 12-step addict in Marla, played with witchy sensuality by Helena Bonham Carter and described by the script as "the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you could stop tonguing it -- but you can't." As that suggests, Marla's grunge recklessness makes a big impression on the film's narrator, and can mostly be blamed for setting the story in motion. Soon after meeting her he is on an airplane, craving any sensation but antiseptic boredom, and he meets Pitt's Tyler Durden in the next seat. Surveying the bourgeois wimp he nicknames Ikea Boy, Tyler asks all the hard questions. Like: "Why do guys like you and I know what a duvet is?" Norton, drawn into Tyler's spell, soon forsakes his tidy ways and moves into the abandoned wreck that is ground central for Tyler. Then Tyler teaches his new roommate to fight in a nearby parking lot. The tacitly homoerotic bouts between these two men become addictive (as does sex with Marla), and their fight group expands into a secret society, all of which the film presents with the curious matter-of-factness of a dream. Somehow nobody gets hurt badly, but the fights leave frustrated, otherwise emasculated men with secret badges of not-quite-honor. "Fight Club" watches this form of escapism morph into something much more dangerous. Tyler somehow builds a bridge from the anti-materialist rhetoric of the 1960s ("It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything") into the kind of paramilitary dream project that Ayn Rand might have admired. The group's rigorous training and subversive agenda are as deeply disturbing to Norton's mild-mannered character as Tyler's original wild streak was thrilling. But even when acts of terrorism are in the offing, he can't seem to tear himself away. Like Kevin Smith's "Dogma," "Fight Club" sounds offensive from afar. If watched sufficiently mindlessly, it might be mistaken for a dangerous endorsement of totalitarian tactics and super-violent nihilism in an all-out assault on society. But this is a much less gruesome film than "Seven" and a notably more serious one. It means to explore the lure of violence in an even more dangerously regimented, dehumanized culture. That's a hard thing to illustrate this powerfully without, so to speak, stepping on a few toes. In an expertly shot and edited film spiked with clever computer-generated surprises, Fincher also benefits, of course, from marquee appeal. The teamwork of Norton and Pitt is as provocative and complex as it's meant to be. Norton, an ingenious actor, is once again trickier than he looks. Pitt struts through the film with rekindled brio and a visceral sense of purpose. He's right at home in a movie that warns against worshiping false idols. PRODUCTION NOTES 'FIGHT CLUB' Rating: "Fight Club" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes bloody fights, grisly touches, sexual situations and nudity, profanity and assorted intentional gross-out shocks, including the rendering of human fat into soap. Directed by David Fincher; written by Jim Uhls, based on the novel "Fight Club," by Chuck Palahniuk; director of photography, Jeff Cronenweth; edited by James Haygood; music by the Dust Brothers; production designer, Alex McDowell; produced by Art Linson, Cean Chaffin and Ross Grayson Bell; released by Fox 2000 Pictures. Running time: 135 minutes. Cast: Brad Pitt (Tyler Durden), Edward Norton (Narrator), Helena Bonham Carter (Marla Singer), Robert (Meat Loaf Aday) and Jared Leto (Angel Face).

Chuck Palahniuk Is Not Who You Think He Is

Twenty-six books in, the author has made a career of writing about loners, misfits, and deviants. But the man behind these controversial and transgressive fictions is full of surprises.

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Four days before I’m supposed to travel to Portland, Oregon to meet Chuck Palahniuk, we’re already plotting a murder. Multiple murders, actually. Palahniuk is texting me from a Columbia High School reunion in Burbank, Washington, from which he graduated in 1980 (it wasn’t technically his reunion but his older sister’s), and among his fellow Coyotes are the bullies who chanted mean shit at him and beat him bloody. “Several will die today,” one text reads. This was a conversation that began nine texts earlier with me saying hello, it’s the writer from Esquire , wanted to touch base , etc., and now, it’s somehow progressed to killing his childhood tormentors. Soon, Palahniuk discovers that “several are dead. I feel cheated.” His solution is, of course, obvious: “Must find and piss on their graves.”

To someone like me, who used to read his work as a twenty-something, this feels quintessentially Palahniukian: darkly funny, shamelessly macabre, and—most crucially—completely straight-faced. In Palahniuk’s fiction, twisted violence and sex occur in a matter-of-fact manner. His infamous short story “Guts,” which used to induce fainting in audience members when Palahniuk read it at events, is a vivid cautionary tale about a teenage boy sitting naked on a pool circulation pump as a means of sexual pleasure, which results in his colon being sucked out of his anus. In Beautiful You , a woman finds herself in a 50 Shades of Grey -type relationship with a megabillionaire who plans to release a line of sex toys for women and uses the protagonist as an experimental subject. In one scene, he has her insert color-coded beads into her vagina (pink) and anus (black) while they dine at a restaurant. The “orgasmic waves” she experiences are too intense, so she runs to the bathroom to pull them out, only she can’t—the beads are magnetized. As her “secretions dripped to the floor, where they’d begun to pool,” another woman has to help her by sucking out the pink bead, like “snake’s venom.”

By the time this text exchange is happening, I’ve spent the better part of a month becoming a Palahniuk completist: miring myself in his menacing diegeses, rife with rape, murder, torture, self-mutilation, suicide, and all manner of gruesome body horror. His latest, Not Forever, But For Now (releasing in early September), is a tour de force of literary debauchery, featuring some truly nasty stuff. Helping him plan the murder of his high school bullies, then, doesn’t seem strange at all. As I texted him then: “I would expect nothing less.”

Less than a week later, I’m in Portland, Oregon, I’m in the passenger seat of Palahniuk’s Prius, and I realize I have no idea where we’re going. I deferred to Palahniuk about where we would conduct the interview, and I neglect to ask as we navigate the city Palahniuk adopted as his own six days after graduating high school in 1980, the place teeming, as he wrote in Fugitives and Refugees , with “the most cracked of the crackpots.”

Chuck Palahniuk has a more significant literary oeuvre than he’s often given credit for, likely because of an unfair association with toxic masculinity, misogyny, and various other social ills typified by Tyler Durden, the impossibly intoxicating antihero at the center of Palahniuk’s breakthrough debut novel Fight Club . It’s true that the majority of his fans are young men, the kind whose dorm room walls are festooned with movie posters featuring, say, Al Pacino, Uma Thurman, and a scowling Brad Pitt clutching a bar of soap, but attempts to link Palahniuk to the recent ascent of men’s rights activists fall apart upon closer examination of the novels. It’s also true that many of his characters possess similar traits, espouse similarly nihilistic or anarchistic philosophies, and behave in similar ways as these misogynist trolls, but this only means that Palahniuk identified the disastrous consequences of enforced masculinity more accurately and earlier than everyone else. To be completely honest, I originally came to Portland to argue in favor of the Palahniuk-to-incel pipeline, but once I was disabused of that premise–first by reading the novels; then by speaking with Palahniuk–I discover something completely unexpected. What becomes clear to me during the eight and a half hours I spend with Palahniuk is that he cares about his characters—about their happiness—much more than I would have assumed, and that his primary objective as a storyteller is the emotional climax a reader can be brought to. The murder? The mayhem? The soap? These are merely his tools, but what he builds with those tools in no way reflects its construction.

Palahniuk is much more subdued in his manner than I expected. He speaks quietly, softly, with a gentleness I associate with patient teachers. His voice and demeanor contain zero trace of menace or even naughtiness. He’s dressed in an understated way, but his clothes fit impeccably, and the interior of his car is as neat as straight bourbon. I can’t envision this Palahniuk pissing on the graves of dead bullies.

At half past noon, we pull into a mostly empty parking lot for what looks like a park. Enormous fir trees are clamoring to be the first to reach the cloudless sky. Urban noise vanishes, replaced by the usual ambience of nature and that human hum we can’t fully eliminate in the “natural” spaces we design and build onto. It’s gorgeous and eerie.

“I’m taking you here to kill you,” Palahniuk says, smiling. This is said without even a joking malice, but instead like an endearment.

The National Sanctuary of our Sorrowful Mother wouldn’t be a bad place to go, honestly. Known locally as the Grotto, it’s 62 acres of towering conifers centered around a ten-story cliff-face out of which a small cavern has been created by dynamite to serve as a Roman Catholic altar, which is festooned with statues, candles, and flowers. More than a dozen rows of pews extend out from the Grotto Cave for the services that regularly occur there. At the end of the plaza, another formidable precipice looms over us, although this one’s manmade: the Chapel of Mary’s façade is tall and flat and wide, mirroring the grandeur of the nearby cliff. A path beyond the chapel, guarded by a comically ineffectual turnstile, leads to an elevator that takes you to the upper gardens and the meditation chapel and vistas of the city, which is, Palahniuk informs me, our destination. Though it’s midday on a bright and warm July Wednesday, the atmosphere is understandably solemn.

When we approach the Chapel of Mary and peer in to glimpse its mural and marble and mosaic-filled interior, I mention that I’m going to snap some photos because my visual memory is so terrible. Very politely, Palahniuk motions for me to be silent, nodding to the handful of attendees inside. He watches them with genuine affection, or at the very least deferential respect. I watch him instead.

Palahniuk is 61. He’s fit, healthy, and stylish in a way one wouldn’t necessarily associate with someone in their seventh decade, but his manner of moving about in the world—patient, deliberate, wholly aware of and attentive to the other people around him—strikes me as something acquired with age. The one other time I saw Palahniuk in real life was in Boston in 2007, when he packed the Coolidge Corner Theatre promoting his novel Rant . I didn’t speak to him that day, only sat in the audience, but he seemed, at 45, to lack some of those qualities. He thrived on that stage, the crowd orchestral to his conductor’s sway. Fans arrived, per Palahniuk’s instruction, decked out in wedding gowns and tuxes, a nod to a demolition derby-style sport called Party Crashing in Rant . It was a raucous affair, as many of Palahniuk’s events are, replete with contests, trivia, beach balls, inflatable animals, and one of the liveliest crowds I’ve ever been a part of. And Palahniuk ate it up, with an almost arrogant ease. My recollection isn’t pristine—it was sixteen years ago, after all—but the Palahniuk standing in front of me, wistfully gazing at a very different group of devotees who worship a very different leader, operates with a humble wisdom. The Grotto, these places of contemplation and reflection, suit him.

Still, it feels like a weird place to discuss a novel about two wealthy brothers who spend their time fucking each other and murdering the staff of their mansion.

Not Forever, But For Now is Palahniuk’s twentieth novel and twenty-sixth book. He’s been a part of the American literary scene for three decades and has produced some of our most fascinating fiction. When Fight Club was published in 1996, Palahniuk emerged as part of a generation of young, transgressive writers—including David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Bret Easton Ellis, A.M. Homes, Elizabeth Hurtzel, Douglas Coupland, and Irvine Welsh—whose books depicted drug addicts, pedophiles, murderers, and the sexually promiscuous with unapologetic directness. David Fincher’s 1999 adaptation of Palahniuk’s first novel catapulted him to genuine fame, allowing him to become a writer full-time after years spent working odd jobs like a mechanic or a technical writer—something for which he still expresses gratitude.

Palahniuk’s writing has pissed people off the world over, but even after all that, he hasn’t been cowed in his mission to transgress and to shock. Not Forever, But For Now is among his most disturbing novels, as it contains numerous gruesome and repugnant moments, and it features characters who make Tyler Durden look like Harvey the rabbit.

The brothers at the novel’s center are Otto and Cecil, two ambiguously aged nepo babies living a lavish life in a manor in Wales. When we first meet them, they’re watching a nature documentary about Australia, from which they glean a wholly Palahniukian lesson: a newborn joey has to crawl up its mother’s fur to reach her pouch, unassisted, and “the squirmy, pink thing must rescue itself.” Otto, the more dominant of the pair, explains to Cecil, the narrator, that sometimes a mother kangaroo will flick away one of her offspring “like a lump of nasty snot off her fingers.” She does this, Otto says, “because she hates its puny weakness,” and because “a mummy can always tell when a joey isn’t like the other joeys, why, it’s always going to be a stunted pre-male.”

As Otto and Cecil’s privileged world of affluence is unveiling, a couple of odd and discomfiting phrases appear. The brothers refer to a game called “Winnie-the-Pooh,” which turns out to be a euphemism for sexual dominance (“Will you be my daddy and chase me through the Hundred Acre Wood?”), and they use phrases like “having a go” and “having it off.” These are also sexual euphemisms, obviously, but these terms are so disturbing because they appear in reference to the brothers. As in, “We get back in the car and Otto has a go with me,” and, “Otto pushes me down on the cushions and has it off.” These brothers fuck each other… a lot. They are constantly engaged in some kind of sexual activity, so much so that there’s a recurring joke about the stench of their nursery.

Their sexual deviancy extends beyond each other, as well. In one scene, Cecil demands the nanny “bathe me front and back,” which she initially refuses to do, because, she says, he’s too old and has “all that hair down there.” Cecil insists, threatening her job. While it never explicitly states that what they’re arguing over is her pleasuring him, there’s a moment when Cecil mentions that they “once had a nanny who did it with her mouth.”

When they’re not doing all of that stuff, Otto and Cecil occupy their days by writing sexually charged letters to prison inmates in the hope that, once released, the convicts will come to their manor in search of some Winnie-the-Pooh, at which point the brothers will kill them.

They belong to a family of murderers with Bond villain-level ambitions for global control. Their grandfather hopes to mentor Otto into a successful member of their organization. He occasionally shows up to reprimand the boys for their horrid, unmanly lifestyles and to regale them with tales of his exploits. They are not ordinary contract killers, but rather forces of empire power. They orchestrate what they consider to be necessary events for the betterment of humanity. Otto and Cecil’s family is responsible for, among other major tragedies, 9/11, Kent State, and Jonestown, as well as the deaths of Princess Di, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Phil Hartman, and Sonny Bono. This devious cabal represents “great powers” who control the fate of history, and their reasons for setting these events into motion are the same as all imperial regimes: the expansion and perpetuation of power. Two significant historical moments—that the Grandfather claims are related—receive special attention in the novel, through a lengthy flashback that’s parsed out in small chunks throughout, partly because the scene succinctly lays out the modus operandi of the organization’s history-forging, but also because it contains what I now know is a deeply personal expression of Palahniuk’s arduous life. The two events are the death of Judy Garland and the Stonewall Riots.

After an elevator to the upper level, Palahniuk and I briefly take in the view of Portland from the Meditation Chapel, with its wall of windows, before finding a bench in the Peace Gardens, where Palahniuk elucidates his passion for what he calls “apostolic fiction,” where a narrator details the thoughts and exploits of a person they love, like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby . Palahniuk says, “When you're writing about a character who really admires and loves another character, it’s such a joy. Because so often with my generation, it’s just narratives of snark, where it's just always about people tearing down things. But to have a character writing about the thing that they love—that is absolutely breathtaking. To be with someone who is intelligently praising, and in that Boswell way, saying, I know this great guy, I want to record everything this great guy says, I want you to love the thing I love. Yeah. That is a joy to write.”

Palahniuk is referring to Fight Club , his first and best-known novel. The unnamed narrator so idolizes Tyler Durden because Durden was designed by the narrator himself to be an ideal, a psychological manifestation of everything he wished he would be. This is why Tyler has proven so perniciously stubborn as a hero of alienated young men. You love Tyler because the narrator loves Tyler, and in the film, every detail of Brad Pitt’s physique, style, and attitude were meticulously calibrated to make you admire him. Palahniuk also claims credit (convincingly, I think) for popularizing the pejorative word snowflake , though ironically, his initial use of the term (”you are not special, you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake” in Fight Club ) was meant as a debunking of the treatment his generation received from public education, this “all encouraging all the time” celebration of everyone’s individuality as equally special. This technique, in Palahniuk’s view, left him and many of his cohort ill-prepared for adulthood. But what right-wingers and boomers mean by snowflake is weakness: an unwillingness to confront dissent, an intolerance to disagreement, an expectation of privilege. Basically some trigger-warning safe-space wokeness bullshit. To put it another way: Palahniuk targeted the parents who raised their kids to believe in such universal uniqueness, whereas now those same parents seem to take aim at anyone foolish enough to believe them. This, to me, succinctly articulates the gap between Palahniuk’s nuanced satire and the surface-level interpretations of a certain contingent of angry, reactionary men who feel cheated out of something they assume was promised to them.

For his part, Palahniuk laughs when I bring up Fight Club ’s connection to incels. What interested him was what would happen if men had their own version of the Joy Luck Club or the Ya-Ya Sisterhood—and to him, the fact that it would be violent wasn’t even a question. “I just wanted to create this arbitrary club,” he says, because what really mattered was the escalation. “Fight Club has to become Project Mayhem. It has to become this thing that’s beyond our control, a thing you can’t reel back in.”

Not Forever, But For Now is also apostolic fiction. Cecil adores Otto; he’s always telling us how clever Otto is, how wise. Cecil, though, is quite aware of Otto’s evil. In fact, Cecil’s narration deliberately withholds information about Otto from the reader because, as he explains, “I’d rather you embrace Otto as a winning boy.” He’s so protective of his abusive brother that he cares more about creating a positive illusion than revealing the negative truth. Palahniuk chose the word “apostolic” as his name for this narrative form, even though when he defines the term in conversation, he invokes love and admiration. Apostolic, though, refers to religious discipleship—not merely love but worship, proselytization, and devotion. Apostles spread the gospels as missionaries and crusaders. An apostle is stauncher than a lover, and much less prone to doubt and nuance. Love—healthy love, at least—seeks to view its object in all its complexity, flaws and all.

Otto wants Cecil to organize his existence around his needs. “Sometimes,” Cecil tells us, late at night, “Otto stands over my bed” and warns him that, “If I held any suspicion you’d leave me, I’d put a stop to you in an instant.” Cecil is completely under Otto’s spell, a fact Palahniuk emphasizes with a tactic he has used since the beginning of his literary career. “I did the Fight Club trick,” he says, “where the narrator—his quotes are never inside quotation marks. It’s always paraphrased.” Dialogue is one of the most effective ways of communicating character, so its absence keeps someone’s true self at bay. The result is that the reader never hears the narrator when he interacts with others, giving him little definition as a character, even on the page. Cecil’s liberation, then, is tied to Otto’s destruction. Cecil can only thrive when the one he loves dies.

It’s easy to dismiss Palahniuk’s fiction as provocation for provocation’s sake, as an indulgence in decadence and debauchery, providing as much visceral pleasure (but as little artistic quality) as gritty horror movies and bloody video games. It wouldn’t be hard—I know, I’ve done it—to dismiss his novels as moody stopovers between young adult fiction and adult literature, like a reader’s goth phase. His work is dark, disturbing, and unsparingly satirical, and it’s filled with an eclectic array of information. When Palahniuk attended college at the University of Oregon, he studied journalism, which is apparent in his novels. One of his trademarks is providing fascinating facts about niche, underground subjects. How to make bombs. The logistics of pornography. The effects of drugs. The means by which Hollywood foley artists create sounds. Palahniuk lends his stories a conspiratorial verisimilitude with these brief lessons, as if nudging you and letting you in on a little-known secret.

Moreover, the novels lob savagely satirical bon mots at their targets, many of which are represented by the characters. This can lead to flimsy, stand-in cyphers who function as tools of the novelist’s subtextual aims rather than full-fledged individuals with convincing agency. Palahniuk’s characters, as he ages, have become more and more human, and their growth more central to the arc. His previous novel, The Invention of Sound , features two protagonists mired in a wild narrative involving missing children, recorded murders, and Hollywood corruption; the finale is a scene of harrowing violence between these two characters. A contextless description of this ending would not do it justice, as what’s happening underneath the violence is an incredibly moving and meaningful conclusion to both characters’ stories. The pieces are disturbing, but the whole is heartbreaking. As a novelist, pathos is now Palahniuk’s primary intent.

I ask him if he thinks readers or critics recognize the emotional component of his novels.

“I don’t think 99% of them do,” he says, “And it’s painful. I don’t blame them for not wanting to go there.”

There is the true depths of a character’s catharsis, a confrontation with their deep, troubled selves. One scene in Not Forever, But For Now involves Otto and Cecil hunting around for “shy, blushing, effete types we can coerce into giving a ride.” They find a guileless boy named Digby, who despite Otto’s unambiguous remarks remains unaware of their intentions. When Cecil spots him, he assesses his appearance:

The lad looks to be so alone that he’ll do human toilet and tell himself this was love, why, he’ll do anything we ask just so long as he’s not ignored and left to stand there alone. He’s a baby animal so unwanted he’ll do rusty trombone and risk his life—risk catching hepatitis and AIDS—to ward off another moment of being some pre-male nobody set under a bus-stop light in the middle of cold nowhere.

When Palahniuk talks about this moment, I sense a real note of resignation in his voice. “That Digby scene is the most human scene I’ve ever written,” he says. “But nobody will appreciate that. Nobody will appreciate the pathos of that scene, because they’ll fix on the sort of dirtiness of it.”

He’s hurt. It hurts him that people rarely grasp the emotional punch of his writing, that they aren’t more moved by the grounded feelings and earned catharses of his characters. Readers don’t see how much his own personal anguish and history informs his fiction. But they can’t. They aren’t privy to enough of Palahniuk’s life to make the connections. They’re understandably distracted by the heightened plots and grotesque imagery and lurid themes. The emotions are there, certainly, but sometimes the visceral intensity overpowers the soulful underpinnings.

In an essay in Stranger Than Fiction , Palahniuk writes that 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.” Lullaby was composed in the aftermath of a personal tragedy, but it would be impossible to discern this from the novel’s plot. In 1999, Palahniuk’s father was murdered, along with a woman he was seeing, by the woman’s ex-boyfriend. During the killer’s trial, Palahniuk struggled over whether they should seek the death penalty, ultimately writing a letter recommending a death sentence. Lullaby is about a culling song that ends the life of anyone who hears it; words that kill.

Palahniuk crafts his art with such personal investment and hard-won wisdom. He immortalizes his friends and navigates his grief, incorporating private pain and experience. And like many artists, he struggles to accept a fundamental disparity in presenting work: that what the art the world sees speaks only to a fraction of the struggle required to complete it, meaning they necessarily underestimate its ingenuity and emotional complexity.

But Not Forever, But For Now contains some of Palahniuk’s most personal expressions of himself, which brings us back to Judy Garland and the Stonewall Riots.

For the past 30 years—since before he’d ever published anything—Palahniuk has been with his husband Mike. They live on a large property outside of Portland, where they’ve lived for the better part of two decades. Palahniuk is protective of Mike and doesn’t like him being written about all that much, so I only want to characterize Mike the way Palahniuk does, as I did not meet or speak with Mike.

Mike mostly doesn’t read Palahniuk’s books (although he did read and was moved by Lullaby ), but he acts as Palahniuk’s sounding board for ideas. “Mike is really smart in terms of cultural precedent,” Palahniuk says, “and he can say, ‘No, that’s too much like this thing a million years ago.’ Because God forbid you get forty pages into something and realize, oh, that was a Simpsons episode.” But if Palahniuk can get Mike to smile, “that little smile like, you bastard, don’t do that ,” or, even better, if he can get him to laugh, “that’s the ultimate green light.”

The nefarious firm of murderers in Not Forever, But For Now must kill Judy Garland, the Grandfather explains to her on June 22, 1969, so that the Stonewall Riots will take place. This is a regularly recurring (and most certainly apocryphal) story about Stonewall. The idea is that the funeral of gay icon Judy Garland, which took place the same night as the riots, set a gloomy mood to the evening and thus contributed to or perhaps even caused the events that unfolded. It probably originated with Charles Kaiser’s 1997 book The Gay Metropolis , but historians don’t grant the theory much credence. In her book The Gay Revolution , Lillian Faderman spends four pages considering, via interviewees, the numerous factors that contributed to the events, and Garland isn’t mentioned at all. But Palahniuk is using this myth more in the sense that Christopher Bram invokes in his book on gay writers, Eminent Outlaws : “People want to connect the death of Garland with the riots, but no mourners appear to have been present at Stonewall. The juxtaposition is only a symbolic coincidence (yet it’s hard to say exactly what it symbolizes).” Others, like activist Bob Kohler, who was present at Stonewall, totally objected to the notion, “because it trivializes the whole thing.”

But it’s more than that. The Grandfather tells Judy Garland why on earth the powers that be would want something like the Stonewall riots to occur, and it goes something like this: “the population explosion was planned” by this ruling cabal because they “needed more humans to constantly vacuum clean the environment.” These expendable hordes will “act as traps to collect and store really harmful germs and viruses such as HIV and hepatitis, thus making those bugs less of a threat to better humans.” But “a slave class,” as Grandfather refers to them, must be controlled so that they don’t take over. Lucky for Grandfather’s firm, “a really ripping science-based solution presented itself.” That is, “the mid-century explosion of styrene and isoprene and vinyl chloride” from the plastics industry caused a birthrate spike of “fey, feeble, polyurethan-defected things.” Gay men is what he means, though he never refers to them that way. Instead it's “PCB-poisoned pre-males” or “this plastics-infused population of eunuchs.” If a growing community of excluded and ostracized people were to discover the truth—that not only have carcinogenic compounds produced “deviant, plastics-inspired impulses,” but that these impulses will deny them “traditional means of advancement,” so that they will “accrue wealth with no offspring”—they might understandably revolt, but they would most certainly sue. At first, Grandfather’s firm decided to employ shame to keep these “wispy, lispy” “bred-to die drones” from acknowledging their sexuality, let alone investigating its possible causes. This worked for a while, but a better solution was needed.

Hence Stonewall. Stonewall and the birth of the gay rights movement would shift the narrative “from shame to pride.” Now, these “tight-pants pre-males” will “embrace their engineered disabilities as badges of honor,” which will, according to Grandfather, result in the same unwillingness to find a cause, or even to consider the idea that their sexuality has a cause, thereby keeping them from discovering the truth and bringing down the global economy.

These are all, from Judy Garland on down, offensive ways to depict gay men and the legacy of Stonewall. Not that it’s any more objectionable than a lot of the stuff in Palahniuk’s fiction, but this relates to an aspect of his life he isn’t very public about, so I was curious what he had to say about this part of the novel.

“God, it’s going to be tough to articulate this,” he says. “Being same-sex-attracted in the tiny town I grew up in was really a dangerous thing. And when I came out to my mother, she said, ‘Don’t tell anybody. Don’t tell anybody, please. They will kill you.’ And I never came out to my father. Then he was murdered in ‘99. So that was always a huge incomplete thing.”

“How old were you when you came out to your mother?” I ask.

“I was sixteen,” he says. He repeats: “And she said, ‘Don’t tell anybody, because they will kill you.’ They will kill you. Because when she was a teenager, somebody in the town was suspected of being homosexual, and his house was burned down, and he was driven out of town. It was such a horrible ordeal that she was terrified it would happen to me.

“And then I age into this culture,” he continues, “where if you aren’t completely out in every aspect of your public life and personal life, then you’re somehow damaged and shameful and raw. So within my lifetime I’m supposed to transition from being a person that has really created this whole guardedness not just for my own protection, but for the protection of the people I love and for my family who are still in that small town. Then I’m expected to automatically step out of that into a kind of joyous, flag-waving outness that is completely at odds with the entire way I’ve been raised, where that was my shell and my armor. You don’t just give that up. You don’t give that up overnight. And people say if you don’t give that up overnight, then you’re self-hating, all these wrong things. So I’m fucked either way. I’m just trying to be one person and live a life. And I’m sorry: I’m just not ready to be completely out and just put it all out there.”

I anticipated Palahniuk citing the corporate commodification of Pride or the conservative backlash that came with it—but I didn’t expect such a personally anguished reason. Then I remember the bullies from high school that he and I plotted to kill, the ones who chanted “Pal-ah-niuk! Suck my dick!” at him while they assaulted him. I think too of the narrator of Fight Club in relation to Tyler Durden—the meek, closeted drone versus the uninhibited, flamboyant hero. I think of the disdain Otto and Cecil have for the weak joeys, how the language they use is not theirs but the Grandfather’s, who has taught them to hate themselves. And I recall, too, how Palahniuk’s fictional milieu tends towards loners who resent the legacy they were born into, who seek out deviant pleasure from disreputable sources, who are made to feel guilty for something they didn’t choose. I see Palahniuk’s anger at all that was withheld from him in his youth that now exists in plentitude. Even though those things no longer mean what they might have to him at sixteen, he’s now expected to be grateful for them. He’s no longer allowed to be afraid.

They will kill you .

Now it’s no surprise at all that Palahniuk cares so deeply for his twisted creations—who else is going to love them? Sure, they’re thieves and con artists and cheats, they’re druggies and sex addicts and adrenaline junkies, and they’re murderers and rapists and villains—but Palahniuk’s novels serve as a haven for them to be their true, deviant selves, because he was never given one himself. These extremist misfits are his life’s work; not the novels, or the over-the-top stories, or the abrasive humor and the controversial satire. It’s Cecil and Mitzi and Madison and Carl and Pygmy and Tender and Joe’s Raging Bile Duct. In their horrific, transgressive, and misunderstood behavior, these outcasts act in his stead to embrace a selfhood he wasn’t allowed, arrive at a catharsis he never experienced, or get retribution on enemies he could only joke about. Like any great novelist, Palahniuk adores his darlings; it’s just that his darlings kill.

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Fight Club Spoke to Me

Twenty-five years later, a novel that shouldn’t have resonated still does..

A few months ago, a friend and I were hanging out beside an abandoned baseball field reflecting on the hypermasculine activities we loved before we came out. I, for instance, loved — “loved” — paintball and Maglites and Anna Nicole Smith, and I continue to fawn over unhinged action movies, those of the Cruise and Cage variety. I obsessed over these things partly to hide my ongoing doubt about my assigned gender identity. My strategy was simple: Like something masculine coded, convince everyone I was a boy, including myself. As a teenager, I loved the novels of Chuck Palahniuk, especially Fight Club , the essential book about the nihilistic rage of aimless men. That made perfect sense to my friend but not for the reasons I expected. “I knew so many so many trans people who loved Fight Club before they came out,” she said, so nonchalant I felt as if I should have already known. After a few weeks’ obsessing over her comment, I bought a new copy of the novel. I had donated my original a decade ago.

Perhaps there’s a simple explanation for trans people loving Fight Club : A lot of people loved Fight Club . But I’m convinced there’s a deeper, less immediate reason. Transformation plays a vital role in the novel. The men who join Fight Club seek to eradicate everything superficially male about their lives — albeit through hypermasculine tactics — and the person you see in Fight Club, the narrator states, “is not who they are in the real world.” Fight Club does two things very well. It captures the colicky malaise of men, and it pursues a truth that is hard to confront: We would like to be someone else. Before I came out as trans, this was not a truth I could avoid.

It has been 25 years since the publication of Fight Club , and its impact remains easy to spot: Fight Club chapters have sprouted up across the world over that time, academics have debated the novel at conferences and performed interpretive dances, and you’ve probably heard someone say “The First Rule of [blank] is don’t talk about [blank]” more times than you care to remember. Only eight months ago, the U.S. faced an attack on the Capitol building led mostly by angry white men looking to reappoint their leader to office. Derailing the democratic process is a fitting task for Project Mayhem, the cult that evolves out of Fight Club.

I first came to Fight Club the way many people did: through the movie. The summer I turned 12, my older cousins named all their video-game characters Tyler Durden. I was eager to get the reference — they refused to explain it to me — so I ordered the film through my mom’s satellite subscription. It did not instill in me a desire to fight or become a Real Man. The literal physics of the final gunshot confused me. How could someone kill his persona by shooting himself in the mouth? I looked to my cousins for answers. They insisted the movie was merely too smart for me.

Fight Club reentered my life in high school when I enrolled in a class called “Filming the Novel” — it was the hottest (easiest) course in school. The semester consisted of reading novels, then watching the adaptations before taking quizzes noting the differences between the films and the books.

In high school, I spent my afternoons at Borders listening to sample tracks from indie bands and splurging on Wes Anderson DVDs. The literature section, however, seemed like a threateningly feminine space — my best friend was a girl, and she read all the time — but Fight Club gave me an excuse to drift among the book aisles, flipping through the opening chapters of Palahniuk’s Choke and Survivor before testing out other books that had been adapted into movies: Alex Garland’s The Beach , Bret Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction and American Psycho . In Palahniuk’s books, nothing ever went unsaid. Every purile and wretched idea seemed to make it onto the page. As a teenager fenced in by curfews and homework and groundings, I was enamored of anything that flouted social conventions, and as a pretentious teenager, I loved finding these ideas in novels. You might expect me to say I was drawn to Invisible Monsters , Palahniuk’s novel about trans fashion models; after reading the flap copy, though, I avoided the book. I feared what reading it might say about me. Just the sight of it made my stomach tighten with shame.

In college, I decided to become a Serious Writer and abandoned Palahniuk. As I fell for the work of Mavis Gallant and Deborah Eisenberg and James Baldwin and others, my love for novels like Fight Club embarrassed me. How could something so pulpy and corny spur my love of reading? But I’ve come to accept that we rarely get to choose what speaks to us on a subcutaneous, languageless level and that hiding my love for the novel meant hiding something essential about me. Since childhood, I had been adept at hiding essential parts of myself, fearing friends and family and partners would abandon me if they knew who I was. And who was I? A writer who loved pulpy Palahniuk novels. A Ph.D. student who skipped class to watch basketball games. A nonbinary person pretending I was a man.

While writing my novel, The Atmospherians , I began to accept that I could no longer hide. Over the first few drafts, I was living in Houston, married and assumed cis, but on the rare weekends I spent on my own, I would toss on dresses while revising scenes in “an attempt to understand” Sasha, the female narrator of the book. At least, that’s what I would have told my wife if she came home or if a neighbor spied me through the windows. But I knew why I was wearing the dresses. I didn’t want to understand Sasha. I wanted to be myself.

My novel is about a pair of friends, Sasha and Dyson, who create a cult to reform problematic men. When I started the book, I set out to imagine a less destructive form of masculinity, to turn Fight Club on its head. Palahniuk’s vision of masculinity suggests that an authentic man — the true man underneath the bourgeois facade — can emerge through violence and self-sacrifice. I wanted to believe in the opposite, that, through writing, I could create a version of masculinity a man would want to inhabit. But my problem was never my style of manhood or that I hadn’t yet become the right type of man; it was that people assumed I was male and that I encouraged this out of convenience and fear. As I revised my novel, I became less interested in reimagining masculinity than in dropping my performance of manhood. My excuse — that I dressed femme to understand Sasha — became too taxing to harbor. Seven months before I finished the book, I came out to my partner and loved ones as trans.

I did not set out to write a trans novel, and many readers would say that I haven’t. My book does not center trans characters — though some have read Dyson’s childhood as that of a closeted trans woman — and in terms of representation, it has little in common with novels like Detransition, Baby and Summer Fun and Confessions of the Fox and Future Feeling . But the novel unconsciously expresses my desire to escape the gender binary. In The Atmospherians , characters suffer because people in their lives have imposed strict gender expectations upon them. That gender is a violent performance is hardly an original concept. See: Butler, Judith. But as Jeanne Thornton, author of Summer Fun , told me recently, it was obvious to her that the book was “ fucking trans ” only a few chapters in. Another trans reader described the novel as “ooz[ing] dysphoria.”

Fight Club also oozes dysphoria. The hypermasculine aspects of the novel haven’t vanished since I read it at 17. There remains something unnervingly fratty in both the tone and the plot. Men raised by women who are tired of discussing their feelings come together through violence and terrorism. Palahniuk’s instructions for building bombs and rendering soap and deflecting class-action lawsuits all give off — I’m sorry — a mansplain-y vibe. The members of Project Mayhem are encouraged to buy guns. Nothing says “man” like a gun.

However, as I reread Fight Club this summer, the narrator’s longing for a more authentic life spoke to my lifelong gender dysphoria. I too harbored a secret; I presided over a club of one that I refused to ever discuss. Who I was when I wore dresses was not the person who entered the world to teach or grab drinks.

Twenty-five years after the novel’s publication, we continue breaking the first rule of Fight Club. That’s not because the book expertly captures the nihilistic resentment of being a man or because it is cryptically trans. Fight Club takes for granted an inexhaustible fear of modern life: We are not who we present to the world. In the book, this fear draws the narrator toward gruesome extremes from which he cannot recover. In my own life, this fear helped me embrace the person I wished to become. Over the past year, I have, gradually, found a Durden-esque confidence wearing the types of dresses the narrator’s love interest, Marla Singer, might steal from a laundromat. For the first time in my life, who I am for the world aligns with the person I once refused to discuss.

• first person
• the first rule

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Everyone Misunderstands the Point of Fight Club

Rebecca renner on the forgotten anti-capitalist message of an unjustly vilified work.

“The first rule about fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.”

“The second rule about fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.”

But the most important rule of fight club is: Fuck the rules.

One hot summer night in 1997, David Fincher caught Brad Pitt on the street below Pitt’s Manhattan apartment. Pitt was returning after a long day filming Meet Joe Black , an odd movie where Pitt plays the titular peanut-butter-obsessed embodiment of death. Now Fincher had a new concept for Pitt to embody: Tyler Durden, who is rule breaking, personified.

When Fincher handed him the script for Fight Club that night, he read it and related to it—not to the chaos or destruction, but to the existential dread of having everything you’ve been told to want and still feeling empty.

Pitt had already played some peculiar roles, including a cop in Fincher’s deadly-sins-inspired Seven. But it’s like fans glossed over the content of his movies. He had a reputation for being a pretty boy, an empty-headed heartthrob. He was dating Jennifer Anniston, America’s girl next door, and it seemed like his whole life was coming together.

“I’m the guy who’s got everything,” he said in an interview with Rolling Stone in 1999, the year the movie was released in theaters. “But I’m telling you, once you get everything, then you’re just left with yourself. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: It doesn’t help you sleep any better, and you don’t wake up any better because of it.”

Meanwhile, Edward Norton, who would go on to play the book’s nameless narrator (who fans sometimes call Jack), devoured the book in one night. Unlike Pitt, Norton zeroed in on the story’s black humor.

“The book was so sardonic and hilarious in observing the vicissitudes of Gen-X/Gen-Y’s nervous anticipation of what the world was becoming—and what we were expected to buy into,” Norton said, according to Best. Movie. Year. Ever ., a book by Brian Raftery.

In interviews, Fincher was on the same page as Norton: he said he was making a satire. While I’m not sure anyone actually comes away from it laughing, what Fincher did do is manage to capture the disaffected Gen X essence of the novel, the iconoclastic ethos that has been enthralling die-hard fans like me for 20 years.

In the movie, Durden and the narrator are opposites; the narrator is an office drone who wears forgettable suits, whose scenes are cast in somnolent shades of blue, while Durden is flashy, marked by the color red, and as tan and swaggering as the narrator is sallow and thin. They first meet one night at a scuzzy bar. Later, in the parking lot, Durden delivers the line that wakes up the narrator: “ I want you to hit me as hard as you can .” From there, their lives are connected. The narrator starts sleeping at Durden’s ramshackle house near the paper mill and going to Fight Club, a secretive, underground bare-knuckle boxing club that is strangely like the support groups the narrator used to attend, with more blood and sweat.

Officially, you’re not supposed to talk about fight club. But rules are made to be broken when you’re an anarchist like Durden who makes soap from stolen liposuction fat. Without broken rules, there would be no recruitment, which Durden needs to scale up his club of disaffected men into Project Mayhem, a group of anarchists who blindly follow Durden into chaos.

During filming, Fincher, Norton, and Pitt would hang out, drinking Mountain Dew, playing Nerf basketball and, “riffing on the film’s numerous bull’s-eyes: masculinity, consumerism, their aggravating elders,” according to Best. Movie. Year. Ever . That ranting inspired what would become some of the movie’s most famous lines, like: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate, so we can buy shit we don’t need. We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we’ll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won’t.”

Project Mayhem sets its sights on destruction. Sure, it’s literal anarchy for a while, but after that, it has a purpose: Durden wants to blow up the credit card companies, undo the American Dream, and set everyone free from their debt.

In Fincher’s vison, the devil truly is in the details. The movie is rife with Easter eggs, including cigarette burns and sudden phallic flashes that are often too quick to see.

Fincher watched UFC fights to study the blood and the movement of broken bodies. Norton and Pitt took tae kwon do—and they really learned to make soap. Cinematographers played up the grit with cheap lighting. Designers created sets with holes, smoke, and leaks, making the grungy, dripping, shadowy, disgusting places that seem like the grossest parts of our own subconscious rendered on the screen. Combined with the fractured cinematic techniques, the flashbacks, spliced-in images and imagined scenes, the film feels like a slow descent into madness, a fever dream with Durden at the wheel.

For a rallying cry against capitalism, Fight Club had appropriately humble beginnings. Chuck Palahniuk wrote the novel in snippets while on the job at a truck manufacturer. The meager first printing sold just under 5,000 copies. Even optioning the movie was a steal, at about $10,000.

Things didn’t get much better after the movie was released. Fight Club was a flop at the box office. People didn’t want to see it, and it was panned by most critics.

But other people got it. Millions of other people. It just took us a while.

Fight Club came to DVD in 2000, and in the decade that followed, it sold more than six million copies. I bought one of them. I watched it and re-watched it.

In 2007, a year deep in the heart of the recession, I was a senior in high school. My dad had canceled our cable package so we’d still have some crumbs left to buy books, including this one. I read it sitting on our lawn within view of no less than eight for-sale signs; a third of our neighbors’ houses had been foreclosed.

There was a gaping hole where the American Dream was supposed to be. While my dad and I were eating one-dollar-a-box pasta for dinner in a house with almost no furniture, in school, I was studying American literature. The books we read— The Great Gatsby , Death of a Salesman —said the Dream was broken. But it was Fight Club that showed me the Dream was a lie in the first place , and the people who shilled for it were all selling something.

So I didn’t understand why it seemed like I was the only one of my friends who loved it. Not only that: loving Fight Club made me weird. The only other people who liked it were guys, but the more I talked to them about it, the more it seemed like we were watching two totally different movies.

Most of them were dazzled by the violence, the gross-out motifs, or Brad Pitt’s low body fat percentage. They thought the story was about how men should be able to take out their aggression however and whenever they want. To them, Fight Club wasn’t anti-capitalist; instead, it catered to their entitlement.

“In the decade and a half or so after its release and reception as a cult classic,  Fight Club has been embraced by the loose collection of radical online male communities (known as the ‘manosphere’) as a kind of gospel text,” Paulie Doyle wrote for Vice . “The manosphere’s affinity for  Fight Club stems from a common central, biologically deterministic claim: Men are naturally predisposed to being violent, dominant hunter gatherers, who, having found themselves domesticated by modern civilization, are now in a state of crisis.”

The “manosphere” thinks Fight Club is telling us we need to reprogram ourselves. The weird thing is they’re half right, but it’s like they’ve all watched the movie on mute.

The problem in their logic comes when they want to strip away the consumerist programming Fight Club is so against, and replace it with more programming in the form of old-fashioned gender roles, destructive caricatures of masculinity, and patriarchal privilege.

“While both the manosphere and  Fight Club  believe that a lack of ‘heroic’ roles for men in society has caused a generalized male malaise,” Doyle writes, “these online communities add one crucial, misogynist caveat: Women are the ones to blame, and they need to be brought back in line to solve the problem.”

Instead of consumerist culture, MRA Fight Club fanboys want power, silent women, and—wait for it—the American Dream, just by another name. In other words, they’re a bunch of rule-followers trying to remake the world in the way they’ve always been told it should be.

That kind of ethos is completely against the point of Fight Club , which recognizes that the patriarchy hurts men as well as the rest of us. The patriarchal establishments that make up our country also created the American Dream; they told us what we should want and gave us the (often quite rigged) rules of how to get it. That’s what people latch onto in the book and the movie: the repression and a hyper-masculine way of expressing anger against it.

Fight Club ’s real philosophy: fuck the rules. The Dream isn’t worth the struggle, our freedom, our souls, or the time we have on this earth. Be who you are, whether that looks like traditional masculinity or not. Don’t forget one of the most important characters in the movie has breasts. “His name was Robert Paulson.”

If this story was happening today, Project Mayhem would be rounding up incels and turning them into anti-capitalist freedom fighters, men who try to destroy the patriarchy instead of bending to its will and lining its pockets.

The movie has a lot of added flourishes and details, of course, that aren’t in the book. But the book has something the movie doesn’t, and it clears things up a little: In the end, the narrator meets God.

I’ve met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, “Why?”

Why did I cause so much pain?

Didn’t I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness?

Can’t I see how we’re all manifestations of love?

I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God’s got this all wrong.

We are not special.

We are not crap or trash, either.

We just are.

We just are, and what happens just happens.

And God says, “No, that’s not right.”

Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can’t teach God anything.

Maybe this isn’t God. Maybe the narrator’s in a psych ward. It’s Fight Club. Why can’t it be both?

The real lesson, regardless, isn’t about how to be a hypermasculine bro or Übermensch hero. It’s that the world doesn’t owe you shit. So stop listening to gods, fathers, and advertising agencies; be yourself, and you’ll be free. Fuck the rules.

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Chuck Palahniuk on His New Serial Killer Novel and the One Part He Didn’t Like in the ‘Fight Club’ Movie

By William Earl

William Earl

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Chuck Palahniuk ‘s just-released 20th novel, “ Not Forever, But For Now ,” is dark and twisted, even for him. The author of “Fight Club” and “Choke” profiles two Welch brothers named Otto and Cecil, who squander their days away in a mansion performing sexual acts on each other and both committing and plotting murder. Yet their grandfather hopes to recruit them to the family business of changing the course of history through committing atrocities like the death of Princess Diana and 9/11. Palahniuk spoke to Variety about the subversive ideas he turns into books, censorship in the United States and the one thing he didn’t love from the film adaptation of “Fight Club.”

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I never want to be overtly political, but in this case, I wanted to really look at empire and whether the next generation is going to be willing to take on the kind of mass slaughter and assassination that keeps empire in place. So you’ve got these two little boys: They’ll kill the servants, but will they go out in the world and kill huge numbers of people just to keep that crenelated house over their heads?

How did you select the real world events that Otto and Cecil’s family is responsible for?

The very first one that gave me the idea was I was driving through Burbank to an appointment in December and passing somebody’s front yard. I saw this enormous Christmas display of wise men and sheep and shepherds and everything. It was the blow up kind, but the blowers weren’t working. So they were all just lying there on the lawn, and my first thought really was that is exactly what Jonestown looked like. And the parallel was so perfect in my mind that that’s where I started from.

Your books have so many indelible images that are shocking. When you’re writing, do you tend to think of the characters first, or the concept, or do you have visual flashes?

Why do you think your work lends itself to having such a loyal fan base?

Boy, that’s a big question with a lot of speculation. It might be that that my books tend to go to the scariest, darkest places that most other kind of mass-tested material does not. Everything on Netflix has to reach such a huge audience. But my books are gonna give people a darker journey than something that’s been test marketed in a million different screening rooms.

As someone whose books have been banned many times through the years, do you feel we’re in the middle of a moment where a loud minority are calling for more bannings, or rather we’re at a cultural downswing where this could be the new normal?

Since 9/11, people have not gone near transgressive material, publishers would not touch it. So this kind of voluntary ban or cultural ban started September 12th, 2001. So maybe we’re seeing the worst of it now, and maybe it’s actually getting better.

What do you like to read personally? Do you tend to be on the more transgressive side or do you totally zag and have comfort food?

In this case I wanted to read a bunch of cozy mysteries, those sort of English mysteries where somebody is butchered and a cat solves the crime, or Miss Marple solves the crimes. I read a bunch and then I wanted to adopt all the tropes and use them for something very, very dark. But normally I just read short story collections because it gives me such a little taste of so many different writers and I’m not committed for 800 pages.

Were there any parts in the “Fight Club” movie adaptation that you didn’t understand at first, or that surprised you?

I wasn’t a big fan of the ticking bomb, that counting down clock near the end. And [screenwriter] Jim Uhls stuck it in because there’s obviously such a trope, and I’ve grown to accept that it is a trope.

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Ten years after its release, there are still plenty of people who will not get David Fincher 's " Fight Club " because they refuse to see what is in front of their eyes. They think it's about a cult of men who get together to punch each other, which is like saying " Citizen Kane " is about a sled. Fundamentally, it's an uncannily accurate depiction of depression and delusion -- capturing a uniquely (post-?)modern strain of anomie to which perhaps older baby boomers and their seniors find it difficult to connect because it's beyond their frame of reference. (I don't know -- that's just a hunch.)

"People get scared, not just of violence and mortality, but viewers are terrified of how they can no longer relate to the evolving culture," "Fight Club" author Chuck Palahniuk told Dennis Lim recently in the New York Times:

Some older audiences prefer darker material in conventional forms; they "really truly want nothing more than to watch Hilary Swank strive and suffer and eventually die -- beaten to a pulp, riddled with cancer, or smashed in a plane crash."

In that Times piece, Lim dubbed "Fight Club" "the defining cult movie of our time."

Back in 1999, I described it as "a grim fairy tale for adults, a consumerist revenge fantasy, a portrait of a disintegrating personality, and, for all its hyper-active stylization, an astonishingly vivid portrait of the berserk materialist wasteland in which (like it or not) billions of city dwellers live today." (It can also be seen, in retrospect, as a prescient 9/11 nightmare.)

Also from Lim's article:

"The critical reaction was polarized," said Edward Norton , who plays the film's nameless narrator, "but the negative half of that was as vituperative as anything I've ever been a part of." In one of the more apoplectic slams, Rex Reed, writing in The New York Observer , called it "a film without a single redeeming quality, which may have to find its audience in hell." More than one critic condemned the movie as an incitement to violence; several likened it to fascist propaganda. ("It resurrects the Führer principle," one British critic declared.) On her talk show an appalled Rosie O'Donnell implored viewers not to see the movie and, for good measure, gave away its big twist.

And director David Fincher picked up on something I noticed when the film was first released: that "women picked up on the humor faster." Perhaps they understood certain inherent ironies about male behavior (or consumer capitalism?) that were too close to some men for them to see themselves. (Not unlike ''Jack'' and Tyler.)

It's amazing to think that a movie that dive-bombed at the box office, that Hollywood executives found so threatening some considered it unreleasable,¹ that so many critics beat up so viciously (the subject of my article here ) could be considered such an important and influential film only ten years later.

My take on the movie is condensed into a few minutes in the above clip. I see it as a classic romantic comedy, a late-20th-century love story in the anarchic spirit of "Bringing Up Baby."² To quote Lim's piece again:

Reached by e-mail, [novelist Chuck] Palahniuk went further and called the film "the best date flick ever." "The 'Fight Club' generation is the first generation to whom sex and death seem synonymous," he said, pointing out that the "meet-cute" between the characters played by Mr. Norton and Helena Bonham Carter occurs in a support group for the terminally ill. Having grown up with an awareness of AIDS, younger readers and viewers, he added, "could identify with the implied marriage of sex and death; and once that fear was acknowledged those people could move forward and risk finding romantic love."

Or as Norton himself pithily observed in the DVD commentary, it's the story of a guy who had to destroy the world so he could have a relationship with a woman. Does modern love require anything less?

(Finding and reposting many video essays lost when iKlipz went under. The one above was originally published here .)

¹ From producer Art Linson's book, " What Just Happened?: Bitter Hollywood Tales from the Front Line ":

What I hadn't anticipated was the dramatic response from those who were uncomfortable with it. They almost wanted to punish those responsible for this "heinous" act. I remember a couple months after the picture was released, I ran into Robbie Friedman, a high-ranking executive at Paramount Pictures, and a friend of mine. All he could do was shake his head. "How could you," he asked. "Huh?" I was about to start with "Don't blame us producers, we're just the monkeys that do th dishes," or better yet, the more confrontational approach, "You stupid bastard, it's a brilliant movie and anyways, you must admit it's darkly funny," but by that time I'd already been down that road too many times.

² One film ends with the lovers holding hands and the collapse of a dinosaur skeleton, the death of the male protagonist's past life. The newer film ends with the lovers holding hands and the collapse of skyscraper skeletons, the death of the male protagonist's past life.

"Fight Club" has just been released in a 10th Anniversary "You Are Not Special" Edition

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Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk | Book Review

“At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.”

This book follows a disillusioned office worker and a charismatic soap salesman who form an underground fight club that evolves into a violent anarchist movement.

At the heart of the novel is the relationship between the narrator and Tyler Durden, a charismatic and mysterious figure who becomes the leader of an underground fight club. Their relationship is complicated and fraught with tension, and it ultimately leads to a shocking and unforgettable conclusion.

This was a very dark and provocative book. The language used is sometimes graphic and vulgar, as the author definitely does not shy away from depicting violence and other disturbing imagery. I thought the author's writing style did well in conveying the nihilistic worldview of the characters, but there were times when I felt withdrawn from the story, as I didn't like the execution of the multiple flashbacks and shifts in time. It felt too confusing, which I suppose was done on purpose, as it does add to the unsettling and disorienting atmosphere of the story. Nonetheless, I think this atmosphere could still have been achieved with a more clear and straightforward writing style.

I can see why Fight Club is such a popular novel. It is an engaging and very unforgettable story which explores important themes of masculinity, consumerism, and identity.

I read this book as part of my Top 100 Books of All Time reading challenge.

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Book review: ‘Fight Club’ by Chuck Palahniuk

(contains spoilers. duh it’s 24 years old).

This book review was written prior to this website transitioning to AI-written reviews by Buddy the BookBot. This review is the opinions of Kirstie, the human.

Alright, alright – so I’m a huge fan of Chuck Palahniuk and I’ve never read Fight Club. This book was only written 5 years after I was born (brace yourself – these book reviews might become even LESS timely because I read what I want, damnit.) What in the Tyler-Durden-lickin-Marla-repenting-spitting-in-rich-peoples-food-Sam-hell-is-this?

I don’t know why I never read it. Maybe because I really loved the film and I figured the novel couldn’t measure up to it. Or maybe it was because of this unconscious aversion I have to things I ‘should have’ read by now, or ‘should watch’ – Tiger King fans, I’m looking at you.

Fully aware that this is a very alienating and sanctimonious aversion, but I just can’t help it.

So, finally cracked the spine of Fight Club (well, the digital spine of my ebook) and sat down to drink in the marvellous Chuck Palahniuk-ness of this, his seminal work. My friends, I finished it pretty bummed. 

Maybe I’d built it up in my head, and maybe I was looking for the familiar ebb and flow of the film – but my conclusion was that Fight Club’s storyline just makes for a better cinematic piece than a novel (even when the novel is clearly written to be filmic.)

It was thrilling in a way to see the teachings that Chuck gives in ‘ Consider This: The moments in my writing life after which everything was different’ used quite clearly, in black and white, to drive the story. It’s been a good few years since I properly studied literature, and even then it wasn’t the study of creative writing, so it was cool to see some of his biggest advice used systematically and carefully, in what is otherwise a book with a plot that careens all over the place. 

For instance: 

• Not only does he include the sacrifice of the secondary character (Big Bob) at the end of the second act, he also includes the murder of the rebel and the sacrifice of the ‘good guy’. Spoiler alert – he stands out from this time-old structure by making them the same person!
• He builds a new world order. Invites you into a club with new rules, and invites you to learn them and share them. To that end, he:
• Implements the ‘chorus’. The repetitive phrase that marks the movement to the next scene, keeping your audience engaged while setting out expectation and natural pauses
• Uses lists to give authority to the author and the narrator
• Setting himself a clock to finish the novel by, from the very moment the book begins with the countdown to the bomb going off
• Ends dialogue with active verbs (I get a little nauseous when I hear them used now because of Trump, but they’re very effective in adding a punch to the end of a sentence)
• Has the characters to address themselves in third person where they can pass particularly harsh judgement i.e. Marla shouting to the police sent to her suicide scene that: “The girl is infectious human waste”.
• Making each chapter work as a standalone piece (in fact, the whole book was spawned from a short story about waiters soiling their rich customer’s food), eliminating the presence of any unnecessary detail. 

And I do firmly believe, having read his book on writing, that this is fantastic advice. These are all ways in which we can improve your writing – but funnily enough, I didn’t see it realised as expertly as I’d hoped. Well, it was 24 years ago, he was just warming up , I hear you cry. Yeah, yeah. And his later works have shown that he is capable of implementing this in a much more natural way – for example, his work ‘Choke’ which remains one of my favorites. However, as you can see by my previous review for ‘Damned’, he can miss the mark in his pursuit for quirky writing. 

Chuck mentions himself in ‘Consider This’ , that reviewers of Fight Club initially told him they would get super frustrated with the plot and writing style, on occasion literally throwing the book across the room, and then returning to it because they had to know how it ended. I’m not sure you should ever write something that makes reviewers want to get as far away from your book as possible, even if you do return to it out of curiosity. The reading experience wasn’t particularly pleasurable, and on a few occasions I put it down without wanting to finish it at all.

Countdowns in particular were a little overdone in this novel. From the start, it is clear that things are ramping towards a conclusion (the minutes ticking down to the moment the bomb explodes), but it is repeated at every opportunity, for multiple reasons until it actually starts to lose its potency. By the end, I was willing the countdown to finally end so that I could finish the book.

However, there are bits of writing within Fight Club which absolutely sparkle – from the narrator identifying singular parts of the body to identify with multiple times over the course of the book, out of a stack of newspapers, “I am Joe’s raging bile duct” , to Marla’s unapologetic darkness, “I want to have your abortion” , to shreds of wisdom, “It’s your life and it’s ending one minute at a time” , to the singular scenes such as the waiters and the hold up where Tyler convinces a barkeep to go to veterinary school. All things which feel original, and weighted and brimming with potential. 

Unfortunately, the rest of the novel just didn’t do it for me. Sorry teacher.

I imagine all of y’all have read Fight Club, so let me know what you thought! And if you haven’t read it – get yourself a copy and see whether you agree!

Is this one of the rare occasions where a movie beats a novel, share this:, leave a comment cancel reply.

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The Untold Truth Of Fight Club

Fight Club 's induction into pop-culture history was neither easy nor assured. With its release postponed because of the Columbine school shooting and a weak debut at the box office, this highly quotable masterpiece took its sweet time taking over the cultural zeitgeist. Directed by David Fincher and based on the novel of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club tells the story of an insomniac insurance adjuster and the soap-making leader of an underground men's boxing club who turn out to be the same person. Featuring Edward Norton as the morose Narrator, Brad Pitt as his charismatic alter ego, and Helena Bonham-Carter as the catalyst who sparks the two men's social revolution, the film is a tornado of action, humor, and horror.

In time, Fight Club became recognized as the smart, shocking satire it is. Nowadays, we all know the rules of Fight Club, the New York Times hails it as a defining cult-classic, and Tyler Durden has name recognition on par with Tony Stark and Rick Blaine. But for as beloved as the film has become, there's still a lot most don't know about it. This is the untold truth of Fight Club , from DVD sales to novelty bathrobes.

The could-have-beens of Fight Club

David Fincher was not the first choice to direct Fight Club . Other directors  offered the position include  Peter Jackson ,  Bryan Singer , and Danny Boyle . That's not the only role that might have gone to other talents, however. 

For the role of enigmatic Tyler Durden, Russell Crowe was considered. Matt Damon and Sean Penn were on deck for the Narrator. For the part of chain-smoking potty-mouth Marla Singer, the choices included Janeane Garofalo, Reese Witherspoon, Winona Ryder, Courtney Love, and even Julia Louis-Dreyfus, whose Elaine Benes on Seinfeld has major Marla Singer vibes. Garofalo claims Norton didn't want to work with her, and Love was dating Norton at the time. Louis-Dreyfus had no idea who David Fincher was, and Witherspoon and Ryder seemed too young . Helena Bonham-Carter  had reservations about singing on, but after she met with Fincher and understood his agenda, she got on board. Thus, Fight Club as we would come to know it was assembled.

Getting messy on set

Life on the Fight Club set wasn't easy. Fincher is famous for filming dozens and dozens of takes , only to end up using the first one. He also expects a great deal of realism, so Helena Bonham-Carter really was smoking during those many months of shooting, including Fincher's multiple takes to get the now-iconic smoke swirling around her face just right. She ended up getting a terrible case of bronchitis because of it.

Brad Pitt was not one to be one-upped by Bonham-Carter's method smoking, however: He actually had his perfect teeth chipped for Fight Club . His snaggle-toothed smile appears towards the end of the movie. Pitt's girlfriend at the time, Jennifer Aniston , even  shaved his head for the film at home.

Unsurprisingly, there were a huge number of injuries sustained on set. For example, the scene toward the end where Tyler throws the Narrator down the stairs and through the toll booth was filmed by Ed Norton's stunt double dozens of times, until Brad Pitt grew concerned he was actually getting hurt. Since they didn't hire professional boxers, everyone on set was constantly jamming fingers and joints. Both Pitt and Norton started developing similar injuries as filming went on — a brutal, if appropriate symbol of their characters' relationship.

Iconic moments, courtesy of Pitt and Norton

Tyler and the Narrator's first fight wasn't as choreographed as others in the movie. When Tyler screams "Why the ear?!" it's because the punch came as a fictional and real-world surprise — the excellent line is an ad-lib on Pitt's part.

That's just one of many moments of chemistry created by Pitt and Norton. As they would note years later, they came up with the idea of smashing the then-new streamlined version of the Volkswagen Beetle specifically. Why? As Norton told Salon , "There's the perfect example of the baby-boomer generation marketing its youth culture to us as if our happiness is going to come by buying the symbol of their own youth movement." Salon went even further, asking, "But isn't the VW bug the perfect example of boomers peddling their youth to themselves? " Fight Club  is all about encouraging that sort of questioning — and the whole conversation is thanks to Norton and Pitt's brilliant idea.

Elaborate costuming

Having worked on Blade Runner and Flashdance , costume designer Michael Kaplan found himself helping Helena Bonham-Carter understand Marla through wardrobe choices. "Think Judy Garland for the millennium. Not the actress in The Wizard of Oz –  think Judy Garland later on, when she was a bit of a mess, drinking and doing drugs while her life was falling apart," Kaplan told Bonham-Carter . Her smoky eye makeup and smeared lipstick deliberately mirror the bruises on her co-stars' faces, and she even had her makeup artist use her left hand so the effect would be perfectly mussed.

For Tyler Durden's look, Kaplan turned to more and more outlandish outfits that eventually include a red leather jacket and a see-through mesh shirt, as well as a secondhand Victoria's Secret bathrobe.

While both Tyler and Marla are fans of thrift store shopping, the Narrator begins with a wardrobe filled with generic-looking suits. As the movie progresses, he grows more and more grungy, just as Tyler becomes ever more outrageous and colorful. This relationship is mirrored in their shifting physiques: As Tyler gains muscle, the Narrator grows more and more frail. The alter ego acts as a parasite, siphoning away more and more of its host.

How one of the most disturbing lines in Fight Club came to be

Fight Club is chock-full of one-liners. But one of the most memorably disturbing lines is deployed by Marla Singer after a particularly satisfying tryst with Tyler Durden: "I haven't been f***ed like that since grade school." But this was not the line in Chuck Palahniuk's novel or the original screenplay. In those, Marla says, "I want to have your abortion."

Producer Laura Ziskin asked Fincher to change to original line. She and other Fox executives didn't want to give picketers another reason to target the movie. But in an extremely Tyler Durden-ish move on Fincher's part, he made Ziskin promise that whatever he changed the line to, she would have to accept. No conditions, no take-backs. When she heard the replacement line, Fincher said she visibly cringed and begged him to return to the original script. 

Marla's post-coital nastiness stayed in the film. The irony is that Laura Ziskin was herself responsible for scripting a pivotal line in Pretty Woman  – "She rescues him right back." This immortal utterance changes the entire tone of the movie, just as Marla's line changes Fight Club .

Norton's own philsophizing

Edward Norton had just turned 30 when filming on Fight Club began, and he found himself deeply connected to the material. Norton was very aware of the generation gap Fight Club exposed between Baby Boomers and their Gen X children, who were disillusioned by the world they'd inherited. "I'm not saying nobody over the age of 45 understood the film -– that's ludicrous, lots of people deeply appreciated it –- but I think for the same reasons a lot of Baby Boomers didn't understand Nirvana, they didn't understand Fight Club . I think a lot of the Baby Boomers looked at their children and said, 'Why so negative?' I don't think they related to the ambivalence of our generation." 

Norton also agrees with the film's anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist messages, going so far as to say Fight Club is Gen X's The Catcher in the Rye . "I think the Fight Club is kind of metaphoric for the fight against your own impulses to get cocooned in things," he remarked  soon after the film's debut. "Which is why, when the guys fight, they get up and hug each other at the end and thank each other for the experience. It's the gesture that's helping them strip away the fears; the fears of pain and the reliance on the material signifiers of their self-worth." This is Jack's mind blown.

A clash with critics

Many critics saw Fight Club as promoting and glorifying violence. But, like the book on which it's based, Fincher insists that Fight Club is actually a social satire that critiques violence and toxic masculinity in American society. As Fincher told a concerned Dr. Drew , "There are ideas in the movie that are scary, but the film isn't about violence, the glorification of violence, or the embracing of violence. In the movie, violence is a metaphor for feeling. It's a film about the problems or requirements involved with being masculine in today's society." Fincher even went so far as to tell Entertainment Weekly , "I've always thought people would think the film was funny. It's supposed to be satire. A dark comedy. I think it's funny."

Screenwriter Jim Uhls takes Fincher's analysis even further, telling Salon that he wrote and continues to see Fight Club as a romantic comedy, "but not a typical romantic comedy. It has to do with the characters' attitudes toward a healthy relationship, which is a lot of behavior which seems unhealthy and harsh to each other, but in fact does work for them — because both characters are out on the edge psychologically." It's not the most widespread reading of the film, but it's definitely one of the most thought-provoking.

Chuck Palahniuk's take

Chuck Palahniuk sold the film rights to Fight Club for $10,000 — and that's after his publishing deal gave him just $6,000 for the book. These are shockingly low numbers for a story that has become a cornerstone of modern fiction. Palahniuk's novel was inspired by a variety of personal experiences : His colleagues ignoring bruises sustained by getting jumped, his time as a hospice care worker, and his experiences working in manufacturing. Its power lies in its honesty, and the film respects that truth.

Unlike most screenplays,  Fight Club  lifts almost all of its dialogue from Palahniuk's novel. But there is a major divergence in the two endings: In the book, Jack gets institutionalized, whereas in the movie, Tyler Durden makes himself whole while sparking a revolution. Even so, Palahniuk has mentioned being startled they didn't take the film adaptation even further: "I actually wish they'd taken more license with the book and surprised me a little bit more." He also admits that the screenplay is better than his novel and now finds himself "embarrassed" by the book's writing. He especially appreciates how screenwriter Jim Uhls streamlined his story, making a number of internal connections he himself had missed.

Pivotal DVD sales

Fight Club had a budget of $60 million , but only brought in $37 million during its theatrical run in North America. However, once everyone started breaking those first two rules of Fight Club and word of mouth spread, Fight Club ended up recouping its box office losses with DVD sales.  Fight Club  is ripe for multiple re-watches, rewarding viewers who linger over it for significant lengths of time. Thus it became an odd poster child for the DVD boom of the early 2000s. It certainly helped that Fincher included hours of extras, including interviews, gags, behind-the-scenes footage, and commentaries from the cast and crew.

In 2009, a new edition of Fight Club found its way to Blu-ray for the movie's 10th anniversary. In Durden-esque style, it features a number of gags that had people trying to return their purchases, thinking they'd been sold the wrong movie. The Blu-ray opens with the title cards for another romantic comedy released in 1999, Never Been Kissed , a movie that also features dual identities. It's a perfect prank, and a tribute to all the fans who've brought Fight Club home over the years, making it into the cult classic it is today.

Three detectives with one name

Towards the end of Fight Club, as the Narrator comes to terms with his identity as the founder of Project Mayhem, he finds himself at the downtown offices of the Los Angeles Police Department, attempting to turn himself in. But the three cops present — Detective Andrew, Detective Kevin, and Detective Walker — are actually members of Fight Club. Tyler warned them this would happen, and told them to take the Narrator out of the picture entirely through ritual castration.

Andrew Kevin Walker was one of Fincher's writers on Seven , and he came in at the end to help polish up the Fight Club script. Fincher said Walker had done 20% of the "heavy lifting" of rewrites and deserved a writing credit, but the Writers Guild of America disagreed and denied him attribution on the film. So Fincher and company named the three cops after him, in a Tyler Durden-esque middle finger to the WGA. 

Fight clubs of the real world

When it comes to satire, there is always a risk that the action being critiqued will be taken at face value. Fight Club , unfortunately, was primed to fall victim to this — and did. Ever since it hit theaters, actual fight clubs have sprung into being all over the world. They have existed in  Menlo Park , California,  Arlington, Texas , and  New Jersey , in a particularly grotesque example that involved adults at a daycare getting children to fight each other. Moreover, it's not just fight clubs being imitated. In 2009, a  New York  teenager planned to bomb a Starbucks in emulation of Tyler Durden. Sadly, these folks totally miss the point: The movie is criticizing toxic masculinity, not promoting or encouraging it. In other words, Tyler Durden is not a role model.

In comments to the New York Times , Fincher said, "Women maybe get the humor faster," and noted that Fight Club's female fans better identify and understand the film's message. Perfectly riffing off this dynamic, a 2010 viral comedy sketch called "Jane Austen's Fight Club" highlights the different ways women approach the original story. It's not Tyler Durden's bag, but we think he might approve.

By Brad Pitt (Actor),

THE FIRST RULE about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.

Every weekend, in the basements and parking lots of bars across the country, young men with whitecollar jobs and failed lives take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded just as long as they have to. Then they go back to those jobs with blackened eyes and loosened teeth and the sense that they can handle anything. Fight club is the invention of Tyler Durden, projectionist, waiter, and dark, anarchic genius, and it's only the beginning of his plans for violent revenge on an empty consumer-culture world.

BUY THE BOOK

Average rating: 8.41

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Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk is a novel that answers the question “What if I had insomnia and didn’t know it?” The protagonist goes to support groups but then things spiral out of control and he ends up joining a fight club. Keep reading to find out why you should be reading this classic novel!

Like most people, I first came across Fight Club via Brad Pitt and the movie version and I instantly fell in love. As a young kid, I didn’t really grasp what I had fallen in love with but I was left in awe. And over a decade later, I still love Fight Club and the magic has not gone away.

Fight Cub Summary

C huck Palahniuk’s debut novel was about a protagonist whose name we never get to hear. He is sleep deprived, hates his job, and stuck in a loop, doing the same thing over and over. That cycle breaks when he meets Tyler Durden and the protagonist’s life is flipped upside down.

Tyler encourages the protagonist to stop being a sheep and take the lead in life. Apparently, that means fight Durden outside of a bar and losing a tooth. And starting a fight club all over the country. But things start to take a dark turn and the protagonist realizes everything is not as it appears. 

Palahniuk’s Fight Club is a great commentary on the modern world. The protagonist not having a name implies that he can be anyone, including the reader. And that is kind of the point. Most people can relate to having a boring job, a dull life with no purpose, and a boss that they hate. All we need is a little push to become unhinged. 

One of my favorite things about the novel is how wild of a ride it becomes. The story picks up speed as you keep reading and suddenly, you are headed off of a cliff. Palahniuk pulls the carpet right under the reader and makes us wonder how much of what we read can we trust?

Fight Club is one of my all-time favorite novels and a great movie to watch . If you do read the novel, I recommend to watch the movie which didn’t do that great initially when it was released . Now, it is a cult favorite and is always being brought up in mainstream media.

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The Fight Club Book Review: Exploring Identity and Rebellion

Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is a powerful exploration of identity, rebellion, and freedom. Through its complex characters and intense plot, the book makes readers contemplate their own place in society and what it takes to break away from artificial conventions.

Introduction to the Themes of Identity and Rebellion.

Fight Club is a story of identity and rebellion, as readers witness the intertwined lives of multiple characters trying to make sense of their lives within the chaotic world of underground fight clubs. From disenfranchised white-collar workers seeking an escape from their dead-end jobs to empowered women pushing back against oppressive patriarchy.

This story explores deeply rooted issues embedded in society today. Through its exploration of contemporary themes such as power dynamics, capitalism, and the struggle for worth in a materialistic society, Fight Club examines how individuals can find freedom and overcome societal conventions.

Character Analysis: How Does Fight Club’s Narrator React?

Fight Club’s narrator is the story’s main protagonist, whose journey of self-discovery pushes him to rebel against social conventions. Through his interactions with Tyler Durden and various underground fight club members, the narrator comes to challenge corporate materialism, standing firmly against a homogeneous world where individuals are personally and spiritually disconnected from their own life values.

The people are breathing and their hearts are beating yet they are not living. The narrator learns that violence is a means of reclaiming his human and male identity. Rather than serving as an expression of powerlessness, he allows himself to finally embrace his freedom from the rigid and numb norms of society.

The Rules for the Underground Fight Club

The Fight Club book explores concepts of freedom, individuality, and rebellion through its intricate set of rules for Fight Club. These rules are a direct subversion of societal conventions that encourage conformity, instead allowing people to express themselves in situations often deemed forbidden.

In this way, the Fight Club book exposes the arbitrary nature of socially accepted behaviors while cultivating an environment where different perspectives can thrive.

Fight Club’s First Rule

The first rule of Fight Club is: do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule is that you do not talk about the fight club. The third rule is that you must fight on your first night

Societal Critique: Examining the Lookism Problem in Fight Club.

In Fight Club, Palahniuk highlights the way that traditional concepts of beauty can lead to alienation and dissatisfaction. He portrays a world where conventional attractiveness is being sold as an ideal image, imprisoning people in a society where they feel unworthy if they don’t fit an oppressive mold.

An example is when the unnamed narrator and character Tyler Durden get on a bus together. On the bus, they see an advertising poster for men’s underwear. On it was a young man with a toned body, a six-pack belly, no body hair, and a tan. They chuckle: ” Is that what a man looks like? That’s not what a man looks like”.

This critique is particularly apparent in the protagonist’s internal monologue, which teems with feelings of frustration and anger over how his looks are perceived by others. In this way, Palahniuk critiques not only lookism but also beauty culture in general, providing a thought-provoking commentary on contemporary notions of identity performance.

Exploring How Violence is Constructed in Fight Club and Its Relevance to Today’s Society.

In Fight Club, violence does not necessarily represent evil and destruction: instead, it becomes a tool for redefining the power of identity. Through acts of self-destruction, the characters seek to create alternative structures of power and subsequent freedom from oppressive systems. Palahniuk challenges readers to question their complicity in oppressive constructs and to consider what it means to be an individual in a world that expects us to conform. As such, today’s readers can find relevance in examining how a combination of rebellion, identity formation, and violence can create an avenue for understanding our own relationships with modern society.

Rebellion as Resistance Against Inauthentic Living in Fight Club.

In Fight Club, Palahniuk emphasizes the idea of rebellion against conformity to materialistic values and inauthentic lifestyles. The protagonists seek to create a revolution and a space for genuine human connection through solidarity, self-destruction, and violence. This violence represents the characters’ fight for freedom from expectations that have been placed upon them by society. It is also a way of pushing back against oppressive systems of control. .

Palahniuk seeks to portray rebellion as an escape from shallow mediocrity and ultimately a form of pushback against shallow ideals of beauty and success that have become criminalized in our culture.

Trailer for Fight Club the Movie

Fight club the movie.

Fight Club, the movie adaptation of the book, further popularized the themes explored in The Fight Club book. With its complex characters, suspenseful scenes, and underlying themes exploring the chaos of life, this movie captivated viewers around the world.

Tyler Durden is one of the two main characters in the book, as well as its 1999 film adaptation. He is portrayed by Brad Pitt in the film. Tyler is an anarchist and nihilist who advocates for a world without rules or structure, believing that such a society would allow people to express themselves more freely. He is also a charismatic leader who inspires others to join his club.

The novel achieved cult classic status in 1999 and has since been recognized as one of the greatest films of all time. The movie’s cultural impact is undeniable; from fan art to quotes from lines in the film appearing on apparel, there is no doubt that Fight Club stands apart as a timeless classic.

Other Books by Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk is widely acclaimed as an American novelist and short story writer, with a unique writing style that has resonated with millions of readers around the world. After Fight Club’s enormous success, Palahniuk went on to write a number of other novels.

1. Fight Club (1996) 2. Survivor (1999) 3. Invisible Monsters (1999) 4. Choke (2001) 5. Lullaby (2002) 6. Diary (2003) 7. Haunted (2005) 8. Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey (2007) 9. Snuff (2008)

All his books offer an exciting but often unsettling experience for readers by exploring a wide range of unusual topics – from culture to religion and identity. None of them however have reached the same popularity as the 1996 novel.

8 Movies like Fight Club

1. American Psycho (2000) 2. The Machinist (2004) 3. A Clockwork Orange (1971) 4. Donnie Darko (2001) 5. Memento (2000) 6. Taxi Driver (1976) 7. Oldboy (2003) 8. Requiem for a Dream (2000)

Not exactly like Fight Club, but a book that also explores the theme of identity but also the point of life or the feeling of meaninglessness, is Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami . I greatly enjoyed reading it and you can check out my review as well as my thoughts on suicide in Japan.

Look at what other Works The Fight Club Inspires.

The Fight Club and its author, Chuck Palahniuk, have inspired many works in the arts. These include movies such as Fight Club and Choke. It has also spawned several video games, websites, books, television shows, and podcasts. Even street art has been produced in the wake of this novel’s success. Along with inspiring a wide variety of popular culture works, people across different regions reflect on its various messages and draw self-improvement lessons from it. This speaks to the deep cultural impact that Palahniuk’s work continues to have around the world.

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Fight Club - Book Review

Fight Club – Movie or Book, Which is better?

In blog , Books , Reviews by Michael Michelini Last Updated: 07/26/2020 Leave a Comment

So I Have Watched The Movie 10+ Times – Still Enjoyed the book

It is true, the book is always better than the movie. Watching this movie in 1999 in New York City Theaters and I remember how much influence on my way of thinking, to challenge the hamster wheel, just as I was starting college.

Of course the book is way cooler after you watched the movie, as you have Brad Pitt in your head and the other amazing characters from the movie – honestly I am not sure how much I would have enjoyed the book if I didn’t already have the amazing visual experience from watching the video.

Movie or Book?

Buy The Fight Club Book now (better than the movie!

Yet by reading the book, you get so much more depth and feeling. Those quick 5 second clips in the movie now are written out in pages and you get the more granular feel of what is happening in Tyler and the character’s head (whose name we never know!).

The ending is different in the movie and the book – and I saw that in the review when deciding to invest in reading the book or not – and that alone is worth going through it.

What was surprising was how close the book and the movie are! Some of the exact lines are right from the book, and for the most part it is fairly straight along the the same storyline.

As Fight Club is one of my favorite movies of all time, I of course will enjoy the book and it gives a new angle and dimension – I should probably watch the movie (yes again) to more fully compare the book and movie.

What Do You Prefer? Fight Club Movie or Book?

For all those other Fight Club addicts (or should I say space monkeys?) – which did you prefer, the book or movie? Let us know in the comments below.

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Fight Club ending explained

The 1999 film has been a mind-bending experience for decades with a twist ending that still shocks to this day.

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Fight Club might have been released more than two decades ago, but David Fincher 's iconic film remains as enigmatic and shocking as ever - but, to help make sense of it, we have the Fight Club ending explained.

Though we might be breaching the first rule of Fight Club, the twist ending can still leave viewers scratching their heads and questioning everything they have seen and heard.

Without a doubt, though, Edward Norton does a stellar job of portraying the narrator to be as confused and shocked as we are at the true nature of Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt .

Fincher is continuing to shock us with his latest film The Killer , starring Michael Fassbender .

With all that said, read on to help untangle the web of an unreliable narrator.

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The ending to Fight Club includes one of the most memorable twists in cinema – when it is revealed that Brad Pitt's character Tyler Durden is, in fact, nothing more than the imaginary alter ego of the narrator (Edward Norton), and as such, all the acts carried out by Durden were actually his own.

It then emerges that, while adopting the Durden persona, the narrator had drawn up plans to permanently erase debt by destroying ten bank buildings containing credit card records.

The narrator initially attempts to put a stop to this plan and kills off his alter ego in the process by shooting himself, but it is too late – and the bombs detonate, with the narrator and his girlfriend Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) calmly watching on as the buildings are blown up.

The ending of the film is shrouded in ambiguity, however, as the events of the entire movie are called into question due to the narrator not actually having experienced reality as it actually panned out.

We can deduce, though, that given the narrator has seemingly killed off Durden for good, and is witnessing Project Mayhem unfold with Marla, that these are the only "true" events that appear to be as they are.

What are the alternate endings to Fight Club?

In the version that had been available in China, while much of the ending had been kept intact – for example, the revelation about Durden and his death scene – there was one major change at the very end.

The scene in which the narrator and Marla watch as the buildings are blown up is cut completely, replaced by text explaining: "The police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding."

The message continues: "After the trial, Tyler was sent to lunatic asylum receiving psychological treatment. He was discharged from the hospital in 2012.”

How does the Fight Club book end?

The iconic ending to the film is not actually lifted directly from the novel , which closes in a slightly different manner. In the book, after the narrator shoots himself – with the intention of killing Durden – he blacks out and wakes up in a mental hospital, believing that he is now in heaven.

Crucially, it is then revealed that the narrator's alter ego could yet return, with hospital employees approaching him and explaining that they are members of Project Mayhem and that they expect Tyler to come back.

Interestingly, author Chuck Palahniuk recently remarked : "The irony is that the way the Chinese have changed it, they aligned the ending almost exactly with the ending of the book, as opposed to Fincher’s ending, which was the more spectacular visual ending. So in a way, the Chinese brought the ending back to the book a little bit."

What happened to the Fight Club ending in China?

The controversy first came to light towards the end of January 2022, when Chinese viewers noted the changes to the film after it had been added to streamers in the country.

The switch-up was made for censorship reasons – to show the authorities winning out – and unsurprisingly caused outcry .

Since then, the original ending has been restored on streamer Tencent Video, although the new version still isn't a completely uncut version of the film – with a sex scene between Tyler and Marla having been removed due to nudity.

Watch Fight Club on Amazon Prime Video and Disney Plus in the UK. Sign up to Disney Plus for £7.99 a month or £79.90 for a year .

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