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Fight Club

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Fight Club (1999) is a film based on the novel Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. It was directed by David Fincher and starred Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter.

Also featured in it is an original soundtrack by the Dust Brothers. As of June 23, 2004 Fight Club is in development as a musical, developed by Palahniuk and Fincher.

Plot
Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.
The plot revolves around a nameless narrator (played by Edward Norton; referred to as "Jack" in the film's credits), an accident investigator for a major car company. During a severe bout of insomnia he goes to a meeting for men with testicular cancer. He begins to use the meetings as a release of emotion and subsequently finds that he can now sleep. When a woman named Marla starts attending these meetings for fun, the narrator finds that his insomnia returns.

Returning from a business trip, the narrator meets Tyler Durden on a plane. Arriving at his apartment, he finds that it has exploded in flames and calls Tyler Durden for lack of anyone else to call. Later, they meet at a bar and have a discussion on materialism and the modern male, which turns to the idea of fighting and eventually they have it out in the middle of a parking lot. The release of emotion and energy rejuvenates the narrator and after moving in with Tyler, they start a "fight club".

As the revolutionary idea of the rejection of material goods and the individual animal aspect of the fight grows, so does the club. Soon, Tyler is distributing "assignments" to the members of the club which grows into "Project Mayhem", an anti-corporate destruction squad led by Tyler. As the project grows, the narrator becomes increasingly disturbed by their actions and tries to stop it as one of the co-founders of fight club. He slowly uncovers their plan and soon discovers the real identity of Tyler Durden; he is a split-personality construct that exists only in the narrator's head and the actions that Tyler undertakes are actions that the narrator is really performing. The film climaxes with the narrator taking back control of his mind in a violent incident where he shoots himself in the mouth just as Project Mayhem's final act of vandalism, the destruction of all the credit bureaus, resetting the debt of the world back at zero.

Differences between novel and film
Though the plot is mostly similar to the novel, some significant changes have been made in the film.

Tyler Durden is a soap salesmen instead of a beach artist.
The narrator meets Tyler on a plane instead of on a nude beach.
The first batch of soap made by the narrator and Tyler comes from a lyposuction clinic, rather than from Marla's mother as in the book.
The scene where Tyler fights Lou (as well as Lou himself) did not appear in the novel.
The narrator's fights with himself to blackmail his boss at the car company in the film; in the novel, it was done to threaten his boss at the hotel that Tyler got him a job as a waiter at.
The narrator is not entirely aware of what Tyler is doing with Project Mayhem and is more uncomfortable with the increasing destructiveness of their activities, rather than being partially in control of it as in the book.
The confrontation with Raymond K Hessel is handled by the narrator alone in the novel; in the film, Tyler takes control while the narrator witnesses the event.
Project Mayhem's bombs are successful in exploding in the film, while they were duds in the novel.
The narrator shoots himself to kill Tyler, rather than to make a decision on his own as in the novel.
The film ends with the narrator and Marla watching buildings explode, while the novel ends with the narrator talking about a mental institution that he has been confined to.

Reaction and Themes
Fight Club was released in the United States on October 15, 1999 to mixed reviews. While some critics raved about the film, many high-profile critics denounced it. Janet Maslin of The New York Times compared it favorably to American Beauty while Roger Ebert called it "male porn." The graphic violence of the fights seemed to upset most critics, although only one person is actually killed in the film.

The film's highly critical view of consumerism and modern living echoes Naomi Klein's book No Logo and also caused discomfort among some critics. Critics like Ebert decried what they described as a fascist themes throughout the film, while others have commented on anarchist, nihilist, and buddhist ideals. Both are represented in the transformation of the fight club, an anti-materialistic organization of individuality to Project Mayhem, a more organized anarchy, led solely on the authority of Tyler Durden. The amorphous nature with which these seemingly opposed philosophical systems incorporated into each other is the cause for much of the disagreement over the philosophical core of this film.

Parallels are also drawn between Tyler Durden's vision of the world after his revolution, and the views of Theodore Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber. This can be seen in one scene where Tyler talks about abseiling down the Sears Tower in clothes that will last you the rest of your life and hunting elk on abandoned freeways.

Some elements from the film have found their way into the mainstream, such as the first two rules of fight club — both of which are You do not talk about fight club — or the name "Tyler Durden" itself. The general idea of a fight club was also adapted into the German computer role-playing game Gothic 2, which also listed Palahniuk in its credits.

The film opened with $11 million, a surprise #1 movie in a close race that weekend at the box office. However, it fell very quickly in subsequent weekends, finishing with only $37 million in the U.S. It was regarded as a failure as the budget was $63 million, not including advertising which could have been another $20-30 million. Even with the $63 million later accumulated overseas, executives at 20th Century Fox still felt the movie was a severe disappointment, so much so that Entertainment Chief Bill Mechanic was fired. According to Mechanic, he had personally clashed with Fox owner Rupert Murdoch over Fight Club and it cost him his job, barely a year after Fox's Titanic had become the highest-grossing film ever made.

Trivia
The movie appears to take place in Wilmington, Delaware, home to most credit card companies. Tyler's business card includes the Wilmington zip code 19808. Moreover, the cities specifically mentioned in the car-smashing scene are New Castle, Delaware City and Penns Grove, NJ, which are close to Wilmington. The apartment building in which the narrator lives has as its motto "a place to be somebody," which is also the city motto of Wilmington, Delaware.

The film makers originally intended Tyler Durden to recite working recipes for homemade explosives. They later decided against it for the interest of public safety, and fake recipes were used.

Two of Tyler Durden's one-frame appeancesIn the beginning of the film, Tyler Durden flashes on screen for a duration of one frame, in four different instances. These are:

At the photocopier at work.
In the doctor's office, when the Narrator is learning about the testicular cancer support group.
At that group's meeting.
As the Narrator sees Marla leaving a meeting but doesn't follow her.
This sort of trickery has become a trademark of director David Fincher.

Awards
The film won the following awards:

the 2000 Empire Award (UK) for Best British Actress (Helena Bonham Carter)
the 2001 Online Film Critics Society Awards for Best DVD, Best DVD Commentary, and Best DVD Special Features
It was also nominated for the following awards:

the 2000 Academy Award for Best Effects, Sound Effects Editing
the 2000 Blockbuster Entertainment Award for Favorite Action Team (Brad Pitt & Edward Norton)
the 2000 Brit Award for Best Soundtrack
the 2000 Costume Designers Guild Award for Excellence for Costume Design for Film - Contemporary
the 2000 Sierra Award from the Las Vegas Film Critics Society Awards for Best DVD and Best Editing
the 2000 MTV Movie Award for Best Fight (Edward Norton vs himself)
the 2000 Golden Reel Award from the Motion Picture Sound Editors, USA for Best Sound Editing - Effects & Foley
the 2000 Online Film Critics Society Awards for Best Actor (Edward Norton), Best Director, Best Film, Best Film Editing, and Best Screenplay, Adapted
the 2000 Political Film Society Award for Democracy

Quotations from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Fight Club
(novel by Chuck Palahniuk: 1996; movie: 1999)

The narrator
"People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden." - movie version
"People are always asking, did I know about Tyler Durden." - novel version, page 11
"Losing all hope was freedom."
"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? You take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
"This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time."
"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everything drops to zero."
"I am Jack's smirking revenge."
"Jack" is used in the movie. In the book, "Jack" is "Joe."
"If I had a tumor, I would name it Marla."
"We have just lost cabin pressure."
"When deep space exploration ramps up, it will be the corporations that name everything: the IBM stellar-sphere, the Microsoft galaxy, planet Starbucks."
"Well, I gotta tell ya, I'd be very careful who you talk to about that, because the person who wrote that, is dangerous. And this button-down, Oxford cloth psycho, might... just... snap, and stalk, from office to office, with an Armalite AR-10 carbine gas-powered semi-automatic weapon, pumping round after round into colleagues and co-workers. This could be someone you've known for years. Someone very... very... Close to you. Or maybe you shouldn't bring me every little piece of trash you happen to pick up."
"You had to give it to him. He had a plan and it started to make sense . . . in a Tyler sort of way--no fear, no distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide."
"Tyler sold his soap to department stores at $20 a bar. God knows what they charged. It was beautiful. We were selling rich women their own fat asses back to them."
"I had it all, even the glass dishes with tiny dimples and imperfections, proof that they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working, indigenous peoples of... wherever."

Tyler Durden
"I want you to hit me as hard as you can."
"'It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything."
"You know, man, it could be worse: a woman could cut off your penis while you're sleeping and toss it out the window of a moving car."
"The things you own end up owning you."
"You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world."
"Self-improvement is masturbation. Now, self-destruction..."
"How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight? I don't wanna die without any scars."
"The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. Third rule of Fight Club, someone yells 'stop', goes limp, taps out, the fight is over. Fourth rule, only two guys to a fight. Fifth rule, one fight at a time, fellas. Sixth rule, no shirt, no shoes. Seventh rule, fights will go on as long as they have to. And the eighth and final rule, if this is your first night at Fight Club, you have to fight."
"Even the Mona Lisa's falling apart."
"Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken."
"Forget her, she's a predator posing as a house pet."
"Our fathers were our models for God. If our fathers bailed, what does that tell you about God? You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you. He never wanted you. In all probability, he hates you. This is not the worst thing that can happen."
"Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly waking up to that fact, people. And we're very, very pissed off."
These lines are said by Tyler in the movie. In the book, instead of Tyler, a minor character says some lines similar to these lines.
"In the world I see - you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway."
"Look. The people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals. We haul your trash. We connect your calls, we drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. Do not fuck with us."
"Fuck Martha Stewart! Martha's polishing the brass on the Titanic, it's all going down, man!"

Marla Singer
"This isn't a 'for real' suicide thing. This is probably one of those 'cry for help' things."
"I want to have your abortion."
In the film version, the line was changed to "My God... I haven't been fucked like that since grade school."
"It's a bridesmaid's dress. Someone loved it intensely for one day. Then, tossed it... like a Christmas tree. So special, then bam--it's on the side of the road, tinsel still clinging to it, like a sex crime victim, underwear inside out, bound with electrical tape."
"You are Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Jackass."
"Technically, I have more of a right to be there than you; you still have your balls."
Marla to Jack at a testicular cancer meeting.
"A condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip one on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night. Then, you throw it away . . . the condom, I mean, not the stranger."
"You're gonna have to keep me up allll night..."

Miscellaneous
Airport security officer about a vibrating suitcase:
"Nine times out of ten it's an electric razor, but... every once in a while... it's a dildo. Of course, it's company policy never to imply ownership. In the event of a dildo, we have to use the indefinite article "a" dildo, never "your" dildo."

Project Mayhem members chanting after Tyler:
"His name is Robert Paulson. His name is Robert Paulson."

"The First Rule of Project Mayhem is you do not ask questions. The Second Rule of Project Mayhem is you do not ask questions. The Third Rule of Project Mayhem is that in Project Mayhem there are no excuses. The Fourth Rule of Project Mayhem is in Tyler we trust".

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "fight_club".