Ryan Reynolds’ Recipe for Success in 1999 – E! Looks Back
Audiences were destined to talk endlessly about Fight Club.
David Fincher‘s polarizing film—adapted from Chuck Palahniuk‘s book of the same name—starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham-Carter came out 25 years ago. And its critique of consumer capitalism and its corresponding anarchic solutions, the unapologetic hypermasculinity (however satirized it may be) and that WTF ending remain as relevant as ever.
Though a lot of people didn’t quite grasp the point at first. Or they did and didn’t like it one bit.
Fight Club has been called everything from a masterpiece to socially irresponsible to “an inadmissible assault on personal decency—and on society itself.”
That last one made it onto the DVD box.
Coming along before social media turned all of us into amateur bare-knuckle word boxers, Fight Club posited that beating the crap out of each other was perhaps the only unadulterated way for men to literally sweat out the stresses shoved upon them by so-called polite society. The only way to connect—to feel anything at all—amid the mind-numbing demands of an increasingly superficial modern world full of stuff that’s steadily taking ownership of them was to own each other in the makeshift ring.
The movie inspired more than a few imitators and catchphrases as dudes took to the basement to act out their own aggression. But it got even more people thinking.
20th Century Fox/Kobal/Shutterstock
Though perhaps not right away, because the film was considered a commercial flop upon its release on Oct. 15, 1999.
But eventually the epiphanies poured forth: about detachment, moral decay and materialism, about the id that lurks within, about how one movie can be so simultaneously appreciated and thoroughly disliked.
The movie came out on DVD in June 2000 and went on to sell 6 million copies over the course of the decade. And Fight Club still holds up as a brutal but not unsympathetic look at the havoc all this stuff continues to wreak on society, as well as an aggressive fantasia about what saying f–k-all to consequences really looks like.
Moviegoers aren’t always ready to look in that cultural mirror when it’s held up to them. And yet Fincher also wanted to make people uncomfortable, so in that, he couldn’t have scripted a better outcome.
Or maybe it just makes you think about soap and Brad Pitt‘s abs.
In any case, it’s a strange time in all of our lives, so here are 20 secrets about Fight Club:
(Originally published Oct. 15, 2019, at 3 a.m. PT)