Pix Watch: Fight Club

Fight Club is a 1999 American feature film adaptation of the 1996 novel of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk. The film was directed by David Fincher and follows a nameless protagonist (Edward Norton), an everyman and an unreliable narrator who feels trapped with his white-collar position in society.

The narrator gets involved in a fight club with soap salesman Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) and becomes tangled up in a relationship triangle with Durden and a destitute woman, Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter).

The film's use of violence in the fight clubs was intended to serve as a metaphor for feeling based on the generation's conflict. The director carried homoerotic overtones over from Palahniuk's novel to implement in the film, believing that the overtones would make audiences uncomfortable and thereby keep them from anticipating the twist ending.

Studio executives were not receptive to the film, and they altered Fincher's intended marketing campaign to try to recoup perceived losses. Fight Club failed to meet expectations at the box office, and the film received polarized reactions from film critics.

Fight Club was considered one of the most controversial and talked-about films of 1999. The film was perceived as the forerunner of a new mood in American political life. Like other 1999 films Magnolia, Being John Malkovich, and Three Kings, Fight Club was recognized as an innovator in cinematic form and style due to its exploitation of new developments in filmmaking technology. Following its initial release, Fight Club grew in popularity via word of mouth, and the positive reception of the DVD established it as a cult film that Newsweek conjectured would enjoy "perennial" fame. The success of the film also propelled the novel's author Chuck Palahniuk to global renown.