How the Fight Club “prophesied” in the 21st century

Shortly before she officially turns 22, on October 15, one of the emblematic films of Generation X, re-enters the microscope of pop culture. Unfortunately, this time for all the wrong reasons. In an extensive article a few days ago, Vanity Fair magazine, argues that the trinity of the parties, namely Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and director David Fincher (and of course the film’s co-writer and author of the book of the same name, Chuck Palanyuk), essentially prophesied our 1999, future that began two years after the release of the film, on September 11 and continued with him Donald Trump and its rise Far right.

“Fight Club is a visually wonderful, but spiritually ugly masterpiece, a repulsive and limited intelligence project,” the columnist wrote in her introduction. Lily Anolik in the relevant Vanity Fair tribute, comparing many scenes of the film with the events that followed and shook the world in the future. Let’s go see them one by one, after first mentioning, as a reminder, the three protagonists:

Norton plays the anonymous protagonist who is unhappy with the office work he does and that is why he organizes a club boxing (“Fight club”) with a soap maker, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). They are both emotionally and sexually involved with a strange woman, Marla Singer (played by Elena Bonham Carter).

Twin towers

At the end of the film, Norton and Bonham-Carter stand on the top floor of a skyscraper and watch all the tall buildings in front of them collapse, destroyed by bombs planted by a group of “terrorists of the monuments of late American capitalism.” Two years later, this would become a reality, on the 11th^the September 2001.

The rise of the American Far Right

Durden stirs up Fight Club fans with a smirk that refers directly to Donald Trump’s arrogant speeches: “I see around me the strongest and smartest men who have ever lived. I see all this potential and I see it being wasted. An entire generation puts in petrol, serves at tables, is enslaved wearing white collars. We have all grown up with television believing that one day we would all be gods of cinema and rock stars. But it will not happen to us. And we are slowly learning this fact and we are very, very angry “, says Pete, attracting more and more followers of the extreme rhetoric that is expressed through violence and not through dialogue.

In fact, says Vanity Fair columnist, the Fight Club looks like “a movement whose followers believe in how difficult it is to be white and a man,” something like the Proud Boys, the far-right group that supports Trump.

How he “photographs” the Millenials

Tyler targets Generation X members when he suggests: “We are the middle children of history. We did not live in a Great War. No Great Recession. Our Great War is a spiritual war. “Our great recession is our life.” These are essentially the “middle children of history”.

Donald Trump

The columnist claims that the Fight Club “formally paved the way for Donald Trump”. Durden is a semi-insane messiah and a salesman of false news. He goes on to say something that is not true and is based on lies and fraud, as did the former US president. “Like Tyler, Trump has a power that is, by its very nature, annihilating. Tyler wants to eliminate credit card companies. Trump wants to eliminate the last 70 years. They both preach liberation and demand submission. “Both rule through catastrophe,” he said in a statement. Because in this way the Fight Club not only proves to be a prophetic film, but a film that shaped our own era “.

Five things you may not have known about Fight Club

Norton is about to resign: The film’s director David Fincher had daily quarrels with Edward Norton, who perceived the film not as a dark satire (like Fincher) but as a clear comedy. “Edward had taken the film as a comedy,” says the director. That is, as if we were closing our eyes to him and saying “come on, relax, we’re joking”. I do not like winking at all. On the contrary, the meaning is to frighten the viewer “. The shooting was constantly interrupted, with the two men exchanging bad words and the rest of the cast sitting and waiting for the dispute to be resolved between them.

The idea started from a real quarrel: Palaniuk inspired the book after an incident at a campsite he had gone to with his friends. When the author complained to some other campers that their radio music was too loud, a three-way quarrel broke out. Despite the fact that Palaniuk’s face was full of cuts and bruises, none of his colleagues noticed them when he returned to work on Monday. It was as if absolutely nothing had happened.

The first punch was real

The first time Norton and Pete fight, one night in an empty mall parking lot, Pete asks Norton to hit him “to see how he feels.” The punch Norton would give him would certainly be fake, as shortly before the scene was filmed, Fincher told Norton to actually hit Pete to make his reaction more realistic. Norton hit Pete hard in the ear and Brad’s reaction is perfectly natural and not the result of the script, shouting loudly “Well, you hit me in the ear!”

In each scene there is a glass of Starbucks: Fincher deliberately put a Starbucks cup in almost every scene. The Starbucks, for their part, had absolutely no objection to the idea, but did not want a chain store to be blown up at the end of the film, and so the alleged cafeteria that explodes is called “Gratifico Coffee”.

The golf scene was ad-lib

The scene where Norton and Pete play golf, marking houses and cars in the neighborhood next to their house, was not in the script and was a clear improvisation that Fincher deliberately left in the film. The two actors had started drinking on an evening shoot and ended up playing golf, throwing the balls into the catering van with the food. Fincher realized that a very nice scene could emerge from this idea, so he asked them to do the same while playing golf and marking random objects, saying the words of the script.