Incels, Trump and neo-Nazis: Why do men keep misunderstanding Fight Club?

Fight Club: available to stream now on Disney+. It’s an irony Tyler Durden himself would have appreciated. David Fincher’s violent satire was once one of the most controversial films of the 1990s; thanks to the 2019 Fox-Disney merger, the film – and its stomach-churning scenes of middle-class men pulverising one another in squalid basements – is sat right there between Mickey Mouse and The Little Mermaid.

Fight Club is about a lot of things. There’s Edward Norton’s narrator, an emasculated insomniac who starts the film gatecrashing group therapy meetings and ends it as a brawling terrorist. There’s Durden (Brad Pitt), the charismatic jock who goads Norton out of his rut and forms a cult. There’s social commentary, homoerotic undertones – and one outrageous twist. But most of all, perhaps, Fight Club is about what it means to be a man.

It is hardly surprising that the film (and the Chuck Palahniuk novel from which it was adapted) has been linked to some of the most extreme white male behaviour: Fight Club is said to have inspired neo-Nazi fight clubs, incel culture and the excesses of the “alt right”. While most agree that Fincher’s cult movie is satirising toxic masculinity, some viewers mistook it for endorsement. “The movie has become part of the contemporary mass-cultural canon through which large numbers of men try to think through masculinity,” wrote the New Yorker. Vanity Fair, meanwhile, saw shades of Donald Trump in Pitt’s character (“minus, obviously, the face, the bod, the hair, the style… Like Tyler, Trump is manic and messiah”). The 25th-anniversary theatrical re-release next month could hardly be more timely.

Even today, Fincher simply can’t escape Fight Club and the monsters it unleashed. A few months ago, when he was doing press for his latest feature The Killer, Fincher was interrogated yet again about Fight Club’s controversial legacy. He had to defend himself against accusations that Fight Club is now required viewing for what The Guardian called “male supremacists in the Andrew Tate mould” (referring to the misogynistic social media influencer charged with human trafficking and rape).

“I’m not responsible for how people interpret things,” the director protested. “It’s impossible for me to imagine that people don’t understand that Tyler Durden is a negative influence… people who can’t understand that, I don’t know how to respond and I don’t know how to help them.”

Part of the reason people were charmed by the despicable Durden came down to the casting of Pitt, then at the peak of his celebrity. Pitt’s handsome, easygoing manner makes the extreme chauvinism seem palatable – almost endearing. Take the moments in which he splices pornography into family films, urinates into the lobster bisque, or makes high-end soap from the blubber he steals from liposuction clinics. These moments would have been utterly grotesque with a less sympathetic actor – but Pitt plays his character with such genial nonchalance they almost seem like mere shenanigans.

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Fincher, who had shot famous pop videos for Madonna and Michael Jackson, also brings such technical brilliance to the filmmaking that some audiences simply don’t notice how rancid and macabre the story becomes. The Fincher Factor is also how such a notoriously grimy film was able to attract big-name talent (as well as Pitt and Norton, Fight Club also stars Helena Bonham Carter as a Goth siren, plus Meat Loaf and Jared Leto).

“Actors always want to work with David,” explains casting director Laray Mayfield. “It’s always a problem of plenty.”

Unsurprisingly, the movie was a favourite of adolescent boys. It sold a reported 13 million copies on DVD and kids were the ones watching it again and again. Whether they appreciated the irony in the script is almost a moot point. Fincher himself called it a coming-of-age movie like The Graduate, but with protagonists in their late twenties and early thirties.

”It’s talking about very simple concepts,” he told Film Comment. “We’re designed to be hunters and we’re in a society of shopping. There’s nothing to kill any more, nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman is created.”

After its world premiere at the Venice Festival in 1999, Fight Club split opinion. Some critics adored its satirical vision. Variety called it a “bold, inventive, sustained adrenaline rush of a movie.” Janet Maslin in the New York Times picked up enthusiastically on the film’s “serious” purpose, namely “to explore the lure of violence in an even more dangerously regimented, dehumanised culture”. However, she also warned: “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.”

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She would probably argue that her fears were grounded: other reviews dismissed Fight Club as an endorsement of fascism and a celebration of violence. “It’s macho porn – the sex movie Hollywood has been moving toward for years, in which eroticism between the sexes is replaced by all-guy locker-room fights,” wrote Roger Ebert.

Norton later claimed to Marc Maron on the WTF podcast that when he and Pitt first watched it at a festival, it was booed and spectators walked out. “We sat at the back and we watched it with all the negative feeling in the room and he [Pitt] turned to me and said, ‘That’s the best movie I’m ever going to be in.’ And I said, ‘I think so too.’”

The film stuttered at the box office. Nonetheless, the popular myth that it was a commercial and critical disaster doesn’t entirely hold up. Long before it began breaking records for DVD sales, Fight Club was being feted by festival programmers and critics, who were quick to realise that it captured the cultural zeitgeist.

A quarter of a century later, Fight Club really hasn’t dated. Fans still quote many of its most famous lines, particularly Pitt’s Fight Club code: “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.” There are still lots of pale, mixed-up young men around today, uncertain of their role in life, dreaming of doing crazy things. Fight Club’s re-release will offer a new generation of cinemagoers the chance to heed this dark warning about the worst excesses of masculinity. Sorry Tyler, but people will be talking about Fight Club for years to come.

‘Fight Club’ is re-released in cinemas on Friday 15 March