Home > Fight Club (film)

1 Plot

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.

2 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 salesman 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 is made from fat from a liposuction 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.

3 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 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 MurdochKeith Rupert Murdoch (born March 11, 1931) is a successful media mogul, major shareholder and managing director of the News Corporation. He is one of the only chief executives in any multinational media corporation who (through his family company) has a c over Fight Club and it cost him his job, barely a year after Fox's TitanicTitanic is a 1997 dramatic movie released by Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox. The bulk of the plot is set aboard the ill-fated RMS Titanic during her fateful maiden voyage in 1912. The movie won 11 Academy Awards on March 23, 1998 including best p had become the highest-grossing film ever made.

Fight Clubs salvation turned out to be the DVD market which was experiencing rapid growth at the time. The two-disc package featured four audio commentaries and hours of extra material, offering an in-depth analysis of the film. Fight Club would eventually break even and later become profitable thanks to the sales of the DVD. The magazine Entertainment_WeeklyEntertainment Weekly is a magazine published by Time Warner in the United States which is dedicated to the world of celebrity and popular culture. The first edition was published during 1990, and the magazine's weekly circulation averaged 1. 7m copies per, which had originally given the film a negative gradeA grade in education can mean either a teacher's evaluation of a student's work or a student's level of educational progress, usually one grade per year (often denoted by an ordinal number, such as the "3rd Grade" or the "12th Grade"). This article is abo of D, later ranked the DVD #1 on its list of "The Top 50 DVDs You Need To Own."

The film's highly critical view of consumerismConsumerism is the tendency of people to identify strongly with products or services they consume, especially those with commercial brand names and obvious status-enhancing appeal, e. an expensive automobile, rich jewellery. It is a pejorative term which and modern living echoes Naomi KleinNaomi Klein (born 1970) is a Canadian journalist, author and activist. She was born in Montreal, Quebec, and now lives in Toronto. Klein wrote the book No Logo ( 2000), which became a manifesto of the anti-globalization movement. She has also written Fenc's book No LogoNo Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies a controversial book written by Canadian journalist Naomi Klein, first appeared in January 2000. The book focusses on branding, and often makes connections with the anti-globalization movement. Throughout the four and also caused discomfort among some critics. Critics like Ebert decried what they described as a fascistBenito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler Fascism (in Italian, fascismo , capitalized, refers to the right-wing authoritarian political movement which ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943 under the leadership of Benito Mussolini. The name comes from fascia which may mea 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.