Fight Club

It is based on the 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk. Norton plays the unnamed narrator, who is discontented with his white-collar job. He forms a “fight club” with soap salesman Tyler Durden (Pitt), and becomes embroiled in a relationship with an impoverished but beguilingly attractive woman, Marla Singer (Bonham Carter).

Palahniuk’s novel was optioned by Fox 2000 Pictures producer Laura Ziskin, who hired Jim Uhls to write the film adaptation. Fincher was selected because of his enthusiasm for the story. He developed the script with Uhls and sought screenwriting advice from the cast and others in the film industry. It was filmed in and around Los Angeles from July to December 1998. He and the cast compared the film to Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and The Graduate (1967), with a theme of conflict between Generation X and the value system of advertising.

Studio executives did not like the film, and they restructured Fincher’s intended marketing campaign to try to reduce anticipated losses. Fight Club premiered at the 56th Venice International Film Festival on September 10, 1999, and was released in the United States on October 15, 1999 by 20th Century Fox. The film failed to meet the studio’s expectations at the box office and received polarized reactions from critics. It was ranked as one of the most controversial and talked-about films of the 1990s. However, Fight Club later found commercial success with its home video release, establishing it as a cult classic and causing media to revisit the film. In 2009, on its tenth anniversary, The New York Times dubbed it the “defining cult movie of our time.”

On a return flight from work, the Narrator meets a soap salesman, Tyler Durden, who criticizes his consumerist lifestyle. After an explosion destroys the Narrator’s apartment, he moves into Tyler’s decrepit house. They become friends and start an underground fight club in a bar basement. Tyler also saves Marla from an overdose, initiating a sexual relationship between them, while the Narrator remains cold to her.

The Narrator quits his job, blackmails his boss for funds, and grows Fight Club, attracting new members, including his cancer support group friend, Bob. Tyler morphs the club into Project Mayhem, committing acts of vandalism intended to disrupt the social order. Feeling sidelined, the Narrator confronts Tyler, who admits to orchestrating the explosion in the Narrator’s apartment and then goes missing. When the police kill Bob during a mission, the Narrator tries to dismantle Project Mayhem. Discovering its nationwide reach and being called Tyler Durden by Marla and members, he realizes he and Tyler are split personalities.

Learning that Tyler plans to erase debt records by blowing up the skyscrapers of consumer credit companies, the Narrator unsuccessfully warns Marla and goes to the police, some of whom are also Project Mayhem members. He attempts to disarm the explosives, but Tyler attacks him. Accepting that he is Tyler, he shoots himself in the mouth, “killing” Tyler, while the bullet non-fatally passes through the Narrator’s cheek. Marla arrives, and the two hold hands as they watch the targeted buildings collapse.