The first time I saw “Fight Club” was in 1999, when it opened on a wave of publicity and notoriety that had been building for months. The hype started when Brad Pitt and David Fincher attached themselves to the adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, and like everyone who saw the arresting ad campaign I was eager to see the result. I wasn’t sure that any film could live up to such anticipation, but “Fight Club” delivered: it was enthralling, hilarious, disturbing, and unlike anything I had seen before. Afterwards I bought the DVD and watched it periodically over the years, marveling over the performances by Pitt—whose Tyler Durden was a new high in an already impressive career— Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter, as well as “Fight Club”’s enduring freshness.
The second time I saw "Fight Club" on the big screen was at ArcLight Hollywood in 2013. Having voted for it to be shown in the "ArcLight Presents" series, I felt compelled to go and soon found myself enthralled. It was superb--even better than I remembered from my original viewing and all the times I had watched it on DVD.
Today, nearly a quarter century after its release, “Fight Club” is a classic: widely watched, quoted, studied and written about. Audiences who discovered it later might think the film was a commercial and critical success right away, given its bracing and prescient critique of the twin idols of modern capitalism: consumerism and corporate wage slavery. But in its initial run, “Fight Club” was neither. The reviews were decidedly mixed, with much tut-tutting about the dangers of young men starting real-life fight clubs. It was also a box office disappointment, in light of its huge production and advertising budgets.
The fallout was dramatic. Bill Mechanic, Warner Brothers’ CEO and the man who greenlit the film, lost his job largely because Rupert Murdoch hated it. It wasn’t until after the DVD release that “Fight Club” began its steady ascent into commercial and critical stardom. Nowadays even people with a shaky knowledge of the film will recognize the first and second rules of fight club, and know who Tyler Durden is.
On opening weekend in 1999 I watched “Fight Club” surrounded by young men in their teens and twenties. Like “The Shining”, “The Big Lebowski” and “Blade Runner”—three of my other favorite films that also received a tepid initial reception—the original audience was overwhelmingly male. Fourteen years later I was again surrounded by men, now mostly in their thirties. It didn’t take me long to realize this was the same audience: a bunch of guys who had aged normally, though the film they were watching had not.
A couple of years ago, Brad Pitt gave a droll speech in which he claimed to be so old he no longer remembered the first rule of fight club. Fat chance. I’m already looking forward to the day when we original “Fight Club” aficionados, now elderly, will gather to watch Pitt, Norton and their fellow combatants as they were in 1999: sweaty, shirtless and forever in their prime.