“May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect. Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete”

It’s been a while since I’ve picked up something from Chuck Palahniuk after my foray into HAUNTED. So I decided to pick up his most famous book, already adapted into a movie millions have seen, Fight Club (or Flight Club as I kept on calling it due to the frequent flyer miles the main character seemed to be accumulating at the start of the book). It’s on one of these flights insurance drone Jack meets a charismatic anarchist called Tyler Durden.

Our narrator, ‘Jack’ (played by Edward Norton), is a directionless every-bloke who, when not weathering humiliating chewings-out at work, exists as an inadequate nighthawk, trying to cure his chronic insomnia by fixing on the synthetic sympathy of assorted nocturnal self-help groups. Solace is finally found with his head enveloped in a sobbing Meatloaf’s pendulous ‘bitch tits’, while attending a support group for men with testicular cancer. The symbolism couldn’t be clearer – if Jack isn’t actually ball-less, he might as well be.

Something obviously has to give, and it does when Jack meets Tyler Durden (Pitt) on the plane home from a business trip. He arrives back at his apartment to find it in ruins – having mysteriously exploded in a fiery Armageddon of Ikea – so he calls Tyler, who invites him to crash round his place. And then invites him to punch him in the kisser.

You can swallow about a pint of blood before you’re sick

Which he does, and soon they’re scrapping like squaddies in the car park, and enjoying it – the simple act of mano-a-mano rucking reminding Jack not only that he’s alive, but that he’s a he.

The first rule of Fight club is that you don’t talk about the Fight club. I told that I did this myself. […] I just don’t wanna die without a few scars.
The second rule of Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Fight Club.

The craze spreads, and fight clubs start springing up all over the country with Tyler as their charismatic leader.

It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.

But Tyler has a hidden agenda, and before Jack knows it, he’s extending his organisation’s activities into surreal random acts of anti-capitalist terrorism – the highly secret Project Mayhem. Starbucks coffee houses are razed. Corporate art is demolished. And rich, vain women have their own liposuctioned lard sold back to them as classy soap.

There are so many ways to read Fight Club that it’s almost impossible to know where to start. Is it a fascistic call to action for a generation of dickless wonders? A homoerotic love story in which Jack is reintroduced to his nads before being carried off in Tyler’s pneumatic arms? A satire on modern feminism’s cartoonish views of what men are like, or…? Well, have a go yourself. It’s half the fun.

What you see at Fight Club is a generation of men raised by women.

I was thinking of this.. https://www.artofmanliness.com/people/family/a-generation-of-men-raised-by-women/. No dad present. No role model. Tyler has no dad. Jack has a dad who keeps on starting new families every now and then like a “franchise” so not really present.

A Generation of Men Raised by Women

The other half is Fincher’s scorching style. From an opening title sequence that out-Sevens Seven’s, he presents a maelstrom of celluloid sorcery. Flash cuts, subliminal images, fake cue dots, jumping film… it’s a howling monster of a book (and movie) that virtually sticks its ravening snout out of the screen and bites you.