Remaining Men

Man Baby: Edward Norton and Meat Loaf in Fight Club. Photo: 20th Century Fox

Among the many insane, deranged, inflammatory and down-right wrong-headed critiques of David Fincher’s 1999 opus Fight Club, both then and now, perhaps the rawest and most scathing came from Fincher contemporary Paul Thomas Anderson. Asked about it while promoting Magnolia, the newly anointed indie auteur condemned it as “unbearable” then went for the jugular — or, more accurately, the groin: “I wish David Fincher testicular cancer for all his jokes about it; I wish him testicular fucking cancer.”

Some context is important here. In Fight Club, a nameless, insomniac protagonist (played by Edward Norton) finds temporary salvation from his chronic sleep disorder and ongoing spiritual malaise in an all-male support group for survivors of testicular cancer. The group’s fraternally defensive name, ‘Remaining Men Together’, offers a bit of a clue to its purpose in the film, as do its weepy, emotionally fragile members, among them Meat Loaf’s Bob, a former body-building guru whose steroidal abuse has left him with no testicles and big, flopping breasts, the very sight of which provides Fight Club with one of its most indomitable images: Norton’s sleep-deprived narrator being forcibly nuzzled between Bob’s protruding nipples like the man-baby he is.

It's very funny and freudian as hell, but it’s not making fun of cancer. Prior to Norton’s character conjuring up his own anarchist saviour in the form of Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden — a kind of thrift-store Ché Guevara — it’s making fun of a corporate drone feeling so numbed and emasculated by our consumer-driven culture that the only place he feels safe is in a room full of men who’ve literally had their balls cut off. Like Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 source novel, Fincher’s film is a slyly subversive, satirical exploration of the crisis in masculinity affecting white-collar men whose only real test in life has been their ability to endure the tedium of their own crappy jobs.

Thrift store revolutionary: Brad Pitt as Edward Norton’s anarchist saviour Tyler Durden in Fight Club. Photo: 20th Century Fox

Now for some more context. When Paul Thomas Anderson was finishing up Boogie Nights, his dad, Eddie Anderson, died from lung cancer. Anderson Sr had been a cult TV personality in the 1960s and then worked as a continuity announcer on ABC until his death in February of 1997. These biographical details fed into his son’s next film. Released a few months after Fight Club, Magnolia was a sprawling, multi-character epic about fucked-up families, thwarted love and amphibian weather fronts. It also featured two characters — one played by Philip Baker Hall, the other by Jason Robards — who were dying of cancer. Both characters were fathers and both were at the end of long and illustrious television careers. To paraphrase Magnolia’s opening treatise on serendipity,  Anderson’s revulsion to Meat Loaf’s “bitch tits” surely wasn’t just a matter of chance.

His excoriation of Fight Club, though, still feels like a low blow from a director whose own movies rely on people being able to read between the lines. Even before it came out, Fight Club was well on its way to attaining the pariah status it continues to hold in certain quarters without Anderson piling on. In his memoir What Just Happened? the film’s producer, Art Linson, detailed the horror its first screening inspired in the 20th Century Fox execs who suddenly saw their jobs on the line after sanctioning $65 million dollars of Rupert Murdoch’s money for a movie that ended with a bunch of service industry anarchists launching a terrorist assault on capitalism itself.

Things got even more frosty after the Columbine high school massacre forced the already nervous studio to push the release date back from summer to autumn. By the time it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, even the sight of Merchant Ivory mainstay Helena Bonham Carter, all gothed-up as the chain-smoking, filter-free Marla Singer (most memorable line: “I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school”), was too much to bear; it was booed out of the festival. Then came the reviews, with the London Evening Standard’s late critic Alexander Walker not atypical in likening it to SS propaganda and condemning it as “an inadmissible assault on public decency.”

I asked Fincher about this reaction back when Zodiac came out (you can read the whole interview here). He was pretty sanguine about it. “As I like to say, you do the best you can and then try to live it down… I mean, we wanted to offend people a little bit, I won’t deny that, but it was hardly as incendiary as people made it out to be.” And yet Fight Club remains a political punching bag for those who don’t get the satire, or who write off the satire because the film itself (or, more likely, some less-than-savoury aspects of its fandom) offends their sensibility.

On the occasion of Fight Club’s 20th Anniversary, for instance, the New Yorker published a condescending piece that went into great detail about its afterlife as the apparent urtext of the incel and men’s rights movements, citing as evidence its proliferation among the so-called “seduction community” of the mid-to-late aughts. This subculture — made up of groups of men congregating online to strategise about how to pick up women — came to mainstream prominence via Neil Strauss’s 2005 non-fiction best-seller The Game (unrelated to Fincher’s movie of the same name), which, yes, does parrot elements of Fight Club and, yes, does feature a guy who uses Tyler Durden as his online pseudonym.

But the connection still seems a little tenuous, not least because nowhere in Fight Club does a charismatic misogynist teach roomfuls of geeky assholes how to seduce women. But you know which film does have this? Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. Which is also why I laughed like a drain during the flashback scene in Glass Onion when Edward Norton’s moronic, fraudulent, soon-to-be tech billionaire rocks up dressed exactly like Tom Cruise’s alpha-male pick-up artist Frank T.J. Mackey (right down to the leather waistcoat and the samurai ponytail) because, well, of course a wannabe tech bro — another subculture in which misogyny thrives (see Fincher’s The Social Network) — would worship a fictional men’s rights advocate like Mackey. Was this Norton’s smirking revenge, a belated dig, perhaps, at the director for dissing one of his best films? To once again paraphrase Magnolia: it is the humble opinion of this writer that this cannot be just a matter of chance.

I’ll be participating in a panel discussion on Fight Club following a screening of the film at Glasgow Film Theatre on 26 March. Tickets here. Come along!