Rebels on the Backlot (45 page)

Kenneth Turan of the
Los Angeles Times
was even more dismissive. He called
Fight Club
“a witless mishmash of whiny, infantile philosophizing and bone-crunching violence.”
Entertainment Weekly’s
Lisa Schwarzbaum said it was a “dumb and brutal shock show of a movie” that was “extreme and disturbing.” Rex Reed, in the
New York Observer
, called it “a load of rancid depressing swill from start to finish.” Then there was veteran critic Alexander Walker’s comment in the
London Evening Standard
, scolding one of the Western world’s premier capitalists, Rupert Murdoch, for making a movie that was “not only anti-capitalist, but anti-society and, indeed, anti-God.”

Fincher didn’t expect everyone to like his film, but he was confused by Ebert’s comment. “How can a movie that is a proponent of no solution whatsoever be labeled as fascist? It’s just fundamentally opposed to the idea of fascism,” he said, defending the movie ahead of its release in England.

Mechanic had miscalculated, and he knew it. “I had wanted the Pauline Kaels of today—and there isn’t one—to provide a context for understanding the film,” he later said. “Forget about whether you liked it or not. There should be people who see things in a broader context, and there aren’t. I understand not liking the movie. I don’t understand not understanding the movie, or not thinking that it’s an important film.”

Still, some critics wavered between revulsion and awe. They seemed genuinely confused about what to think. “Early on in
Fight Club
I found myself exulting at the scary wit with which David Fincher was pulling things off and racking up a score. It was like watching some nerveless kid play pinball in a minefield,” David Thomson observed in the
New York Times.
“But this is one of the
most glossy and treacherous pieces of cinematic black ice we have yet encountered, with good old photography turning into effects beneath our drifting tires.” Thomson concluded that Fincher was too enamored of his own ability to manipulate his chosen medium and the audience that watched it. He wondered if Fincher wasn’t a terrorist of sorts; “I can’t help wondering whether the social scientist in Mr. Fincher wouldn’t be like the cat that swallowed the cream if a riot of copycat fisticuffs ensued…. David Fincher’s bristling attitude is no defense against rubbish.”

A few key critics championed the movie. Janet Maslin called it “visionary and disturbing” in the
New York Times
, and advocated seeing it twice. Stephen Hunter seemed to praise the movie in the
Washington Post
despite himself. The film is “a provocative experience that lights you up even as it brutalizes you,” he wrote. “But unlike so many of today’s movies, you actually come out feeling something, some spike of sensation that could signify your deep brain’s collapse or its enlightenment.” He concluded: “Understand, I am not writing a defense. The movie is indefensible, which is what is so cool about it. It’s a screed against all that’s holy and noble in man, a yelp from the black hole.”

That was the first wave, the movie critics. But that was quickly followed by a wave of social and cultural critics who within a few days began to have their say. The issue migrated off the arts and leisure pages onto the opinion and editorial pages.
Fight Club
was immoral.
Fight Club
was repugnant.
Fight Club
was a disgrace.

Even people within Hollywood were outraged.

T
HE EDITOR OF THE
H
OLLYWOOD
R
EPORTER
, A
NITA
B
USCH
, wrote a scathing column accusing Fincher and Fox of making a scandalous film filled with gratuitous violence, reflecting the chatter throughout town. “The ultragraphic violence of Fox 2000’s
Fight Club
has drawn more gut anger from the industry than I’ve ever heard,” she wrote. “And for good reason.” Busch argued that the film virtually begged Washington to legislate the film industry into taking a more responsible role as entertainer of the masses.
Busch wrote that the film “will become Washington’s poster child for what’s wrong with Hollywood. And Washington, for once, will be right. …The film is exactly the kind of product that lawmakers should target for being socially irresponsible in a nation that has deteriorated to the point of Columbine.” Busch also presided over two news articles that slammed the film, including one that quoted producers and agents (anonymously, of course) saying the movie was “loathsome,” “absolutely indefensible,” and “deplorable on every level.”

In retaliation, a furious Fox pulled all its movie advertising from the
Hollywood Reporter
, though only briefly. Mechanic was particularly outraged that Busch wrote so passionately about the film but had showed up a half hour late to the screening. The publisher, Bob Dowling, hadn’t seen it at all. He called up Dowling and said, “I don’t care if you didn’t like the movie. But you owe us the respect to see it.” Dowling went to see the film that very night—not that it mattered.

Busch also got into a tangle with an on-line critic, David Poland, who went on a local radio station to criticize her for editorializing about
Fight Club
in the news columns of the
Hollywood Reporter.
Busch, who was notoriously prickly, sent Poland a letter from her lawyer demanding he “cease and desist” from “further use or publication of any reference whatsoever to Anita Busch or the
Hollywood Reporter.”

But Busch was right that people in Hollywood were buzzing about the film, and not in a good way. The vice chairman of Paramount’s Motion Picture Group, Robert Friedman, pulled aside producer Art Linson at the Paramount commissary and pleaded, “How could you?” Walking out of the premiere in Los Angeles, Fincher overheard two women from his agency, CAA, whispering, “This shouldn’t have been made. Who do these people think they are? This is socially irresponsible.”

Fincher was sincerely bewildered by the scandal. “I honestly thought the movie was funny, and I thought it was fairly innocuous,” he said later. He had obviously forgotten that he once said he intended the film to be “a sharp stick in the eye.”

Laura Ziskin thought people read the film wrong. “It wasn’t violence with no context, violence for violence’s sake. This is violence used to tell a story, with a real context. I really think it’s an antiviolence movie. You know, what is the obligation of an artist? To hold up a glass to life. This in no way condones violence—the good self triumphs.” Ziskin also didn’t buy any connection between violence in entertainment and real-life violence, like Columbine. “A lot of people condemned the movie without seeing the movie. But it is a scary movie. I think that’s right. It was at the crest of something.”

Some commented on the irony that Fincher, who’d made millions shooting slick commercials for Madison Avenue, would make the subversive
Fight Club.
Was he biting the hand that fed him?

The erudite magazine
Film Comment
wrote a typically scathing cover story on this order:
“Fight Club
belongs to a distinct moment of both dread and rupture in American mainstream cinema, also manifested in
The Matrix
and traceable at least as far back as [Paul] Verhoeven’s
Starship Troopers…. Is Fight Club
the end of something in cinema, or the beginning? Zeitgeist movie or cult item? Whether you find the state-of-the-art cinematic values of this current moment liberating or oppressive, radical or specious, of lasting significance or entirely transitory, as the little girl in
Poltergeist
says: They’re here.”

T
HE DISCUSSION OVER VIOLENCE CAUSED OTHER FILMMAKERS
, even in this rebel generation, to pause and consider what they were doing. Paul Thomas Anderson, who was an acolyte of Quentin Tarantino, that original “poet of violence,” and had made a fairly violent movie himself with
Boogie Nights
, said he thought
Fight Club
was “an incredibly irresponsible film.” He for one was convinced that movie violence did encourage real-life violence. “Movies absolutely promote violence. I know that as a kid when I saw movies, I would want to be the characters in the movies. I would want to dress like them, and I would want to talk like them.” The first time Anderson screened
Boogie Nights
for a test audience, he was horrified to hear people cheer when William H. Macy’s
character, Little Bill, got his gun after finding his wife having sex with another man. “When he shot her, the audience cheered,” Anderson said. “I sank in my seat and I have never felt worse in my life. I thought that I’d really done wrong in terms of those characters and in the movie and everything else…. I really kind of changed my tune and felt a real responsibility to not want an audience to cheer, laugh, or have a good time when violence happens. I’m all for having fun, but gunshots hurt. You know, I always thought the subtitle for
Boogie Nights
should be, ‘It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.’” The scene was later trimmed because of protests by the MPAA over the sex, not the violence.

David O. Russell also decided that he’d had it with violence, even though
Three Kings
was quite a violent war movie. “In some ways Quentin Tarantino inspired me to make
Three Kings
, indirectly,” Russell said. “Because it was the way he embraced the vitality and life—Paul Anderson, too—there was so much life in their movies. The way they dealt with violence and testosterone, you know, it was kind of intriguing to me. But that is not intriguing to me now…. I’d rather now make a movie about like ten thousand volunteer nonviolent warriors who go to the desert of Iraq and decide to sit there, like the way Gandhi used to do things. That’s just more interesting to me.” Russell made his next movie about two existential detectives; the movie had no guns in it.

But Quentin Tarantino thought
Fight Club
was one of the best movies of its time. “It’s the rare movie that’s come out in the last six years that inspired me the way
Fight Club
inspired me,” he said in 2003. “I adored it. It was like a diamond bullet in my brain when I saw that movie. And you know, to this day, I’ve only seen it twice, and I could watch that movie all the time. But actually I love it so much I don’t want to overuse it. I want to wait.”

N
EWS ITEMS, FROM THE WIRES, TRADES
,
L
OS
A
NGELES
T
IMES:

A
T THE
M
AYFAIR
T
HEATRE IN
O
TTAWA
, C
ANADA, IN THE
spring of 2000, a crowd of young men and women were lined up to go the movies. It was a sold-out crowd of moviegoers in their twenties, and one group barely made it into the packed theater. The ticket woman at the door warned them if they couldn’t find seats they’d have to leave. Anticipation coursed through the crowd. They’d seen the movie before; most were seeing it for the second or third time. They’d come to see
Fight Club.

Something strange happened to
Fight Club
by early 2000. All
over the United States, all across Canada, young people were still lining up to see the movie that had taken a nosedive after two weeks in the national box office, settling in a shallow grave at $37 million, just over half the cost of production. In the United Kingdom the news was even worse—just $7 million for the entire run. Marketing costs alone had been $20 million. What was happening at second-run and repertory theaters, at midnight screenings on college campuses, was something close to resurrection, the birth of a cult classic. As Fincher had originally hoped, the people able to see the satire in his story had stuck with it.

“Ever been at a movie where people all laugh, cheer and clap in the same places, in the right places? This was
Fight Club
on that night,” said writer Blayne Haggart, who was at the Ottawa screening. “The crowd got
Fight Club.
The scene in which Edward Norton’s nameless, ultramaterialist character itemizes his Ikea furnishings, as his apartment morphs into an ultradetailed Ikea catalogue layout, brought the house down. People cheered at the end.”

The Internet also attested to this lingering interest in the film and connection with the issues it raised. A raft of Web sites had sprung up devoted to
Fight Club
and its ideas. Initially people wrote begging to find out where the closest fight club was. One wrote: “I need one of these clubs.” Palahniuk insisted that the clubs had never existed, that he had invented them. But mainly bloggers wanted to talk about consumerism and Starbucks, about brand identity, about individualism and responsibility. One launched the question “What is a man?” There were similar sites in French, Russian, Spanish, and German. Despite the fears of Fox and many social critics, there was no significant attempt by young people to create their own fight clubs and their own Project Mayhem. There was, instead, a lively discussion about what the movie meant and why it spoke to them.