The response to Fight Club, Norton says, “really became a sort of a Rorschach test on where you sat. Not to put an ageist kind of spin on it, but I think people over a certain age had a very hard time. It really had a fairly generational split.” At one screening, Elliott Gould—the sixty-one-year-old star of such counterculture seventies comedies as M*A*S*H and The Long Goodbye—was reportedly overheard declaring, “That was awful.” So I didn’t understand why it seemed like I was the only one of my friends who loved it. Not only that: loving Fight Club made me weird. The only other people who liked it were guys, but the more I talked to them about it, the more it seemed like we were watching two totally different movies.

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Pitt had already played some peculiar roles, including a cop in Fincher’s deadly-sins-inspired Seven. But it’s like fans glossed over the content of his movies. He had a reputation for being a pretty boy, an empty-headed heartthrob. He was dating Jennifer Anniston, America’s girl next door, and it seemed like his whole life was coming together. The problem in their logic comes when they want to strip away the consumerist programming Fight Club is so against, and replace it with more programming in the form of old-fashioned gender roles, destructive caricatures of masculinity, and patriarchal privilege. Bruce is dead and Brad is Ed", that's pure evil. Every other line of this entire movie can be quoted (and believe me, it has been). How many of us have used quotes from here as a signature on forums? Great script, brilliantly shot and a joy to read. Have I been going to bed earlier every night? Have I been sleeping later? Have I been Tyler longer and longer? Marla... the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you could stop tonguing it, but you can't.”

TYLER: Shut up. Our fathers were our models for God. And, if our fathers bailed, what does that tell us about God? I could have moved to another room. On the third floor where I might not have heard them. But I didn't. The summer when this was released, The Sixth Sense was in cinemas at the same time. Two movies, two great surprise endings. Well, not for long and not outside my local cinema. Me and a friend had tee-shirts made up reading: "Bruce is dead and Brad is Ed", which we wore during a casual stroll along the queue for each movie on opening night. People's faces were a picture I can tell you. What can I say, we were young(er). Except for their humping, Tyler and Marla were never in the same room. My parents pulled this exact same act for years.

User Comments for Fight Club

Gentlemen, welcome to Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club!” You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else.” Under and behind and inside everything this man took for granted, something horrible had been growing. She met with Fincher at a Four Seasons in Los Angeles—“just to ascertain that he wasn’t a complete misogynist,” she said—before writing the director a long fax, outlining her reservations. “I just said, ‘I’ve got to play it with a big heart.’ Marla had to have a heart, otherwise she’d be just a nightmare. I was talking myself into it. By the end of the letter I’d convinced myself to do it.” Notes Norton: “Helena is so funny. In British theater, if you break [character] laughing, they call it ‘corpsing.’ And she was the absolute worst. She couldn’t get through a take without breaking up. It was like, ‘You know, Fincher’s already going to do forty of these takes—do you really want to make it seventy?’ ”