Hey! They’re talking about FIGHT CLUB!

8 comments September 18th, 2008

The Onion AV Club’s excellent New Cult Canon finally works its way around to David Fincher’s 1999 masterpiece about office drones, broken bones and DIY explosives, FIGHT CLUB. Writer Scott Tobias delivers a smart defense of the film, and the peanut gallery chimes in with hundreds of comments (some smart, some less so).

When FIGHT CLUB hit theaters nine years ago, many mainstream critics — most of them baby boomers — called it irresponsible, fascist and downright dangerous. These were some of the same writers who praised earlier controversial films, such as A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and STRAW DOGS, but having the message aimed at a younger generation apparently upped the fascism factor. Here, for instance, is what Roger Ebert said…

FIGHT CLUB is the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since DEATH WISH, a celebration of violence in which the heroes write themselves a license to drink, smoke, screw and beat one another up.

What’s funny is how the condemnations of the boomers solidified FIGHT CLUB as a Gen X movie. (In his AV Club piece, Tobias calls it “the quintessential Generation X film.”) The DVD release, in fact, included many of those critical quotes in its self-aware packaging. Its cult has only grown in the last nine years, and though many people — even its fans — miss some of its complexities and ambiguities, it still ranks as one of the best films of the last 25 years.