I Am Jack’s Ten-Year Anniversary: Remembering Fight Club

In college, I introduced myself to a fellow student and when he heard my name was Tyler, he pulled me in close and said, “Are you serious? Do you want to join my fight club?”

On October 15, 1999, director David Fincher’s hilarious, subversive, violent, satiric film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, Fight Club debuted. It is hard to imagine that film is now ten years old.

Fight Club is one of those movies that acts as a watershed for many of my friends and I. I do not doubt that the fact we were in college when we saw it had some affect on why we loved the movie so much. The film questions and offers many critiques about identity, the role of gender in society, consumerism, the work-a-day world, etc. These are precisely many of the questions undergraduates wrestle with on a daily basis. As a bunch of young men living away from home for the first time and away from those male figures in our lives who defined manhood for us, we began asking what exactly does it mean to be a man? What does it mean that so many of my male friends were raised by women because their fathers ditched out on them? Is the narrative that we are to go to college, get a job, and then get married the only one out there? The film tapped into the angst of comfortable, middle class young adults who wonder, “Is this all there is?” much in the same way the grunge music did at the start of that decade.

There was something especially visceral about the film’s violence that fit within our disillusionment. In the midst of a deep-seated frustration with the common trajectory Western society tells us our lives should take and our seeming powerlessness to change that narrative, it seems the only sensible thing is to beat ourselves up. It is an act of deconstruction, a way of going back to square one in order to understand what is real and important rather than merely adopting what was given to us. As Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) says in the film, “How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?”

War Is God: Blood Meridian Review

Of the novels I have read from Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West is perhaps the most difficult to describe. It is a harrowing epic following a gang of scalp-hunters across the US-Mexican border in the 19th century. Unlike Homeric epics, however, it has little plot, little drive to move the action from one scene to the next. There is plenty of action, but it seems to arise organically and for no human reason like lava from the ground or like water particles gathering overhead into storm clouds. The kid, who is the closest thing to a main character in the story all but vanishes from the narration for a large swath of the book — he is present in the gang, but McCarthy allows him to fade into the group. As in all McCarthy’s fiction, it reads like a prose poem. The book is perhaps the most violent thing I have ever read and it has little direct commentary on the violence. In other words, Blood Meridian is a nightmare. It does not fit in the genre of horror. It is horror.

McCarthy does not offer horror as Hollywood gives it to us. This is not voyeurism, nor does the book try to make us jump with twists and turns and monsters who show up outside our window. People like to go to horror movies to feel momentarily frightened, but then realize that they are really safe. McCarthy does not let the audience feel safe afterward.