Jeremy’s Tophunder №55: Fight Club

6 min readMay 1, 2020

Here’s a little-known fact — the 9th rule of Fight Club is: after the fight, you’re supposed to sit on a stoop and share a beer with Brad Pitt.

It always feels weird providing spoiler alerts for movies that came out 20+ years ago, but in the off-chance that you haven’t seen Fight Club yet, and you’d like to experience it fresh, then just stop reading now and come back later.

I was a little late to the party on Fight Club. I saw it for the first time during my freshman year of college, back when a Netflix subscription involved getting DVDs in the mail. I believe I was grinding my way through Edward Norton’s filmography, because I remember also watching Primal Fear, the People vs. Larry Flynt, Rounders, and American History X during this time period. I remember thinking that Fight Club is probably Norton’s most pedestrian performance among these five movies, and while I still feel that way, I find it almost more impressive, because he’s actually really good in Fight Club. He’s just absolutely amazing in the other four. I think the most underrated part of his performance in Fight Club, however, are his voice-overs. They’re ultimately incredibly important to the movie, helping connect dots towards the end, and Norton is able to match the tone of each scene that he’s describing. When it’s a cool, kick-ass scene, the voice-overs sound calm and confident. When it’s confusing, he sounds frantic.

Pitt also gives a great performance, one that you don’t fully appreciate until your second or third viewing. He obviously has some visceral scenes, mostly involving the fight sequences (especially the scene where he allows the bar owner to beat him up), but what really impresses me with Pitt here is how effortlessly he’s able to ramp up the ridiculousness of his character as we get to know him better and better. When we meet him on the plane, he just seems like an unorthodox, but vaguely charismatic guy — talking about plane crashes and using soap to make explosives. But by the end of the movie, once the narrator realizes that Tyler Durden is just a disassociative split personality, Pitt suddenly evolves into an over-the-top cartoon character, like he is in the garage scene. It’s almost like Pitt played two different characters — the Tyler Durden we thought was real, and the Tyler Durden we knew wasn’t.

The movie is bookended by two amazing sequences. The opening credits are layered over a (literal) glimpse into the narrator’s mind, ending with us coming face-to-face with him with a gun in his mouth. It’s a really cool visual effects piece that throws us right into the middle of the action. It’s only later that we find out that what we just saw was actually the end of the movie. The plot flashes back, and then proceeds (mostly) linearly until we catch back up, and we find out why the narrator has a gun in his mouth. He finally figures out how to rid himself of Tyler, just as members of Project Mayhem come deliver Marla Singer (played brilliantly by Helena Bonham Carter) to him. Then we get to watch the narrator and Marla watch the literal downfall of credit card companies, right as The Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind” kicks in. It’s one of my favorite musical cues in any movie, or at least my favorite that involves a pre-existing piece of music.

One of Fight Club’s lasting legacies is the degree to which it contributed to a distinct shift in the style in which stories are told in movies. Plenty of movies throughout history have had shocking twists, but it’s rarely been because the narrator of the film (whether explicitly, like with a character’s voiceover, or implicitly, just viewing the movie from the perspective of the central character) is unwilling or unable to tell the story as it “actually” happened. And, yes, the idea of an unreliable narrator has always existed, I suppose. But the unreliable narrator became a fixture of movie storylines in the mid-90s and early 2000s. Fight Club, The Usual Suspects, American Psycho, The Sixth Sense, Memento, Big Fish, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, A Beautiful Mind, Hero, even Forrest Gump might qualify. It became the cool way to make a movie for the better part of a decade, and it was done so well that it effectively ruined the trope. It’s effectively impossible to make a movie featuring an unreliable narrator without being compared to one or more of those movies. A movie like Shutter Island, which came out in 2010, received mixed reviews, probably in large part because it was living in the shadow of all of those movies that came before it. If Shutter Island had been released in 1998, I can only imagine that it would be much better remembered today.

One of my favorite elements of the movie is the single-frame flashes of Tyler Durden that we get before actually being introduced to him on the plane. These flashes are notable for two reasons — one that’s significant, and one that’s less so. To start with the less significant reason, they serve as a nice preview of a scene that comes later, when the narrator explains one of Tyler’s peculiar forms of vandalism — splicing single frames of pornography into family movies during his nighttime job as a projectionist. And while that’s a cool tid-bit/callback, it doesn’t actually answer why they chose to do it. That leads us to the reason that matters. The single frames of Tyler spliced into those scenes serves as an ongoing indication that the narrator is starting to lose his grip on reality. The character of Tyler has already started to develop inside his mind, but it hasn’t broken out into it’s own separate personality yet. We continue to see flashes of Tyler, and eventually see him as a fully formed entity (like when we see him at the airport or when he steals a car), but the narrator still can’t interact with him. It’s not until the scene on the plane, when the narrator is returning from a business trip (and an implied severe bout of insomnia) that Tyler becomes a walking talking character in the narrative.

Fight Club wasn’t the first movie I ever saw with an unreliable narrator and a twist at the end — that probably goes to Unbreakable, which I contend is probably one of the more underrated movies of the 2000s, but I won’t digress too much. Fight Club, was, however, the first movie where I really started to recognize that the unreliable narrator was a plot device that I really found engaging and interesting. I just found it really cool. There aren’t too many movies on my final list that feature an unreliable narrator, or a narrative structure as unorthodox as Fight Club’s, but that’s for a lack of space, not a lack of interest. In the years since I’ve seen it, I’ve seen a lot of movies that subvert the classic narrative structure, but I haven’t seen too many that do it as well as Fight Club does. It’s a movie that I still enjoy re-watching, because it’s fun to pick up on all of the hints that the filmmakers drop through the first hour and a half of the movie. If you’re really paying attention, the twist isn’t really much of a twist — you can see it coming if you know what to look for. It’s not quite as good as the first time around, but I can’t really take points off for that. For a movie that was great the first time and is still great now, there was never any question that it would make the Tophunder. For now, it slides in at №55.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall

17. Ocean’s 11

18. Air Force One