Arts & Literature
Fight Club: Influence on Culture and Thought
Over the past two decades, Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel Fight Club appears to have cast a good deal of influence on contemporary thought and culture. The novel led to a 1999 movie of the same name by David Fincher; the movie’s IMDB page shows an average rating of 8.8 the film out of 2 million user ratings and over 4000 user reviews. Both academic circles and popular culture seem to have been impacted by the novel and the film adaptation.
In summer 2014, the famous British paper The Guardian published a story “Chuck Palahniuk outlines Fight Club comic book sequel” on Palahniuk working on a graphic novel as a sequel to Fight Club. The paper called the novel a “pop-cultural sensation” that gives expression to “professional, social and sexual anxieties of late youth.”
With a male lead, the novel and its film adaptation have both been widely explored by analysts and academicians in gender context. In the Journal of American Culture (Vol. 29, Issue 3) in September 2006, Lynn M. Ta Published an essay “Hurt So Good: Fight Club, Masculine Violence, and the Crisis of Capitalism” that the movie Fight Club has sparked a polarized debate over the impact of profit-driven consumerism on an “American masculinity gone soft.”
Personally, as someone who hasn’t read the novel yet but glimpses of it and discussion about it, the novel seems to have deep connections with human psyche—connections that have become more pronounced with time and research in social sciences, particularly psychology. Exploring anxiety, estrangement, and violence via a character in America’s urban, post-modern society is relevant to millions of those who struggle with financial stress caused by corporate forces and their resulting societal structure.
On the level of research and academic thought, probably the novel was foreseen in works such as Daniel Goleman’s Vital Lies, Simple Truths (1987) that explain the psychology of self-deception. Like Palahniuk’s unnamed protagonist/narrator, chronically stressed people tend to seek satisfaction in what appears to be self-deceiving behaviors, e.g., participating in groups where they don’t belong but need to be for undisclosed needs, and those needs actually are satisfied by such participation. A medical equivalent is the effect of placebos on people, including the findings that some people even get addicted to placebos!
In a way, Fight Club is a complementary work to ideals of romanticism since it involves a play on people’s real versus assumed needs – nature versus human control of reality. Apparently, there are no in-depth studies to establish well-supported connections between Fight Club and romantic literature. But a thesis by Jacob Wiker, of Franciscan University of Steubenville, “Romance and Identity in Fight Club” (2010) concludes that “romance drives the narrator’s quest for identity.”
Online search seems to suggest that the film has a more widespread and deeper impact on American pop culture than the book. There are dozens of trivia and “things you didn’t know about fight club” pages. The cult status of the film has found its way as an example of definitions of “cult”, as seen in “Cultographies’ Definition of Cult Cinema” that writes:
“Examples of films that are known to attract cinephiles are: A Clockwork Orange (1971), Crash (1996), and Fight Club (1999).”
And in our times, the litmus test of trendiness and cult following is our social media, and of that of course, everyone’s addictively popular Facebook. Of now, the facebook page of the film Fight Club https://www.facebook.com/FightClub has well over 8 million likes!
Clearly, Fight Club, as a book and film, seems to have a great attraction for those who grew up in the 90s and after, but many others as well.
