Fight Club
Sorry, I am going to break the first two rules of Fight Club here. For those of you just getting out from your residence under a rock, Chuck Palahniuk’s sardonic, biting look at violence, nihilism, male identity and consumer culture, interspersed with shocking and deadpan humour, was adapted into a 1999 film directed by David Fincher that was all of those things and adjectives I just listed. Both Palahniuk’s novel and Fincher’s film are dark and clever, like A Clockwork Orange if narrated by a Kurt Vonnegut character.
However, I give the movie a bit of an edge here. In the novel, the ending is dark and up for interpretation, as the Narrator is in a mental institution (with the spirit of Tyler Durden arguably not extinguished). In the film, there is a greater sense of closure, as the Narrator and Marla have each other, but the repercussions of his actions as Tyler Durden still remain, as they watch his plan to bring the credit card company buildings down. Both endings work, but the film also tightens up on some of the more disturbing fetishes that Palahniuk’s book scatters throughout that seem more like shock value than redeeming sidebars to the story.
Fincher and screenwriter Jim Uhls do a superb job visualizing the tasteless opinions of the snarky Narrator. With the tandem of Brad Pitt and Edward Norton playing off each other, their harmonious friendship (and what it eventually means at the end) ends up being a more significant part of the film. Chuck Palahniuk also revealed that he preferred Fincher’s streamlined adaptation as his novel is too sordid at some points to stick with the generation-X audience that the author wanted to speak to.