20 Things You Didn't Know About Fight Club
Let’s have a chat about Fight Club. What’s that? Why not?
In two months it’ll be the 20th anniversary of the world premiere of David Fincher’s brutal satire Fight Club. It’s a dense, intelligent movie that rewards repeated viewing, snatches of dialogue taking on deeper resonance over time.
What this means is that, despite the first - and second - rule of Fight Club (hey, sing along if you know the words), a lot of people have spent a lot of time talking about Fight Club.
The internet is dotted with articles detailing trivia, Easter Eggs and theories (many stolen from each other: if one’s made a mistake, so have two dozen others). For film buffs, this film is the gift that keeps on giving.
That being the case, it’s been a challenge to come up with twenty snippets of information for the 20th anniversary that aren’t necessarily common knowledge amongst every Fight Club fan in the world: theories, quotes, trivia and filmmaking facts that not everyone knows.
But let’s be honest. Many of you will have already read about a couple of these little tidbits, and some of you will be familiar with several. However, only movie anoraks will know most of them - and it’d take a true Fight Club obsessive to tick off the lot.
So which are you? And can you trump us and come up with something more... something that you think no one else will know?
And obviously there are spoilers, but come on - it’s been twenty years now.
20. The Protagonist’s Name Is… Confusing
Edward Norton’s protagonist is never named: in the credits, he’s just ‘Narrator’, which is how most people refer to him (including Fincher). In the self-help groups, he takes on a variety of fake names - Cornelius, Rupert etc.
Casual fans of the movie infamously took to calling him ‘Jack’, after the Narrator’s satirical use of non-fiction article titles: I Am Jack’s Colon, I am Jack’s Raging Bile Duct, etc etc. For ‘real’ fans, this was clearly a shallow misunderstanding.
The thing is, they’re almost right: in the shooting script, the character is referred to as ‘Jack’ - but probably just for the sake of convenience (just as this article will, going forward).
Those article titles were adapted from real-life Reader’s Digest pamphlets, which is how they were presented in Chuck Palahniuk’s original novel: I Am Joe’s Colon, I am Joe’s Raging Bile Duct, etc etc. However, Reader’s Digest refused permission at a late stage for Fincher’s film to use their copyrighted titles. They didn’t want their buttoned-down brand associated with a film like Fight Club.
This led to Norton having to step back in to re-record sections of his narration, replacing ‘Joe’ with ‘Jack’, the name in the script.
However, to Project Mayhem and Marla Singer, his name is Tyler Durden. ‘Tyler’ buys plane tickets in his name: does he have fake ID? Or was that the narrator’s name all along? Did ‘Tyler’ just take it from him, leaving him nameless as he did with the members of Project Mayhem?