10 Controversial Movies Everyone Misunderstood

2. Fight Club

Surely the best cultural touchstone for the current Joker controversy is the kerfuffle that surrounded the release of David Fincher's masterful thriller Fight Club.

Just as Joker has been deemed an empowering film for angry young men, so too was Fight Club pilloried by many for influencing rage-filled males to not only start their own fight clubs, but attempt to tear down the very institutions that society is composed of.

And it's absolutely fair to say that many young men did take the wrong message away from Fight Club, viewing Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) as an aspirational figure and conveniently ignoring the fact that he's, you know, a fabricated embodiment of the protagonist's (Edward Norton) mental illness whose monologues shouldn't be taken seriously.

Audiences and critics alike largely missed the fact that Fincher's film is a satire of traditional, toxic masculinity and the forces within society (namely consumerism) which reinforce it.

Fight Club is executed with enough style that less-attentive viewers missed the critique, even if it's absurd that anyone over the age of 15 could get to the end of the movie and not see Project Mayhem for the insane edgelord sham that it is.