20 Things You Didn't Know About Fight Club
8. There's A Reason They Trash The Beetle
During their brainstorming sessions over the script in the development stage, Pitt and Norton bonded over one specific loathing of Generation X for a boomer icon gone bad.
The new, updated Volkswagen Beetle had debuted in 1997 amid a wave of nostalgia for the sixties and seventies, and Fight Club’s two stars hated it with a passion. The car had been a key symbol of sixties youth culture: but the radicals of the sixties had become the bosses and gatekeepers of the nineties, and had repackaged their own idealised youth to sell to the next generation as Swinging Sixties™.
In their minds, this kind of sell-out of authentic culture as an inauthentic marketing experience was exactly what Fight Club was kicking against - and that’s the reason why they insisted on one of the cars that Tyler and Jack beat to hell with bats be a New Beetle.
Funnily enough, shortly after Norton recounts this story on the DVD commentary, Pitt admits that in the intervening time he’s had a volte face regarding the car and believes it to be “a great reworking of a classic design.”