Transcript
Speaker: My throat's broken, I think all.
Speaker: Today we have with us Matthew Spector. Spector is an American novelist and a screenwriter based in l LA. ah Some of his recent publications have included Always Crashing in the Same Car, An Art Crisis in Los Angeles, California from 2021.
Speaker: ah His upcoming book, The Golden Hour, will be published later this month, I think, in April. It explores Hollywood, family, power, and place. Spector is a former senior fiction editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Speaker: has penned an introduction to Eve Babbitt's Slow Days Fast Company, and probably some others. Joan Didion, maybe, Matthew? Yeah, I've written about all of them somewhere. um I have not introduced any current Didion editions, but I've certainly ah written and commented on her. I think I wrote something for The Washington Post a few weeks ago about her. She's an L.A. guy.
Speaker: Yeah, we're here to talk about Fight Club. Yeah, Fight Club. think you had some kind of auxiliary involvement in, right? I did. i actually, um I mean, should we should we take it from the top? Because I do think it's kind of useful to know where the movie comes comes from. And and i I know a bit more of that more about that than than most people do.
Speaker: Let's do it. So I only ever worked in the film industry as an executive in New York. I went there in 1994. to work for Robert De Niro. and mean, I was sort of hired into these jobs because they were specifically about finding material to adapt.
Speaker: It was kind of a ah big speculative marketplace. You know, that was a time when any novel with any cinematic potential generally would be optioned by somebody. And so I i was working, i worked first for De Niro and then I was working for um for Jersey Films, which was Danny DeVito's company. um when We produced Pulp Fiction, you know coming off a period of of great success.
Speaker: And I had a friend, a fellow named Raymond Bongiovanni, who worked for a division of 20th Century Fox called ah Fox 2000. And he called me up one day and he said, I just read this manuscript and um I think it would be a great movie. He said, it's a little dark, but it's um you know it'd be something you you guys could produce it. Maybe Danny Boyle could direct it. Danny Boyle at that time had only directed Shell Grave. It was pre-Train Spotting when we had this conversation. That's really interesting as well, because obviously, Danny Boyd, like, Trainspotting is kind of the British sort of accompaniment to Fight Club in many ways. Very much. i think, I'm sure we'll come to that.
Speaker: So he sends me this manuscript, and it hadn't yet been picked up by a publisher. It was just ah a book that was on submission. And I sat there at my desk and I read, I read, I think I just read the first 75 pages while I was sitting there, you know, because I was inundated with manuscripts all day long. And I and i called him back an hour and a half later and I said, Raymond, you are completely out of your mind. This is not, not nobody's going to make this movie. this is This is um completely unsellable.
Speaker: You know, in the context of of that moment, that was some that was really abundantly true. You know, this was really a time when any movie or any kind of, any script, you know, you had to be able to sort of describe it as, you know, it's Die Hard meets Total Recall. It's...
Speaker: you know ah You know, Rosemary's baby on the moon. So that's there's like a truth to that, like the whole like doors in space sort clear, right? Yes, yes. I mean, there was, you know, some irony attached to it, particularly um for people like me or Raymond, who was just a in so many ways the opposite of what you think a Hollywood executive would be. He was ah a guy who would come up working for a literary agent.
Speaker: I think he spoke eight languages. he was He was so literate and so literary, so incredibly well-read, knew so much about cinema. He and I became friends because we would we would just talk about literature. We would go to lunch and we'd be supposed to be having these conversations about development and film and Hollywood, and we'd wind up talking about Shostakovich.
Speaker: When is this? Is this 1997? Early 1996. So anyway, I said, this is this is not a movie. and And, you know, he took it to his bosses and they didn't they didn't want to buy it.
Speaker: And eventually, eventually they did. He prevailed on them. And I i never really understood it. i I mean, I think it was a very small option. mean, to make a long story short, he died.
Speaker: he He passed away and um he'd been sick and um sort of doing a good job of sort of concealing it. And i I kind of had the feeling, you know, that his boss, I mean, i think his employers who became my employers shortly thereafter, I think they knew that he was ill. And and I think they finally just decided, you know, Raymond's such a good soldier.
Speaker: Let's let him have this one. But they didn't really believe in it either. Not not when it was just a manuscript. And I think, and again, i'm I'm not entirely sure who was the person who gave it to Fincher, but I believe what happened is that Art Linson, the producer Art Linson, who's sort of a very famous, legendary Hollywood producer, was brought on you know when when Fox bought the project. And he gave it to Fincher, I think.
Speaker: And the moment that Fincher read it and got it, and gave it to Brad Pitt, who, you know, then as later was, you know, really kind of in his, at the beginning of his kind of imperial run as a movie star was like, Oh my God, Brad Pitt wants to do it.
Speaker: That's when the project became, was taken seriously. That's really interesting to there wasn't, it wasn't, it was published and there was hype around the publication of the book. No, no. If anything, even getting the book published was difficult. There was a, an editor, legendary American editor named Jerry Howard.
Speaker: And I can remember, I remember having lunch with him and, and he was sort of saying, yeah, there's, ah you know, I think that, Fight Club was technically Polanyiuk's second book to go on submission. There was a previous novel that was published subsequently, I think, called Beautiful Monsters, i have which I have not read.
Speaker: But yeah I remember him sort of saying, yeah, I've been i've been sort of trying to you know trying to get my you know overlords around to you know so I could buy this this guy's novel. um So i you know again, it was a, um I may be wrong, but the kind of thing that was maybe like $10,000, $15,000 option, it was not No, it was really like a book where people could see, like they saw what was there, but they nobody had ah had a ah notion that it was going to be of so commercial prospect in any way.
Speaker: it that's It's an interesting... You're saying this about 96, all this is taking off. And that seems to me almost the perfect moment because i think about what else is going on in American culture.
Speaker: i can use ah professional wrestling as a touchstone. as yeah yeah right That is just as what they end up calling the attitude era is going to become such a big deal. And that's where you know yeah go from having a guy dressed as like a plumber fighting a guy who's a Japanese soldier from World War II who's still, you know, in the Southeast Pacific fighting each other in a ring. And then a year later, it's, you know, Billy Gunn, the ass man. It's ah this sort of very, yeah I mean, transgressive, this very masculine, you know, for lack of a better term, I'll just use it, vibe.
Speaker: So it rode the wave, if accidentally, it sounds like. Yeah, i it it absolutely did. and and i And I would also say that that stuff was so kind of pressed out to a certain kind of cultural perimeter, right? I mean, there's always been that you know, WWF, monster truck rallies. You know, there's always been kind of that broad guns and biceps aspect of American culture, right? Which, ah sadly, which... ah you know, obviously has evolved and transformed in all kinds of horrifying ways over the last couple of decades. But um but yes, it it jacked right into that.
Speaker: And yet where it landed, you know, the particular studio and after my friend passed, not right away, but about six months after that, I wound up in his former job.
Speaker: Certainly I i wasn't like a primary person on that movie at all, but I i was a kind of peripheral presence while Fox 2000 was making it. Was there a sense of like, and incredibly wrong about this, was there a sense of the the older people in the studio, these Hollywood executives from like the previous generation, sort of boomers and greatest generation, having less of a comprehension of the resonance of the script?
Speaker: Yes. Well, no. i First of all, my... When the script was delivered, when Jim Ewells delivered his script, which is fantastically good script, and I remember you know sitting in my, you know, saying, oh, here comes the first draft of the script. And I picked up the script and I just thought, man, I blew it on this. This is such a great, such a fantastic script. And Everybody at Fox 2000, specifically my my boss, Laura Ziskin, who is also passed now, and then Kevin McCormick, who was the kind of senior vice president, they got it.
Speaker: They saw it all the way to their great credit, I think. ah But... I don't know that anybody else did. I certainly know that the marketing people at the studio would ultimately be completely flummoxed by it. They were very unhappy. And and that that certain aspects of the making of the movie, which I'm sure we'll get into, were, were you know, embattled.
Speaker: um Or not not not embattled, but, you know, um there were differences of opinion between Ventura and the studio. so that's I mean, it's so interesting in the sense that it it gives the lie to that For lack of a better term, a kind of libertarian nostalgia. Yes. So you might see among my generation of kind of, oh, this, you know, this couldn't be made now at the time in the 90s of this kind of like radically sort of innovatory free period. Yes.
Speaker: It was done because in this particular case, you know, a movie star and a director that people really liked had leverage. They had the leverage to do it. And, and um you know, and there was just enough risk tolerance still to do it. and But the the very, the weirdest thing about it was that Fox 2000, that arm of 20th Century Fox had been set up with a very, they had, them their mission was sort of, this was a time when sort of things like demographics and market, you know, they were talking about the four quadrants of an audience. And somebody had decided for a moment that the most important quadrant were adult women, that it was adult women who, you know, when when a family was trying to decide what to see,
Speaker: It was usually the ah female partner. This is just very heteronormative and very 90s. But the idea was the woman decides what the rest of the family is going to see. So Fox 2000. They clubs target demographic. Yeah, I mean, that makes yeah perfect sense. Yeah.
Speaker: And Fox 2000, where explicitly, they they you know, Laura Ziskin, who was a great producer, but they put her, you know, they she she came aboard and that that that was the remit. We're going to make movies aimed at an adult female audience.
Speaker: Yeah. You know, it turned out there was some wiggle in that because they, you know, they they made things like, I don't know, you know, ah ah Volcano. And, you know, they they made a lot of movies that would not fit that. But but they're particularly at the beginning, they were making sort of domestic dramas, stories, things that have, movies that have been forgotten, like ah Hope Floats and Inventing the Abbots and all these things that are certainly not Fight Club. And, you know, Fight Club is about as far from that demographic as you would possibly imagine. And it really was the most memorable movie they made in those was going to say, in the marketing department at that time, was there a conscious sense of marketing it towards Gen X? I mean, Gen X was sort of like coming into consciousness that time, stuff like David Copeland's novel. What did they think they were doing?
Speaker: you know like In other words, you said earlier they were just kind of befuddled by it in a certain way. so No, I think the marketing... I think initially they were befuddled by it because the book didn't... you know There was no context for the book, right? Every day when you're an executive, you are getting 20, 30...
Speaker: 40 things landing on your desk, yeah you know, between but the moment you get in and the moment you go home. And and that stuff has to be... discussable or, you know, you have to be able to sort of at least articulate, like, this is how you do it, right? You know, this is this is what the movie is.
Speaker: You know, we I think this movie is, you know, the the English patient made $200 million dollars last year and this is a romantic drama, you know, that, that you know, you cast it up and you, you you know, you sort of... It's not much in an ivory, is it? But it very feels much an ivory. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker: The novel of The Fight Club did not have any of that. There was just no way to sort of see that immediately. was about to say the film wasn't made in 1999. It was, I think, probably optioned then and then came out in 2000. But was there any reference to Ray Sinelis' American Psycho, which was... No, I mean, it's obvious, you know, there really wasn't.
Speaker: um And remember, in American Psycho, the movie hadn't existed yet, hadn't been made yet either, I don't think. I think it was like 2003 or 2002 or something. Yeah, it was 2000, I think it came out. But obviously the novel came out in 1991.
Speaker: Yeah, the Fight Club came out in 99. And I don't remember anybody connecting those dots. I do know that from the studio perspective, once Fincher and Brad Pitt were locked in and once the script existed, that you know the certainly the executive half of the studio was like... um they they thought Well, it's a you know it's a dark satire about you know consumerism and the kind of emptiness of of American consumer life. And and you you know there were other movies at the same time.
Speaker: you know i mean, I think you could look at American beauty as tackling some of the same things. I mean, it's it's it's ah I don't think that movie has aged particularly well. But thematically, there are some commonalities.
Speaker: And I think from... Office space too, right? Yeah, office space very much. And I know that from Fincher's perspective and from the perspective of the cast, Edward told me a few years ago that that he they used to talk about it as being like The Graduate.
Speaker: Edward and Fincher used to, they would sit there and they would say, no it's it's it's basically like it's our version of The Graduate. It's, ah you know, your your character is Anne Braddock and Tyler Durden is Mrs. Robinson and And, you know I was thinking when I watched it recently that it's, it's um you can see echoes even of something like Harold Maude, right? i mean, Harold Maude, you have Harold that get who kind of gets off by going to funerals.
Speaker: And, you know, here you you start with Edward Norton's character getting off by, you know, needing to go to support groups for people who are terminally ill. You know, it's it is, i think in a lot of ways, like that's the tradition I would situate in. It's very much the, it's kind of like a next generation version of what the boomers were making at the end of the sixty s you know, like a coming of adult, you know, kind of an an edge of adulthood movie and a movie about kind of like young people confronting the, you know, realities of life in a capitalist culture.
Speaker: Well, there is something interesting there in terms of where the characters are in their lives, though, right? Because so often the the boomer equivalent is sort of, i've I've either left college or I'm deferring that if it's happening at all.
Speaker: ah And, you know, I'm sort of inhabiting this space. In the case of the Graduate, i'm I'm headed there. You know, that's what's about to happen. but It just happened. yeah Whereas here, you know he's he's already in the office. He's sort of accepted that he's traveling. he's accepted he's ah i He's accepted he's a cog in the machine, but he's being the cog, let's say. Yes, and he knows and he knows he's a cog, right? Yes. um right I think he's roughly supposed to be 30, right? I think Tyler Durden refers to himself as a 30-year-old child.
Speaker: Yeah. but So what do we think is going on there with that change in sort of where a person's life is when this sort of epiphany or, know, where we kind of zoom in on them? Why here and not 18?
Speaker: yeah well Well, 18, you know, that's in in America, that's, as we know, that's the reprieve of of um university life where you can sort of pretend that art is front and center. You can not just pretend, you can, you can,
Speaker: You know, you can have ah literature and film and art and things like that be and learning and knowledge be front and center. um in these In both of these movies, or in The Graduate and in Fight Club, you're dealing with people in their early 20s, right?
Speaker: and um you know and And I think it makes more sense in fight you know and in The Graduate. He's on the cusp of entering the workforce. In Fight Club, he he already has entered the workforce. um But... um But, you know, that's, but both of those movies are concerned with that that moment of of collision, right? with With adult responsibility and reality.
Speaker: hundred percent. No, I guess I asked the question because there's that scene, i think it's when Brad Pitts Durden is in the bathtub and he's talking about, oh, you know, I asked my father what to do. He said, go to college. And, you know, and so there's this sense of disillusionment with you know even what college might have represented um in you know for the boomer in the 60s, that yes maybe you have to push it back a little bit or or forward a little bit because you can't have the epiphany until you've tried it out. You know you can't know there's nothing at the end and until you've tried it out. It's also dated incredibly, like in comparison to the millennials and Gen Z, oh you have a sense of less that life's trajectories are trapping them and more that they can't actually get on the ah sort of escalator of the trajectory.
Speaker: i think the contrast from from now to sort of like the 1990s is huge at this point, actually. Of course. I mean, look, it looks like a, you know, that looks like the peak of civilization. It's like, really? This is what you were so upset about that you, you know, had a ah stable employment and housing and health insurance?
Speaker: Really? This is what you're so upset about? but um But I do think that that just you know one distinction, and I was talking about this with with my wife, who's a millennial, who's you know crucially younger enough and than I am. I mean, you know Fight Club came out when she was just about to graduate from high school. And that distinction, I think, you know and in the era of The Graduate,
Speaker: there was still some sense that like, if you, if you went down this road and you sold your soul, right. The um return for that would be, you know, material security and the embodiment of some kind of like American notion of success, right. The, the, the older man in the graduate who looks at Braddock and says plastics is saying that with the, with the full conviction that, that, you know, that this is, this is the way that you can, you know, you can earn a great life and and have vacations and and, you know, actuate yourself on the path of American success.
Speaker: By the mid-90s, that was quite legibly no longer true. if you were If you were taking that bargain you were doing it at the expense of of kind of actuating anything at all. You were you really were, you know, it didn't involve a kind of self-suffocation, I think. I mean, you know, obviously it always did, but I think that that that fact was just kind of more more legible and also, you know, kind of the the roots of that. I mean, I'm a, you know, I always consider myself very much generation X, but I'm actually right on the cusp, right? I mean, I was born in 66. That makes me an old X, I guess.
Speaker: Technically my my peers and writer friends and whatnot, you know, Brett Ellis and David Foster Wallace and all that, like those people yeah were technically boomers. Yeah. I mean, that's the interesting thing about this whole discourse, right, is that someone like Brett Easton Ellis is considered sort of one of the voices of Gen The absolute people of Gen And yet he's born in 61 or 62?
Speaker: Yeah, I think so, 62 maybe. um But I mean, that's always kind of like the the the palindrome of this discourse, isn't it? The the kind of the leading voices of a generation always sort of just on the the cusp of it or the outside of it. Yes.
Speaker: Yes, for sure. Is that the case for the author of Fight Club? Yeah. He's definitely not much younger than I am. if and if In fact, he may be I think he's about the same age. He's probably hovering in his late fifty s too.
Speaker: um but But I do think that... um the The whole concept of of and the kind of anti-consumerism that runs through this movie, it's like, you know, that that was a ah legible point in the 80s, right? in the In the mid and early 80s. You know, I mean, i was in I was in high school, you know, whatever, buying minor threat records and, you know, just this whole sense of like, you you were not in this to make money because making money was for was for clowns. It was for sellouts and and, you know, kind of people who who bought what Ronald Reagan was selling.
Speaker: hi you know So in many ways, I think that attitude in something like Fight Club is a direct outgrowth. you was I think was really preceded by the whole discourse about selling out, right which you saw play out with Nirvana and major labels. and you know that that's That's what came before.
Speaker: Maybe we could talk a little bit about that a sense of spiritual desiccation that seems to be at the heart of the movie. Yeah. I'm born 93. ninety three I can remember growing up with this sense that selling out was very bad.
Speaker: You know, I was sort of reared on even the cartoons of the late 90s that were clearly written by these kind of Gen X writers who wanted you to know that, you know, the big heads on Rocco's Modern Life were bad.
Speaker: And, you know, um I don't know, Heifer is good. I guess what I'm getting at is at some point, the saliency of that, I guess, decreased at some level, you know, for me. But I was young when these feelings were in the air.
Speaker: And I'm interested in what you think it might be or, you know, drawing from your own experience, what it was about that moment when America sort of has won the Cold War. There's a general sense of we're kind of in charge. We've got what we want. Right. But there seems to be some lack of recognition or um creative potential. Something is not being identified in each person that's leading them to this sense of restlessness that Fight Club captures beautifully.
Speaker: And Fincher, as he always does, does a very good job with. So I guess I'm just curious about what that What do you think might be going on there, what the core of that might be? Well, look, I mean, you know, all of this in so many ways, I mean, I was thinking about this last night too, about about how that kind of anti-materialist sentiment that we experienced in Gen X, ah the precursor to that was the anti-material sentiment of the late 60s and early 70s, where you had, you know, hippies and people dropping out, people advocating, you know, for, you know, not entering the rat race, you know, stuff that really reached a kind of critical mass, right, in the Haight-Ashbury era.
Speaker: And there was a kind of um ideological underpinning beneath that, least in theory, right? There was this idea that free love and you could take drugs and, you know get high and find enlightenment. And obviously all of that stuff in retrospect looks like an enormous con pulled by the most narcissistic generation in recent memory, ah even worse than Jack's.
Speaker: Right. but There just seemed to be this explicit rejection, right, of the self-actualization of the hippie movement. Yes, yes. Specifically in the the chemical burn part where he's trying to sort of go into this meditative state. and Yes. well Well, I mean, look, there is a lot of... you know that I do think that the book is saturated with kind of stuff like Est and landmark forums, um which I believe... I think Polanyiak was pretty into that stuff. can we say what as i mean I know what it is, the sort of California ideology, I don't know what non-actionable words I can use, but you know an organization that... Yeah, it was it was a self-actualization, right and it and i and I believe it still exists.
Speaker: ah you You go to these seminars and they and and you know i there's a... I mean, I guess I should speak ah circumspectly here because they're pretty litigious, so I'm given, but you know some people think of it as ah as an MLM or like a multi-level marketing scheme because they're you pay to attend and and and the whole thing is that you kind of get, you know, they try to break down your ego by yelling at you and telling you you can't go to the bathroom. And, you knows there are there are undercurrents of um of ah abuse that or of certainly of of real aggression that play into it. And I think, you know, you can you can see the strands of all of that in Fight Club and in what what a fight club is in the movie.
Speaker: But just to speak to the original question, By the 80s and 90s, the whole kind of hippie idol was ah was considered a joke. It was it was ludicrous, right?
Speaker: you know So we had sort of you know been put in a position where, you know on the one hand, you know I did go to school with people that were like young, you know there were people in my class who were like real young Republican types, you know just people who were just getting into Ayn Rand and you know all that bullshit. was You could see that even in my extremely you know left- coded ah high school, you would see people like that.
Speaker: But most people I knew were very not into that. know You know, um really, you know, loathed Ronald Reagan, loathed Bush one.
Speaker: you know, there was the first Iraq war, you know, so there was this sense that like, none of us were going to go that way. Right. We weren't going to be like, you know, we, we, we felt like to sort of chase materialist stuff was extremely uncool.
Speaker: Right. Gen X, at least the Gen X politics captured in Fight Club feels sort of politically anti-political in a sense. Like it's not the the characters in Fight Club or broadly Gen X, or you can correct me if I'm wrong about this, they're not sort of fleeing the hippie movement and fleeing Reaganism into the arms of, I don't know, trade unionism or Trotskyism? No, sadly, no.
Speaker: the The opposite of that. And I think it really, you know, there was that that sense for writers of of my generation. And, you know, I mean, it's like you, I still see writers of my generation who will sort of, you know, are old kind of old people were like, you know, you just keep the politics out of the writing, man. And I'm just like, yeah.
Speaker: kind replicated in Gen Z today. I mean, there was a kind of like ironic anti-politics among people, say, under the age of 29. twenty nine Yeah. It's sort of returning. I mean, these things are kind of cyclical, I think.
Speaker: um i mean, at the time when Fight Club was being produced, was there a sense of it being political as a film? um And what were those politics coded as at the time? Because obviously, it's it's it can be read both yeah as a kind of far-right film and a far-left film in an ironic sense.
Speaker: Yes. I would say um the way you read it read it the first time is correct. It definitely was not imagined to be a far left film ah by any means. I don't think it was conceived in that way.
Speaker: and it But I also think that it's kind of you know i mean it's its predictions of the far right are pretty astonishing. um you know I think the way that it articulates what what the right wing would look like are...
Speaker: stunning um but you know i mean i i can't speak for the politics of any of the people who made the movie because i don't know them but i but i mean you know in other words i don't know edwards or or brad pitts or fincher's voting history or whatever but i i'm i'm fairly confident that they would all have at that time before the term was embarrassing have just consider themselves liberals, you know? you know It's interesting ah just thinking about um how things code in in retrospect or how things are received. I mean, obviously, it's a movie that's earned this reputation as people sort of missing the point, not getting the ending and and thinking of it as a celebration of these things. I guess...
Speaker: Maybe part of the point of Sam's question in a way is, um at the time when it was being made, even if they saw themselves as liberals, was there any sense that the ideas it contained were political? Of course. I mean, you know, i'd I'd say that it would have been very difficult for anyone to locate them on a left-right continuum.
Speaker: You know, and and part of that just has to do with a trouble that I had with the movie, even at the time. but You know, when when by the time it came out and while they were making it, i you know, I was working for News Corp.
Speaker: As the movie was made by News Corp, I mean, I was working for 20th Century Fox. 20th Century Fox was oren owned by News Corp. And I just thought, you know, a movie that is sort of, in some sense, you know, it culminates in in, you know, let's let's blow up a Starbucks, right? let's yeah ah You know, um that's being financed by News Corp just seemed like this is...
Speaker: this is ah Completely. um It's so muddled from a political standpoint. And and so um ah it's self-canceling. I thought that's it's just, you know, you can't really this. This isn't a house. How how truly transgressive, how sort of satisfyingly.
Speaker: ah Yeah, there was no there was no plausible leftist read on the movie. I mean, there's something beautiful pate about the kind of activism that's engaged in the movie, like the the part where they put the um the safety cards of screaming passengers yes into the jet planes. It just reminds me of banks like Banksy art from like the early 2000s.
Speaker: Of course, right. Which at the time was seen as incredibly profound, and now you sort of look back and just, I don't know, cringe. um yeah Yeah. I wonder where what the material or economic basis for that kind of generational...
Speaker: stance towards sort of provocation comes from. Right. Because it's for me retrospectively, it's quite hard to understand. Yeah. Well... you know Again, i think that this was a movie in which the the kind of, um again, i have to kind of trace that back to some of the sort of like, some of the more you know now kind of lamentable sort of like edgelord stuff that Gen X artists and were doing, you know and boomer artists were doing before that, right? It's like it's like you you look, it's the same thing that that you know when when ah you know you had punk musicians, you know Susie Sue wearing a Nazi armband or
Speaker: Steve Albini, you know. yeah I mean, i was thinking very much of like Jake and Dinos Chapman and the young British artists and the are like the ah the SS officers on wheelchairs like bumping into each other.
Speaker: yeah yeah Yeah. I always think of the, um was it Penelope's Furious, the first Decline and Fall of Western Civilization movie where I can't remember, it's one of those like punk bands that it's, you know, it's a one one word name. It's, you know, hate or or murder or something. Fear.
Speaker: fear. I was close. Even like J Division. I mean, J Division is named after um yes is it in the SSX camps. Yeah. yeah and Well, i' I've officially learned something I did not want to yes yeah no But i think that I do think that that was a That was a very American, you know, that kind of edgy, you know, kind of appropriation of forbidden symbols and, you know, just, just that you know, trolling, basically trolling before there was an internet. You know, that was a very American thing to do.
Speaker: This provides maybe an interesting kind of transition to something I wanted to ask. Because, you know, i i sent you some, we sent you some questions before, you know, we we started up on this. And one of the ones I was just interested in raising was about, you know, Gen X is supposed to have been the most, you know, Trumpian voting generation, so to speak. And I guess I'm kind of interested even beyond, know,
Speaker: you know just the what Sam called the anti-politics of the movie and how that might represent something that could turn into this right-wing thing. yeah I'm also just interested in how prizing transgression yeah can sort of create that politics in itself and that there might be a kind of line there between punk, yeah because you know you were saying that Gen X comes up with punk everywhere, yeah and where we are now. And and I mean, you obviously you you can see that with you know certain punk personalities at the beginning, but I mean, even now, Gen X comedians being like, well, you can't say that anymore. And it was sort of left-coded in the ninety s and early 2000s to say the thing you weren't supposed to say. There was something kind of and it is li liberatory about that. And now it doesn't seem that way.
Speaker: yeah Yeah. Someone like Bill Maher is like a yeah descendant of the fun of Fight Club ethos. A perfect, well, i don't know if I want to give Bill Maher that much credit. it's This whole notion that that, you know, left-wing people used to be the the people that were like you know, cool and could say the stuff that was edgy and could be the things that were edgy, right? Because the people on the right were, you know, religious and, you know, just wanted everything to be 1952 again, which, you know, and on some level they still do.
Speaker: But I think... um you You still you see this in, you know, when people talk about the election or, you know, or after the election, there was some New York Times article where, you know, some some banker was like, you know, it's ah it's a new it's a it's a new it's a new day. I can you know, we can say the word retard again and we don't have to feel policed, you know, or or whatever.
Speaker: and And I just thought, how weak-minded do you have to be to build your entire politics around you're you know being being you know feeling feeling like it's permissible to like say a slur? It actually brings us nicely into another question, which is sort of revolution relevance of sort of globalization and you know the end of the Cold War to this film. Yeah.
Speaker: yeah That makes this big speech about the middle generation of history, they don't have a great war, don't have a Great Depression. Right. Obviously, the kind of unnamed protagonist, who he is also Tyler Durden.
Speaker: Yeah. He hasn't watched your film by now, spoiler alert. But he's constantly on planes. i think they're mostly domestic flights. Yes, yes. But there was still a sense of that globalized... Oh, absolutely.
Speaker: and And likewise, you know there's when a when he's when he's there's that montage of him furnishing his apartment, and he he talks about the you know whatever the something or other stripes, you know and it's like it's given a sort of either a real IKEA name or like a fake IKEA name, right like Swedish. Yeah, and there's ah there's a Confucian yin-yang table.
Speaker: Yes, yes, yes, all of that. And and you know that was, i mean, again, I was i was thinking about On the one hand, i think that I was too, you know, at a time, particularly when I was just like embedded in the in the motion picture business, I was thinking less about that.
Speaker: You know, I reading about the paper and just, oh you know, there's ah and a trade agreement, yeah you know. But I guess it was a weird thing because it took me a while to really understand, you know, how that, how that effect, how the kind of effects of that outside the world of, you know, goods, manufacturing and goods, right? Right.
Speaker: And there's that great line in that same scene that you talked about earlier where he has the cup that has the sort of little marks and the indications of unevenness yes to demonstrate that it's actually been produced by whatever kind of native group or whoever it's supposed to be. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Right, right.
Speaker: So, yeah, I find it very interesting the way the movie is able to build into itself, it's kind of reflective of, in a way, what you just said about reading about trade agreements. And this is all very timely. i don't know when this is going to come out, but obviously we had, you know, ah Black Monday, as we're calling it yesterday. Yeah. um Where you have these abstract forces, you know, you have, is China going to join the WTO?
Speaker: Right. Is, um you know, what does it mean to have free trade with Mexico and Canada? You know, these sorts of things. But they're ultimately like lines on a graph to a normal person, if even that, right? And so you get...
Speaker: you know I doubt that Poniac, when he wrote the the novel, ah was thinking, i do I'm representing what happens when you do you know ah globalization and free trade here. Maybe was, I don't know.
Speaker: But it's interesting that the effects could filter down in such a way that even someone like the unnamed Edward Norton version of the Durden character has already sort of recognized these various material instantiations and that are not creating that sense of spiritual fulfillment. It's just striking me how fast it happened. Yes, course. And I think it happened, again, when you had that particular kind of consumer good, this kind of cheaply produced, made by factories abroad and with exploited labor and all that. It's like, that was, there is a spiritual...
Speaker: you know there is a spiritual The spiritual cost to that is felt by everybody, whether we knew it at the time or not. No, it's a very good point. I like, you know, as may be clear for my questions, thinking about the movie yeah in her in kind of spiritual terms, not to sound like a boomer, but it's hard not to because earlier you mentioned, of course,
Speaker: kind of trying on different anti-materialist hats, you could almost say, right? And maybe it speaks to our own moment here where we don't necessarily know what anti-materialist hats are left. You know, if we've tried the self-actualization ones, we've tried the kind of ironized one, which you mentioned David Foster Wallace earlier. He was maybe onto that a little bit faster than the rest of us.
Speaker: um And so here we are in a moment where we can look back at a movie like Fight Club and say... you know This is so diagnostically powerful in a certain sense. yeah Its politics are at best confused and at worst you know um the the politics of Columbine or something. yeah But what can I do with that now? I'm now realizing as I get to the end of this, this may be not a question so much as a... no a statement about how makes me feel. it I mean, that it is, i think, a very good, um you know, I think most really strong works of art, you know, the the politics are always at war with themselves somewhere.
Speaker: um Right? I mean, i I do strongly believe that. I mean, i maybe it's just been on my mind because I feel like I, you know, I just wrote, you know, I have a book coming out that on the one hand is you know, leftist in its outlook and yet also, you know, full of a sense of loss for, you know, a world that was the kind of peak of American empire, you know, and that's that kind of struggle hopefully is animating, but I think it's kind of inescapable a lot of the time. And and so, you know, it's like, it's the country, it's the contradictions in a movie like this that that make it so,
Speaker: It's so interesting because in one sense, the film is incredibly time-bound in terms of that generational listlessness yes is going to come to an end with like the war on terror, 9-11, Iraq war, 2008, financial crisis, the rise of populism.
Speaker: financial crisis yes rise buhism And yet, at the same time, that sense of listlessness, especially among Gen Z men, remains. And there's, you know, every sort of, it feels like every five years, there's a sort of thing keeps on Fight Club and masculinity.
Speaker: um And it's like continuing continuingu relevant. as a continuing relevantle lupe I wonder in what sense ah it's a sort of a timeless film and in what sense it's very much a time time bound and a specific film.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, look I think in its own way, it's like um not any more time-bound than It's a Wonderful Life. Right? In its own way, it's certainly not heartwarming, but, you know, there are two things. One, you know, I think you had wondered about the the sort of cod-Nietzianism of the film.
Speaker: Which is back, back in the book, right? Yes, that's what I mean. Of course it's back. And my sense is that's something of a perennial, right? I mean, it really is. it's that That will... and that is That is a young person's game that, you know, ah Nietzsche is never so attractive, if also easy to misinterpret as when one is, you know, 23 or 17 or, you know, no um you know, that question of, the as you said, you know, it's like Gen X broke for Trump more than any other generation. That is pretty fascinating and pretty horrifying, know,
Speaker: And I can't help but think, you know, the 21st century has has has radicalized me, surely. i think that for most of my adult, my young adult life, when I was in my 20s and early 30s, I would have just considered myself a a liberal.
Speaker: And I feel like a lot of my, you know, you know, whatever, a Bill Clinton voter, a Bush hater, you know, right? All of that stuff. i You know, i yeah God help me, an Obama voter. You know, these things that are, I just, I know so many people who don't really see what that means, who sort of think, well, you know, like, but I'm, I'm not, I'm a,
Speaker: you know, i'm I'm in favor of, you know, racial justice and gender equality. And, you know, and it's sort of like, yeah. And how do you feel about that genocide? Because, you know, ah you know, if if if you are, you know, like not politicized, if you're sort of like, you know, if ah if only if only the left would have, you know, voted for Kamala, you know, and it's like, but I mean, that point is, is that I know a lot of people, a lot of Xers who still think of it that way.
Speaker: That's, I think, very, very insightful. And, you know, i just as a bit of a throwaway, I mean, I'll confess that I first read Punnack novels at a girl's behest. So, you know, there's a sense in which these things are are even more complicated than they might seem, right? And and that they these books really spoke to, it's not like they only ever spoke to disaffected young men. Obviously they do.
Speaker: Obviously they do and they're they're kind of exist on a continuum as you may know with you know stuff like American Psycho and you know and stuff that's far more noxious and you know there's there's uh you know it's like I don't spend a lot of time haunting right-wing spaces but you know it's like I I'll be looking at sub-step notes and I'll see somebody talking about American Psycho and it'll lead lead to people talking about stuff like Mike Ma or, you know, there's just writers who were in. I'm just like, who who's that? And, you know, it's like I looked into that i was just like, holy shit, this is really.
Speaker: Yeah. I think there are writers today who are trying to like so replicate that that Fight Club moment. People like um sure Sean Thorne Conroe. Yeah. Probably the big one. I can think of Fuckboy. But they just don't... And I wonder if this is because of our media fragmentation, but they just don't hatch the zeitgeist or the imagination in quite the same way.
Speaker: Yeah. I mean, I i think that there's... a couple reasons for that. I mean, you know, it's I've only read a little bit of Sean Thor Conner. I've not finished that book. ah A little more interesting than I thought it would be, but I also, it's not as good as Brett or Polania could. Of course, I mean, I agree, but I think there's an interest just in the sense of people trying to like recreate, nostalgically recreate that kind of Gen X 90s literature moment. Yeah, well, it was also... There's something about our time in and of itself.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it was sort of the last moment when You know, books were still embedded in mainstream culture a little bit. Right. They still it still existed. There was, you know, there, there the you know, and and indeed, it's why you had people like Bezos real to deciding like, oh, I can I can build a business here.
Speaker: Right. I mean, obviously, Amazon left books behind ages ago. But but the fact is they still sell them. weird yeah And they're still where people go to buy them. and and but i But I do think that you know the the confluence of forces that have made reading a sort of specialist pursuit, so to speak, right? And you can tell you can point to declining literacy rates, you can point to...
Speaker: you know, this sort of crisis in retail culture that means that, you know, people don't pass bookstores. You know, there's just, there you can point to the collapse of the fourth estate. So there isn't as much writing about books. It's like all that, you know, so it's like there's there's there's a shrinking, you know, fewer people read books.
Speaker: And as a consequence, I think it's much harder. In fact, probably impossible for books to really, you know, to really kind of like anticipate the culture in the way that they used to. It's like, there's a kind of necessary give and take.
Speaker: Right. do you think Do you think film is still capable of that or do you think film has lost that? Film has absolutely lost that too. I think the film having now moved away from the center of the culture and you know I would have said a couple years ago that TV had sort of supplanted it as that but I honestly think television is sort of you know we still watch it but it's not it doesn't have the same cultural purchase that it did even like five or ten years ago.
Speaker: I mean, television is central to a flight club sort of conception of media, right? like Yes. There's all this stuff about like 500 channels and 24 hours. So the met slow emergence of 24-hour news.
Speaker: Yes. I mean, it's it's just on the edge of my memory, this sort of centrality of TV. Yes. I don barely really, really remember it. And, yeah i mean well ah What was the valence of TV at that point during the sort of era of Fight Club?
Speaker: so I think what you just described. I think at that time what it was, was that TV had moved from, in in my childhood, it was sort of like there were the three major networks. And there was PBS, right?
Speaker: There was ABC, there was NBC, there was CBS. There were like local stations, you know, right? a you know And it would broadcast in Los Angeles only. you know And then there was cable, right? There was ah thing in l LA called the Z Channel, which was like the first big kind of cable, which showed uncut movies. you know So I remember being a child, my parents got you know cable and I was able to watch like Clockwork Orange you know when I was like 10 years old.
Speaker: and Speaking of movies that were that are that our forerunners of Fight Club, you know that's that's probably more than it. That may be the only thing. Well, and and a very i very transgressive, right? I kind of want to maybe hitch on that real quick if we can think about about that question. So I remember when i I first read Less Than Zero, if we want to talk about Brace and Ellis again, when I was about 13 or 14 years old. It was assigned to me in high school, if you can believe it. can.
Speaker: And so at the time, right, there it was sort of, we we had almost begun to accept ah that this was a ah part of the edification of the young man or something. You know, it was, you you could, you know, i it's not the Marquis de Sade, but it it sort of gives you a sense of how you can push against boundaries or something like this. Yes.
Speaker: I wonder, you know, maybe part of the reason that people feel even more lost now, as we were discussing earlier, is because it's not even clear what what transgression remains. I mean, obviously, you have all sorts of online edgelordism, but at the end of the day, and you know, we are rebels without a cause and in a sense. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And again, bring up David Foster Wallace. There's a, what is it? The FX pornography essay, I think that is sort of about this. like It's something that people clearly saw at the time, yeah but we're living at the end of it now where it's like, yes you have access to gore online if you want 24 hours a day.
Speaker: i mean, that just wasn't, you had to watch, you know, Jason X in space yeah in you know the nineties if you wanted to see it. To add on to that, I feel like, sort of and again, these are generalizations, but the the millennial generation's reaction to kind of transgression of Gen X with this kind of earnestness, or a sort of reheated earnestness trip yeah that has roots in the 60s. It does seem like we're stuck in this endless cycle um sort of quantum movement and movement, each of which sort of like yeah just reinvents the thing prior to it or one step before it.
Speaker: I wouldn't want to necessarily counterpose earnestness and the kind of transgression I'm talking about because like we can break out that four quadrant thing from earlier again and say, you know you have kind of irony, you have earnestness, and then you have you know transgression, and then you have complacency or something. yeah Because again, if you go back and you watch Decline to Fall Western Civilization 1 again, I guess, they're very earnest about what they're doing.
Speaker: ah It's very transgressive transgressive, but they are deeply, deeply earnest about that transgression. Sort of. I mean, I think that fear is pretty, you know, that was meant to be the one band that really brought a sense humor to it. Yes. But for everybody else. Oh, sure. Yeah.
Speaker: I just mean that there there's a sense in which you can be both transgressive and sort of not operating at a comedic level about the transgression you're engaged in. And you you are right, of course, that, you know, that's Not necessarily the case with with Fear. i frankly, have trouble remembering the other bands. Black Flag is in it before Henry Rollins, but that's that's what I remember.
Speaker: But yeah, I mean, I think of even like the kind of pop punk of the early 2000s. You know, I loved American Idiot when I was whatever age I would have been. Sure. And like a song like Holiday. i mean, you know, Heil to the President, Gas Man, Bombs Away is Your Party. Like...
Speaker: It's trying to be transgressive, but it's also very very earnest about that. so yeah i That's a good point. yeah and There's a sort of, perhaps a continuation of the emphasis, but abandonment of the transgression as you get into the later two thousand yeah Into the it feels like.
Speaker: Yeah, that's kind of where it ends. The whole you know notion of being transgressive kind got turned around, meaning that it was you know it was the right who became, what we were talking about earlier, how it used to be the you know the left were the envelope pushers and and you know and then not so much.
Speaker: That's kind of mirrored in in the politics. I mean, earlier you were talking about you know identifications with a term like liberal, for example, and how that becomes unfashionable. I mean, if you're on the left now, you find yourself in the position of kind of defending a certain kind of status quo, even if your own political agenda would desire something different from that status quo. You know, we're not, we're sort of on the back foot in in in terms of that sense of political or social or cultural action in a way, which is. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. Dismaying. Yeah. Yeah. that But i um you know, the what what I will say about Fight Club, you know, just because, you know, the movie is held in such esteem now, it's very important to remember that it was really not at all. It was not embraced at the time. And, ah you know, again, i think it was something where i know from,
Speaker: Fincher and the cast perspective, they, you know, they made the movie and they were thinking, you know, this is so funny. This is going to be, you know, people are going to, people are going to get it. Right. You know, we, we all think it's hilarious and they had, you know, but they knew that they were pushing the envelope. There's a sort of famous story about um ah my boss, Laura wanted Fincher to remove a line of dialogue from the, from the movie. She, he was, uh,
Speaker: but You know, when when Brad Pitt and Helena are having sex, she she said to him in it in you know in the original version, the line was, I want to have your abortion.
Speaker: And she found that objectionable. And he didn't want to take it out. She was like, you got to take it out. And he didn't want to take it. You got to take it out. And he said, fine, I'll write something else. And he came back with. I haven't been fucked like that since grade school.
Speaker: And, you know, so they knew, they knew, you know, that that transgressive spirit was essential to it. And, you know, when they delivered the movie, certainly the the marketing people were very unhappy or very confounded. You know, they didn't they didn't think it was funny.
Speaker: And then, you know, I know that when when they screened the movie at Venice, you know Edward told me once that they screened the movie at Venice, and and you know and he said, you know we sort of felt like we should have been at you know South by Southwest, like what what we were doing in Venice in suits.
Speaker: I was going to say, not where I thought it would have been shown the first time. yeah He said that Brad looked at him and said, um you know how do you think this is going to go? And um they may have been a little high.
Speaker: and And Edward said, you know ah it could go either way. it It definitely did not go... the way of being rhapsodically embraced. You know, there were there were some booze involved and and, you know, in the movie there was, you know, kind of controversy in the but media about it's how violent it was and, you know, and ultimately Laura, my boss, lost her job because of this movie, you know.
Speaker: So um too interesting that the critique was over how violent, it's just such ah a sort of time-bound critique in a sense, like the 90s, fear of violence, because now, obviously, the critique of Fight Club is around sort of misogyny, toxic masculinity. Yes, and yes. no Yeah, that's that's so revealing that it was the sort of violence that was critiqued rather than anything else. It was not about misogyny or toxic masculinity. It was it was about violence. And, you know, and to be fair, you know, it's very visceral in a way. And and I think, you know, so a lot of people who are uncomfortable with it might have felt, you know, either indicted by it or just sort of, you know,
Speaker: horrified by its by its nihilism, right? I mean, you know, it's, you really, yeah you know, the the ending of that movie hits so hard now, much harder than it did in 1999. I mean, I still find the the the final shot to be, you can't look at that shot after 9-11 and not feel like that's what you're watching on some level.
Speaker: but One of my questions is the kind of perceptual shift of terrorism. I mean, from the sort of yeah that that point in 1999 to sort post-2001. Yeah. Yeah, of of course. I mean, you know, and I really would say, you know, prior to 9-11, you know, obviously there had been the the sort of failed World Trade Center bombing. There had been the Oklahoma City bombing.
Speaker: But you know terrorism at that time was considered to be one, you know do kind of an and you know exceptional. and and And also, I think, was considered mostly you know the whole concept of domestic terrorism. you know The Oklahoma City bombing was people didn't understand that at all. you know Again, and so it's it's the same thing where You know, you look at Timothy McVeigh, the benefit of hindsight, and you're like, oh, there are people like that, like all over America, unfortunately. And, and but at the time, it was like, you know, like you just thought that's crazy. Like this guy was so ah a, you know, ex-military and he was a white supremacist. Like what?
Speaker: I have to ask. mean, the Project Mayhem, when you sort of, the transformation from the Fight Club to Project Mayhem, you get these guys, you know, who are taken from the basement and put in the house, and they're suddenly wearing military fatigues and black berets. In a kind of,
Speaker: parodic, uh, interpretation of like black Panther uniforms from the 1970s. Yes. I mean, was that, do you know if that was a, on the costuming department or Sam Mendes's part, was that sort of deliberate sort of satire of seventies militancy? I mean, what was going on? I assume you Fincher, right? Not, not Mendes, but, uh,
Speaker: But yeah, I, yeah, yes, I think for sure. I think there was a, that gap again, drawing from, you know, the, the iconography of, of, of Black Panthers, because, him you know, that at that time, somehow like the concept of sort of like American radicalism was, was, you know, it had to be shifted away from, you know, it had to be coded other than white, you know, other than as white people.
Speaker: but it And it fits into this broader, um this kind of apolitical or how it would have been perceived anyways as a political wave of violence you do see in the 90s, which is, of course, workplace massacres, right? I mean, eventually this will become the school shooting. a Shout out to Mark Ames' book, Going Postal, on this on this point. Yeah.
Speaker: And so it i think in some ways what's so interesting to me about Fight Club is that he doesn't go after the office. it It becomes a quasi-political movement, Project Mayhem, rather than act of violence against his boss. In fact, he uses his own violence against himself yes to make his boss pay. yeah So there is...
Speaker: Something a little bit ah smarter might be the wrong word, but more developed as a political ideology beyond just a lone wolf attack on an office. absolutely.
Speaker: Absolutely. And I and i think you know i and think about those sequences and it must be said, Edward's physical comedy and it worked in the movie now is is just like astonishing. It's so... He's perfectly cast. I was saying that to my wife when we were rewatching, yeah.
Speaker: If you think about, quickly, you think about office space and sort of the attack on the printer with baseball bats. Yes. And then it's kind of parodied with this sort of self-attack in Fight Club. absolutely. There's a really interesting resonance there. Yeah. it's i mean, that whole, all those sequences are are amazing. And also, you know, Fincher is coded in such a way, know, he goes to the cops and, you know, the cops are all in on it, right? So so I would say, you know, that that it was, again, you know, had some sense of who who the terrorists really were, you know, were...
Speaker: At that time, too. but But I would also say, um you know, was's thinking about, you know, one one distinction because, you know, you you look at that that that movement, Project Mayhem, and when it sort of becomes more of a kind of militia type thing, and you just think again, you know, there are all these things now, Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and J6ers and, you know, real hard Nazi organizations that have actual fight clubs, right?
Speaker: But what's curious is that Tyler, the Brad Pitt's rhetoric around this is is' different, right? He says, like, you know, stop right stop being perfect, you know, and and there' that there's that moment where Edward says, you know i felt sorry for men who went to the gym thinking this is what a man should look like, right? Let's bring that up. I mean, it's it's so distinct from the kind of Andrew Tate, Manistel. Yes, that's what I mean. 2025, that is very much about self-actualization. Yes, yes. And it's you know and of course, you know it's like that the the martyr of that movement is is the very physically imperfect meatloaf, right?
Speaker: Bob. And also Norton, right? I mean, that Edward Norton is not a specimen of platonic masculinity. No, that's exactly that's exactly right. And I think that's, you know, in some way, it's like, you know, obviously, even he, you know, if we understand the Brad Pitt character to be a sort of, you know, idealized projection of some, you know, version of himself, it's like there's a there's a certain kind of, you know, physical enhancement involved in this fantasy, right? There always is.
Speaker: But it's not quite as consuming as sort of, you know, I feel like on the on the contemporary, right, all that stuff is so is strangely... self-swallowing, right?
Speaker: ah I have to wonder if that's not the sort of residual anti-consumerism, right? Because what is it that where what is it that kind of sets him off to say that's not the ideal male body? It's the underwear ads, right?
Speaker: um That are on the bus stop and then you know ah in the bus, maybe I can't quite remember. But, you know, it's because they're being held up as sort of social standards of beauty. Right. And so in that sense, they need to be rejected out of hand, just sort of based on the ideology of the movement.
Speaker: Whereas now, you know, the influencer is sort of the end-all, you're there to buy the supplements. you know You're there to buy the training package that Andrew Tate has to sell.
Speaker: because There's a a kind of odd kind of both generational and political school um inversion. I mean, like the 90s are when you had the rise of the metrosexual. I'm not sure if that's a term that kind comes off in America so much, but...
Speaker: At the time, in the 90s, it felt very much to be, it was very liberal coded. yeah um And now, if you sort of look at the contemporary, and again, these are kind of arbitrary categories, but you look at the contemporary sort of millennial and Gen Z left and right,
Speaker: very much the right, the metrosexual in lots of ways. So this is, yeah, a very odd inversion from at that period, it feels. Yeah, that's that's very interesting, actually, to a point. I mean, I think, again, all of this, you trace that you trace the sort of, um you know, you look back at the 70s at like the sensitive sensitive male, the sort of, you know, Alan Alda, Richard Dreyfuss, you know, that you go back a generation and you see this kind of what people on the right would consider the the feminization of... of sort of male role models, right? And even though that's not ah quite alluded to directly in this movie, it's like this this movie kind of articulates a ah revenge of the repressed there, I suppose.
Speaker: Yeah. And no Tyler Durden does ah Travis Bickle at the end, right? He shaves his head, takes on a sort of more military, ah you know, instead of being in these kind of almost like quasi-metrosexual outfits he's been wearing throughout. He instead puts on ah basically military fatigues, if I'm remembering correctly. Yeah, yeah. Something like that.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah, maybe this is this a question I raised before. I don't mean to take us off of this very generative topic, but i you know you're you've been in the film industry, and one thing that you know hit me on this viewing is what seemed like the sort of quasi-noir elements that I hadn't paid a ton of attention to before. yeah Obviously, a very popular genre in the 90s. It has the opening with the ending, the voiceover narration, the sort of...
Speaker: grimy, yeah you know, background, very, you know, kind of low contrast lighting a lot of the time. You know, there are all sorts of things to commend it in that direction. But on the other hand, yeah it's not really selling itself as a noir. it definitely is not. and and And I have to say, too, I love that reading of it as a noir.
Speaker: I never considered it as such. I do know that the 90s were a time when, despite the existence of of Lost Highway and and L.A. Confidential, and I guess you mentioned Usual Suspect, I mean, these are these are noirs, but all of those movies had real impediments to getting made as this one did.
Speaker: There wasn't a sense that the noir, I think the noir, like the Western was considered to be mostly a kind of defunct genre. I know that LA confidential, you know, they've been, people have been trying to make that forever because they were so passionate about Elroy and, um,
Speaker: You know, and it really just took Curtis Hanson and, you know, and and a very, ah yeah I'm not remembering off the top of my head who wrote the script, but, you know, they had ah they had ah an excellent script. It was just, it was, ah the elements came together, but that was considered an an outlier.
Speaker: It wasn't, it did not kick off a wave of noirs. and Yeah, it's fascinating how these things end up kind of reconceptualized, which in a way is what this little podcast is all about, right? Is that as someone who more or less grew up, you know, after these films were made, ah think about the 90s and I think, oh, this erotic thriller thing, this, you know, these these big movies from then, they must have been interested, you know, in the North. The Coens are coming up, you know, this must be.
Speaker: Big Lebowski is on the horizon. Yes. um It's all happening. And yet these things are all essentially not wanted. ah the the unwanted children end up being the cultural artifacts that we remember. And yeah I think that's especially interesting with something like Fight Club, because if it stands out to us now as, oh, this, I don't know, predicted Trump, predicted the Proud Boys, predicted all of these things, it it did so against the forces of self-understanding in Hollywood at that moment. There is resistance.
Speaker: Yes. to that self-understanding. And maybe that makes it more illuminating than it even seems, because it's unmasking even the the system itself. is Yeah, that's a very, very, very astute way to put it, I think.
Speaker: you know Absolutely ideal. I mean, again, it's like the calculus there. I mean, it was such a terrible time in a way to, I mean, you know you look at it now, people are sort of like, oh, 1999, one of the truly great years in American cinema.
Speaker: And that was not my experience of it as someone who was very much in the in the trenches at that time. I mean, for me, it just felt like Fight Club seemed, you know, certainly much more interesting than most. but But I think even at the time, I was sort of like, I... Again, I just couldn't couldn't get over the sort of self-canceling nature of its politics, that, you know, that it that it was not actually ah radical or transgressive in the way that it pretended to be because it was, you know, because it was in a news court movie.
Speaker: that It's not a Mike Lee movie. It's not a Ken Loach movie. Exactly. yeah Yeah, it's it's class politics are very sort of submerged. I mean, they sort of rise to the surface occasionally. i mean, the bit where they sort of capture the um police chief and have his bulls in an elastic band. Yes. To warn of the fact that they're all frontline workers, as we would now say.
Speaker: Yes. It's not the proletariat. It's sort of... No. it's It's almost like lucidermit. It's some kind of yeah much more like culturalist understanding of class than it is a kind of economical materialist one.
Speaker: Yeah, and also the the kind of just the the kind of fundamental nihilism of it. You know, that's ah that's a that's a right-wing conclusion that that that this movie is is, you know, it's got that kind of accelerationist, you know, right? no no no No better world is possible here, only the triumph of the strong and the, you know, destruction of the weak.
Speaker: I need to ask, just because we we haven't brought it up, we need to say something about the the balls business here. um you know Sam, you mentioned a moment ago when they've got the police chief like that, but the constant threat, of course, right is always castration in this movie. and You don't need to be you know Jacques Lacan or something to...
Speaker: to To notice this. I mean, there's an obvious sense in which it is a movie about being a man, you know, turning away from feminized ah support group culture and towards these kind of outlets of contained violence spread in these the fight club.
Speaker: um It's obviously a movie about belonging with other men in a lack of, as Sam put it, one of the questions, third spaces, right? they're not They go to a bar, but it's to fight in the basement. Right. You mentioned Robert Putnam's Boring Alone comes out like a year later, I think.
Speaker: Yeah, that's right. Exactly. And so I guess I'm i'm interested in what we might think of as like Gen X conceptions of masculinity. Yeah. um Because on the one hand, you know, as mentioned earlier, this is a a high point or will soon be a high point for what we now call metrosexuality. Well, what they then called metrosexuality. Yeah. It's a high point for even the maybe the first creakings of of something like a slightly more openness towards non-standard heteronormativity and cinema in certain ways.
Speaker: But at the same time, it's it's an obvious moment in which there's a desire for a virility, a desire for a masculinity that you can inhabit that is, I don't even know if it's not socially destructive because it is in this movie, but where, you know, people want to be able to put that somewhere. And this is obviously the generator of endless think pieces in our own moment. Sure. and you had And you had stuff which maybe was, ah you know, around that same time you had, you know,
Speaker: what was was that Robert Bly book called Iron John. yeah know yeah there were there were you know there were That was a very popular book in the in the in the States. And it definitely was you know men going in men's retreats and beating drums. I'm super interested also say in the sort of ahistorical nature of the Fight Club in the sense that There are these prior yeah historical resonances, going back to the sort of Indo-European manor bund with its kind of Nazi resonances, yeah ah the sort of Mensa fencing societies of 18th and 19th century Germany.
Speaker: i mean, there's all these things that could have been drawn on. But yeah, it kind of just floats in time. It's kind of like babe that they somehow were the first to do it. or but Yeah, that kind of timelessness or ahistoristicity is quite Gen X, I feel. I don't know.
Speaker: Yeah. Well, there's also something very interesting somehow about the fact that the the way that the that the Fight Club is presented in the movie is not as a place where you're necessarily going to, you know, the delight, that the kind of, you know, the transformative experience isn't beating someone else up. It's being beaten up.
Speaker: it's It's suffering. yeah it's You know, in other words, it's it's a it's a it's a movie that actually feel feels more kind of masochist coded, you know, than sadism coded. now Now I have to put on my Jacques Lacan hat, if I may, for just a moment. but Because it it is, i go back to the pit in the bathtub talking about the father, right? And there's the line in there where ah they're talking about the Hlennemannam Carter character and saying, like, I think it's pit says something like, We're a generation of men raised by women.
Speaker: I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need. Yes. It's a great line. But ah you know it's almost as if there's an absence of like the paternal authority that would have been you know whatever psychic version of that physical violence is.
Speaker: where there's some kind of missing force there that is now inviting the physicality. And you know um i maybe that's resonant for now, maybe it's not, but it is it's interesting. People don't think of it that way. I i would add also the the sort of ah story about Ed Norton's character, his father sort of pitching up in different states and starting the family every couple of years. Yes. And this is kind of almost like transactional commodified element to the family.
Speaker: yes It feels very nineteen ninety s I suppose this would have been happening a few decades prior, but yeah, this kind of interchangeability of family life. Right. At some point, Edward Norton says, you know I'm six years old again, passing messages between parents.
Speaker: Or he says of Brad pe you know brad Pitt, he says, you know what most of the time we were Ozzie and Harriet, right? And it's also, you know, worth noting that the, that when the, you know, Tyler pours the lie on his hand and he has that, you know, that, that kind of stigmata, I mean, it looks like a, it looks like a vulva.
Speaker: um And you see that, that mark later in the movie too. He turns his hand up right, to say, i'm I'm in on it, basically. The bartender. That's so interesting. I mean, both the Christian and sort sexual resonances of the... Yes. I mean, there's the early scene where he's crying into the man who's sort of been chemically castrated's chest.
Speaker: Yes. And he he lifts he lifts his head off the T-shirt. Yes. there's almost like a tear in the shroud. Yes. Yes. Or or veronica's Veronica's veil, right? Where Jesus puts his face into, is sort of dried as he's ascending to this crucifixion and an imprint of his face. Well, yeah, the trap terrain is that, but I'm just thinking like in that, if we think of him as a Christ figure, it's sort of like he's actually hitting all the beats like within the life itself, not just the ah relic.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, religion is, I think, something i wanted to ask about. I mean, when he has his first emotional release during group therapy, I think it's at the first Methodist church. And you can hear the choir probably, presumably performing in another room in the background.
Speaker: I don't know if that's too much on the nose, but all of this does seem to be a sort of replication for the loss of religion. Yeah. I mean, it's look, I think it's just very knowingly playing with those tropes, right?
Speaker: Yeah. And Sam, ah you you Brits won't get off that easily because it's the first Episcopalian church. I thought it was it was Methodist. You know what? I could be wrong, but i'm just I think maybe you're trying to excuse your own people for producing Tyler Durden. Possibly. that's a Yeah, well, you know...
Speaker: I think, you know, we're about to hit up on, on three 30. So, I mean, I, I think, first of all, I want to thank you so much for agreeing to come on Matthew. And it's my pleasure. I mean, you know, very, very fun to talk to you guys and to talk about this movie, which I think is the enduring life it has is not something people would have. not I mean, I think obviously it deserves it.
Speaker: Right. I mean, you know everything that's, Everything that's complicated or incomplete about it, it's still like kind of one of the most remarkable films of about that year and, you know, really of recent kind of, you know, about Hollywood vintage, you know, at all. And and I think um it's it's a fun one to talk about. And I and i think that a lot of time in a lot of ways, people still don't understand it all that well.
Speaker: Not to say that I do, but... but and That's why we we we wanted to talk about it because it's it kind of haunts culture in a certain way. So successful, but also so sort of disputed.
Speaker: it Is there anything I know Sam mentioned at the top, some of the things you're working on, is there anything you wanted to promote? I mean, i talk i do i do talk about Fight Club and about the making of it some in the in the book. I mean, not not at great length, certainly less than I have here, it's in the Golden Hour. It's at him immense length and you should purchase the book. Yeah, yeah. that billionlin ours You remind us what the book's title is.
Speaker: It's called The Golden Hour. And even though it's called um a memoir of or a story of family and power in Hollywood, which makes it feel very... ah I don't know. It's not my subtitle. And I think it's, it's a, it's a, it's really a, it's a book that has ah an enormous cast of characters. It, it, it is, it's more like a novel. I mean, I think in many ways it is a kind of nonfiction novel, um, cause it involves it. And, but you know, I mean, it's Ronald Reagan's in it, Huey Newton's in it. Like oh there's a lot of historical terrain that is traversed that is not Hollywood terrain.
Speaker: No, it's, it's something maybe we, we didn't really get to touch on cause it, you know the movie is not located in a particular place, but a lot of what we talked about today has to do with California. Whether it's the hippies or um whether it's Est, these are all is ra California. Is there a specific city it's supposed to be set in?
Speaker: Yeah, it's an interesting question. Obviously, it's but by design. My assumption, even though the city is not... No, I don't think that there is a specific city that it's set in. I think it is meant to be set in a sort of sort of like generic...
Speaker: lee you know mid-sized you know or larger mid-sized American city. I think you you can imagine it set in Detroit. Somehow I've always, you know I actually don't remember where they shot it, which is crazy, but it you know feels to me like a Midwestern city.
Speaker: See, I had always assumed Seattle because I think Chuck Palahniuk is up in the Pacific Northwest. And I guess the kind of grunginess of both the world and also just thinking of it in terms of Gen X, as always put it there. But Detroit makes sort of more sense. But but I would actually say Seattle, here's here's what it is that makes me think Detroit, I realize. One is the sort of like the ruins of, you know, the fact that he lives in this kind of area that's, you know, this kind of outlying, this crumbling outlying This punk house, this sort of, you know, bizarre inversion of punk house. His job is sort of, you know, I mean, he's an insurance adjuster whatever he is, but it's auto industry. Oh, you're right.
Speaker: It's automotive focus. But the kind of prominence of things like Starbucks do make does make one think of Seattle, but it doesn't look like Seattle to me. I've only been there once, I'll be honest. So, ah you know, ah I got most of information from Seattle about, was it Cameron Crowe's singles, I think, is where I've done most of it. so Which, you know, will we be talking about that later this season?
Speaker: Probably, I'll be honest. Can you ask this one final question, which is so much of 90s media is sort of suburban. I mean, it's like oh the consciousness of suburban. I American Beauty is incredibly suburban, for instance. um And Fight Club is consciously not that.
Speaker: Yes, it's consciously urban. I think that's really interesting. but I do. I find that really interesting, too. you know and and But I think that has to do with urban centers. and urban they're They're signaling kind of parallel or analogous forms of discontent, but the there the arena is not the same.
Speaker: And when you're young, the suburbs are are generally for for people who are a little older than the people in Fight Club. Yeah, it is id not to where we're adding on. And so I will swear myself to silence after this. But earlier when we were talking about sort of where this fits into 90s, into the world of movies in the 90s, I couldn't help but think about movies like Pleasantville or the remake of the Stipford Wives, right?
Speaker: Where you have these movies that are kind of about the same thing or even even something like Safe, yeah right? these These movies that are kind of about the same things. but are located in very, very, very different places and are much more overtly interested in the 50s as a kind of problem.
Speaker: Yes. Right? and As this vector that's haunting 90s America that sort of want you know, they want everyone to look like they're a character in a John Carpenter movie from 1981. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Speaker: Right? And this is not a movie that is interested in any kind of return. It is many things, but nostalgic is not one of them. Absolutely not. That does separate it from a lot of what we see now, and it makes it, I think, bolder. and I won't say more compelling, because that makes it sound like I'm going to put my you know Proud Boys ah you know Hawaiian shirt on as soon as we're done here. But it it remains sort of affecting and gripping. That's so interesting, Chase, because isn't that the big distinction between Fight Club and the people, the sort of adoptees of Fight Club or the heirs of Fight Club, is that they are nostalgic and Fight Club isn't.
Speaker: Yeah, that is a good point. And a very, you know, it's, so I mean, when you stack all of those movies together, it's so, I mean, you know even, even last night watching it and see and feeling the, the correlation with chain, with train spotting, right. With feeling in a lot of ways, like these are very similar movies.
Speaker: And there's a bit, I've got to push back and say that I feel like train spotting doesn't have that. ennui of like consumerism. They're sort of disgusting. There's the whole kind of the kind of monologue in there where... There is that cynicism of trajectories, definitely, like and careers. but I think it just comes from a different... I mean, working-class Edinburgh in the 90s is just a different... but some blue park I will certainly defer to you on that point, but it is interesting nonetheless.
Speaker: With that, thank you so much, Matthew Spector. It's a pleasure to talk to both of you. Anytime. I really thought that was was wonderful. I mean, just getting the background, knowing, for example, that Fight Club was not a sure thing in the Hollywood production system is sort of shocking to me, given that I'd always thought about it as like, oh, what a perfect movie for the perfect moment. Like, what could be more 1999 than this?
Speaker: and There's all this self-nithologization about the 90s as being this era where like anything could be made and anything could be said. Well, it's especially interesting because i guess when I think about the 90s, think about a lot of the stuff we talked about.
Speaker: A certain kind of masculinity, transgression, dare I use the word soy? i don't think I used it in the interview, but one of the thing that fascinates me about it is it's like a noir, but then at the moment of revelation, he says like, oh my, and what is it?
Speaker: Buckle up, ladies gentlemen, get your seat backs in position. you know We're going for a bumpy ride or something like this. Yeah, it's got that earnestness to it. There's like a level of self-pitying, sort of like melancholy to it as well.
Speaker: I think that earnestness might be in some ways the greatest legacy of this historical moment. I mean, maybe I'm over speaking a little bit, but like there is certain kind of like transgressive earnestness that I think continues to drive like 47 year old kind of upper millennial lower gen X guys who have supplements based podcasts.
Speaker: Well, that's Foster Wallace, right? is Is this kind of cynical earnestness. um I mean, I think right, a quadrant between, was it apathy, earnestness, cynicism, and transgression or something?
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's kind of perfect summation of like, sort of generational shifts moving around that those quadrants. Yeah. Well, and you will have to subscribe to pay. We will be interviewing the AI ghost of David Foster Wallace. It is behind the paywall.
Speaker: We're doing a David Foster Wallace seance about new sincerity and what it means for the Trump movement today. You don't want to miss it. You can find us at Patreon slash Death Photo Pod or email us at deathphotopod at gmail.com.
Speaker: Matthew Spector's new book, The Golden Hour, almost certainly available by the time that this comes out. I think with that, we should call it, let me say, this is a lot of fun. This has been Death is a Photograph, Culture at the End of History. I'm Chase Biduzniak. I'm Samuel Michael Huggard.
Speaker: Peace out.
