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"Fight Club, then, can be seen as an over-correction to Se7en’s insidiousness and defeat. While someone like John Doe is scary, murderous, literate, Tyler Durden, the alter-ego of our clumsy narrator, is egotistical, enlightened, brilliant. Or so he thinks. Fight Club’s vision of spliced celluloid cocks, penguin power caves, testicular cancer meetings, and acts of terrorism have been interpreted and misinterpreted for decades now, and it’s mostly tiring except when watching the film itself. You can’t escape Fight Club’s power, as much as it’s been run into the ground. It has an everlasting pull, a tantalizing slyness that pulls the viewer in and out of seductively living and rejecting its anti-social behavior."

I wrote about two Fincher films, Se7en and Fight Club, and their equally apocalyptic portraits of late-20th century America, on my Patreon.

More here: www.patreon.com/posts/36902772