David Fincher called the first “pathetic” Fight Club project (for a good reason)

David Fincher’s comic thriller in 1999 “Fight Club” has become a somewhat controversial part of our pop culture landscape during the over 25 years since its release, but originally, the film script had much less bite. Addressing The Guardian during a British Film Institute (BFI) event in 2009, Fincher shared that the original “Fight Club” script did not have the voice -over which would one day become one of the film’s brand identifiers. “Fight Club” would simply not work without the voice-over Edward Norton as a pitiful protagonist, a number of sad bag insurance company, known only under the name of “The Narrator” or “Jack”, on the basis of its habit of referring to itself as the different parts of the Jack body based on a magazine article he reads. The narration not only gives us a acerbic perspective on the reason why Jack does the things he does, but it also gives the film a large part of its satirical edge.

In the novel by Chuck Palahniuk “Fight Club”, on which the film was based, the story is entirely told in the first person from the narrator’s point of view. Trying to translate the books in the first person in the films can be delicate as is, and the narration does not always work (the theatrical cut of “Blade Runner”, anyone?), But “Fight Club” without saying the sarcastic voice of the narrator, as Fincher said, “pathetic”.

Fincing was not nice during the description of the first project of the scenario “Fight Club”, saying:

“So, we hired Jim Uhls, who left and wrote a draft of the script that had no voiceover. I read it and I said:” It’s sad and pathetic. It’s just sorrow and people are horrible. Where is all he is talking about what he thinks? “And he said:” Oh, it’s a kind of crutch. “And I said:” No, guy, it’s our only chance of being sarcastic and satirical. “So he returned and put it all.”

Thank God for understanding the film’s need for comedy, because without narration, it’s really, Really depressing. Unfortunately, even with this sense of humor, many fans of “Fight Club” have always missed his point (Tyler Durden by Brad Pitt not The hero of the story, no matter how cool it may seem), which has disturbed ficing since the film’s release. It can be easy to identify with the Norton version of the narrator; Despite the fact that he is a flucoming that attends support group meetings for illnesses he does not have, he has the same kind of gallows humor that many use to survive. (Well, that and he wants to strike the character of Jared Leto, and who can blame him?) Without that, however, he is just a loser who gets caught in extremist violence when he meets Tyler on a flight and the latter begins to give his radical views on the lonely jack.

The cinematographic version of “Fight Club” is one of those rare adaptations which is even better than source equipment, and a large part of this is finishing in the satire of all this. Although it can be a little difficult to extract from which beliefs of Durden Palahniuk really believes in the original novel (which is a problem because some of them are deeply harmful), Fincher seems to fully understand the attraction of Tyler Durden without being indebted to the character himself. The adaptation of the director “Fight Club” is also superimposed and nuanced, taking some of the best ideas of Palahniuk and the most targeted lines of the book and making a film which is a more intelligent criticism of all this. And that it all starts with the interior dialogue of Jack, which gives us an overview exactly of the type of man unhappy to linger strangers for pleasure.