Punchdrunk love: "Fight Club" at 25

I saw Fight Club for the first time on the morning it opened in Paris in late 1999. Queuing up for a 9.30am screening in Pigalle: my fresher-faced self, a clutch of burly bruisers in leather jackets set to be palpably disappointed by the film before them, and an elegant, Deneuve-like older woman in furs who wafted down to the front row and spent the entire movie laughing like Juliette Binoche. It was a screening that more or less crystallised early responses to David Fincher's film, not least because the six of us were just about the only folks in the world paying to see it that weekend. After taking a notable box-office dive on first release, Fight Club would eventually be reclaimed, first by film buffs waving the DVD as proof as Fincher's emergent virtuosity, then by online edgelords, trolls and incels, reframing a black comedy as the bloodiest of red flags. The question of who should really be laughing at Fight Club abides. As Mme Deneuve doubtless understood, the varyingly grim jokes of the film, ripped from Chuck Palahniuk's cult novel, come at the expense of men; it's alpha lone wolf Fincher, a director who'd likely refuse to join any club that would have him as a member, seeking to skewer masculinity much as he'd done in 1997's underrated The Game and would do in 2010's The Social Network and the shortlived Netflix series Mindhunter. 

For any newcomers, this is the story of a perilously lonely boy (with "a house full of condiments, but no food", as Jim Uhls' script has it) who starts listening to an inner voice urging him to give into his worst instincts. (Fortuitously, this reissue lands between two high-profile films centred on protagonists with imaginary friends: we've been primed.) Beating himself and others up in underground gladiatorial arenas hardly improves his condition: he's soon homeless, bleeding, being cuckolded by his own subconscious and well on his way to becoming public enemy number one. His downward spiral allows Fincher to flag just how easily certain men are misled towards violent, (self-)destructive activity. Yet one reason this late 20th century endeavour has endured so is that it feels very much of the 21st century: simultaneously doomy and snarky while ambiguous and slippery, bound up with cults of personality (for Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden, the film's strutting imp of the perverse, read Tate or Trump), a broadly despairing view of the state of play between the sexes, and the misplaced anger that follows from our understanding that we need to shake off capitalism but haven't quite figured out how best to achieve that aim. And that's before the collapsing buildings the movie arrives at, a trailer for non-movie spectacles to come.

I think we might still concede Fight Club is less forcefully of a piece than it seemed a quarter-century ago, when the critic Alexander Walker was driven to declare its nihilism a danger to civilised society. Time and a clearer eye reveal the film to be composed of showoffy segments, overlaid with Ed Norton's droning voiceover and a pounding Dust Brothers score, which highlight Fincher's unarguable camera and editing prowess: the plane crash, the sex scene, the soap making, the fights. Nothing really connects; only in its final act does the film gather real momentum, rather than circling a drain while gurgling loudly. At this point, Fincher was still thinking in grabby setpieces, trying to make a name and a career for himself; we may all of us prefer the subtler, sublimated craft and guile of The Social Network and Mindhunter over these barely controlled explosions. Fincher's business here was provocation: though the twist ending loosely ties Fight Club to late 1999's runaway hit The Sixth Sense, for most of its running time, it feels closer to an American translation of Lars von Trier's The Idiots, another study of a fraying collective conducted with cackling intelligence. (Either that, or it's Drop Dead Fred rewritten by the Unabomber.)

All that said, it is often wildly funny, or howlingly inappropriate, its tossed-off wisecracks pushing some way beyond those of, say, South Park or Family Guy; you can see why the edgelords seized upon it, but also why Fincher wound up making the comparably distasteful Gone Girl, which I half-suspect may be Fight Club for girls. And Fincher was always good with actors, driving them to commit and subvert as befits. Incels seem to miss this, but wiggly Norton - one of the great worms of 1990s film - only becomes heroic late on after trying to take responsibility for his crimes; Pitt remains a pretty terrific articulation of a pose most men will have wanted to throw at some point, even if it stands for nothing and might get you killed. The bonus is Helena Bonham Carter at her most withering; you have to overlook her Marla if you want to appropriate Fight Club as an unapologetic push for men's rights. (Further down the callsheet, two from the funny-how-things-turn-out file: a TV news reporter is played by Lauren Sánchez, newly prominent as the main squeeze of Amazon boss Jeff Bezos; and it still strikes me as faintly ironic that our hero should be seen to bottom out upon beating Jared Leto to a pulp, "I felt like destroying something beautiful" et al.)

Even after 25 years, we haven't yet fully metabolised Fight Club - what it means, what it represents, where it ranks - which probably accounts for the ongoing arguments. Fincher pushed on regardless, but Uhls has had only one more script produced in the years since, 2008's bland Hayden Christensen vehicle Jumper. Like an off-colour joke, it might just be unrepeatable, although elements of the film seemed to factor into the following year's American Psycho (another droll rendering of a notionally unfilmable novel) and the Jackass series (first transmission: October 2000), which was - which remains, somewhat implausibly - Fight Club reenacted by clowns for shits and giggles. But extinction was where everything was heading: within ten years, and after a decade characterised by insecurity on various fronts, American movies had been reduced to childproofed superheroics and digimated cutesiness, with barely a single Tyler Durden around to splice a welcome transgression or two into the mix. Raw meat stuffed with gelignite, Fincher's film still requires marking as dangerous - I wouldn't take a date to it - but we'd do well to reclaim some of its swagger from the nuts on the Internet. Peer beyond its sloganeering and sixpacks, and you can spy a moment when our movies still took risks, and revolution of multiple kinds remained some sort of possibility.

Fight Club returns to cinemas nationwide from today.