It was a film that hit just at the right place, at just the right time. I was 24 when Fight Club came out, right at the age where you can't use education as an excuse anymore, and really need to get out into the world, and then you find it's a cold place and you've got to get your kicks where you can, so of course I fucking loved that film.
A lot of it hasn't aged that well, with two decades of toxic masculinity feeding on the most intellectually sordid aspects of the story, but I still do love it. These days I'm more about the cinematic fun and games, and the sheer fucking charm of Pitt, Norton and Bonham-Carter, all peaking their tits off.
But back in the day, I followed those threads into the Palahniuk books, and they were mostly a lot of fun (especially the one about the dude who worked at a colonial reenactment museum), but there was something about the official comic book sequel that really soured me on the whole thing, even if it was not as much as it wanted.
Written by Palahniuk, drawn by somebody who turned out to be a terrible person and published by Dark Horse, the Fight Club sequels were more narratively complex, but lost the simple pleasures of the whole thing in these new complexities.
And where it really lost me was in its own self-love with a horrible all or nothing meta attitude, where you either loved the ideas behind Fight Club enough to die for them, or loathed them enough to kill for them.
And Fight Club, whether it was book, movie or comic, was never that extreme. It really was just okay - nothing worth changing your life over, nothing worth getting properly angry about. There was an ocean of grey between those two extremes, and getting that worked up about it just seemed a little bit silly.
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