The final image of two people holding hands as the Pixies’ Where is My Mind? blares on the soundtrack could be seen as nihilistic, but it’s secretly thrilling to imagine the possibilities of starting over after a hard reboot. Both were attacking the soft center of America as they understood it, except in Fight Club, the idea was to raze the country to the ground and start over, because consumerism had anesthetized it and hollowed out its soul. It wouldn’t even be two years later that a terrorist cell would bring down the World Trade Center towers, those symbols of American financial might, and the motives of al-Qaida and the film’s Project Mayhem are not that dissimilar. Let’s begin at the end, as the film does, when a series of detonations leads to the collapse of downtown office buildings. Whatever you think about Fight Club in 2019, it’s probably not exactly what you thought about it in 1999, if only because so much of what it describes has manifested itself in the real world or been distorted beyond recognition. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Fincher’s point of view isn’t confusing or contradictory all these years later, but the culture tends to move quickly from threat to threat, and it’s helpful to have enough distance to see the world it’s depicting more clearly.

It becomes easier to appreciate the ambiguities of the film when it no longer feels like a clear and present danger. What cannot be predicted, however, is how items like Fight Club will shift during flight.

Fight club chuck