Opinion Piece - Why Fight Club is No Longer My Favourite Film

As you may know from last week, Fight Club is no longer my favourite film, it has been overtaken by Mulholland Drive. I'm sure it hardly disrupted your lives at all but for someone who spends most of his life talking, reading and watching films or film adjacent stuff, a disruption of the grand pantheon of my interests is big news. Now, I've always been pretty open to the idea that any list of favourite films is in constant fluidity. We, as humans, are works in progress and so any list that is such a reflection of the self is going to grow too. With that said, let's break down exactly what Fight Club did for me, what it doesn't do now and what Mulholland Drive does that better suits my tastes now. I apologise because this post may feel slightly indulgent but it's a quiet week. I promise, stick with it and not only will we try something new next week, you'll also be treated with a mildly spicy meme at the end.

I don't like to talk about this a lot because there's an element of shame around it but let me tell you about the first time I saw Fight Club. I think I was about thirteen, maybe fourteen. A couple of my friends had started properly getting into films and we were essentially racing through a couple of the iconic heavy hitters together, the kind of classics that are very approachable for teenage boys. You know, films like Seven, The Matrix and pretty much anything Tarantino directed. Being a young teenager, most of these first viewings were done in the middle of the night on a phone, not the ideal viewing experience for pretty much anything, I'm sure we can agree. Anyway, it was exactly a night like this when I first watched Fight Club and even through a tiny phone screen and crappy headphones, it captured my heart. I'd never seen a film that felt this cool. It was self aware, it was anti-capitalistic and what easily influenced teenage boy didn't want to become Tyler Durden? Partly important too was that this was a film that many people (at this time, a metric decided by the IMDb ranking) also loved. So it was a cool, edgy film, respected by many, with an ending that demanded multiple rewatches (even now, I still believe that a film you can revisit multiple times for multiple unique experiences is valuable), that fit all the boxes for being considered a proper film critic, right? Of course now, I realise that liking Fight Club didn't make me a film critic, partly because writing trash no one reads on the internet doesn't make you a critic and partly because I know that even now, six years on, I'm not even close to being considered a proper critic. The point remains though that back then, Fight Club felt like an important film to love, that also happened to be a film I loved. The two crossing over was a happy coincidence.

And then I started to grow up a bit. Rewatching a film you love can sometimes be scary, because you wonder if you will feel the same way as you did before. Sometimes, that love stays the same, like with the Before trilogy or Paddington 2. Sometimes, if you're really lucky, that love grows like it did with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But most of the time, films start to lose their sheen and that's exactly what happened with Fight Club. I do want to clear something up, in case there's been a misunderstanding; I still love Fight Club. No, it didn't have that sheen it had when I first watched it but the charm that made me fall in love was still there. It's just that a lot has happened since then. For example, Tyler Durden's philosophy, specifically his derogative use of the word "snowflake" has slipped into popular culture through the alt-right's use and, frankly, worship of it. Of course films should be able to stand on their own somewhat, being judged by their own qualities, but films cannot exist in a vacuum. When I watch Durden deliver a monologue, part of me can see Palahnuik's brilliant source material delivered by a swaggering Brad Pitt but the other part of me sees ironic critique that has since become hateful rhetoric. There is also a side of it that's like looking back at videos of yourself and feeling a little cringey. What once felt like a badass swagger now has the hint of arrogance, a teenager shouting against a system when everyone else has already been ground down to dust by it.

The other key part of why Fight Club isn't my favourite movie is that I love Mulholland Drive more, a film that aligns much better with my current interests in film. See, I'm one of those people who loves a movie that is very difficult to understand, often referred to as a puzzle film. There is pleasure in the film but much of the enjoyment comes from figuring out what the hell you've just seen. That said, David Lynch's films also trade on this filmic experience that is hard to describe. Just a scene like the Club Silencio scene is powerful despite its artifice and without being able to verbalise what you've seen. That kind of brings me onto the thematic elements, where Mulholland Drive also hits the spot. It has a huge theme of identity, which Fight Club also had, although the lengths that Mulholland is willing to take it to is jaw-dropping. Once you get your head around it, it is truly something to behold. I've also become obsessed with the theme of falseness and artificiality in cinema, because of how everything we see in cinema is a lie and yet we still go along with it. Scenes like Club Silencio capture this better than any other film I've yet seen can. We are told everything is a tape, is artificial, is just straight up not true, but both we and the characters remain enraptured, being moved almost to the point of tears, before the artifice is again ripped away. I've seen the film five times and somehow, it works every single time.

To clarify again as we wrap up, I don't hate Fight Club all of a sudden. It was once right next to my heart, it's now slightly removed, but I still have a lot of love for it. Time passed, my interests "evolved" and now, Mulholland Drive has that top spot. Who knows, maybe that too will be surpassed in two years? I dunno. What I do know is, like relationships in your life, their power may fade but you will always remember the impact they had on your life. And now as a thanks for reading all of this, enjoy the meme: