Exploring Paul Thomas Anderson’s surprising hatred of ‘Fight Club’: “It’s just unbearable”
Say what you will about his output, but you can’t deny the creativity of Paul Thomas Anderson. The auteur has produced some incredibly varied work over his long career, from his crime thriller debut Hard Eight to porn-based drama Boogie Nights, literal cult film The Master to coming of age romance Licorice Pizza. Then there’s Magnolia, which is about three different films in one.
The director has more than earned his right to comment on the state of the movie industry. His favourite films range from Powell and Pressburger’s Night Ambush to the Howard Hughes-produced noir His Kind of Woman, but what about the movies he simply cannot stand? According to one interview, it’s one of David Fincher’s best-known works that rubs him up the wrong way.
Whilst promoting Magnolia to Rolling Stone, Anderson revealed his reaction to his first viewing of Fight Club. “I saw 30 minutes of it only because our trailer is playing in front of it. And I would love to go on railing about the movie, but I’m just going to pretend as if I haven’t seen it,” he said (via Cigarettes and Red Vines). “It’s just unbearable“. He then made some incredibly pointed comments towards his fellow director, ones that have not aged well at all. “I wish David Fincher testicular cancer, for all of his jokes about it,” he said. “I wish him testicular fucking cancer.”
Anderson is referring to the character of Bob, played by Meat Loaf, a testicular cancer sufferer whose treatment has caused him to grow breasts. Whilst the decision to make Bob the butt of several jokes – Edward Norton’s narrator character refers to his growths as ‘bitch tits’ – Anderson’s comments wishing cancer upon Fincher are simply unacceptable. Something like that might have been ok in the edgy era of the late 1990s, but in the harsh light of modernity, it simply doesn’t fly. Also, Fincher only adapted the character from Chuck Palahniuk’s novel. If Anderson should be angry with anyone, it’s him.
Fincher initially didn’t respond to Anderson’s comments. It wasn’t until 2021 that he sat down with Rolling Stone – the same magazine that had published the ‘cancer’ line over two decades earlier – to express his feelings on the matter. “I’ve been through cancer with somebody that I love, and I can understand if somebody thought . . . I didn’t think that we were making fun of cancer survivors or victims,” he said. “I thought what Chuck [Palanhuik] was doing was talking about a therapeutic environment that could be infiltrated or abused. We were talking about empathy vampirism.”
One of Fincher’s first big directing jobs was an advert for the American Cancer Society, so he was clearly conscious of the impact of the condition long before he made Fight Club. “Cancer’s rough. It’s a fucking horrible thing,” he continued. “As far as Paul’s quote, I get it. If you’re in a rough emotional state and you’ve just been through something major. . . . My dad died, and it certainly made me feel different about death and suffering. And my dad probably liked Fight Club even less than Paul did.”
Fight Club continues to be a divisive topic amongst film fans across generations. Whilst Anderson was simply trying to express how passionately he disliked it, he definitely went too far. It’ll be interesting to see if he ever responds to Fincher’s rebuttal.
