Fight Club : 20th Anniversary

David Fincher’s “Fight Club” has become one of his most iconic and quotable movies, but that was hardly the case when the film opened in theaters 20 years ago. Author Brian Raftery takes a behind-the-scenes look at the tumultuous making of the Chuck Palahniuk adaptation in the new book “How 1999 Blew Up the Screen,” an excerpt from which is now available to read on The Ringer. Fox 2000 executive Laura Ziskin optioned Palahniuk’s novel for $10,000 and originally courted David O. Russell to direct. Russell read “Fight Club” and passed because he just didn’t understand it. Fincher, meanwhile, was instantly attracted to the story.

“I was in my late thirties, and I saw that book as a rallying cry,” Fincher told Raftery. “Chuck was talking about a very specific kind of anger that was engendered by a kind of malaise: ‘We’ve been inert so long, we need to sprint into our next evolution of ourselves.’ And it was easy to get swept away in just the sheer juiciness of it.”

In order to direct the movie, Fincher had to get over his past relationship with 20th Century Fox. The director had notoriously clashed with the studio on his directorial debut, “Alien 3.” Fincher went to Fox and presented the only two options he felt a “Fight Club” adaptation could go: Make a low-budget $3 million movie on videotape or go with a big budget and big stars. Fincher eyed the latter choice and called it an “act of sedition.” Fox was intrigued and gave Fincher time to put together a script.

“We were making a satire,” Fincher said. “We were saying, ‘This is as serious about blowing up buildings as ‘The Graduate’ is about fucking your mom’s friend.'”

Fox went ahead with the script Fincher planned with screenwriter Jim Uhls. Having directed Brad Pitt already in the serial killer drama “Se7en,” all Fincher had to do was convince the actor to read the script during the making of “Meet Joe Black” in order to get him to sign on as Tyler Durden. Edward Norton caught Fincher’s eye after the director watched him in “The People vs. Larry Flynt.” Like Fincher, Norton viewed “Fight Club” as a comedy.

Just how funny “Fight Club” should be ended up being a point of contention on set between Fincher and Norton. The two men fought over the movie’s tone, often resulting in long breaks between scenes where other actors would wait around aimlessly.

“I think Edward had this idea of, ‘Let’s make sure people realize that this is a comedy,’” Fincher said. “He and I talked about this ad nauseum. There’s humor that’s obsequious, that’s saying, ‘Wink-wink, don’t worry, it’s all in good fun.’ And my whole thing was to not wink. What we want is for people to go, ‘Are they espousing this?’”

Fincher’s clashes with Norton were nothing compared to his battle with Fox over the movie’s marketing. The director was given no control over the “Fight Club” marketing. As Fincher said, “The people whose job it is to sell it were like, ‘I’m not going down with this.’” One executive at Fox told Fincher the movie was for no one. Fincher recalled being told, “Men do not want to see Brad Pitt with his shirt off. It makes them feel bad. And women don’t want to see him bloody. So I don’t know who you made this movie for.”

“When I think of 1999, I don’t think of my feet on the chair in front of me with a sixteen-ounce cup of popcorn in my hands,” the director added. “I think of it mostly as a series of meetings where I would slap myself so hard, I would leave with a calloused forehead.”

Fincher wanted to take a creative approach to the film’s marketing and directed a couple of fake PSA videos featuring Pitt and Norton. The two actors appeared in character and advised moviegoers to turn off their cell phones, adding dark and twisted lines as “no one has the right to touch you in your bathing suit area.” Fincher’s idea was to take an “in-your-face assaultive” approach to the marketing, but Fox preferred to play it safe by selling the film as a “big studio film with movie stars” and leaning into the fighting plot line by marketing “Fight Club” at wrestling events.

The marketing didn’t work and “Fight Club” was a notorious box office bomb, only opening to $11 million and tapping out at $37 million at the U.S. box office. Fox spent $65 million on the movie. Fincher had heard the movie could bomb and decided to take a vacation to Bali on opening weekend as to not pay attention to the inevitable bad news. On the poor box office returns Fincher said, “Two years of your life and you get one fax and it’s like, ‘Everybody go home. It’s going to be a fire sale.’ You do a lot of soul-searching at that moment: ‘Oh, fuck, what am I going to do now?’ How do you bounce back from that?”

“People at [the restaurant] Morton’s would pat you on the shoulders like you lost a loved one,” the director added. “The vibe [at CAA] was very much, ‘It’s good you’ve experienced this and that you understand we can sway you from making these kinds of life-altering, possibly career-destroying decisions for yourself.’ I just got up and excused myself. And later on, I had a conversation and said, ‘How dare you? I’m really okay with this movie.’”

Whatever pain Fincher dealt with during the making of “Fight Club”and its aftermath surely healed in the two decades since, as the film went on to sell over 6 million DVDs and become a cultural touchstone for a generation of young moviegoers. Head over to The Ringer to read the full “Fight Club” excerpt Brian Raftery’s “How 1999 Blew Up the Screen.”

‘Fight Club’: David Fincher on Clashing With Ed Norton, Battling Fox Over Marketing, and Bad Box Office. By Zack Sharf. Indiewire ,  March 27, 2019.

See also :

The First Rule of Making ‘Fight Club’: Talk About ‘Fight Club’ . By  Brain Raftery.  In an excerpt from the new book ‘Best. Movie. Year. Ever.,” David Fincher, Edward Norton, and the minds behind ‘Fight Club’ talk about the bare-knuckled, bloody battle to bring Chuck Palahniuk’s book to the big screen. The Ringer , March 26, 2019.

When David Fincher’s movie of Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel Fight Club was released 20 years ago, it polarised the critics.

Many people just did not know which way to jump on this twisted allegory about an American wage slave, played by Edward Norton, who is a cog in the capitalist economy and does his bit to keep all the other cogs turning. He assesses insurance claims for a living and in turn spends the money he earns on things he thinks he needs from the Ikea catalogue.

Yet the character – often referred to as simply the Narrator, but who likes to call himself ‘Jack’ in the film – has a growing disquiet at his place in the machine. Unable to sleep at night, he fakes a variety of medical and mental health conditions so he can join support groups for sufferers of testicular cancer or sickle cell anaemia, finding some comfort and release in the physical and emotional pain of others.

However, he still has a void in his soul – until he meets Tyler Durden. Tyler is everything The Narrator is not… for a start, he’s Brad Pitt. Charming, beautiful, ripped and totally off-the-grid. Tyler is on a one-man revenge mission against the world, relieving himself in the soup in fancy restaurant kitchens and turning human fat stolen from liposuction clinics into soap – which he then sells back to the rich women it came from in the first place.

Tyler shows The Narrator that the rampant consumerism in which he’s enmeshed is a pre-millennial affliction that must be denied. And he demonstrates that the only way for men to really feel anything is to beat the living hell out of each other in underground fight clubs. At first, there are just two of these in existence; but as the story progresses, ‘Fight Club’ becomes an out-of-control movement that spans the US.

Fight Club the movie is brutal, sexy, violent, stylish and, superficially at least, has a powerful message: the things we own end up owning us. But is that the message at all, in fact? Is it really an anti-consumerist statement, or something else entirely?

Perhaps its ambiguity was one of the things that made it a hard sell. For while it now regularly makes the lists of the best movies of the 1990s, if not of all time, it fared less well on its autumn 1999 release. After a splashy premiere at the Venice film festival, which set the industry abuzz, it failed to set fire at the box office and critics were extremely divided.

Peter Travers at Rolling Stone loved it: “Fight Club pulls you in, challenges your prejudices, rocks your world and leaves you laughing in the face of an abyss,” he said. “It’s alive, all right. It’s also an uncompromising American classic.”

However, the renowned reviewer Roger Ebert hated it. “Fight Club is the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since Death Wish, a celebration of violence in which the heroes write themselves a license to drink, smoke, screw and beat one another up,” he fumed. “Sometimes, for variety, they beat up themselves. It’s macho porn.” Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian was also none-too enamoured, remarking, “By the end, it has unravelled catastrophically into a strident, shallow, pretentious bore with a ‘twist’ ending that doesn’t work.”

Although he wasn’t a fan, Bradshaw perhaps got to the nub of it better than many of its champions. For while many positive reviews applauded Tyler Durden’s attack on capitalist culture, Bradshaw understood it as a different beast – highlighting that Fight Club at least starts off as a satire on what he calls the “bogus contemporary ‘crisis of masculinity’”. It is this element that is perhaps most pertinent – and, many would argue, misunderstood – two decades on.

The big twist that Bradshaw refers to is, of course, that The Narrator and Tyler Durden are one and the same. The first has created the second as an avatar who can say and do all the things he is too scared to. The Narrator is emasculated, beaten down, paralysed, while Tyler is his subconscious escape tunnel – even though he doesn’t realise it until the climax of the movie.

The turning point for The Narrator comes when he realises that Tyler – before he knows they are one and the same – is directing the energy from the Fight Clubs into something very different: militia group Project Mayhem. Tyler has turned the men who have found both a release and a purpose from knocking hell out of each other into a private army, with plans to launch a devastating terrorist attack.

The Narrator travels the country to try to stop the operation… only for it to finally dawn on him that he is Tyler. The battle lines are drawn between The Narrator and the creature from his id.

As for the audience? Though we might have cheered Tyler on in the middle of the movie for his Robin Hood-like tendencies (he wants to blow up all the credit card companies and erase the debt record of millions of Americans), by the end we – like The Narrator – realise that Tyler is the villain, a Frankenstein’s monster running amok.

Or at least, that’s one reading of it. Because the thing with Fight Club is that not everybody does think Tyler is the bad guy of the piece… in fact, there are many people today who still consider him the hero.

Fight Club came out when the internet was in its infancy, a good decade before most people began to join social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. But, with its alter-ego conceit, the movie, and Palahniuk’s book before it, anticipated a time when people could create their own online personas to hide behind, from which they could say the things that they might never be bold enough to voice in real life.

So it’s perhaps unsurprising that that ultimate aggrieved macho fantasy figure Tyler Durden has become something of an unironic poster boy for Men’s Rights Activism. The men’s rights movement has been around for decades as a riposte to feminism, but really found its feet in the internet age – and if you tune into conversations between its followers on the news aggregator and discussion forum Reddit, you can see Fight Club, and Durden, are two of its clear obsessions.

Consider this, posted just two months ago by user The Motte: “Men are suffering today because they are inherently unsuited for the social demands of modernity. Evolutionarily, men were developed to hunt, to fight, to kill, to survive only by the force of their own muscles and instinct…The modern world has completely removed this aspect of life and replaced it with soft, decadent, consumer capitalism. Not only are men not supposed to be violent, aggressive, and driven by their very real biological urges, but they are told that these aspects of themselves are barbaric, evil, and worthy of condemnation… I do think Tyler Durden’s philosophy hits at real issues that all men feel to some degree. I think it’s possible that men feel unfulfilled without a real sense of stakes in their lives, like the sort that mortal combat would have given them in the past.”

Because Tyler Durden wasn’t just about sticking it to the establishment. He wanted to rip down the whole structure of man’s apparently emasculated place in the modern world, constrained by marriage, kids, and white collar careerism. In a long speech Tyler rails against the undermining of masculinity, observing: “We’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.”

‘Toxic masculinity’ wasn’t the buzzword in 1999 that it is today, but Tyler Durden certainly seems to be a prime example of it. But what of the fact that he has become a hero to many – and if it is an error to perceive him that way, is that the film’s, or the audience’s, fault?

Laurie Penny is a feminist journalist and writer, and author of the book The Bitch Doctrine. Despite her own anti-capitalist stance, she looks at Tyler Durden as a feeble type of social justice warrior. “He’s angry about consumerism on a purely aesthetic level – he does not, in fact, have any sort of social programme, and one of the climactic scenes is him holding a gun to an Asian restaurant worker’s head and explaining that the guy should be grateful because this will make him feel alive.

“That’s not how that works. That guy isn’t working a restaurant job because he’s a loser and a consumerist shill. He’s doing it because he needs the money, and now he also has PTSD because a violent narcissist assaulted him in an alley. Great job, Tyler.”

However, if not a fan of Durden, Penny says she is definitely a fan of the story: “I adore Palahniuk’s writing,” she says, and claims that she loved the movie when it was first released. As has time has gone on, however, her feelings have changed about the latter. In particular she sees a problem with the fact that, in the film’s interpretation of the story, Tyler’s message, and charisma, is stronger than the idea that he’s actually wrong. “The film has so much fun with Tyler Durden as a mad phantom from the id that it forgets that he’s meant to be frightening,” she says. “Honestly, the problem is that a lot of young men really do believe that misogyny itself is a form of brave social rebellion. They associate womanhood with oppression. Hence the ‘generation of men raised by women’ nonsense. What generation of men hasn’t been raised by women?

“I don’t think toxic masculinity is a revolutionary force of social change. I don’t think Palahniuk does either. Clearly, parts of the internet disagree.”

Does this supposed ‘bad fandom’ mean that the film version, at least, is irretrievably tainted for her? “I don’t believe there’s any one correct way to interpret a piece of art, but it’s certainly harder for me to enjoy the shiny set-pieces and the cool soundtrack now than it was when I was 13. Or maybe it’s just that I grew up, and punching strangers in the face because you don’t like consumerism doesn’t seem so cool any more.”

Perhaps the person to make a definitive call on how we should regard Tyler Durden is Chuck Palahniuk himself. However, when BBC Culture asks him, the author demurs to give anything like a solid answer. “My policy has always been to not give a definite meaning or intention to my work or characters,” he tells us. “That would preclude the reader's participation. As if I were presenting a Rorschach test and asking, ‘Would you tell me what this picture of a blood-sucking vampire bat looks like?’ That might sound evasive, but why spoil the fun?”

However, it’s certainly interesting to note some of the differences in the detail of Durden’s character between the book and the movie. In the latter, Uhls adds in elements that serve to enhance his heroic credentials: for example, his so-called ‘Project Mayhem’ is a much bigger deal, and its plot to destroy the credit card companies makes him seem almost philanthropic.

“Jim Uhls thought there ought to be a greater, tangible goal to the madness,” says Palahuniuk. “[But] I've always felt the story was about fixing one person rather than fixing society.” He draws a parallel between Durden and Jordan Peterson, the controversial Canadian psychologist and writer, who has become a self-help guru for men with his philosophy that they have been hobbled by gender politics and need to toughen up again. “I've always thought Tyler was a tough love-type of [life] coach, created to bridge the gap between the narrator's obedient boyhood and an autonomous adulthood. Tyler would be what Joseph Campbell called a ‘secondary father’ figure, such as a teacher, coach, minister or drill instructor, who challenges a person more than a biological father would dare.”

Writer Neil Strauss released a notorious book in 2005 called The Game, in which he championed the rules and techniques of pick-up artists who use pseudo-scientific techniques to seduce women. One of the most notorious PUAs he featured went by the name Tyler Durden. Real name Owen Cook, he went on to co-found a ‘pick-up’ website called Real Social Dynamics, passing on his ‘tips’. BBC Culture approached Cook for this article but he did not respond.

Surely this co-opting of Tyler Durden must annoy Palahniuk? Once more, Palanhuik remains determinedly neutral. “Again, can a person misread a Rorschach test – or a mirror?” he says. “Neil Strauss used the name Tyler Durden in his book and made far more money from it than I ever have. Imitation is the most sincere form of… fill in the blank.”

In the novel, as well as being less altruistic, Tyler Durden is also more psychopathic and murderous, a true dark side to The Narrator. And there’s definitely no mention of the kind of obvious physical attributes possessed by Brad Pitt, which undoubtedly have contributed to film Tyler becoming much more of a role model than novel Tyler. For Palahniuk, however, there’s no question that Pitt is Durden.

“Pitt was the obvious choice, perhaps the only choice, like Clark Gable as Rhett Butler,” he says. “Director David Fincher wanted that meta level of meaning when Pitt said lines like, ‘I look the way you want to look. I fuck who you want to fuck.’ Could any other actor have pulled off such lines in 1998, when the film was made? No Brad, no movie.”

And no movie, no hero figure for the men’s rights movement in the shape of Tyler Durden. Who, ironically, would probably have no truck with those on the internet who essentially want to be Brad Pitt. In Tyler’s big, state-of-the-union monologue in the film, he bemoans the lack of a defining moment like the Great War or Depression in modern men’s lives, adding, “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won’t. We’re slowly learning that fact.”

Is Fight Club’s Tyler Durden Film’s Most Misunderstood Man? By  David Barnett. BBC , July 22, 2019.

Released 78 days before the end of the world (October 15, 1999), this film touched down like a tornado and became a manifesto for anti-consumerism and living an authentic life. For letting go of the work-a-day drudgery and materialism that had hypnotized society. For shattering what it meant to be a human being, a real man. It spoke to our fear and anger, and our desire for connection and purpose. Fight Clubs sprang up around the country. Rule #1 became an infamous meme.

The end of the millennium was a time that had yet to see Facebook, 911, fentanyl, and the dot com crash. The world wide web was nascent and promised endless possibility and profitability, and yet the Y2K scare threatened doomsday. We were on the precipice of a new era as the millennium dawned, and talks of an apocalypse simmered. The World Trade Centers still stood tall, symbols of the capitalism Tyler Durden railed against. Little did he know that they, like the bank buildings in the film’s final scene, would come crashing down within a couple of years. What would have been his response?

What Tyler Durden Got Right

Tyler is a dark, twisted play on the manic pixie dream girl trope — beautiful and charming, wild and eccentric, unfettered by society’s constraints. He dive bombs into the narrator’s life for the sole purpose of turning it right side out. The Superego. Tyler tells the fumbling narrator:

All the ways you wish you could be, that’s me. I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not.

Tyler warns the narrator — and by extension, all of us — that the hunger for a better car, better bod, and better job title pulls us away from a richer, simpler life of star-gazing, physicality, play, and connection. This demoralizing delusion tells us that our lives would be complete if we only had…something, anything more. What commercials ultimately offer isn’t a better product, but a better you.

Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. — Tyler Durden

This rings even truer today, as technology has only sped up production and consumption, and smart phones offer endless hollow distractions. The “if it bleeds, it leads” news has every stomach in knots over meaningless headlines of political corruption and murder. Anxiety and depression have skyrocketed, and Amazon and Starbucks aren’t a panacea. Tyler was right about this.

The things you own end up owning you. — Tyler Durden

He was also right about something else that’s not as often mentioned about this film. With all of its failings, Project Mayhem offers disaffected men a community, sense of purpose, and test of manhood that so many lack today. With the loss of religious ritual and tribal traditions, modern society has lost its rites of passage into adulthood. Anyone who has studied traditional cultures or read The Golden Bough or the works of Joseph Campbell knows their importance. They define the stages of our lives, connect us to peers and ancestors who endure the same trial, and give us a sense of purpose and pride.

Religious sacraments, the onset of puberty, graduations, and even fraternity hazings, mark accomplishments and stages in our lives. Without them, many of us feel lost. This is much of why gangs are so popular — with no father figures, many young men look to their peers for guidance and “family,” and their gang initiations only strengthen their bond (tattoos and violence have long been associated with coming-of-age ceremonies).

In Fight Club, the blue-collars and cubicle hostages are given a chance to reconnect with the part of them (“their hunter-gatherer side”) that has been slung into a noose by their Hugo Boss neckties. Buried alive in faxes, Ikea catalogs and $80 DKNY wool socks, these men have probably not had an authentic, adrenaline-infused experience for several years; and never a test of true manhood.

This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time. — The Narrator

Finally the panacea of consumerism, where the closest you can get to rebellion are hyper-individualist slogans like “live life in your own lane” or “think different” is no longer enough. Tyler comments in one of the most memorable passages, “We’re the middle children of history, man, no purpose, no place. We have no great war, no great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives.”

Tyler enlists in this war, knowing that redemption can only be earned through violence and loss — hence the fights, the chemical burns, the blaze in the apartment, the outpost of a lonely shack; cleansing rituals, so to speak, like the more ancient practices of blood-letting, scarification, or nights spent alone in a forest.

Though the “can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs” cliche does slip out toward the end of the film, Tyler articulates this idea more eloquently earlier on:

The liberator who has destroyed my property has realigned my perception. — Tyler Durden

It is only when the narrator is literally evicted from his former life (the poignant line, “I am Jack’s wasted life” comes to mind) can he begin anew. Only when he has lost everything is he free to do anything, as Tyler tells him. Even in the major story arc of the film, the narrator could only cultivate his new persona that would set him free after he lost his most precious asset — his mind. And in losing it, he regains his soul.

Only when we’ve lost everything are we free to do anything. — Tyler Durden

The narrator asks again and again, “Was I asleep? Had I slept?” The answer is yes and no. Throughout most of the film, the narrator did not sleep, as he spent his nights as an insomniac or as Tyler — movie house worker, soap maker, revolutionary — and yet for those months he was spiritually out cold. Only after he fully became Tyler Durden was he truly awake — and allowed to sleep in peace. The narrator’s last words to Tyler are, “I want you to really listen to me… My eyes are open.”

What Tyler Durden Got Wrong

The irony of the last third of this film is that those who have enlisted in Tyler’s war against the Establishment ultimately become mindless disciples, chanting slogans (“His name is Robert Paulsen”) and following orders. No one is allowed a name in Project Mayhem. They are all “part of the same compost heap,” as Tyler says. The statement seems to refer more to faceless conformity than community. They clean, cook, and garden together, but to what end? “Only Tyler knows for sure.”

What is the first rule of Project Mayhem? You do not ask questions. It makes you wonder— is that our ultimate desire? To be lead, under any circumstances, toward any goal? It seems so. What was, in our grandparents’ time, the need to fit in is now the need to rebel (all, of course, in order to fit in again). Pierce your nose and get a unique tattoo, just like everyone else. And when rebellion is the hallmark of conformity, what can you do to rebel against that?

Even Tyler’s singular vision becomes a military-style combine with a swarm of black-clad lemmings ready to jump off the edge of the nearest TRW building. There is one visionary for every 200 who follow him. What is the difference between them — intelligence, charisma, strength? Maybe. But visionaries have a vision they move toward, while most people only have a past, a self-image or a fear they run from. The latter will never be leaders.

Something teenagers don’t understand is that whether you do what parents or authorities tell you — or the exact opposite — you’re still letting them control your behavior. If you are dedicated to a goal, does it matter if you are going with the flow, against it, or escaping it entirely? The true rebels are not rebelling at all — they are just following their own path.

And when rebellion is the hallmark of conformity, what can you do to rebel against that?

The other major misfire is that Tyler’s army doesn’t build anything — they only destroy. The death count begins early in the film — the narrator’s apartment, his crappy job, a few teeth, Marla Singer (a kind of casualty), Jared Leto’s pretty face, Robert Paulsen, then cars, buildings, livelihoods. Causing near-fatal car accidents, blowing up buildings, and instigating juvenile pranks. Is this the way to prove that consumerism is bad? To awaken a generation? Do the men of Project Mayhem even understand why they do what they do? They seem interested only in subservience and anarchy (an ironic pair) and destruction.

Presumably, the end of the film is the beginning of the next phase — where the true Tyler Durden (the awakened narrator) begins to build a better life and society in place of what was destroyed. It’s unclear whether Project Mayhem will be at his side, or if the old Tyler’s violent vision is too different from the new Tyler’s more subdued perspective. Sadly, we’ll never know what that might have been (Even sadder, it’s our nature to be bored by such things. We prefer destruction).

What we do know — from the fall of the World Trade Centers, from so many wars, rebellions, and protests — is that these acts alone are not enough to spark lasting change, or even clean a slate. Yes, true revolutions often begin with violence, a grassroots groundswell, and a driven, charismatic leader like Tyler Durden. But without blueprints for a future, there is nothing to build or strive for.

It’s easy to argue that that’s not the job of this film — not the story it was trying to tell. As a psychological mind-bender, an action thriller, an inspiring diatribe against the shallow consumerism and isolation of modern life, it succeeds brilliantly. Its greatness makes it all the more disappointing that we don’t know what happens next. Where Tyler Durden would take us.

Can we create a vital, interconnected society that’s not built on wealth, power, and mindless distraction? Should we return to a simpler, more authentic way of life that values interaction and experience over objects? Are most of us doomed to be followers and conformists? How many of are fully alive? Twenty years on, these questions are still crucial to our fulfillment and survival, and still unanswered. We can begin simply by paying attention.

In the spirit of Tyler’s homework assignments, I dare anyone still reading this to “pick a fight” with the daily routine that is modern living. Follow in the footsteps of the Guy Debord and the Situationists and “vivez sans temps mort” (live without dead time).

What did you love and hate about this film? How did it change you?

Fight Club Turns 20: What Tyler Durden Got Right and Wrong. By Absolute Madness. Medium , October 11, 2019.

Also of interest : The Society of the 'Fight Club' Is the Society of the Spectacle. By Carl Wilson. Popmatters ,  July 23, 2017.

When David Fincher’s Fight Club was released 20 years ago, it was a crystal ball that was mistaken for a cultural crisis, much like Do the Right Thing had been a decade earlier and perhaps Joker is now. Film-makers who were trying to identify a violence nesting in the culture were accused of trying to incite it – or at least clumsily juggling lit sticks of dynamite. No less an authority than Roger Ebert opened his review of Fincher’s film by calling it “the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since Death Wish”, echoing widespread concern that impressionable men would lock into the empowering brutality of Tyler Durden and the army that gathers around him. Viewed from a certain angle, it looked like a recruitment film.

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

Let’s begin at the end, as the film does, when a series of detonations leads to the collapse of downtown office buildings. 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. 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. 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. (It also helps to know that the explosions are about taking down institutions, not people, more The Weather Underground than Osama bin Laden.)

It all begins, as many terrible things do, with the pissy aggrievement of a young white male. Much like Ron Livingston in Office Space, another cult classic from the same year, Edward Norton’s unnamed narrator has gotten tired of the deadening routines that define his life. The difference is that cubicle culture alone isn’t what’s bothering Norton, but his realization that he’s a cog into a terrible corporate machine. His day job is to calculate the necessity of automobile recalls under a formula: “Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.” Many of his later actions are explained by the emptiness of being defined by the things he buys – most famously, the Ikea catalog that accounts for the interior of his apartment – but his work matters, too. He knows firsthand that capitalism will let people die if it’s better for the bottom line.

The Narrator’s need to feel something at all draws him first to terminal-disease support groups at the local Episcopal church and later to the anarchist philosophy of Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), who makes him feel the old-fashioned way – by punching him hard in the gut. The twist of Tyler’s true identity – fully earned, incidentally, by the many times Fincher hints at it – says a lot about the conversation the Narrator has with himself about what he thinks he needs and how it develops into a messianic vision that completely gets away from him. But those first punches are an expression of brute masculinity that hit him like a cold splash of water to the face. Men are simple creatures in that way.

As the fight clubs metastasize around the country, Tyler’s pre-brawl speeches shift from stating the rules to spouting off about his generation being “the middle children of history”, without a world war or a Great Depression to give it purpose. (“Our Great War is a spiritual war,” he says. “Our Great Depression is our lives.”) The implication is that all that masculine energy needs an outlet, and since Generation X hasn’t been provided with one, it will have to find some other way to channel its inchoate rage. And it’s here where the film’s meaning can get a little slippery: how much of what Tyler is saying is to be understood as nonsense? And if it’s not nonsense, then how much does the film implicitly endorse?

The fact that the fight clubs lead into Project Mayhem, a full-on terrorist organization, should lay the second question to rest. In his efforts to satisfy a personal need, the Narrator/Tyler has set off a brushfire that rages out of control, and he’s utterly powerless to keep it from consuming the world. Working from Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, only identify with their hero(es) up to the point when the narrator/Tyler still has some control over the situation. The film does recognize a phenomenon where men are waking in anger from a culture intended to numb or emasculate them, but it also sees in that the presence of sickening misogyny and the potential for fascism. And contrary to Ebert’s review, it panics right alongside the Narrator, who goes so far as to shoot himself in the head to stop it.

What Fight Club missed in 1999 – and comes oh-so-close to getting – is how much the rage it identifies is connected to white supremacy. But the world it anticipated is now upon us, with a host of Tyler Durdens marshaling attacks on perceived enemies and twisting the meaning of “snowflake”, a term used in Palahniuk’s book and popularized in the movie (ie “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake”), to taunt the vulnerable. What are the Proud Boys if not a roving gang of Project Mayhem thugs? Or the tiki-torch-bearers of Charlottesville. Fight Club saw it coming, with thrilling vividness and wit and technical panache. Just don’t shoot the messenger.

Fight Club at 20: the prescience and power of David Fincher's drama. By Scott Tobias. The Guardian,  October 15, 2019. 

There are terms that we use a lot these days that we didn’t back in 1999, when the film Fight Club was made. “Toxic masculinity” is one of them. So is “incel”. And so is “gaslighting”.

That doesn’t mean that when David Fincher made Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel into the brilliantly sick and twisted cult classic it is, he wasn’t thinking about these things. The film is about the fragility of masculinity, men’s mental health, and the way the two are interlocked. From the early scenes of the main character at a testicular cancer support group – where a distraught Meat Loaf cries “we’re still men!” – to other lines like “we’re a generation of men raised by women... I’m wondering if another woman is really what we need” – to, of course, the savage fight scenes, Fight Club is a raw portrait of what happens when male insecurity contorts itself into masculinity-in-overdrive, and an experiment in what men would do without social constraints.

At the time of release, viewers questioned whether Fincher critiques or glorifies this. “Far from satirising the tiresome ‘crisis of masculinity’ stuff sloshing around the airwaves either side of the Atlantic, the film simply endorses it,” wrote Peter Bradshaw in his 1999 Guardian review. Twenty years on, when terms like “toxic masculinity”, “incel” and “gaslighting” exist precisely because Fight Club’s experiment has become a reality, it feels relevant to ask this question again.

Fight Club tells the story of an unnamed but nihilistic narrator, played by Edward Norton (who one year earlier had played that other lost man, the kerbstomping neo-nazi in American History X). When he’s not ordering Ikea furniture and wishing he was dead, our narrator goes to support meetings for problems he doesn’t have. At these meetings, he encounters fellow meetings addict Marla, played by Helena Bonham Carter, and they forge a kind of relationship. By day, he works in insurance for a car company, and on a trip to examine a car crash, meets Brad Pitt’s character, the charismatic Tyler Durden. In the parking lot of a bar, Durden asks the narrator to punch him for absolutely no reason. This is how Fight Club, an underground sect of bored and frustrated men who beat the shit out of each other for fun, is born. Not before long, the club goes nationwide, the narrator can describing it as a “terrorist organisation”, its goal to totally disrupt society and scare the shit out of people.

Fight Club has always been hard to watch – the narrator pulverising Jared Leto’s angel face, that famous scene with the slow acid burn on the hand, the multiple scenes where someone’s head has been blown open – but watching Fight Club back twenty years on, some moments definitely have not aged well: when Durden says to the narrator, after fucking Marla, “Do you wanna finish her off?” for instance. Particularly uncomfortable, in an age of epidemic gun violence in America, is the scene when the narrator threatens his boss with a mass shooting at the office. And I’d be interested to hear how mental health activists view the film, since it equates the narrator’s mental health condition – which we presume to be schizophrenia – with extreme violence. (Although it is, in a way, somewhat tactful that the film deliberately avoids labelling, or using the word schizophrenia.)

With these elements in mind, the film has recently earned comparisons to Joker – both are, loosely, about disenfranchised men who experience psychotic episodes and turn to violence. Both films have sparked debates about whether they will incite real world violence; according to a recent article in Indiewire, comparing their controversy, Fight Club was, at the time of release, labelled “irresponsible and appalling” while Joker was “a Category 5 cinematic shitstorm even before it won the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival”. One Reddit thread even asks whether Fight Club is the origin story for Joker, basing the theory around the protagonists’ similar facial disfigurement

Over the years, Fight Club has found its way into Reddit threads often; it has been adopted as a film favourite by Men’s Rights Activists, alt right bros and people that we might now call incels, men who think they're owed sex, owed social status, and when they don't get it, they feel betrayed. An online forum popular with incels called Red Pill takes its name from The Matrix, also made in 1999, and the film’s idea of the red pill, which means being able to see reality, versus the blue pill, ignorance is bliss. In incel culture seeing the reality means understanding the true dynamic between male and female genders: that women are only attracted to certain types of men. In the Red Pill forum, Fight Club has been lauded as the perfect parable for achieving alpha male status. “It shows the struggles a man goes through when swallowing the red pill, it shows the denial and fear from straying from the beaten path,” writes one user, concluding: “If you haven't seen it yet, do. It's a great alpha example.” Users even adopted the film’s famous line “the first rule of Fight Club is you never talk about fight club”; a Red Pill adjacent Subreddit asks, of talking about Red Pill philosophy with others: “Am I breaking the First Rule of Fight Club?”

It’s easy to see the film’s appeal to these people; the narrator doesn’t seem to have any romantic prospects, finds a community of sad, frustrated men who feel the same, and they attempt to reaffirm each other’s masculinity. The narrator even begins to, as we would now understand it, gaslight Marla. It later becomes clear this is partly down to his specific mental health problems, which in turn lead to a spree of violence, as became the case in some extreme pockets of incel culture. The members of Fight Club worship Tyler Durden in the same way that many incels worship mass shooter Elliot Rodgers.

Fight Club is a lot about toxic masculinity, but it doesn’t necessarily approve of it: it paints the narrator as an ill man, for whom – without giving away too much – things do not end well, and it paints the army of men who follow him as nasty, alienated, cruel. Crucially, the film is also about so much more than the male pursuit of alpha status. It’s about anomie, the mayhem that ensues when you remove social bonds and value systems. Take for example the scene where Durden gives all of the men in Fight Club the task of going out and starting a fight with a stranger. Civil society basically operates on the unspoken rule that we do not act like assholes, infringe upon one another’s personal space, or hit people for no reason. Fight Club asks: if you take this away, what have you got? The answer is chaos.

It’s no surprise that a film about anarchy takes a punch at capitalism. In the explosion our narrator loses all of his “versatile solutions for modern living” before Durden warns him that “the things you own end up owning you”. Later, in a speech at Fight Club, Durden describes a generation of men “raised on television to think we’re gonna be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars” (again, reflecting incel culture, and the idea of male entitlement); when the men go out to cause trouble, they’re ruining dvds, smashing TV aerials, and trashing computers; at the end, naturally, they target banks.

As in Palahniuk’s novel, Fincher works hard to craft characters that are suffering the effects of capitalism, too, socially isolated, living in a shitty prefab apartment, sitting in a little office, yearning for human contact from strangers. The support groups are addictive because they offer connectivity, in what was a pre-social media age. The Fight Club itself replaces the support groups in that it offers a more immediate form of physical human contact, in a time before you had the internet in the palm of your hand giving you access to a slow release of dopamine or adrenaline. Fight Club was a way to binge on these hormones. Chloe, a cancer patient at the cancer support group, perhaps best embodies the characters’ desperation when she talks about how she longs for physical touch before she dies. In a way, isn’t that all of us? 

And finally, Fight Club is a film about ennui. When narrator asks Marla why she visits the support groups she says it’s because they’re “cheaper than a movie and there’s free coffee”. Like our narrator, she is so nihilistic that the only thing that will jolt her into feeling anything is watching other people’s misery for sport. She takes Xanax in a suicide attempt out of apparent boredom. This is the female character, this is not gendered. The film asks us, gender aside, to interrogate our fear of death, and the influence this has on the way we live our lives, the choices we make, the risk assessments we do daily. Think of the narrator wishing a plane would crash. Marla standing in the middle of traffic, Durden crashing the car on purpose. It’s deeply nihilistic, but it also prompts us to ask ourselves the question of what we’re so afraid of.

Overall then, while Fight Club is about toxic masculinity, it’s also about so much more than that. It’s about what happens when you remove social mores, take aim at capitalist structures, transcend your fear of death. The answer is, it doesn’t look good. At the end of the film, it becomes clear that Durden embodies the narrator’s ego – the side of ourselves that would be unleashed if our id wasn’t putting in the hours. In order to survive, the narrator must destroy his ego. Yes, Fight Club has aged badly in some areas (haven’t most films from 20 years ago?) and yes, it’s probably given birth to some awful things – ranging from white collar boxing clubs in the city to incel forum fodder, but that’s not necessarily its fault. As a piece of very well-made cinema it provides a brilliant enquiry into the human condition. To appreciate it is to reclaim it from creeps on the internet.

Does Fight Club critique or celebrate the extreme violence of men? By  Amelia Abraham. Dazed ,

October 22, 2019.

Is it just me, or is it getting more reasonable out there? Temperatures are falling, Trump is being impeached, and Todd Phillips’ “Joker” — which was a Category 5 cinematic shitstorm even before it won the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival, and had been touted as a potential Oscar heavyweight until some bad PR and a plummeting Rotten Tomatoes score helped slow its momentum on opening week — has packed multiplexes across the country without any sign of the mass shootings that certain people feared it might inspire.

But if it’s already starting to seem absurd that anyone was legitimately worried about “Joker,” perhaps that says less about the world we live in than does it about the fecklessness of the film itself? For all of the pearl-clutching that preceded its release (much of which traces back to critics who tried to reconcile the size of the movie’s predicted impact with the smallness of its ideas), “Joker” will likely be remembered as a paper-thin provocation; as a cultural lightning rod that lacked the courage to do anything more than draw attention to itself. I know this because — 20 years ago this month — a movie called “Fight Club” punched its way into the public consciousness in a way that still continues to bruise. I know this, because Tyler knows this.

“The King of Comedy” provides the template for so much of what “Joker” does well, but “Fight Club”  clarifies all of its failures. Not only was David Fincher’s roman candle of a movie the last major studio release to burn with the kind of ingrown, anarchic, “are men okay?” energy that fuels Joaquin Phoenix across the screen, but the reasons people still talk about “Fight Club” today are the same reasons why people won’t be talking about “Joker” tomorrow.

Both films tell broadly allegorical stories about middle-aged white guys who grow so isolated from the world around them (and so disenfranchised from themselves) that they disassociate altogether, and both films entertain violence as a possible road towards personal agency. But where “Fight Club” confronts the toxicities of its time, “Joker” simply wallows in them.

Before we get to the differences between these two movies, however, let’s take a quick inventory of their similarities. We’ll start with the film that some critics labeled “irresponsible and appalling” soon after it premiered to mixed reviews in Venice and “touched a nerve in the male psyche that was debated in newspapers across the world.” You know, the one about a guy who lives in a big city where everyone is numb to each other. People tell him that he’s happy, but there’s a sick desperation in his laugh. One night, after he’s become too thoroughly dehumanized to even need his own name, the man experiences a violent encounter that triggers a complete psychic break.

From that moment on, he’s split between his anonymous persona and his flamboyant alter-ego: an idealized, swaggering response to a society in which visibility has become the only viable superpower of the masses. The fissure allows him to see the world from a funny new perspective — it’s like the man finally gets the punchline to a joke he’s always just pretended to understand. His epiphany proves contagious (even before he threatens an important political figure in the bathroom of a black-tie event), and eventually boils into a full-blown revolution that’s too angry for him to control. Suffering from a vague mental illness and so detached from reality that he can’t even tell if he’s actually sleeping with the woman who’s moved into his building, the man ultimately re-affirms his own existence by shooting a false idol in the head.

Okay, so “Joker” and “Fight Club” aren’t exactly mirror images of each other; one flirts with chaos as a possible response to consumerism, while the other is a major studio tentpole that posits consumerism as a meaningful response to chaos. But these two movies share much of the same DNA, and follow their protagonists along identical arcs in opposite directions (Edward Norton’s unnamed corporate drone crawls toward empathy, while Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck dances away from it). Most of all, “Joker” and “Fight Club” target subsequent iterations of the same group: Men who feel irrelevant in a world they’d been promised to own.

Only one of them, however, dares to question that demographic. While “Fight Club” has been famously misunderstood by all the dorm room decorators who still think of Tyler Durden as some kind of shredded prophet, “Joker” doesn’t offer any opportunity to miss its point, or even provide a legible point to miss. “Fight Club” challenges its audience; “Joker” merely comforts them. “Fight Club” encourages men to exorcise their anger, while “Joker” invites them to give in to it. One is a wake-up call, and the other a demented lullaby. In other words, “Joker” is effectively the movie that “Fight Club” has often been mistaken for.

“Joker” is most effective at the beginning, when Arthur is sympathetic and still on his meds (perhaps the sharpest detail of Phillips’ script is that Gotham’s decay is measured by its treatment of the mentally ill). Arthur is more in touch with his feelings than the Narrator at the start of their respective films — he has his mother at home and Murray Franklin on TV, while the protagonist of “Fight Club” attends support groups for diseases he doesn’t have in order to siphon love from dying strangers — but neither man feels as special as they’re led to believe that they should.

Arthur’s uncomfortable laughing fits are the result of a Pseudobulbar affect, but his mom rationalizes them as proof that he was brought into the world to spread joy. The Narrator is an automobile recall specialist whose job requires him to reduce human lives to corporate data, and his identity and sense of well-being are entirely determined by the products he buys. The plaque outside his generic apartment complex reads “A Place to Be Somebody,” and the Narrator is convinced that turning his kitchen into an Ikea showroom means that he’s fulfilled that promise. Neither he nor Arthur are ready to accept the possibility (to paraphrase Tyler Durden) that God does not like them. But (Durden again) it’s only after they’ve lost everything that they’re free to do anything.

Fracturing apart from their own ids allows both characters to spark a point of connection that spreads like wildfire. The Narrator hatches an imaginary friend who runs amok like a radicalized Johnny Knoxville, while Arthur twins into a homicidal clown who isn’t afraid to clap back. The more these men dilute their self-identities, the stronger they feel about who they are; it’s only once they surrender to fantasy that anything starts to seem real. “My whole life,” Arthur says, “I didn’t know if I even really existed. But I do. And people are starting to notice.”

Tyler Durden and the Joker are two sides of the same coin (even before the former activates Project Mayhem and pivots from galvanizing masculinity to sowing chaos). One scene, in which Tyler reasons with a hostile bar owner by laughing his head off while the man beats his face to a bloody pulp, seems especially instructive to what Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix went on to do with the Batman villain they both played: The sight of Brad Pitt’s beautiful face smiling from beneath a red mask of wet meat left an unforgettable impression about the power that men can wield by weaponizing their own pain.

Alas, the frustrations expressed in “Fight Club” are as hyper-specific as the ones that fuel “Joker” are vague. Tyler Durden embodies a pre-9/11 generation of men who can’t shake the inertia of a life without conflict: “Slaves with white collars,” or victims of a consumerist utopia that — on some level — they all know isn’t real. Fincher, the most fastidious Hollywood director of the modern era, does whatever he can to explore the sterile crevices of that feeling, even using not-quite-ready CGI to dive into everything from the guts of the Narrator’s bachelor pad to the gray matter of his brain.

“Joker,” on the other hand, rages against a vague sense of unfairness, stirring timeless (and topical) sentiments of inequality together with the age-old frustration of feeling unseen. Arthur’s mental illness is treated like a pliable narrative convenience, even if the public’s indifference about treating it at all it is well-articulated. Beyond the Occupy Wall Street overtones that grow into a Greek chorus, people didn’t like Rupert Pupkin, but they love the Joker.

Phillips may have wanted to subvert the average superhero origin story by twisting it into something grotesque, but his film is painted in such broad strokes that it just becomes a grimy, embittered version of the very thing it exists to undermine. Arthur’s killings are obviously amoral, but they’re slotted into such an uncomplicated hero’s journey that you can’t help but root for his success. In a better film, that may have been the point; many of the great movies that led us to this one are valuable for how they seduce viewers into identifying with the ugliest parts of themselves. But “Joker” lacks the integrity to see that through. Whereas we align ourselves with Travis Bickle or Jordan Belfort despite what they do, “Joker” literally dances around Arthur Fleck’s worst behavior.

“Joker” has the chutzpah to recontextualize Batman’s villain as Gotham’s hero, but not the spine to interrogate what that really means. Nowhere is that more galling than in Sophie’s last scene, which leaves Arthur — now on a killing spree — in her apartment just moments after he realizes that he’s imagined the relationship between them. Every other part of the movie revels in Arthur’s volatility, and invites us to cheer him along as he shoots finance bros, his former co-workers, and finally Murray Franklin at point-blank range. But here, when it comes to the most vulnerable and “innocent” of Arthur’s victims, Phillips wants to have it both ways.

He knows that Arthur has to kill Sophie in order to clinch his irredeemable coming-of-rage, but he also knows that showing Arthur kill Sophie (and her kid?) would make it impossible for audiences to embrace him as an anti-hero. Having written himself into a corner, Phillips simply opts to wiggle out of it however he can.

“Fight Club” is smarmy and self-important for much of its running time in a way that didn’t register with me when I first snuck into it on opening night, but there’s a reason why “Joker” feels like it was made by someone who took everything Tyler Durden said at face value (or turned the movie off 30 minutes before the end). Unlike “Joker,” which drags its audience by the neck, “Fight Club” simply offers viewers enough rope to hang themselves. Perhaps the film is a bit too proud of its own philosophizing — it sometimes feels like a smug, 140-minute version of the sequence where Morpheus teaches Neo about “The Matrix” — but it only gets so high on its supply.

Whereas Arthur and Joker merge into one, the Narrator and Tyler Durden pull apart until they can see each other clearly. Fincher’s movie thrives in the rift that grows between them, and — like the almost subliminal flash of penis spliced between the frames of a cartoon — you can occasionally sense that something isn’t right with the tao of Tyler. It’s there in the scene where Tyler holds a convenience store clerk at gunpoint, and scares him into seizing hold of his life; maybe Raymond’s next meal will taste better than any breakfast he’s ever had, but trauma is often an unreliable teacher. It’s there in the scene where the Narrator talks back to his soulless middle-manager of a boss, and threatens to come back and massacre everyone in the office. And it’s definitely there when a man named Robert Paulson gets shot in the head for his role in Project Mayhem.

“Fight Club” isn’t as didactic as it seems on the surface. Despite investigating the impotence it finds in the men of the Narrator’s generation — and even going so far as to validate their frustration  — the movie strains not to provide any kind of salve. Tyler’s anarchic philosophies are too pure to survive in a real world full of real people (as represented by Marla Singer), and the Narrator’s growing awareness of that fact works like a crash landing back into his own body. He may see the value in blowing up a bunch of high rises in order to reset the debt record back to zero, but the Narrator recognizes how the chaos Tyler has sowed is just as dehumanizing as the order it seeks to destabilize.

So where does that leave him? Staring out at a world on fire, surveying the carnage with a newfound appreciation of his own agency, and holding hands with someone who accepts that she met him at a very strange time in his life. It’s destruction tinged with the possibility of building something better in its wake. “Fight Club” will be worth revisiting for as long as people remain at war with themselves over what “something better” might be.

“Joker,” on the other hand, limits itself to circling around the same rage that “Fight Club” uses as a starting point. Like Arthur, Phillips tries to sift a nugget of happiness from a steady torrent of anger, and like Phillips, Arthur eventually just gives up and decides they’re the same thing. In a more probing film, that might work. Movies don’t have to be constructive — cinema is not an inherently moral place, and there’s no sense in forcing it to act like one. But if “Joker” fades away as fast as I suspect that it might, it won’t be because the film has the temerity to be “evil”; it will be because the film doesn’t have the courage to be good.

Why ‘Fight Club’ Is the Movie that ‘Joker’ Failed to Become — Opinion. By David Ehrlich. Indiewire, October 7, 2019.