David Fincher’s 1999 adaptation of Fight Club brought its source novelist, Chuck Palahniuk, offers aplenty from the very people he had satirized.
This article contains spoilers for Fight Club and Gone Girl.In 1985, then-23-year-old David Fincher took a few of the tricks he picked up in San Francisco working for George Lucas’ visual effects company, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), and directed a commercial for the American Cancer Society depicting a fetus smoking a cigarette. From the moment it aired back in 1985 the commercial drew plenty of controversy. But it also drew a few eyeballs from the major Hollywood studios to the commercial’s bold, young director.
Looking back on Fincher’s career as one of the best provocateurs of his era, from Brad Pitt’s character screaming “What’s in the box?” in the unforgettable climax of Se7en (1995) to Rosamund Pike’s character slitting Neil Patrick Harris’ character’s throat as he climaxes in Gone Girl (2014), the director could hardly have picked a better debut than that baby smoking a cigarette in the womb.
So when Fincher brought Chuck Palahniuk's transgressive 1996 novel Fight Club to the big screen in 1999, it seemed like a match made in heaven (or maybe hell). Fincher’s background in commercials made him the perfect director to skewer the world of marketing as he did with the scene from the film featuring IKEA furniture.
There was hardly any other director working in Hollywood in the 1990s who could tackle Palahniuk's pitch-black tale of a white-collar insomniac who rejects his life of corporate materialism and falls down a rabbit hole of masculine violence and domestic terrorism. Not only did Fincher wrangle Palahniuk's wild plot into a two-hour film, but he did it with a level of visual efficiency that went somewhat unmatched for 20 years until the release of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019), another dark comedy thriller that runs like a Swiss watch.
But back in 1999, the studio heads at 20th Century Fox were not impressed. Upon its theatrical release, they quickly declared Fight Club a box office failure, compounding their contempt for Fincher’s contractual ability to include incendiary lines in the final cut of the film like the one which Helena Bonham Carter’s character Marla Singer says after a loud sex scene with Brad Pitt’s iconic Tyler Durden character:
I haven’t been [expletived] like that since grade school.
Despite its disappointing box office numbers Fight Club quickly gained cult classic status on home video. In the years since its release it has become far more than just a movie. Yet, much of the credit for the film’s status as one of the defining films of Generation X has not gone to the author of the source material. And while Fight Club helped advance Fincher’s career, it opened a few doors for Palahniuk as well.
Though he is best known for his 1996 breakout novel Fight Club, Palahniuk is considered by many to be the king of contemporary transgressive fiction, followed only by the likes of Irvine Welsh and Brett Easton Ellis. In the years since Fincher widened the novel’s audience with his adaptation of Fight Club, Palahniuk has pumped out some of the most successful transgressive novels to a devoted cult following.
Related: Has Fight Club Aged Poorly?
His 2001 novel Choke, concerning a sex-addicted con man who intentionally chokes on food in upscale restaurants in order to guilt-trip sympathizing rich people into sending him money, was adapted into a 2008 film of the same name starring Sam Rockwell. As if the premise of Choke wasn’t enough, Palahniuk's 2005 anthology novel, Haunted, contains a short story about a young man whose lower intestine is suctioned out of his body in the heat of a masturbatory act with a pool filter. That short story came from the same mind that Volvo (yes, the Swedish car company) decided would be perfect to write them some commercials.
The snowballing success of Fincher’s Fight Club adaptation brought a flurry of advertising offers to Palahniuk throughout the 2000s and 2010s. In his 2020 memoir, Consider This: Moments In My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different, Palahniuk says:
[Volvo] asked me to write a series of enticing stories [centering] on an obscure hamlet in Sweden where an enormous number of Volvos were being sold. The concept could go anywhere, they assured me, but my impression was that an element of vampires would be welcomed… They were offering, as I recall, tens of thousands of dollars.
The irony of Volvo’s advertising offer to the writer of Fight Club, a blatant satire on the world of advertising, was not lost on Palahniuk. What more did he have to do with his novel to get his point across? Fight Club already features a subplot where the unnamed narrator, played by Edward Norton in one of his best roles, comes along with Tyler Durden to steal leftover fat from the dumpster liposuction clinics which he then turns into soap, adding in his voice-over that:
Tyler sold his soap to department stores at $20 a bar. Lord knows what they charged. It was beautiful. We were selling rich women their own fat asses back to them.
Bringing in the guy who wrote Fight Club to write a car commercial is like if Nancy Reagan tried to recruit Keith Richards to help out with the “Just Say No” campaign against drug use. And just like Richards would have done to Reagan, Palahniuk rejected Volvo. Why would he reject “tens of thousands of dollars” if all he had to do was write a few vampire commercials? Because he was afraid of being labeled a sellout by “serious novelist” contemporaries of the 2000s like Infinite Jest’s David Foster Wallace, who wrote a scathing essay against another novelist, Frank Conroy, who did some copywriting for a cruise ship brochure. As Palahniuk puts it in Consider This:
Conroy had gotten his large family a fancy ocean cruise as payment, but later regretted writing the love letter used to sell similar vacations to his readers. But I’d also cracked my share of old National Geographic magazines and found full-page advertisements wherein Ernest Hemingway endorsed some brand of Scotch, William Faulkner flogged a certain cigar, and Tennessee Williams raved about an ocean cruise.
Had Palahniuk accepted Volvo’s money his vampire commercials would probably have looked something like Tony Scott’s erotic horror film The Hunger (1983) which starred David Bowie, Susan Sarandon, and Catherine Deneuve in a classical-music-loving, child-killing, vampiric love triangle.
Related: What Is the Actual Point of Fight Club?
That film’s visuals were striking enough to have caught the eye of Jerry Bruckheimer, who tapped Scott to direct Top Gun (1986), which the legendary producer described as “Star Wars on Earth” after reading Ehud Yonay’s 1983 article “Top Guns” in California magazine.
Regardless of the aesthetic, it seems unlikely that Palahniuk could flex his usual offensive storylines to sell Swedish cars like the bizarre plot for his 2007 novel Rant: An Oral Biography Of Buster Casey set in a demolition derby in a dystopian society in the throes of a rabies epidemic. Will we ever get a glimpse of the vampire commercials the Fight Club writer might have written for Volvo? Probably not. It appears that ship has sailed. However, for his last word on the matter in Consider This, Palahniuk says:
But I still sit here. I’m not young, not anymore, but my phone is turned on. Just in case Volvo… calls.
Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that Fight Club has become an iconic brand in and of itself. The film’s most quoted line, “The first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club,” is right up there with “Just Do It” and “What are you wearing, Jake From State Farm?" Palahniuk and Fincher’s groundbreaking and button-pushing satire on consumerism has been consumed by the very system it aimed to dismantle, embracing the inescapable destiny of all countercultures: to be sold on shop counters like tie-dye shirts and hippie beads.

Kyler Knight is a freelance writer and independent filmmaker based in the Greater Seattle Area. Knight won the top prize of, “Best Overall” in a company-wide national competition at Cinemark for his short film, The Refillables (2018) and Knight’s short film, Careful with that Axe, Eugene (2018) played at the Seattle horror short film festival, The Nightmare Emporium. His essay, “Green Room: Reflections on Film Violence” was published in Una Voce magazine (2019) for Tacoma Community College—where Knight received an Associate in Arts (DTA) with High Honors in 2021.

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