Abstract
After presenting a brief survey of the academic and popular critical celebration of Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) this article argues that claims for Fight Club's progressive credentials are misplaced. Rather than accepting the one-sided critical discourse that posits Fight Club as cleverly subverting the dominant values of the entertainment industry that financed it, I attempt to reveal the film as a commercially driven, anti-progressive, Trojan horse. I argue that the film's biggest trick is to borrow formal and thematic motifs from the early 1990s grunge scene. This provides a 'dazzling' (to use a term that appears on more than one occasion in reviews) smokescreen for a set of gendered representations that do nothing to undermine conventional conceptions of sociocultural relations. This article also questions the orthodox critical view that Fight Club provided a point of identification for its embattled white, middle-class, target audience and suggests the film may have connected with less affluent male audiences for different, but equally negative reasons.
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