When the Movie Is Better Than the Book: <em>Fight Club</em>, Consumption, and Vital Signs

Abstract

Film adaptations of novels have a contentious relationship to their origins, and adaptation studies have foregrounded this problem, a problem that is itself paradigmatic ofthe unresolved tensions between modernism and postmodernism. Traditionally, book, source, has been privileged over movie, so that as both Robert Stam and Linda Hutcheon have argued, most discussions about film adaptations are negative terms ofloss,1 and film versions are often dismissed with morally loaded language and accused of betrayal, bastardization, and infidelity.2 In other words, they are understood as weak, illegitimate, second-rate copies of original leading to that predictable response, the book was better than movie. In this slavish valuing of original, hierarchies are established where literature is assumed better than film, and high art is pitted against popular culture, with all implicit gender and class biases of feminizing markets and ignorant masses. The original work is vacuum sealed and stuck on a pedestal, removed from messiness of a past life or afterlife. Hence, discussions of shifting cultural and historical contexts and questions of translation, audience, market, and media specificity are mostly absent from more traditional approaches to adaptation criticism.Yet, for well over a decade, adaptation theory has been turning away from this obsession with origins and fidelity and toward questions of remediation, mutation, creative reinvention, translation, and intertextuality as it recognizes inherent instability and impurity of any narrative. Poststructuralism and deconstruction have, as Stam has argued, challenged hierarchical binary between original and copy, and as Hutcheon points out, there are precious few stories around that have not been lovingly 'ripped off' from others.3 Thomas Leitch, in his thorough review of current state of field, welcomes this shift even while observing that recent works are still haunted by their dependency on literature and literary studies, and the notion that adaptations ought to be faithful to their ostensible source texts.4 Despite this turn, however, I want to suggest a reason-apart from considerations of fidelity and evaluative judgments about film adaptations-for holding onto question of origins and sources, and why they should continue to haunt adaptation theory.What many contemporary writers these days are hoping is that their books will be optioned, as films generally garner a much wider audience and are more lucrative than publishing. Chuck Palahniuk, now celebrity author from Washington with a large cult following, had an early work, Invisible Monsters, rejected by publishers for being too disturbing; in response, he wrote what he felt was an even more provocative work, Fight Club. Palahniuk got a six-thousand-dollar advance from Norton for this novel (first published in 1996), but ten thousand for film option and a promise of a much larger fee on first day of production. The film adaptation of Fight Club (David Fincher, US, 1999) follows an insomniac narrator (played by Edward Norton) who begins to rebel against tininess ofhis life that is made up ofhis white-collar job as an assessor of automobile insurance claims and online shopping for housewares. To help ease his insomnia, he begins attending support groups for sick and dying people, where he meets Marla Singer (played by Helena Bonham Carter), love interest. On a business flight, he also encounters Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt), a soap salesman, who persuades narrator to join his underground fight club, where men get together and express their primal aggression by beating each other. The club takes off and new chapters start to spring up around country; under Tyler's charismatic leadership, these men start to perform terrorist acts with ultimate goal of taking down a capitalist system that has stripped them of their vitality. …