THE FIGHT CLUB (1999, 20th Century Fox, dir. David Fincher)
Personal account narrative is even more effective in a darker film about middle class alienation, that is, The Fight Club. This 20th Century Fox (Fox 2000) offering is directed by David Fincher, and it evokes the nocturnal, other-dominion feel of his 'Se7en' (1995). The anti-hero is an lean and agile thirty year old played by acting genius Ed Norton. Why is everyman Norton (Primal Fear) so effective playing a psychopath? Here is a well-off young adult paying his condo mortgage as a recall engineer, and looking for meaning. He orders every piece of mod furniture he finds in mail-order, thinking that this becomes him (forget the computers and compact discs). The condo is a ménage of blues and grays. He starts attending encounter groups, for voyeuristic reasons. (They're way off; testicular cancer surgery does not make men grow teats. In one of the groups, public speaking, to borrow from Dan Quayle, is easy: a woman is asked to sit down from her lectern as she jokes about her sexual frigidity.) He goes over the edge when his psyche invents an imaginary playmate Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). Of course, he doesn't realize that when he talks to Tyler, or Tyler talks to him, or hits him, he is talking to himself. He becomes more and more disheveled, to the dismay of his boss; and when his condo burns up during a vacation trip (from a file which he set in his schizophrenia) he moves into a dump that looks like the old house in Psycho. But his craziness attracts a following, to the extent that he sets up am underground of boxing clubs all over the country, eventually becoming a terrorist group a la Tim McVeigh Number 1.
This guy, who might have been a nerd, just, given his failure with the opposite sex and its taming influence, can't find anything to do by herd violence and eventually blowing up buildings (and himself). Some critics call this movie a recipe for terrorists, but I think it is a study of psychological emptiness. It's interesting, though, how he deals with it by standing outside of himself and talking about himself, governing himself, even from beyond the grave.
On Feb. 16 2006 there were reports on ABC “Good Morning America” of middle school kids making “fight club” videos of themselves and posting the videos on the Internet (as an “Internet fight club”). Some of the kids were arrested for disorderly conduct as juveniles.
I remember, as a boy, being called "chicken" for turning down a chance to "fight".
Recently (I can't recall the video) chess YouTuber Levy Rozman (GothamChess) talked about taking boxing lessons (in Brooklyn, NY) to improve his chess, and how exhausting they are. Tyler Mowery (second video above) has a video of shadow boxing on his Instagram.