'Fight Club' at 25

David Fincher’s subversive comedy-drama Fight Club turns 25 this year. Its blackly comic exploration of toxic masculinity, released when Andrew Tate was still an impressionable 12-year-old, continues to divide opinion. It was gloriously misunderstood upon its initial release in the United States in October 1999 — Roger Ebert wrote of Fight Club that it was “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 was on firmer ground with the film’s homoeroticism, saying “It’s macho porn — the sex movie Hollywood has been moving toward for years, in which eroticism between the sexes is replaced by all-guy locker-room fights.” But to read his review is to see a great, usually incisive critic missing the point entirely.