Fight Club...the Musical?

“Fight Club” director David Fincher, with the support of writer Chuck Palahniuk, is in the process of developing a “Fight Club” musical which is slated to hit Broadway in 2009. Not only is Brad Pitt on board, but TRENT REZNOR (Nine Inch Nails frontman and musical genius, for those of you not in the know) is going to develop the music!! I think this will be an exciting and difficult test of the creativities of all involved, and I look forward to seeing the finished product….but the project also worries me a little. Here’s why:



“Fight Club” first started as a short story, written by talented satirical novelist Chuck Palahniuk. He expanded it into a full novel, which garnered mostly positive reviews, but led a disappointingly short shelf life. Luckily, Fight Club grabbed the attention of Hollywood and the movie adaptation – directed by Colorado native David Fincher – hit the silver screens in 1999.

Although “Fight Club” was #1 on its premier weekend, it was overall a box office disappointment. Not until its DVD release did the movie develop a cult following and become a social symbol for young counterculturalists everywhere. Although the story was partly based on truth (Chuck Palahniuk had a conversation once with a waiter at one of London’s finest restaurants who really did ejaculate in Margaret Thatcher’s food….twice…and this little detail found its way into the story), he had no prior knowledge of any actual fight clubs. It wasn’t until after “Fight Club” the movie became popular that evidence of old fight clubs surfaced in the wake of hundreds of new imitation organizations.

Now, almost a decade later, the story of “Fight Club” remains infamously popular as a critique of American consumerism and a beacon for defiant, rebellious young people who suffer a lack of things to actually rebel against. In the words of Nick Rombes, an associate professor of film and American literature,

(Fight Club) directs its furies at nothing less than the fact of its very own obsolescence in a culture where nothing really means anything, after all.

Why? Because there's nothing left to fight against…In Fight Club, this loss of history is figured as the obsolescence of the American male. "We are the middle children of history," says Tyler, "with no purpose or place. We have no great war, no great depression." The movie's rebellion doesn't seek so much to tear down the System, but rather to lash out at its absence, to re-create the Lost Father, to make Law in the Void, to reassert Order over Randomness…When history as simulacrum denies you real blood ("everything's a copy of a copy of a copy," says Jack) you invent your own rituals and myths in parking lots and warehouse basements.

“Fight Club” is more than just a well-written book or an entertaining movie. It’s a complicated social statement of which most people don’t seem to recognize the full meaning. My only fear in the development of the musical is that the original intentions and subliminal connotations will be lost.

What do you all think? Is it important for the Broadway adaptation to retain the messages of the original book and movie? Or since the story is switching mediums, should the project develop its own sense of meaning and importance within its new musical subscripts?