We need to talk about Fight Club

Philadelphia, 2019. An Uber is hauling me to the nearest Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and I ask the driver to name the best parts of Philly. A twenty-something black guy, he says, “I don’t think there are any good parts.” He clocks me in the rearview mirror and asks, “Are you the writer?” The young man pulls out his phone and hits a number, saying, “You have to talk to my mom. Her favorite movie is Fight Club.” He hands the phone to me in the backseat. In 2019, the film was already two decades old. This year, the book turns 30. In 1999 the head of publicity at Twentieth Century Fox had told the director, David Fincher, “You’ve made a movie with so much male nudity that no man will want to see it, and so much blood that no woman will. You’ve made a movie that’s impossible to market.” Yet h