Three weeks later, he was carved out of wood. Not that we should think there's anything, you know, funny going on between them. Of course, Fincher is too clever to play all this straight. Despite Tyler Durden's sermonizing, there's no moral center to Fight Club. If that's meant to be irony, it only comes off as a smart-ass joke, and serves the dual purpose of reminding us that Budweiser paid for the privilege of being briefly demonized.
Any press is good press.
As he showed in 12 Monkeys, Pitt can play a maniac who speaks the truth, but here he's just a rabble-rouser, a thrill jockey getting off on pummeling and being pummeled. Tyler lectures the narrator on how today's men have become obsessed with image instead of substance, how they tone their muscles in gyms instead of teaching themselves to fight. Suddenly Tyler's house is filled with black-clad men with shaved heads, all following orders toward some unseen end. But he knows it's destructive, and he knows that, horrified as he is, part of him wants Tyler to succeed. Rather than an anarchist who sees an inherent order under the socially imposed one, he's just concerned with ripping things down and starting over, on the principle that we couldn't possibly do things as badly next time.